Can't Stop Won't Stop (71 page)

The moment seemed perfect to define a hip-hop generation moving toward global solidarity. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had refused to attend the conference, an action many took as reflective of George W. Bush's administration's disinterest in addressing racism. The Black August crew was well aware that their very presence in South Africa was a protest against their government's unilateralist silence.

South Africa's hip-hop movement had taken root during apartheid in cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg (Gauteng) during the early ‘80s, and helped fuel some of the most dangerous forms of cultural protest of the era. Rappers that decried the government received death threats from right-wing extremists. Graffiti writers piecing political slogans after dark amidst curfews risked being shot by government soldiers.
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When the Black August crew came to South Africa, local heads hoped for an exchange of ideas and a sharing of stories of struggle. Instead they came away feeling snubbed. Some of South African rap's leading stars offered to take the Americans around; they thought it was a mutual opportunity to get to know each other better. But they found themselves treated like hired drivers.

Onstage, it began to look to them as if some of the American rappers had developed a Moses complex, dispensing vague pieties about loving the motherland, and stamping across the stage to lecture the crowd about racism and reparations in the United States. “The idea behind Black August is to facilitate the international cultural exchange between youth across the globe while supporting and promoting social consciousness and positive self-expression,” wrote South African journalist Niren Tolsi. “What we got were a bunch of Yanks jerking off on the tits of Mother Africa.”
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At a press conference in Durban the growing tensions—exacerbated by the fact that the South African promoters had failed to secure the shows promised the Black August collective—finally exploded. African youth activists demanded
to know from the Black August rappers: Who were they to come off a plane, stay in expensive hotels and then whine onstage about how bad racism was in America? Some decried their rap as a new form of American cultural imperialism. “They came here either to conquer Africa with their rhymes,” South African rapper Emile of Black Noise told journalist Cristina Verán, “or thinking, ‘Here we are, ready to save you.' ”
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The irony was that the Black August rappers were among the most politically educated and committed of commercially successful North American artists. “People expect a lot from MCs who are considered ‘conscious rappers.' If the people detect any kind of ‘studio activist' vibe, then they are harder on those MCs than the ‘studio gangstas,' ” explained Capetonian hip-hop pioneer activist, producer and radio personality Shaheen Ariefdien. “I don't equate them with MTV or Nike, but this was just disrespectful.”

To frustrated Black August organizer Baye Adofo, who had the thankless task of piecing together the rest of the tour and making it pay for itself after being abandoned by the local promoters, the complaints spoke to complicated issues of privilege.

“I felt that what people didn't want to hear about was American racism,” he says. “But I do feel that we had a right to protest U.S. Racism at the World Conference Against Racism where Colin Powell and the U.S. wanted to deny that it existed. The issue became: Given how poor and racist other countries are, especially South Africa, was racism in the United States worthy of international attention?” With the agreement of the artists, Adofo organized free dates in the townships of Cape Town and Soweto.

“I don't know if these American MCs realize the impact they make on, say, a kid living in a shack in Khayelitsha [township] who's listening to what they say and trying to apply it to his own life,” said another South African hip-hop activist, Marlon Burgess. “It would be quite interesting to know what life is like on that side of cultural imperialism.”
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If the arc of hip-hop generation's cultural revolution was bowing toward difficult issues of engagement and exploitation, its political revolution was just taking flight.

Born in 1965 to prominent civil rights organizers in North Carolina, Angela
Brown had been a child activist, leading campaigns to free Black women political prisoners. But her life changed in 1982, when the state of North Carolina decided to put a toxic waste landfill in the middle of a nearby working-class Black community. Brown and other teenage girls lay down on the road to prevent trucks from bringing in PCB-tainted soil for the landfill. That battle in Warren County became known as the opening shot in the environmental justice movement, a struggle that combined anti-racist and environmental activism.

