The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back by Andreana Clay

Author:Andreana Clay [Clay, Andreana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780814723951
Google: 73sqM6hldXAC
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2012-07-02T03:20:52+00:00

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have explored how youth use hip-hop as an organizing strategy in the twenty-first century. Specifically, we have seen how hip-hop culture becomes a tool that allows youth of color to transform their individual and organizational politics in their everyday lives. It is in these moments that hip-hop becomes the mechanism that youth utilize to make sense of their social location and social justice organizing. For the youth involved with Teen Justice, hip-hop culture was central in gaining support for the political issues that they were involved in. Organizers like Naseem, Conrad, David, and Eduardo explicitly view hip-hop as an important mobilizing tool with other teenagers. And, as Conrad indicates in his discussion of the political potential of hip-hop, poetry slams and other events got folks interested because “everyone is listening.” Or, as David keenly observes, every generation has its moment and for post–civil rights youth, the moment is informed by hip-hop.

While youth use hip-hop to organize around structural change in their communities, hip-hop also influence their individual political (race, class, and gender) identities. As Courtney and David explained, hip-hop was important for them because they were able to write and express the things that happened in their communities in a form that reflected those communities. Te and Donelle also cited Tupac and other rappers as a central to their individual understandings of their raced and gendered location as young Black males. In spite of the more commercialized aspects of hip-hop, which the youth themselves critique, the important position it has in the lives and experience of youth of color, make it an important organizing tool.

By reconceptualizing the importance of popular culture in the everyday practices and organizational strategies of marginalized groups, scholars can “privilege the specific lived experience of distinct communities [and] also … search for those interconnected sites of resistance from which we can wage broader politics.”37 For post–civil rights youth, this is imperative in understanding their dual experience as both the subjects of history post–civil rights as well as objects of civil rights history. This approach must be understood as central to analyzing the importance of popular culture, social movement processes, and social change in the post–civil rights era.

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