Hip-Hop Republicans: What Do They Represent?

Hip Hop Republican, a blog I've been trying to read more, posted their very intriguing "'Hip-Hop Republicanism': A Manifesto" yesterday. This is a trend I've been noticing for the past two to three years: a very thin layer of hip-hop generation folks who represent a minority left tendency within the Republican Party. They, like Michael Steele, recently elected RNC Chair, embrace hip-hop and oppose the mainstream old school racism of white Republicanism that relegates hip-hop to violence.

I haven't given this phenomenon a lot of thought, but from what I can tell it is a result of two things; one, the fact that America itself is becoming more hip-hop and that hip-hop as such is becoming more diffuse throughout mainstream society, and two, the growth of hip-hop as an industry, or to use the Republican lexicon, as a "job creator."

What we've often referred to as "Hip-Hop Conservatism" is distinct from Hip-Hop Republicanism. Back in '97 when I was still a b-boy in a Kansas City-based crew called The Circuit Breakers, a friend and fellow dancer remarked, "Rebel (my hip-hop moniker of the time), you're like a hip-hop republican." Of course, he was talking about my hip-hop cultural conservatism as I was politically left. I, like other cultural conservatives then, was railing about the need for hip-hop to remain true to its so-called essence.

Hip-Hop Republicans aren't necessarily cultural conservatives (as indicated by their identification with the artists below), but are a logical extension of this conservatism into politics. The difference is that they aren't explicitly loyal to any one form of hip-hop, just as we at D&HHP aren't.

Their proof of hip-hop's positive force is in (surprise!) its entrepreneurialism. Everyone from Russell Simmons and Jay-Z to T.I. and David Banner are championed as a testament to hip-hop's commitment to free markets and as a provider of jobs for people of color and poor youth.

Part of how the neoliberal platform of the Republican Party has been packaged in terms of social spending has been its replacement by the encouragement of private funding and charity. Tax money has been cut from the wealthy, appropriated from the poor, and used to fund American geopolitical interests and war on people of color. This bankrupt philosophy has proved itself unable to fix what in reality will take a massive reinvestment into infrastructure and social institutions. The "golden era" of American capitalist expansion (1946-1973) meant a historically unprecedented investment in the "social wage" and even that was not enough to stifle working class rebellion from the black community to the women's movement who were fighting for direct democratic control of workplaces, schools, and communities.

The mainstream of the Democrats and the teabag crackers believe that this is what Obama is doing. He is not. Forty-five percent of Obama's stimulus has been tax cuts. The money supposedly earmarked for infrastructure development won't create jobs with livable wages, but will go to contractors who will make beaucoup dough relying on ultra-exploited undocumented labor. Obama is no FDR. And FDR's New Deal is no model for change anyhow.

The "Urban Republicans" ensure us that they aren't anarchists or right-wing von Mises Institute-type libertarians who oppose the State, but rather, like Republicans generally, support "small government." This kind of disingenuous language is supposed to gloss over the fact that the Republican Party has been intrinsic to the enormous growth of the federal government in the past thirty years. The "small government" talk was used to justify undoing government regulation of capital, but to impose the greatest amount of regulation on labor with ever more laws and labor department appointments that aimed to repress working class organization.

But Urban Republicans don't ever look to become the dominant force in the Republican Party. Many Republicans are demanding Steele resign which indicates how closely rooted in old school white supremacy the GOP is. Of course, we're not naive enough to think that the Democrats are any kind of legitimate opposition to white supremacy within official society. On the contrary, they represent its advanced wing. Not only that, but Urban Republicans aren't a viable enough hegemonic opposition, let alone numerical, to overcome the Party. They hope to push the GOP to the left and supplant themselves for what can only be popular control from below.

For those wanting to stay abreast of how Urban Republicans are orienting to the hip-hop generation, check out Hip Hop Republican.

Free Mumia

In continuing with the theme of mid 90s hip-hop, I'm posting the lyrics to a KRS joint from '95 with the group Channel Live. I particularly like its slam of C. Delores Tucker, Jesse Jackson, and the Rainbow Coalition. We don't exactly see C. Delores Tucker, Jesse Jackson, and Colin Powell as House Negroes. Jackson in particular is a more advanced justification for white supremacy who embodied the language and dress of black power. The House Negro phenomenon is indicative of pre-Black Power politics and is all but superseded by a relatively new multiracial ruling class. These aren't sellouts but folks who have a vested class interest in white supremacy and in denial of people of color's self-governance.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has little to do with the song other than to underscore the hypocrisy of the civil rights leaders for joining with official society in an attack on people of color and a boycott of WEA (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic). Mumia is a clear and iconic example of State repression of Black people and in the 90s radical youth were organizing to free him. KRS' essential point is that the State, not hip-hop artists, is the real threat to people of color. "Warner, Elektra, Atlantic equals WEA, instead of fightin them why don't you go Free Mumia?!"