A decade later, Brown was on the staff of the Atlanta-based civil rights stalwart, the Southern Organizing Committee, where she formed the Youth Task Force to organize youths from ten states and eighty-five universities into the environmental justice movement. She began to realize that a sharp, traumatic generational divide was emerging. Elders called her generation apathetic, but Brown saw a fundamentally different politics.

“The way in which they built their movement was around the ‘lunch counter'—SNCC and others coming down to the South to challenge segregation on the lunch counter,” she says. “We didn't have a single ‘lunch counter.' We have had
many
‘lunch counters.' Our fight has been a constant barrage of struggles.” No longer was there a single Movement, but dozens of movements—civil rights, education, environmental justice, AIDS, prisons, the list went on. But Brown noticed that where the dialogue really collapsed, where the generation gap was deepest, was over the question of hip-hop culture and rap music.

It was a divide that a fading Black Pennsylvania politician named C. Delores Tucker tried to exploit. Born in 1929 and raised in northern Philadelphia, Tucker inherited twenty-four tenement buildings from her parents and by 1966 had been singled out by the local newspaper as one of the city's worst slumlords. Her buildings were all soon boarded up, taken over by the city, given to charities or simply abandoned.
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Tucker's failures as a property manager did not stop her from seeking the civil rights limelight. She marched arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and became a close ally of Jesse Jackson. She became a rainmaker for the Democratic Party and was appointed Pennsylvania's secretary of state in 1971, the highest-ranking Black woman official in the state's history. Six years later, she was fired by the Democratic governor for allegedly using state employees to write personal speeches and collecting kickbacks from charities.

In 1984, Tucker formed a lobby group called the National Political Congress
of Black Women. Two years later, she became the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus. She then embarked on a series of unsuccessful runs for lieutenant governor and Congress before fading back into obscurity. In 1993, her friends Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore gave Tucker an opportunity to climb back into the spotlight when they approached her about having the NPCBW take up the fight against gangsta rap. Reverend Calvin Butts had already been steamrolling rap CDs in Harlem. They wanted in on the action.

Tucker repeated the same critique that hip-hop feminists had been leveling at media monopolies and rap misogynists for years. Corporations were not taking responsibility for the images they were distributing, and ducking serious discussion by hiding behind the First Amendment. But there was something disingenuous and opportunistic about her attacks.

Tucker won over both the liberal and conservative wings of her party by courting Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Joe Lieberman. Yet she also avidly welcomed the support of cultural conservatives like prominent Reagan/Bush cabinet member Bill Bennett. As the presidential election season rolled around, she joined with Republican candidate Bob Dole. Together, Bennett, Dole and Tucker made Suge Knight, Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg into clay pigeons for their culture war.

Tucker was enormously helpful to white cultural conservatives. In interviews, she compared herself to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and made an explicitly racial appeal that insulated white cult-cons from criticism. Tucker was also mouthing the most extreme fears of many disillusioned, middle-class, middle-aged people of color, the very same civil rights generation elders who felt they had given everything in struggle for their kids, only to see them turn out to be spoiled, anarchic, value-free ingrates. She attracted Blacks who supported police crackdowns and strengthening juvenile-crime laws, the very same elders with whom Angela Brown was having anguishing arguments. To the cult-cons, Tucker was mobilizing fresh troops for further attacks on youths of color.

In early 1994, Tucker prevailed upon Moseley Braun to convene an unprecedented Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gangsta rap, an inquiry into “the effects of violent and demeaning imagery in popular music on American youth.” Tucker was the star witness. Echoing right-wing backlash architects like
James Q. Wilson, John Dilulio and James Alan Fox, she called for a broadening of the War on Youth:

As we have seen in the last thirty years, increasing law enforcement and correctional facilities have not reduced crime. These short-term fixes will do nothing to improve the lives of children like the nineteen that [sic] were recently removed from a home in Chicago because of parental neglect and abuse. Because of the lack of positive influences, their minds will be fertile and receptive ground for internalizing the violence glorified in gangster rap. Children such as these, our most neglected population, will become a social time bomb in our midst. Being coaxed by gangster rap, they will trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions that we have never seen the likes of. Regardless of the number of jails built, it will not be enough. Neither will there be enough police or government programs to contain the explosion of crime. We as a Nation must act now and we must act decisively.
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Brown and the Youth Task Force had heard enough. Not only had Tucker committed the political equivalent of taking a family argument public, she seemed to be calling down the wrath of the government on the hip-hop generation by arguing that sweep laws, new prisons, and profiling were
inadequate,
that youth culture also needed to be regulated. Not just bodies, but ideas needed to be contained. By articulating a broader basis for the politics of containment, Tucker had turned the debate over hip-hop culture misogyny and violence into something much worse—she had mobilized the elders to turn on their children, to join their enemies in a broad political and cultural attack on youth of color.

The Task Force reacted by organizing the Atlanta hip-hop community. They initiated a series of forums to defend hip-hop and constructively critique it. The forums brought artists like the Goodie Mob, Tupac and Afeni Shakur, and Lil' Jon and the Eastside Boyz together with elders, lawyers, scholars, activists, and poets. The Task Force catalyzed an active response in activism, the arts, and the record industry. Many now credit their work as laying the foundation for Atlanta's leap to the cutting edge of both the rap industry and hip-hop activism by the end of the decade.

Around the country, hip-hop heads took similar stands. These activists were not trying to stifle or chastise the artists Tucker-style, they were trying to create a sense of community and responsibility, and to define a new praxis of politics and culture. The aim was, as Maxine Waters had put it during the gangsta rap hearings, to “embrace and transform rather than to confront, isolate, and marginalize.”
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They were dealing with a unique paradox—a generation that had greater access to the media and culture than any other in history remained as politically scapegoated and marginalized as any in history. They called themselves “hip-hop activists” because the term spoke to the way culture and politics came together for them, and because it was a way to reclaim and define their generational identity.

In fact, the hip-hop generation was at least as, if not more, politically active than the civil rights generation. In 2001, the UCLA Freshman Survey—the definitive documentation of college-age youth attitudes since 1966—found that nearly half of all freshman said they had participated in an organized demonstration during the past year. That number was three times greater than in the inaugural survey, conducted at the peak of the civil rights movement.

Civil rights may have fixed an image of “The Movement” as picket-waving masses on the National Mall listening to Dr. King. If the youths weren't there in D.C., elders figured, nothing must be happening. But hip-hop activism largely took place below the national radar. Capitol Hill's diminished powers, big-money lobbying and campaign financing, and symbolic politics made it a less likely place than ever to go to get a problem solved. From Watergate to Monicagate, national politics often seemed just a lesser form of entertainment. Why bother marching on Washington?

The life-and-death struggles were happening at the local level, where hip-hop activists were busy fighting in the streets, neighborhoods, school boards, city halls, state legislatures and corporate offices. This time, the whole world would
not
be watching; global media monopolies could make sure of that. But the hiphop generation was pushing forward in a complicated world, in more sophisticated ways than previous generations ever had.

Most visibly, Russell Simmons was assembling his hip-hop army, forming the Hip Hop Summit Action Network to bring together rappers, academics, music industry leaders, civil rights leaders, and politicians to push for social change. But
the most compelling work was happening at the local level, outside of the traditional institutions. In Chicago, Brooklyn and Oakland, hip-hop activists used graffiti, b-boying, and DJing to educate and organize around education, gentrification, and juvenile justice issues. In Louisville, they fought book bans and youth curfews. In the Bay Area and the Bronx, they organized to stop the expansion of the juvenile detention facilities. In Albuquerque, they tossed out city council members who supported the building of a highway through sacred Native lands. On campuses across the country, they fought for labor unions, living wages, and against sweatshops and companies that invested in the prison industry.