As you know Congress held hearings on Hip Hop yesterday up on Capitol Hill. Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush wanted to see why there is so much music being pushed by corporations that highlight racial stereotypes and disrespect toward women. Overall the hearings were explosive from the start. One of the Congressmen from New York Anthony D Weiner, posed the question as to why artists today don't step it up and do like artists did in the past and pen songs that talk about social issues in the community. He cited Shinehead who at the height of the crack epidemic in the late 80s so fit to write a song that spoke out against crack. He wanted to know why we don't see more artists who have different types of conversations like the way Tribe Called Quest or Brand Nubian did in year's past.
Weiner also noted that Congress won't be able to solve this issue of questionable content, because it's a business decision. He talked about the move Chamillionaire made to not curse on his new album. He suggested that Chamillionaire was making a shrewd business decision to fill a void and capture an audience that doesn't want to hear cursing. He hoped that other artists would see the wisdom in this and follow his lead.
Joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps was once an attractive choice for people with few options growing up in impoverished, predominantly black East Baltimore. That has all changed, largely because of the war in Iraq.
"Now, it is like, no way," said Cornelius McMurray, who does outreach with a local church and says the young black people he works with view life in Baltimore as enough of a war. "It is a continuous fight waking up and walking the streets every day."
In the Bronx, Adeyefa Finch says he simply walks past the recruiters who, seeking out minority members along Fordham Road, make the case that the military can help with college financing and job placement after they serve. "I'm not really into going overseas with guns and fighting other people's wars," said Mr. Finch, 18, headed to college this fall to study accounting.
That kind of rejection of military service as an option of young blacks throughout the country has resulted in a sharp drop in black recruitment figures since the war began. Defense Department reports show that the share of blacks among active-duty recruits declined to 13 percent in 2006 from 20 percent in 2001, the last year before the invasion of Iraq began to seem inevitable...
In a recent CBS News telephone poll, 83 percent of the blacks surveyed said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq; only 14 percent said it had done the right thing in taking military action. Whites, by contrast, were closely divided: 48 percent said military action had been right, and 46 percent said the United States should have stayed out. The poll was conducted Aug. 8-12 with 1,214 adults nationwide and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll numbers show up in the daily hardships of recruiters trained by Sgt. First Class Abdul-Malik Muhammad, based in Birmingham, Ala. "With blacks, there is not really a great support for the war," Sergeant Muhammad said, recalling one prospective recruit who was told by his parents that they would sever all ties with him if he enlisted.
My read on this is that there's a deep sense of betrayal within the African-American community that parallels what's going on in the activist base of the party in general. I took a glance at the drops in polling support for a variety of Democrats over the past month or two, and the drop is concentrated among liberals and African-Americans. At the same time, there's a deep sense of frustration with current black leadership centered in two areas. One, many opinion leaders in the hip hop community are deeply embittered by the civil rights generation of leaders and media stars like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Oprah that chide Hip Hop culture without speaking to the real concern in their music, communities, and expression. And two, the middle class emerging black activist class is furious with failures of the political leadership, represented both by the political leaders themselves and institutions like the NAACP and the Urban League that aren't capturing the newer generation. There's obviously overlap here, and I'm probably simplifying these trends dramatically.
It's still interesting, though, how this parallels what's going on with the new progressive movement on the blogs. We're part of a newer irony-infused culture, and we're constantly told by our progressive elders that we're too angry, controversial, or informal. We don't relate to traditional liberal institutions like unions or mass membership organizations like the ACLU, and our leaders tend to disappoint us on a regular basis. Permeating all of this is Iraq and the breakdown of trust in Republican governance. Anyway, I don't have tremendous insight here, but there are a lot of opportunities and I figured I'd point out that there's ferment all over the place.
Davey D is a journalist, radio programmer, webmaster (daveyd.com) and media activist from the Bay Area. He pens a Hip Hop and Politics column for the San Jose Mercury news. He is also the co-host of syndicated radio show called Hard Knock Radio which focuses on Hip Hop, politics and social justice issues. He is the program director for Breakdown FM out of Los Angeles, California. He is also a member of the National Hip Hop Political Convention
First I wanna thank Senator Durbin and his staff for reaching out to me and allowing me to be a part of this event.
There are a lot of things that I can and would like to say about the Internet and what it means for me and the communities I engage daily. I have been online since 1991 and when I was first introduced to the Internet and told that it was a place that democratized communication to the masses.
As an African American male I have long felt the frustration of confronting one side's perspectives of important issues as it pertained to my community. I have long been frustrated with rampant stereotypes that mass communication outlets have used to pigeonhole us. Ironically I was equally frustrated at the lack of accountability and broken promises by the handful of African American owned media outlets like Radio One and BET that initially gained our trust by positioning themselves as viable alternatives to what I and many others found as ongoing media assaults.
As a person who is deeply rooted in the Hip Hop community the Internet was a place where the playing field was leveled and we could find relief from the outlets that felt the only way they could be profitable was by highlighting material that fell under the themes of violence, misogyny, beefs and other types of controversy.
When the media consolidated in 1996 I was among the few voices on radio in major market (the Bay Area) who was able to go on the air in a prime time setting and speak out against it. At the time my objections fell on deaf ears and it would not be until 2001 as we saw increased marginalizing of other voices and communities in the mainstream media that the general public began to 'get it'.
STATE BLOGS
As you know Congress held hearings on Hip Hop yesterday up on Capitol Hill. Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush wanted to see why there is so much music being pushed by corporations that highlight racial stereotypes and disrespect toward women. Overall the hearings were explosive from the start. One of the Congressmen from New York Anthony D Weiner, posed the question as to why artists today don't step it up and do like artists did in the past and pen songs that talk about social issues in the community. He cited Shinehead who at the height of the crack epidemic in the late 80s so fit to write a song that spoke out against crack. He wanted to know why we don't see more artists who have different types of conversations like the way Tribe Called Quest or Brand Nubian did in year's past.