Knowledge, where the people at?
Free Mumia!
Channel Live! (KRS-One, come and represent)
(The wisdom)
Hah hah hah hah hah hahaha!
Free Mumia!

Everywhere I look there's another house negro
Talkin about they people and how they should be equal
They talkin but the conversation ain't goin nowhere
You can't diss hip-hop, so don't you even go there
C. Delores Tucker, you wanna quote the scripture
Everytime you hear nigga, listen up sista

Verse One: Hakim, KRS, Tuffy

I met up with this girl named Delores, a prankster
I said I MC, she said, "You're a gangster"
But she was caught up, she hit the floor like a breakdance
Wrapped her up like the arms in a b-boy stance
Recognize moms I'm one of your sons I'm hip-hop
in the form of Channel Live and KRS-One
Representin MC's across America
She said, "You're the one who be causin all that mass hysteria"

Wisdom shall come out of the mouths of babes and sucklings
But you blinded by cultural ignorance and steady judging
But judge not, lest ye may be judged
For the judgment ye judge ye shall surely be judged, you gets no love

She said, "I like it, that's why I jock it"
Then I said, "You only on my back because I fill brother's pockets"
Got em drivin Benzes Jeeps and Rolls Royces
Attackin me will leave youth with no voices
The choice is yours not mine hang with me
I'll have you freestyle and bombin graffiti
We can cut it up like like wax
Claimin I cause violence but America was violent before rap, FACT

Chorus: KRS-One

Warner, Elektra, Atlantic equals WEA
Instead of fighting them why don't you go free Mumia
(repeat 2X)

Verse Two: Tuffy, KRS, Hakim

Wild recital, I kicks the vital, like the Final
Call as I watch, Babylon fall
I had to Rush Limbaugh, get that pig with an axe
Tuffy dips to the side, buckin cannons that's phat
Because he censors the uses of the metaphor
You can get the dick bum up
Because it's you that brings the, real horrorcore
Expenditures forgettin, gut from the poor

Why sure! Back before we were born they sold us out
Yeah J. Jackson we know what you about
You's a Slave Mason, not a Free Mason
Before long the Goddess Tiamat through hip-hop you'll be facin
Don't start me, cause I be the, lyricist
At the nineteen ninety-nine millenium party held at Giza
Sayin he's a, fraud, oh my Goddess
Never in your life should you disrespect an artist
Instead, focus your attention on astronomy
And the up and coming, shift in the economy
If you can't do that, then heed the final call
To free Mumia Abu-Jamal

Hate to be so rough, it could be the White Owls
House niggaz are full of crap, like my Colin Powell
Kickin vowels, is how we relieve the tension
Until we start to bounce white people like suspension (revolution)
You paint the pictures, the black man on the corner
But tell me, who blew up Oklahoma?
The City, ain't no pity, for the beast
It's Hakim that voice from the East

Chorus

Verse Three: KRS, Hakim, Tuffy

Buck buck! Buck buck buck!
It sound like gunshots but it could be the plot
of a chicken, definition, is what you're missin and
listen to your children instead of dissin em
Senator Dole doesn't understand the young people
Like they be sayin want to, but we be sayin wanna
They gettin dumber every summer as they walk the rope
Maybe because they cannot understand the quotes

Word, in actuality, this Norman Bates mentality
always seems to represent, minus three-sixty percent
For degrees full circle, dead from the purple
rays of the sun I gots melanin so check it
Bag your nuts quick or get sick from being naked
Suspect it, was it a means for the end
For just a few to drive the Benz while you eat the pigskins
Turned you into mannequins, cause the trick of technology
A revelation, revelations
Sensation gives me inspiration of revolution
That's my solution, there will be no sequels
I'm audi hundred forty four thousand with my people

From Caligula to Hitler, now it's Schwarzenegger
A lust for the violence is the science of their behavior
Who enslaved ya (it's the Devil) but the God of virtuosity
And of the world created, could it be mental sodomy
Got my mind twisted like the blades of fonta leaf
I sit in disbelief as he crawls underneath
the rock cock back the glock, cause I don't trust
the Devil I rebel until Babylon is dust

Chorus

Hip-Hop vs. The Rainbow

I recently read this excerpt from Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop and thought I'd share it. I think it's a good look at some of the historical attacks on hip-hop and how the Rainbow Coalition (a collaborationist outgrowth of Black Power) became the new justification for white supremacy. On the flip, we see the emergence of a new layer of militant youth who clearly identify as hip-hop and are waging a fight against the racism of a multiracial official society. This was one of the earliest forms of resistance our generation mounted against the new Rainbow Coalition rulers and it is an ethos still alive today, though uneven. In the 1990s, we didn't view C. Delores Tucker as a black leader, but a straight up parasitic and opportunistic racist. Despite attempts to gloss over that legacy today and while this specific generation might not know of her, we continue to buck the idea that black liberation has meant having a black face in State power.

