It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (8 page)

What do you think can be done about this?

People need universal health care, for starters, to begin to climb out of the desolate pits of poverty. Right now, nearly all of my citizens, and more than 43 million Americans in total, are uninsured and it doesn’t have to be like this. Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA), for example, proposes a single payer plan that would provide coverage for all Americans without increasing total costs, every year; however, it’s never been approved. Moreover, this is what the people want—not just my people, but most Americans. A USA/Harris poll recently conducted showed that 77 percent of the general public believes the government should provide universal health care.

The other important thing is unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance keeps people who have been laid off above the poverty level; however, the way it’s structured now, 60 percent of people who are laid off don’t receive any temporary monies. We must do this. It would mean no person willing and ready to work should be living in poverty.

Another thing is expanding Supplemental Security Income, a program that provides benefits to those permanently disabled, and workers’ compensation, a program that provides benefits to workers who have been injured on the job. Everyone who cannot work should receive benefits. Right now, people who have been temporarily disabled from injuries caused off the job cannot receive benefits from either program. What’s worse is that even those who are permanently disabled—by mental illness, disability due to addiction, and hard-to-prove conditions like back pain—are not eligible to receive any benefits.

How much would all this cost?

That can’t be determined for sure, but consider this: in 1999, the “poverty gap,” which is the amount of money needed to raise all the incomes to at least the poverty line, was $65 billion. Yearly Social Security income is $500 billion. And the tax cut we got in 2001 was $1.3 trillion. America has the loot.

Why are your schools, some of which I attended, failing?

Because poor African-Americans are forced into me, my schools are almost completely segregated. Secondary and elementary schools are funded mainly through local taxes, so my schools have much fewer resources per child and significantly less money to fund education.

My students are bringing noneducational issues like hunger, domestic violence, homelessness, abuse, and many other personal problems that demand greater resources. However, despite this, my schools
are getting far less money than, say, suburban schools, which don’t have to deal with these issues.

Can I read you a passage? I came across it recently and it echoes this point.

Sure, go ahead.

This is from
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
by Jonathan Kozol:

That’s the sad reality.

Along the same lines, the late, great artivist Ossie Davis once said, “I believe the ending of poverty is the cultural assignment of our time.” Do you agree?

Yes, and racism in this country is intertwined with poverty—so yes, poverty and racism. I mean, in America, the richest nation in the world, on any given night, 562,000 American children go to bed hungry.

Do you think the U.S. government cares?

Follow the money, the budget, and you’ll see what the government cares about. The U.S. budget represents not only political and economic interests, but moral ones as well. Don’t believe what politicians tell you their priorities are, look at the budget and decide for yourself.

A child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and without health insurance every minute in America. This is public information.

One of the most common misconceptions is that the government can’t solve the poverty problem and that everything that could possibly be done has been tried. The government can in fact solve the problem and it’s not that expensive. The reality is they haven’t been willing to consider eradicating poverty in this country.

So what do we do?

Didn’t Frederick Douglass say that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Yeah, he did.

Well, there you go.

It’s up to the people, in me and outside of me, to make this a priority. Demand justice and true equality.

But they don’t understand because of misrepresentation. That’s why I agreed to this interview.

KRS-One once said, “It’s not a novelty, you can love your neighborhood without loving poverty.” Do you agree with that?

Most definitely. Poverty is nothing to love. My image has been distorted and misrepresented, though, so you have a white media that both glorifies and demonizes me at the same time, while never really addressing who I am.

So I take it you feel misrepresented?

Of course. There is me, as I am, with all of the institutional, political, economic, and structural racist policies, and then there is my image that fails to address any of this in a real way.

The misrepresentation leads to a public consensus about my residents. They believe, both those who reside elsewhere and, sadly, those who reside in me, that their poverty is their fault. That they are lazy, addicted, sexually promiscuous, and so on and so forth, and that this is the reason for the poverty, when the reality, as I’ve touched upon, is completely different. To give you a quick example, most people who live in me are not addicted to drugs or alcohol, don’t engage in criminal activity, and are not on welfare. This would come as a shock to those who absorb the images on TV and in movies and the rhymes of mainstream rappers.

America is a very individualistic society. So, as a result, poor people are blamed for their poverty and the rich are credited with their wealth, disregarding inheritance, class privilege, resources, et cetera. I mean, Bush is as responsible for his wealth as most of my residents are for their poverty.

