About Rap Sessions - (continued)

Last summer's National Hip-Hop Political Convention was an attempt toward national community building that sought to demonstrate hip-hop's potential to organize cross-racial political agenda. The event successfully gathered 4000 young people from across the country. 400 delegates drafted a national hip-hop political agenda. In terms of racial diversity, the event was a mostly Black affair.

Over the 18 months leading up to the 2004 Election, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network held 13 summits to registered young hip-hop kids to vote and encourage them to participate in electoral politics. These events too were over 95 percent Black and Latino.

Although American youth across race are active participants in hip-hop's cultural movement, where are the spaces being nurtured to encourage all hip-hop kids to engage in a politics of change?

The League of Pissed Off Voters offers one option. The League essentially has emerged as an organization that is creating a comfortable space for white hip-hop kids to get involved in hip-hop and community building efforts beyond strictly the hip-hop arts.

Community Dialogues on hip-hop and race hope to serve as an additional option.

As a generation, it's important that we think about race as strength and not an obstacle. We've often done this in hip-hop's cultural movement, but it's happen in pockets and coincidences not as a strategy. Now that hip-hop has been in existence for over 30 years, the question of hip-hop origins has become a recurring one that often pits racial and ethnic groups claiming hip-hop against one another. Conversations about hip-hop's origins are important and necessary, but as we have these conversations in order to escape an outdated divide and conquer racial politics, we need to have a healthy dialogue around conflicts between Caribbean Americans and African Americans; between Puerto Rican Americans and Dominican Americans; between the Latino community and the Black community; between Blacks and Whites. Part of this discussion includes discussing the history of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and contemporary imperialism. Such analysis is crucial to building cross racial coalitions.

Likewise discussions about conflicts between Asian Americans (especially Korean Americans) and African Americans still get played out in the same old ways. Racist portrayals of people of African descent in Japan raise questions in some circles about Japanese youth claiming hip-hop. And Jeff Chang's recently published book on hip-hop (Can't Stop Won't Stop), compelled some within the hip-hop community to raise the question, why is an Asian-American an authority on hip-hop? The dialogues will allow us to have healthy conversations about all of these issues and give young hip-hop artists and activists a language and framework for thinking through these complex issues and how they've evolved because of hip-hop.

The panelists are a multicultural range of accomplished hip-hop intellectuals who have written on hip-hop on a variety of levels and or engaged in hip-hop activism.

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