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.