It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

by M. K. Asante Jr

  Stedman, who was a soldier in a Dutch military unit, found himself in Surinam, a small country sharing its southern border with Brazil. In his book, Stedman describes the many abuses the Dutch inflicted upon the enslaved Africans in Surinam until something monumental happened: The enslaved Africans realized that their labor was supporting the entire Dutch economy and, led by the Surinam Maroons, resisted, rebelled, and revolted.

  Blacks, not just in the hip-hop community and industry, but in all areas, need to realize the incredible power we yield over markets. Before we can even seriously discuss the content of the music, we have to own it. The “old white men” that I met with in New York, hip hop’s decision makers, don’t have the interest of the Black community at heart. We must also not make the mistake of believing that all Blacks have the best interests of Black folks. That’s why a consciousness that values the collective interests of the people is vital. Consider, for example, that Ossie Davis in 1971 said, “Cable TV is a new opportunity for those seeking their fair share of power, and the black man must do, at the beginning, what he has failed to do in the past—get in at the beginning.” Bob Johnson, founder of BET, followed through on Davis’s advice; however, because of a lack of collective consciousness, turned it over to Viacom, who, as Mos rhymed, “is runnin’ this rap shit.”

  Clarence Avant, music industry veteran and former president of Motown, crystallizes this point and reinforces the notion that we must take seriously what scholar Harold Cruise called a “community point of view”:

  We have always been entertainers, but we have never really owned anything. Based on the number of Black artists who are successful, we should have more ownership. We are not owners because we have a combination of the wrong attitude and no money. For instance, our artists become famous, and they want to be known as pop stars. How can we own anything when our best assets want to be stop being Black when they are successful?… Whoever controls the talent is going to be in the best position, but we do not….

  Today that wrong attitude can and must be righted. “The Black economy is a myth only because a truly viable Black economy does not exist,” writes Cruise.

  Chuck D warned, “If we don’t get up on the good foot—I’m talking to my people—then we’re going to be behind the eight-ball again…. White businesses have built themselves up and blacks are still working for the white businesses.” When Nas rhymes “Hip-hop been dead, we the reason it died / Wasn’t Sylvia’s fault or ’cause MC’s skills are lost / It’s ’cause we can’t see ourselves as the boss,” he follows up with an even more astute analysis of Black pathology:

  Deep-rooted through slavery, self-hatred

  The Jewish stick together, friends in high places

  We on some low-level shit

  We don’t want niggas to ever win…

  Despite criticism of white, corporate, or Jewish influence in hip hop, the Jewish model, with respect to Hollywood, is one African-Americans can learn a great deal from. As Neal Gabler writes in An Empire of Their Own:

  Within the studios and on the screen, the Jews could simply create a new country—an empire of their own, so to speak—one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. They would fabricate their empire in the image of America as they would fabricate themselves in the image of prosperous Americans. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent. This was their America, and its invention may be their most enduring legacy.

  Our history is filled with African-Americans overcoming a great number of obstacles and achieving what was thought to be impossible. The logical, necessary, and vital next step for the post-hip-hop generation is simple: ownership over its cultural creations.

  I believe that all African American prisoners are political

  prisoners, whether or not they label themselves as such.

  Because of the circumstances that got them into jail as

  well as the harshness of sentencing applied only to them.

  — EVELYN WILLIAMS

  The courts have become a universal device

  for re-enslaving blacks.

  — W. E. B. DUBOIS

  Trying to solve the crime problem by building

  more prison cells is like trying to solve the problem of

  AIDS by building more hospitals.

  — JAMES AUSTIN

  “No justice, no peace!” a sparkling crowd of hundreds chanted in front of Morgan State University’s Soper Library in a student-led rally to support the Jena Six. With students clad in varying tones of black, the scene at Morgan mirrored scores of similar events across the country including in Jena, Louisiana, where tens of thousands of people, also dressed in black, gathered to participate in the biggest civil rights demonstration since the 1960s. In many ways, the coordinated protocol to wear black clothing symbolized not only solidarity, but a kind of funeral—one that marked the death of an apathy that had become emblematic of this generation. And with that memorial “a new movement was born,” as one student reflected.

  I recalled Jordan, the young man in prison who explained to me that although there was a mattress in his cell, he didn’t sleep on it, because the comfort of a bed would numb him to the brutal reality of where he really was. Just as the frigid floor reminded him of where he was, the six Black teenagers sentenced to a total of more than one hundred years in prison for a schoolyard fight revealed to the post-hip-hop generation where we are today: a day, born yesterday, grayed with the evidence of things unseen.

  Thirty years ago, a rash of posters began smothering the brick and mortar of walls throughout Brooklyn. The posters pictured a young woman whose face, which was the color of the earth, was crowned by a spectacular wheel of black wool. Just below her high cheekbones WANTED screamed out in violent typeface. The posters claimed that the woman, whom they called “Joanne Chesimard,” was a “murderer” and was “armed and dangerous”—assertions that not only stood in stark contrast to the radiant figure who floated above the brazen words, but to the woman who was loved by her community, the woman whom they called Assata.

