September
17, 2001
Hip-Hop Must Call For Peace
By Jeff Chang
This past weekend, as we mourned the
countless victims of 9/11 and built with each other in passionate
conversations on what to do next, President George W. Bush finally
and unequivocally declared war.
He ordered a call-up of 50,000
reservistsÐthe first step towards reinstituting the draftÐwhile
preparing Americans for a long, ground war that could leave many
innocent Afghanis dead or displaced. Reversing the Powell doctrine
to seize upon a desire for vengeance, he warned that there may
be no foreseeable end to this war, and declared no specific enemy.
This does not bode well for
the hip-hop generation. As STORM, the Bay Area hip-hop activist
organization says, "Increasingly, safety at home will require
justice abroad." Bush1s open-ended war could leave us increasingly
insecure, subject to more terror not less, with less justice
for all in the world.
Because of its history, the
global hip-hop generation can play a crucial moral role in the
call for peaceÐpeace on the streets where we live, and a
global peace free from terror.
At one time, others dissed
our generation by saying that we were privileged, that we had
never been tested by war. [This was before Bush1s father opened
the Persian Gulf War.] The fact is that hip-hop was born under
the conditions of war. It grew and spread as a global alternative
to war.
Before hip-hop, during the
early 1970s, Jamaica1s bloody tribal wars fostered a music and
culture of defiance in roots, dancehall and dub reggae. This
music and culture--a safe space from the bloody gang runnings
on the street immigrated to the Bronx--a space so devastated
by deindustrialization and governmental neglect that when Ronald
Reagan visited in 1980, he declared that it looked like London
after World War II. In the Bronx, the Universal Zulu Nation,
hip-hop1s first institution and organization, literally emerged
from a peace forged between racially divided, warring gangs.
As Reagan took office, immigration
was rapidly browning the face of America. The "culture war"
was declaredÐa way to contain the nation1s growing diversity.
Culture warriors went after youth in their schools; they fought
multiculturalism, ethnic studies, and affirmative action. In
Congress, they sought limits on movie and music content.
Hip-hop turned out to be everything
they detestedÐit was real, truth telling, unapologetic, and,
worst of all, their kids loved it. Imagine how they felt when
Chuck D enlisted millions into the opposition by rhyming, "They1ll
never care for the brothers and sisters cause the country has
us up for a war."
In one sense, hip-hop won the
culture war. By the end of the 80s, Public Enemy and Spike Lee,
John Singleton and N.W.A., and other brothers and sisters had
crashed the lily-white pop culture mainstream. Hip-hop became
the single most potent global youth force in a generation.
But the culture war had serious
political consequences, too. Right-wingers manufactured the conditions--moving
drugs and guns into the ghetto via the wars in Central America--for
a resurgence of gang warfare. And they succeeded in stigmatizing
inner-city gangs--whose ranks, of course, were swollen with young,
poor people of color--as mindlessly, irredeemably violent and
evil.
Hip-hop reveled in the young
generation1s diversity. The culture warriors taught other generations
to be afraid of it. When the 90s came, they warned of a coming
wave of juvenile crime, one that would crest with the darkening
demographic surge.
Their apocalyptic predications
began a dramatic shift in juvenile justice, away from rehabilitation
towards incarceration. 48 states made their juvenile crime statutes
more punitive. Dozens of cities instituted curfews, anti-cruising
laws, and sweep ordinances (which were ruled unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court but have reappeared in many cities).
Especially after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as urgent gang
truce work forged peace across the country, the new laws were
implemented at a feverish clip and enforced with a heavy hand.
Juvenile arrests and detention populations skyrocketed, even
as juvenile violent crime rates plummeted.
Local police, the FBI, and
private companies began compiling gang databases. Every young
boy or girl of color who fit the profile--sagging, baggy jeans,
athletic shoes, hip-hop swagger--became fodder for the gang databases.
In Cook County, IL, the gang database was two-thirds black. In
Orange County, CA, 92 percent of those listed in the gang database
were of color. Angry Black, Chicano and Latino parents in Denver,
CO, learned that eight of every ten young people of color in
the entire city were listed.
Post-modern racial profiling
was invented for the hip-hop Generation, the most catalogued
and spied-upon in history. Along with the "war on drugs"Ðthe
only result of which has been racist sentencing and the largest
prison population in world historyÐwhat hip-hop activists
called the "war on youth" left a generation staring
into a tense present and an insecure future.
These are the reasons why thousands
of hip-hop activists came out to protest at the Republican and
Democratic Conventions last year. They took courageous stands
against the massive profiling and imprisoning of a generation;
against the death penalty; for better education; and for stopping
gang violence. They linked these issues to global struggles for
economic and racial justice.
Now that President Bush has
declared an open war with no clear enemy, the global, multiracial,
polycultural hip-hop generation can elevate beyond the chant
of "No justice, no peace"Ða cry that, in truth,
sounds much different when uttered by Bush.
If we can understand the history
of wars from Israel to Afghanistan the way that we understand
our own generation1s history, we can link what is happening on
our streets with what is happening in our world.
We can call for peace on our
streetsÐto be free from profiling and imprisoning, to be
free from the cycle of violence that causes us to kill each other
needlessly.
And we can call for peace in
our worldÐto be free from the kind of terror that strikes
our bodies and our hearts, to be free from the cycles of violence
driven by geopolitical posturing and economic greed that cause
us to kill each other needlessly.
Everyone deserves a better,
safer future. Hip-hop has already survived many wars. Time and
again, we have learned how to react to crisis by forging a principled
peace. As we stand on the brink of the biggest war we have ever
faced, let us come together to find the most powerful, lasting
peace yet. CP
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