Bakari Kitwana, Political Writing and the Harlem Book Fair

A portion of my recent conversation with Bakari Kitwana is now live over at AOL BlackVoices. I reviewed Bakari’s Hip-Hop Generation for Africana.com back in 2002, when I had less of a sense of his project. Over the last few years I’ve come to greatly appreciate his commitment to expanding the available language currently used to discuss hip-hop as well as his investment in coalition politics, as rooted in his notion of a multicultural, multi-racial hip-hop electorate. Our conversation is just a small glimpse of the ideas he expounds throughout his new book Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop.

I sat down with Bakari (via phone) only a week or so after his controversial essay The Cotton Club was published in the Village Voice. The premise of Bakari’s essay is that there is, in fact, a vibrant political scene in underground hip-hop, that is largely populated by black artists and white audiences. I had just read Bakari’s essay when I walked into the Barnes & Noble here in Durham, trying to track down a copy of the new Leela James cd. With Leela no where to be found, I did fid an interesting hip-hop display, which featured what I’ll diplomatically call “white boy hip-hop”: Aesop, Gift of Gab, MF Doom, etc. When I pressed the manager about the logic behind the display, he responded that if B&N was gonna have a hip-hop display, it was gonna be “good hip-hop.” Common, Missy, Jay Z aren’t “good hip-hop”?. Hell, here we are in Durham; had the cat ever heard of Little Brother?

There is lots of anxiety about Bakari’s new book and his Village Voice piece from folk who believe that he is advocating the jettisoning of a black specific political agenda, which thankfully, if you read the book closely, is not the case. On the other hand, I am having real reservations about the emergence of a generation of cultural gatekeepers—editors, program directors, concert promoters and even Barnes & Noble managers—who have little connection with hip hop’s history or aesthetic criteria. Too many cats in the game now don’t know nothing about Big Daddy Kane—I’m not just being nostalgic here. For example, I can’t claim to be a scholar of American literature if I can’t engage Walt Whitman with the same verve that I do James Baldwin—men who wrote in different centuries. In my specific case, I can’t call myself a scholar/critic of Black Popular Culture if I can’t engage Mary J. Blige with the same sophistication that I engage Aretha Franklin.

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Bakari Kitwana was among the panelist who were convened at this year’s Harlem Book Fair to discuss the “devolution” of hip-hop. While Gwendolyn Pough, Nelson George, Danyel Smith, Bakari and I talked, across the street at the Schomburg, C-Span was broadcasting another Harlem Book Fair panel about Black Political Writing in the 21st Century that featured Kevin Powell, Yvonne Bynoe and senior political scientist Ron Walters (University of Maryland). The irony of the two panels being scheduled at the same time is that the commentary on the hip-hop panel was as political as that which the “political writing” panel engaged in. Unfortunately for far too many, the general expectation is that if you put together a panel with hip-hop generation writers, then the sum total of our available knowledges is a conversation that covers ground about the beef between 50 Cent and The Game. And indeed for many of the Civil Rights Generation, that’s all there is to hip-hop. But as our colleagues Kevin Powell and Yvonne Bynoe evidenced throughout the “political writing” panel, any sophisticated engagement with hip-hop is an engagement with the social, political, cultural, and intellectual forces that created it. As Yvonne Bynoe stated so eloquently, when all is said and done, she’s a married parent, looking for the same quality of life issues that any married parent is looking for.

A month ago I lamented that hip-hop lacked it’s Audre Lorde. Hearing us do our thing at the Harlem Book Fair last Sunday I realized that we—Bakari Kitwana, Kevin Powell, Danyel Smith, Gwedonlyn Pough, Nelson George, Greg Tate, Yvonne Bynoe…Joan Morgan, William Jelani Cobb, Akiba Solomon, Lawrence Jackson, Farai Chideya, Miles Marshall Lewis, S. Craig Watkins, Imani Perry, Scott Poulsen-Bryant, Davey D and so many, many more—are already our generation’s Lorde…and Baldwin. Now it is just the matter of us having the faith to do the work that we have been primed to do.

“Lesbianism is about to take over our community”: The Homophobic “wisdom” of Reverend Willie Wilson

I’m late on this one…

During his sermon on July 3, 2005 Reverend Willie Wilson of Washington D.C.’s Union Temple unleashed a homophobic and sexist rant, which included the claim that “lesbianism is about to take over” the black community. One of the most prominent ministers in D.C., Wilson is also the Executive Director of the Millions More Movement march, which will commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the Million Man March in October of this year.