  “They made her sound like a super-villain, like something out of a comic book,” rapper and actor Mos Def remembers of the posters that tattered his Bed-Stuy neighborhood. “But even then, as a child, I couldn’t believe what I was being told,” he adds. Mos Def’s position was reflected in the actions of his Brooklyn community when, time after time, the WANTED posters were yanked down as fast as they were put up and replaced with colorful posters that read: ASSATA IS WELCOME HERE.

  The community, unremitting in their support despite what outside forces may have thought, remembered that the same external forces have dubbed most of their heroes and sheroes, at one point in time, as criminals. Assata’s community remembered what the “authorities” said about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., about Fannie Lou Hamer, about Paul Robeson, about Rosa Parks, even ‘bout Jesus. As a result, they were (and still are) skeptical about what the authorities say. That is why when the authorities called Assata a criminal, her community—who often mentioned her in the same breath as Harriet Tubman—was unfazed because, after all, Harriet Tubman was a “criminal,” too. So instead of turning Assata in, they honored her as they did Harriet, knowing that by honoring these women, they were honoring the best in themselves, ourselves.

  Assata was a—

  Perhaps it is most appropriate for her to introduce herself, in her voice, with her words:

  My name is Assata (“she who struggles”) Shakur (“the thankful one”), and I am a twentieth-century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism, and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy toward people of color. I am an ex—political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984. I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everyt
hing in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one. In the 1960s, I participated in various struggles: the black liberation movement, the student rights movement, and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. I joined the Black Panther Party. By 1969 the Black Panther Party had become the number one organization targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Because the Black Panther Party demanded the total liberation of Black people, J. Edgar Hoover called it the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and vowed to destroy it and its leaders and activists.

  On May 2, 1973, Assata was pulled over by the New Jersey State Police, shot twice, and then charged with murder of a police officer. After spending nearly seven years in prison under torturous conditions, she escaped in 1979 and moved to Cuba.

  Even with political asylum in Cuba, Assata’s struggle still persists. In September 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives bloodthirstily passed a resolution that called upon Cuba to extradite Assata—a call that Cuba ignored. Then, in the summer of 2005, thirty-two years later, the FBI classified Assata as a “domestic terrorist” and increased the reward for her capture to an unprecedented $1 million.

  “She is now 120 pounds of money,” snarled New Jersey State Police superintendent Rick Fuentes. In echo, Colonel Williams of the New Jersey State Police announced that his department, in desperation, “would do everything we could to get her off the island of Cuba, and if that includes kidnapping, we would do it.” All of this despite an overwhelming mass of evidence that demonstrated Assata’s innocence.

  In the same spirit demonstrated thirty years ago, Assata’s community came out in full support, launching several initiatives dedicated to protecting their courageous Black rose. Most visible among these campaigns is the Hands Off Assata Coalition, a “collective comprised of activists, artists, scholars, elected officials, students, parents, attorneys, workers, clerics, and concerned community members who are standing against the latest attack upon Assata Shakur.” The hip-hop community, whose interest in her was heightened upon the discovery that she was Tupac Shakur’s aunt, praised her on T-shirts, Web sites, and in rap lyrics. Common retells her story in “Song for Assata,” which he prefaces with a soulful libation:

  In the Spirit of Assata Shakur.

  We make this movement towards freedom.

  I’m thinkin’ of Assata, yes, listen to my Love, Assata, yes

  Your Power and Pride is beautiful, may God bless your Soul.

  In Havana, President Fidel Castro reminded Cuban citizens that “They [the U.S. government] wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie,” and that Assata had been “a true political prisoner.”

  Amnesty International, the nongovernmental organization that campaigns for internationally recognized human rights, defines a political prisoner as “any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner’s acts, the acts themselves, or the motivation of the authorities.” Political prisoners are often arrested and tried beneath a veneer of legality, where false charges, manufactured evidence, and unfair trials are used to disguise the fact that an individual is a political prisoner. Assata was a political prisoner, joining a long legacy of African-American political prisoners whose “acts” have had a “significant political element.” In 1927, scholar, activist, and Black Star Line founder Marcus Garvey was imprisoned and deported after being criminalized on a bogus charge of mail fraud. In 1951, scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois, who was Garvey’s rival during the 1920s, was imprisoned during the height of the Cold War for advocating world peace. He was officially charged with “failure to register as an agent of a foreign principle.” While imprisoned, DuBois realized that he was connected to all African-American prisoners, writing, “We protect and defend sensational cases where negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused Black folk have no defense.”

