Bakari Kitwana

Bakari Kitwana (Moderator) is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary has been seen on CNN, Fox News (The O’Reilly Factor), BET and heard on NPR. The co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention, he’s the author of the bestselling The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, which has been adopted as a course book at over 100 colleges and universities across the country. The former editor of The Source, his writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, Savoy and the Progressive. He’s been the editorial director of Third World Press and a consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Currently Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, he’s been a visiting scholar at Kent State University where he taught a course entitled “The Politics of The Hip-Hop Generation.” For the last decade, he’s given hundreds of presentations on hip-hop and youth culture at the nation’s leading universities including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and others. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America is his most recent book. www.bakarikitwana.com