Included among Rev. Wilson’s “insightful” observations is the notion that

Sisters are making more money than brothers and its creating problems…that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians.

Huh? Seems like a classic case of masculine anxiety, as if women choose same sex relationships solely out of a dissatisfaction with men.

While I agree with the tensions associated with "sisters making more money that brothers”, the reality is that the tensions are rooted in the inability of black men to see their self-worth as being more than making money and being the primary “provider”. Bruh if you ain’t got a job, pick up a broom and sweep the floor; hit the hamper and do some laundry; hell, pull out a pot or two and get to cookin’, and guess what, just because your labor is now relegated to the domestic sphere, that don’t make you any less of a man—just like working in the kitchen don’t make women any less of a women or a human being.

But then Rev. Wilson just gets vile. On lesbian relationships he states:

anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, its something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that…No wonder your behind is bleeding.

WHOA. What’s up with this cat? And this was in a church, right? And this cat considers himself a community leader? And we want to blame all the misogyny and homophobia in the black community on some rappers…?

Activists like Phil Pannell and Keith Boykin were of course ON this. Wilson’s diatribe comes months after Boykin’s celebrated hug of Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam and the spiritual figurehead for the Millions More Movement march. During their embrace, Farrakhan promised Boykin that black gays and lesbians would be welcomed at the march. That’s a hell of a welcoming speech by Wilson—It recalls some of the equally vile comments made by Bishop George Augustus Stallings of the Imani Temple who responded to charges of homophobia during the planning stages of the 1995 Million Man March with the quip:

What do you want, some milquetoast, sissy faggot to lead you to the promised land?

Farrakhan was silent then and thus far has been silent about Wilson.

Equally maddening is the coverage of Wilson’s comments in the mainstream press. BlackAmericaWeb.com is to be commended for covering the controversy, but their headline Black Homosexuals Enraged Over MMM Leader’s Anti-Gay Sermon reinforces the notion that homophobic rants like that of Wilson are solely the problem of black gays and lesbians and thus their “outrage” can be easily dismissed. No Wilson’s rant is our problem…it’s my problem. One of the reasons why homophobia and misogyny continues to fester in our communities is because we reduce the targets of such practices as less than black, less than human. Homophobia and Sexism is not only divisive, they also deny us the fullness of our humanity and anything that denies any of us our humanity, needs to be put in check.

I’m done.

Read New Black Man.

So Can You Pass a Brother some Hot Sauce…and perhaps a Revolution?

So…members of the legendary Black Panther Party are preparing to sell a new line of products called Burn Baby Burn: A Taste of the Sixties Revolutionary Hot Sauce—yes I said hot sauce. Proceeds from the sale of the hot sauce (still ruminating on this?) will go towards the Huey Newton Foundation and Oakland based community organization. Now I know that so many of us have become jaded and look at the hot sauce venture with a healthy sense cynicism, but this is not new territory for members of the Black Panther Party. During the late 1980s BPP founder Bobby Seale began to hawk his skills as a master Bar BQer. His cook book (“it’s a cook book, it’s a cook book!”) Barbeque'N With Bobby was published in 1988. I remember catching Seale give a talk up at New York University shortly after the book’s publication, where he defended his right to write such a book on the basis that (and I’m of cousre paraphrasing), even a revolutionary has a right to eat good Bar BQ (keep in mind as I write this, I am across the street from a place called the Q-Shack which specializes to East Carolina-styled Bar BQ). It seems to me that if Elijah Muhammad could sell the masses of the diverse uses of navy beans, then Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party can celebrate the virtues of some good Bar-BQ and hot sauce.

Of the cousre the timing of “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce is not accidental. Next year marks the “formal’ birth of the Black Power Movement and the reality is that unless you are a hard-core fan/scholar/veteran of the era, names like David Hilliard, Mark Clark, Elaine Brown, Fred Hampton, Kathleen Clever and Bobby Hutton are not familiar names. At the very least, “Burn Baby Burn” gives us an opportunity to revisit that amazing moment in American history and at best, let’s hope the Huey Newton Foundation raises enough money to do the kind of work that lives up to the radical democratic ideals that the Black Panther Party tried to uphold.

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Just to Get a Rep?

I repped today on behalf of Hip-Hop parents on NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon. Danyel Smith also got down on a little Bliss