Will The Youth Vote Trump Tea Party In Midterm Elections?

Will The Youth Vote Trump Tea Party In Midterm Elections?
by Bakari Kitwana

One of the most important unasked questions this midterm election year is this: "Will the youth vote be a factor in 2010?" Given the actual impact of the youth vote in 2008, it's a far more important question than the ones daily raised by the media manufactured so-called Tea Party Movement--despite the latter's success at striking fear in the hearts of incumbents.

The Tea Party murmuring is hardly a movement. It has not a single political victory to speak of. Not so easy to dismiss are young voters who two years ago turned out in record numbers to vote in the presidential election. Two-thirds of the 23 million voters 18-29 who voted for president in 2008, voted for Barack Obama.

"The election of Barack Obama was a major electoral politics victory for the youth vote," says Angela Woodson who co-chaired the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which brought together 4000 young voters from across the US. "But it doesn't help the president to move their agenda if he isn't backed by a strong legislative body with the same vision."

The primary races unfolding this spring and summer (Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina had theirs this week) will lay the groundwork for important midterm elections this November. Both will determine if President Barack Obama can move forward effectively with his change agenda or if young voters will see common sense policies that they voted for in 2008 erupt into ugly, year-long knock down, drag out debates--the ways healthcare and economic reform have.

Over the last year and a half, young voters have for the most part remained on the sidelines of mainstream political debates. And a Gallup poll last week found that young voters are less enthusiastic about voting in midterm elections than older voters.

Is the youth vote simply elated by what it achieved in 2008 or exhausted from the effort?

Read the Full Essay @ Huffington Post

Bakari Kitwana on "New Muslim Cool"

New Muslim Cool Forges Path for New America
by Bakari Kitwana

New Muslim Cool comes at a time when daily we observe in our national culture old-guard gatekeepers (can you say Dick Cheney?) who work tirelessly to impose on the younger generation a shared American identity that is dated, simple, and in white and black. The magic of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's important new film, which recently aired on PBS, is found in its ability to provide a bird's eye view of a freshly minted generation of Americans. Fighting against being defined by America's bygone eras, New Muslim Cool points us toward a more complicated future.

It's a journey full of collisions -- mainly because the very act of shining a spotlight on the ways race, politics, religion and generational rifts have evolved, something that Taylor does quite well, is a process that slowly gleans viewers from the self-identity America has for decades projected as status quo to the world. Welcome to a nation at the crossroads between old and new.

Thank goodness, this is the story of the new America that is unfolding -- the one that young Americans across traditional divides are claiming every day as their own.

Enter Hamza Perez. The film traces the ups and downs in the life of this northeastern seaboard urban native who is transplanted to post-industrial Pittsburgh for a new start, just as the US is on the verge of the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression. Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip-hop artist, is also Muslim. His conversion from Catholicism brings him face-to-face with what freedom of religion looks like in the throes of the war on terror. (One of the film's high points is an unprovoked and unjustified FBI raid on Perez's mosque.)

Absent of his other identities, Perez's story is incomplete: A street hustler turned anti-drug counselor; a father embarking on a second marriage; a young man struggling to find a workable definition of masculinity; an unsigned hip-hop artist for whom hip-hop culture provides both the foundation for his anti-drug advocacy and a medium through which he projects his new faith.

The film is most powerful when it meets all of these varying and sometimes overlapping identities head-on. It does this best when embracing the complexities of the three-part axis on which New Muslim Cool turns.

Read the Full Essay @ THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Bakari Kitwana is a journalist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on major media outlets including CNN, FOX News and NPR. Kitwana is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the author of several books including, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.