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Hip hop activism


Hip hop activism is a term coined by the hip hop intellectual and journalist Harry Allen. It is meant to describe an activist movement of the post- baby boomer generation.

The hip hop generation was defined in The Hip- Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture as African Americans born between 1965 and 1984. This group is situated between the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X on one end and hip hop's explosion during the 1970s and 1980s. But the hip-hop generation can be more loosely defined to include minorities born between 1965 and 1984 who have grown up within a culture of hip hop music, dance, fashion and art. [1]

Some of the issues of social justice the movement addresses are minority and immigration rights, educational access, prison reform and transportation policy. In recent years California's Proposition 187 and Proposition 21 have also been a focus of hip hop activism. The movement also addresses a broad range of social change practices like youth organizing and development, cultural work, and intercultural exchanges.

The mid-1990s were a particularly active period for the hip-hop agenda. In 1994, C. Delores Tucker told a Senate panel that the hip-hop generation, "coaxed by gangster rap,' would "trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions that we have never seen the likes of." And then added, "Regardless of the number of jails built, it will not be enough."

In his book Can't Stop Won't Stop, author Jeff Chang traces the evolution of the hip hop activist movement noting that it was initially mostly grass roots and locally focused. But as movements against the prison-industrial complex and police brutality emerged simultaneous to movements against corporate globalization, many young hip hop activists began to organize nationally.


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