--


The Great Divide

If the arc of hip-hop generation's cultural revolution was bowing toward difficult issues of engagement and exploitation, its political revolution was just taking flight.

Born in 1965 to prominent civil rights organizers in North Carolina, Angela Brown had been a child activist, leading campaigns to free Black women political prisoners. But her life changed in 1982, when the state of North Carolina decided to put a toxic waste landfill in the middle of a nearby working-class Black community. Brown and other teenage girls lay down on the road to prevent trucks from bringing in PCB-tainted soil for the landfill. That battle in Warren County became known as the opening shot in the environmental justice movement, a struggle that combined anti-racist and environmental activism.

A decade later, Brown was on the staff of the Atlanta-based civil rights stalwart, the Southern Organizing Committee, where she formed the Youth Task Force to organize youths from ten states and eighty-five universities into the environmental justice movement. She began to realize that a sharp, traumatic generational divide was emerging. Elders called her generation apathetic, but Brown saw a fundamentally different politics.

"The way in which they built their movement was around the 'lunch counter'— SNCC and others coming down to the South to challenge segregation on the lunch counter," she says. "We didn't have a single lunch counter.' We have had many 'lunch counters.' Our fight has been a constant barrage of struggles." No longer was there a single Movement, but dozens of movements—civil rights, education, environmental justice, AIDS, prisons, the list went on. But Brown noticed that where the dialogue really collapsed, where the generation gap was deepest, was over the question of hip-hop culture and rap music.

It was a divide that a fading Black Pennsylvania politician named C. Delores Tucker tried to exploit. Born in 1929 and raised in northern Philadelphia, Tucker inherited twenty-four tenement buildings from her parents and by 1966 had been singled out by the local newspaper as one of the city's worst slumlords. Her buildings were all soon boarded up, taken over by the city, given to charities or simply abandoned.

Tucker's failures as a property manager did not stop her from seeking the civil rights limelight. She marched arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and became a close ally of Jesse Jackson. She became a rainmaker for the Democratic Party and was appointed Pennsylvania's secretary of state in 1971, the highest-ranking Black woman official in the state's history. Six years later, she was fired by the Democratic governor for allegedly using state employees to write personal speeches and collecting kickbacks from charities.

In 1984, Tucker formed a lobby group called the National Political Congress of Black Women. Two years later, she became the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus. She then embarked on a series of unsuccessful runs for lieutenant governor and Congress before fading back into obscurity. In 1993, her friends Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore gave Tucker an opportunity to climb back into the spotlight when they approached her about having the NPCBW take up the fight against gangsta rap. Reverend Calvin Butts had already been steamrolling rap CDs in Harlem. They wanted in on the action.

Tucker repeated the same critique that hip-hop feminists had been leveling at media monopolies and rap misogynists for years. Corporations were not taking responsibility for the images they were distributing, and ducking serious discussion by hiding behind the First Amendment. But there was something disingenuous and opportunistic about her attacks.

Tucker won over both the liberal and conservative wings of her party by courting Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Joe Lieberman. Yet she also avidly welcomed the support of cultural conservatives like prominent Reagan/Bush cabinet member Bill Bennett. As the presidential election season rolled around, she joined with Republican candidate Bob Dole. Together, Bennett, Dole and Tucker made Suge Knight, Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg into clay pigeons for their culture war.

Tucker was enormously helpful to white cultural conservatives. In interviews, she compared herself to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and made an explicitly racial appeal that insulated white cult-cons from criticism. Tucker was also mouthing the most extreme fears of many disillusioned, middle-class, middle-aged people of color, the very same civil rights generation elders who felt they had given everything in struggle for their kids, only to see them turn out to be spoiled, anarchic, value-free ingrates. She attracted Blacks who supported police crackdowns and strengthening juvenile-crime laws, the very same elders with whom Angela Brown was having anguishing arguments. To the cult-cons, Tucker was mobilizing fresh troops for further attacks on youths of color.