Yeah. So do you think this has political ramifications?

Definitely. If the majority of Americans think that the poor are poor because of their own faults, then they’ll also believe that the poor should get out of it on their own. They believe the poor are undeserving.
All of this is reinforced by popular culture, which literally makes fun of poor people. Their lack of education is laughed at, their squalor glorified, their struggle criminalized. People certainly don’t want to change the policies.

There’s this big thing about “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.”

You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don’t have any damn shoes!

What about the violence in you?

Violence? [shrugs]

Well?

Was Nat Turner violent?

Uh, I’m not —

Reminds me of Nat Turner, because he was not violent, he was responding to slavery, which was violent. The conditions in which my residents live are violent. There’s always been this attempt to demonize my residents. They call survival after a hurricane “looting.” They call protests against a system that keeps them poor “riots.”

Look, man, as long as I’m around, there will be desperation. What do you expect if you put the poorest folks together in one area, take away jobs, destroy social networks, police the hell out of them, harass them—I mean, seriously, what do you expect?

Is there anything else that you’d like to tell the post-hip-hop generation?

Organize, organize, organize. The time is now.

Thanks for your time.

Peace.

“And finally
, how does it feel to be just twenty-three years old—and a
professor?”
asked the energetic host of the Pacifica radio program on which I was being phone interviewed.

“I haven’t started yet, however, the thing—”

“I’m sorry, brother Asante, I’m afraid that’s our time,” she informed me.

“Oh,” I grunted, feeling cheated.

“It was nice talking to you. Good luck to you this semester at Morgan State University.”

“A’ight, thanks, peace,” I said as I disappointedly hung up the phone.

I wanted to answer the question. I wanted to say that I truly was excited about the position; however, just as our interview was
prematurely amputated, I was convinced that my professorship would be, too.

A few years before I was hired, artivist Amiri Baraka was offered the position of poet laureate of New Jersey by then-governor Jim McGreevey. Baraka—perplexed that he, given his highly publicized radical politics—would be offered a state gig, warned McGreevey, “You’re gonna get in trouble,” as he accepted the job. Sure enough, within a few months, after Baraka wrote and recited his book-length post-9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” there was trouble. The poem asks: “Who have the colonies / Who stole the most land / Who rule the world / Who say they good but only do evil / Who the biggest executioner / Who made Bush president? / Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying? / Who talk about democracy and be lying?” When Baraka refused to resign at the governor’s request, McGreevey, lacking the power to fire Baraka, opted to abolish the position altogether, thus giving Baraka the distinct moniker as the first and last poet laureate of New Jersey. On a similar note, I felt I was destined to become the first and last twenty-three-year-old professor ever appointed.

Why?

Because most colleges and universities, especially historically Black schools, are conservative institutions. I have the audacity to believe that poverty can and must be eradicated; that health care can and must be made free; that prisons should be converted into schools and rehabilitation centers; and that war is not the answer—thus making me, in the eyes of those that seek to conserve the unjust world as it is, a “radical.” Additionally, I understand that the exercise of education is never neutral. Education, in this turbulent time, is either engaged in integrating and conforming young minds to accept and maintain the world they’ve inherited or it is an exercise in liberation by which young women and men create, imagine, and participate in the
transformation of their world. Because I coveted the latter—
the transformation of the world
—I knew that my job was not secure. For, in order to transform the world, one must challenge and confront the institutions that train and graduate custodians of the status quo.

Despite my skepticism, though, the reality was that I was now a professor. Among the classes I was set to teach was a general studies course entitled “The Post-Hip-Hop Generation.” Months before, I’d published an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
entitled “We Are the Post-Hip-Hop Generation,” based on conversations I was having with young people around the country who felt that hip hop no longer represented their desire for radical change and wasn’t apt to respond to the critical challenges facing our world. A month later, community organizers in Newark put together “Post-Hip-Hop Generation,” a panel discussion where music executives, DJs, rappers, and scholars came together to discuss, among other things, the ideas put forth in my article. Despite a lively discussion, nothing could match the promise of a class populated and taught by the post-hip-hop generation.

Zora Neale Hurston, who strolled across the Morgan State University (then Morgan College) campus as a student ninety years before I would begin teaching there, once remarked that “The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.” As my first day approached, I grew more and more anxious about my role in helping to hatch the future. And then the day came.