Adam Mansbach
Website(s): http://www.bakarikitwana.com
[Click to see Bakari on Rap Sessions Panel]
Pictures: [Click for larger viewing]
Books:
® Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America
by Bakari Kitwana [Click for More Information]
Publisher Comments:
In this bold bombshell of a book, Bakari Kitwana argues that hip hop has broken down more racial barriers than any other social development of the past three decades.
Our national conversation about race is ludicrously out of date. Hip hop is the key to understanding how things are changing. In a provocative book that will appeal to hip hoppers both black and white and their parents, Bakari Kitwana deftly teases apart the culture of hip hop to illuminate how race is being lived by young Americans. This topic is ripe, but untried, and there is a plethora of questions that he is the first to articulate.
®Does hip hop belong to black kids?
®What in hip hop appeals to white youth?
®Is hip hop different from rhythm, blues, jazz, and even rock 'n' roll for previous generations?
®How have mass media and consumer culture made hip hop a unique phenomenon?
®What does class have to do with it?
®Can a culture belong to a race in the first place?
®How do young Americans think about race, and how has hip hop influenced their perspective?
®Are young Americans achieving Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream through hip hop?
Kitwana addresses uncomfortable truths about America's level of comfort with black people, challenging preconceived notions of race. With this brave tour de force, Bakari Kitwana takes his place alongside the greatest African American intellectuals of the past decades.
Articles: Kitwana Testifies in Lawsuit as Expert Witness [Article From AllHipHop.com]
A 14-year-old rapper who was arrested and then suspended for two years by The Riverside Beaver County School District in Pennsylvania for posting his battle raps on the internet has been awarded a $90,000 settlement over his expulsion from school.
Anthony “emceeaccident” Latour, member of an upcoming rap group Just Business, was handcuffed and arrested in middle school in April of 2005, after another student rapper’s mother saw lyrics the two were posting back and forth on the internet.
Latour was charged with terroristic threats over the lyrics to the rap songs.
The same day Latour was arrested, seven police officers with a K-9 dog searched his parents home and confiscated $10,000 worth of recording equipment Latour’s parents had purchased for him.
The rapper spent a week in a juvenile detention facility over the incident and was eventually expelled for two years because of the violent lyrics that allegedly threatened other students.
“I live in a small town and they really don’t understand rap music,” Latour told AllHipHop.com. “I didn’t really know what was happening, it blindsided me.”
The Pittsburgh chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Latour in August of 2005, claiming the school had violated his First Amendment rights.
One of the songs that helped get Latour expelled was titled “Murder He Wrote,” which lawyers for the ACLU deemed “a third party narrative song about the incident at columbine [high school in Colorado] reflecting Anthony’s attempt to imagine what could have been going on in the heads of the students who perpetuated the tragedy.”
Latour, who said he considers Eminem, Necro and D-Block as his main influences, said he hails from a small town here people don’t understand Hip-Hop music.
At a May expulsion hearing, the student Latour was battling admitted he was never threatened and that the two never intended to harm each other.
In August, attorneys from the ACLU argued that the rapper was battling and that his lyrics didn’t threaten anyone specifically.
"Anthony's rap music -- by which he flexes his lyrical muscles -- is not a true threat, but is art enjoying full First Amendment protection,” argued Kim Watterson, a lawyer based in Pittsburgh with the international law firm Reed Smith, which handled the case on a pro bono basis.
Watterson also called noted Hip-Hop author Bikari Kitwana to testify on behalf of Latour. Kitwana explained that battle rap can “get pretty nasty in terms of the language," but was still simply “a verbal challenge.” [more]