In early 1994, Tucker prevailed upon Moseley Braun to convene an unprecedented Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gangsta rap, an inquiry into "the effects of violent and demeaning imagery in popular music on American youth." Tucker was the star witness. Echoing right-wing backlash architects like James Q. Wilson, John Dilulio and James Alan Fox, she called for a broadening of the War on Youth:

As we have seen in the last thirty years, increasing law enforcement and correctional facilities have not reduced crime. These short-term fixes will do nothing to improve the lives of children like the nineteen that [sic] were recently removed from a home in Chicago because of parental neglect and abuse. Because of the lack of positive influences, their minds will be fertile and receptive ground for internalizing the violence glorified in gangster rap. Children such as these, our most neglected population, will become a social time bomb in our midst. Being coaxed by gangster rap, they will trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions that we have never seen the likes-of. Regardless of the number of jails built, it will not be enough. Neither will there be enough police or government programs to contain the explosion of crime. We as a Nation must act now and we must act decisively.

The Return of Hip-Hop Activism

Brown and the Youth Task Force had heard enough. Not only had Tucker committed the political equivalent of taking a family argument public, she seemed to be calling down the wrath of the government on the hip-hop generation by arguing that sweep laws, new prisons, and profiling were inadequate, that youth culture also needed to be regulated. Not just bodies, but ideas needed to be contained. By articulating a broader basis for the politics of containment, Tucker had turned the debate over hip-hop culture misogyny and violence into something much worse—she had mobilized the elders to turn on their children, to join their enemies in a broad political and cultural attack on youth of color.

The Task Force reacted by organizing the Atlanta hip-hop community. They initiated a series of forums to defend hip-hop and constructively critique it. The forums brought artists like the Goodie Mob, Tupac and Afeni Shakur, and Lil' Jon and the Eastside Boyz together with elders, lawyers, scholars, activists, and poets. The Task Force catalyzed an active response in activism, the arts, and the record industry. Many now credit their work as laying the foundation for Atlanta's leap to the cutting edge of both the rap industry and hip-hop activism by the end of the decade.

Around the country, hip-hop heads took similar stands. These activists were not trying to stifle or chastise the artists Tucker-style, they were trying to create a sense of community and responsibility, and to define a new praxis of politics and culture. The aim was, as Maxine Waters had put it during the gangsta rap hearings, to "embrace and transform rather than to confront, isolate, and marginalize." They were dealing with a unique paradox—a generation that had greater access to the media and culture than any other in history remained as politically scapegoated and marginalized as any in history. They called themselves "hip-hop activists" because the term spoke to the way culture and politics came together for them, and because it was a way to reclaim and define their generational identity.

In fact, the hip-hop generation was at least as, if not more, politically active than the civil rights generation. In 2001, the UCLA Freshman Survey—the definitive documentation of college-age youth attitudes since 1966—found that nearly half of all freshmen said they had participated in an organized demonstration during the past year. That number was three times greater than in the inaugural survey, conducted at the peak of the civil rights movement.

Civil rights may have fixed an image of "The Movement" as picket-waving masses on the National Mall listening to Dr. King. If the youths weren't there in D.C., elders figured, nothing must be happening. But hip-hop activism largely took place below the national radar. Capitol Hill's diminished powers, big-money lobbying and campaign financing, and symbolic politics made it a less likely place than ever to go to get a problem solved. From Watergate to Monicagate, national politics often seemed just a lesser form of entertainment. Why bother marching on Washington?

The life-and-death struggles were happening at the local level, where hip-hop activists were busy fighting in the streets, neighborhoods, school boards, city halls, state legislatures and corporate offices. This time, the whole world would not be watching; global media monopolies could make sure of that. But the hip-hop generation was pushing forward in a complicated world, in more sophisticated ways than previous generations ever had.

Most visibly, Russell Simmons was assembling his hip-hop army, forming the Hip Hop Summit Action Network to bring together rappers, academics, music industry leaders, civil rights leaders, and politicians to push for social change. But the most compelling work was happening at the local level, outside of the traditional institutions. In Chicago, Brooklyn and Oakland, hip-hop activists used graffiti, b-boying, and DJing to educate and organize around education, gentrification, and juvenile justice issues. In Louisville, they fought book bans and youth curfews. In the Bay Area and the Bronx, they organized to stop the expansion of the juvenile detention facilities. In Albuquerque, they tossed out city council members who supported the building of a highway through sacred Native lands. On campuses across the country, they fought for labor unions, living wages, and against sweatshops and companies that invested in the prison industry.

In introducing The Future 500, a ground-breaking study of five hundred U.S. hip-hop activist and youth organizations, William "UPSKI" Wimsatt wrote, "Young people are noticing that the only thing that can't be bought, sold, co-opted or marketed anymore is substantive political organizing and dissent."