...San Francisco Bay Area. In the following pages, I explore how youth use hip-hop music and culture in their activism on their high school campuses and youth empowerment organizations. Beyond examining the larger social justice potential of hip-hop music for youth, I also explore how hip-hop music assists in the development of a political consciousness among youth activists. In other words, music can enable youth, disenfranchised from electoral politics, to engage in the practice of democracy.

I use participant-observation and in-depth interviews to understand and explain how youth of color make sense of themselves and society through activism. From October 2000 to May 2002, I conducted fieldwork with two nonprofit organizations; the first I call Teen Justice and the second, Multicultural Alliance. (2) During this time, I attended hip-hop poetry slams, talked with youth individually about hip-hop music and culture, and observed as youth used it as a political organizing tool with other youth in school-based social justice campaigns, in cases of racial profiling by police, and as a consciousness-raising tool concerning narratives of inequality. In the following pages, I bring those settings and conversations to the table in an effort to understand the important relationship between culture, social movements, and identity. I aim to make several arguments: First, hip-hop is an important cultural art form for youth at this particular historical moment, post-civil rights. Second, hip-hop culture is a significant tool in organizing other youth for social and political change in their local communities. Third, hip-hop is often an important part of the individual formation of a political consciousness among youth of color involved in activism, enabling them to address and combat racism and other forms of inequality. Finally, I argue that youth of color incorporate hip-hop into their developing political consciousness as they experience multiple, often contradictory, experiences because of a current backlash on civil rights gains.

Hip-Hop for the Soul: Youth, Music, and Identity

Previous studies of popular culture indicate that it is an important place for individuals to create meaning, identify, and find community (Epstein, 1998; Gaines, 1991; Hebdige, 1979; Lipsitz, 1994). This is particularly true of teenagers, who are overwhelmingly recognized as the "MTV generation." (3) Music, television, and film are all important sites for identity construction and community representation for all individuals, not just youth. For instance, in his discussion of Black popular culture, Stuart Hall (1992: 32) argues that popular culture is a site for self-discovery and realization. As he states,

Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find out who we really are, the truth of our experience.... It is where we discover and play with identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there that do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.

As Hall suggests, popular cultures, like hip-hop culture, act as important venues for understanding the collective experience of individuals, not only for others, but also for the individuals themselves. Since the 1970s, hip-hop culture has communicated a particular experience of what it means to be young, Black, and (often) male. These visual representations influence understandings of what it means to hold these identities, for black males and for the larger community. More important, these representations mirror social interactions and relationships.

The use of popular culture for political purposes is particularly significant for youth in the post-civil rights era. First, teenagers have assumed a powerful position as global consumers and creators of popular cultures. At the same time, the reality of racial segregation persists even in light of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The latter often contributes to a sense of political and social urgency in communities of color, primarily centered on the dual reality of living with hard-won civil rights, while witnessing the slow erosion of those rights in each generation. As former Source magazine (4) editor, Bakari Kitwana (2002: 147), explains in his discussion of the political possibilities for the "hip-hop generation," the struggles of contemporary youth are rooted in a current civil rights backlash:

Due to the nature of the America we've grown up in, we've developed a different sense of urgency rooted in what we've lost in a mere generation--what some critics have deemed the reversal of civil rights gains, such as welfare reform and the decline of affirmative action--as well as in new attacks targeting ... youth like police brutality, anti-youth legislation, and the incarceration of hundreds of thousand of hip-hop generationers.

Using Kitwana's description as a backdrop for the contemporary and social landscape, I explore how youth of color use hip-hop to mobilize other youth around inequalities related to these civil rights losses: inadequate school programs, the erosion of affirmative action in California, violence on their school campuses, and racial profiling by law enforcement officials. For 18 months, I conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews with 20 youth at two youth empowerment organizations, Teen Justice and Multicultural Alliance, which train youth to organize around these issues. As part of my research, I attended poetry slams and other hip-hop events sponsored by Teen Justice, sat in on organizing meetings and different events, and talked with youth about using hip-hop as part of their individual and collective activism. I examined the significance of hip-hop music and culture in their lives and in their political endeavors.

Over the last two decades, theorists in the social sciences and humanities have examined the relationship between hip-hop culture and youth (Bennett, 2000; Dyson, 2001; George, 1998; Gilroy, 2000; Lipsitz, 1994; Rose, 1994; Watkins, 1998 and 2005). Overwhelmingly, these scholars conclude that there is an important connection between the two, such as identity construction through narrative and identification with hip-hop artists and lyrics, particularly for youth of color. Both popular and academic understandings of the relationship between youth and hip-hop point to the ability of hip-hop artists to write narratives that couple music with stories taken from their personal experience as the hook for youth of color (George, 1998; Stapleton, 1998). Hip-hop music speaks to youth who find representations of themselves and their community within the lyrics, style, and presentation of the culture.

For example, youth activists in this study identify with hip-hop artists such as the late Tupac Shakur, who wrote about the realities of growing up as a Black and male. In his song entitled "Changes," Tupac talks about...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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