Hip Hop Congress

A great article by Bakari Kitwana showed up on Newsone.com

Here is a snippet
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Hip-hop’s critics, like Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter, use mainstream hip-hop music’s association with criminality and sex to dismiss three things:

• the political analysis offered by some hip-hop lyrics,

• the important political work of activists on the ground from The Ella Baker Center and The League of Young Voters to Industryears.com and Hip-Hop Against Police Brutality,

• and hip-hop activists’ legitimate concerns about the state of American youth.

Thus, issues like the need for affordable and effective education, housing and childcare, the inherent racial injustices of policing and prisons, and the lack of living wage jobs don’t receive serious consideration. Neither do the solutions that hip-hop organizers are proposing for them.

Such issues were raised last week at the annual conference of the Hip-Hop Congress, an 80 chapter strong national organization of independent hip-hop artists and grassroots activists that has been functioning for the last decade. They will be raised again this weekend at the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention, gathering in Las Vegas August 1-3. Reverend Lennox Yearwood, who heads the The Hip-Hop Caucus that recently partnered with rapper T.I. to kick-off a voter registration effort targeting youth, is also raising similar questions.

All three organizations, should do themselves and their movement a favor by articulating loudly and clearly hip-hop’s moral center: that hip-hop political organizers are concerned about the negative representations of women, that criminal lifestyles aren’t something youth should emulate, and that young Black, Brown and poor people are concerned about the future of their families and are committed to placing the interest of children first.
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To read the whole article click here.