  The events in Jena demonstrated to young people that fifty-six years after DuBois was falsely imprisoned, “the great mass of arrested or accused Black folk” still “have no defense” and that the racism our parents and grandparents fought against is still alive and well. Since many of our parents have long put away their marching shoes, the marches to support the Jena Six and to stand up against injustice, orchestrated primarily by this new generation, represented a passing of the mantle.

  This new generation of concerned citizens, diverse in race, gender, orientation, and class, understands that while methods and programs change with time, the objectives that the previous generation struggled to achieve—freedom, justice, and equality—remain the same. While there is no doubt that the Jena rallies illustrated this generation’s commitment to social justice, a fundamental question arose: Where do we go from Jena?

  “This is bigger than Jena—much, much bigger,” a high school student, who left his school to attend various Jena rallies in Baltimore, tells me as he exits a rally held at Coppin State University. “Jena is happening everywhere,” he adds. “And that’s why I’m here.” He tells me that his cousin is imprisoned at a federal correctional institution (FCI) in Fairton, New Jersey, where he joined thousands of Black men who represent a fraction of the more than 1.5 million imprisoned Black men and women. To fully understand what 1.5 million means, consider the horrifying reality that no other society in the history of the world has ever incarcerated so many of its citizens—not even the Soviet Union at the height of the Gulag or South Africa during the brutal regime of apartheid.

  Let us carry with us Amnesty’s internationally recognized definition of a political prisoner in our minds as I spray-paint a picture of the right here, right now, and illustrate the idea, expressed by young people throughout the country at the Jena rallies, that a great majority of the 1.5 million African-Americans in prison today are political prisoners. “Free ’em all, free ’em all,” were the chants that cascaded through the crowds.

  As a teenager in Philadelphia, whenever I traveled—whether to the store, a party, or just wandered aimlessly—it was always with all of my friends… all at once. Ten of us, sometimes more, mahoganycolored saplings, hiking across concrete, exploring the gritty labyrinth of the city.

  “All a y’all not go’n make it,” a woman who resembled my grandmother, all of our grandmothers, once told us as we congregated at a bus stop on Market Street in West Philadelphia. Tight coils of muted silver peeked out from beneath her brightly colored head wrap as she warned us, both with her squinting purple-black eyes and soothing singsong soprano, about our futures.

  “Y’all be careful, now. They lookin’ for y’all: young Black boys. Y’all gotta know that. Avoid the traps,” she grimaced, knowing what we were up against. Roughly a decade later, at twenty-five, with most of my team of ten depleted (jailed, killed, et cetera), I find myself on similar streets, echoing sister elder, trying to find the words, if there are words, that might prevent today’s youth from becoming part of the third (or even two-thirds in some northern cities) of African-American men in their twenties that are in jail, on parole, or on probation.

  The prison industrial complex, as it has come to be known, is the frigid, mechanical name for the ferocious combination of government institutions, private corporations, national policies, and cultural attitudes that have created what scholar Manning Marable dubs the “new leviathan of racial inequality that has been constructed across our country.” “New” because unlike the old leviathans of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, this new one, as Marable observes, “presents itself to the world as a system that is truly color-blind.”

  Consider Marable’s observation with what H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff under President Richard Nixon, wrote in his diary about his former boss’s approach to law and order:

  President Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. They key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to.

  Haldeman’s recollection of Nixon’s
agenda is immensely important if we wish to understand the challenges that the post-hip-hop generation must confront. For it is Nixon’s rabidly racist “system” that is at the foothills of today’s mountain of racial injustice.

  The African-American experience, since we were enslaved for longer than free, could easily be categorized as one of resistance and rebellion. The late sixties were no different. African-Americans, fed up with the decimation and exploitation of their communities, took to the streets in national protests that were often given the misnomer of “riots” by the mainstream press. The front-page images of Black rage, of course, terrified a white America for whom fear has been among its core characteristics, then and now. Harris polls conducted in the sixties reveal that 81 percent of white Americans believed that “Negroes who start riots” were to blame for the perceived collapse of law and order in the cities of America. Politicians like Barry Goldwater, an influential senator from Arizona, used this fear in his 1964 presidential run. “Law and order has broken down, mob violence has engulfed great American cities, and our wives feel unsafe in the streets.”

  If politicians failed to react to the growing sense of fear they would lose their white voters, some of whom were arming themselves. During the 1967 uprisings in Newark, for example, a group of whites led by future New Jersey assemblyman Anthony Imperiale armed themselves and patrolled Black neighborhoods in what they called “jungle cruisers.” When asked about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Imperiale declared that “when the [Black] Panther comes, the white hunter will be ready.” As would Nixon, who had an idea of how to capitalize on white fear while simultaneously eliminating what he dubbed as “the Black problem.” Nixon’s logic: “Crime meant urban, urban meant Black, and the war on crime meant a bulwark built against the increasingly political and vocal racial other by the predominately white state,” as Christian Parenti writes in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. Additionally, the administration “linked street crime to the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement.”