On the Road with Rap Sessions

NATIONAL TOWNHALL MEETINGS SEEK TO ANSWER THE QUESTION,
DOES HIP-HOP HATE WOMEN?

Critically-acclaimed author and hip-hop activist Bakari Kitwana collaborates with the Community Technology Foundation of California to announce a national tour focused on popular culture’s stereotypical representations of women and men in the hip-hop generation.

Rap Sessions presents a diverse panel of leading hip-hop intellectuals to engage youth and community leaders in candid, compelling conversations about the ways the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture influences relationships between young women and men. Targeting the hip-hop generation and their younger millennial siblings, these dynamic and provocative discussions tackle issues from hip-hop’s war of the sexes to ways of ensuring that hip-hop’s emerging political movement is inclusive of an empowering agenda for women.

“For too long the hip-hop community has failed to set forth a national agenda for women,” notes Kitwana. “The goal of these gatherings is to jumpstart a national discussion that asks young people, the hip-hop industry and our policy makers to assume responsibility for their complicity in making hip-hop synonymous with misogyny and homophobia.”

Reflecting on television programming like The Flava of Love, former Source editor-in-chief Kim Osario’s sexual harassment ruling and books like the New York Times bestseller Confessions of a Video Vixen, Kitwana added: “Throughout the last decade, from Congress to the campus center, hip-hop’s troubling representation of women is the question that will not go away. This tour hopes to ensure that solutions to this debate go beyond the ivory tower to intervene in the lives of everyday people.”

Beginning in March 2007, Rap Sessions' interactive community dialogues will convene in ten cities across the United States. Panelists include: Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University Black popular culture professor and author of four books including New Black Man); Hip-Hop journalist Joan Morgan (author of the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist); filmmaker Byron Hurt (director of Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a film about misogyny and hip-hop) and professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the forthcoming Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hop and the New Gender Politics).

Kitwana, the moderator of these discussions, is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the former editor of The Source. His book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture has been adopted as a coursebook at over 100 colleges and universities across the country. A consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kitwana has been acknowledged as an expert on youth culture and hip-hop politics by CNN, Fox News, CNBC, BET and other leading news outlets. His writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, Savoy and the Boston Globe. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America is his most recent book.

The Community Technology Foundation of California (CTFC) is a statewide public foundation dedicated to increasing access to and use of information and telecommunications technology by underserved communities, including communities of color, low-income, disabled, immigrant, limited English proficient, rural and inner-city communities, seniors and at-risk youth. CTFC has invested over $30 million in programs and initiatives and awarded over 500 grants to 393 non-profit organizations which promote digital inclusion. Founded in 1998, CTFC operates a portfolio of innovative grantmaking, initiatives and leadership programs through an array of partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropy and corporations. For more information, go to www.ZeroDivide.org

March
5th; Purdue University
13th; Los Angeles, CA
20th; Spelman College
22nd; St. Louis, MO
27th; Buffalo State College

April
4th; San Jose, CA
12th; Vanderbilt University
18th; Case Western University
28th; University of Chicago
30th; San Antonio, TX

For more information about Rap Sessions, log onto: http://www.rapsessions.org/

Press Contact: Nicole Balin, Ballin PR, 323-651-1580, email at: nik@ballinpr.com.