The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture

Description

For black youth, can hip hop can be this generation's salvation? Young blacks born between 1965 and 1984 belong to the first generation to have grown up in post-segregation America. Bakari Kitwana, one of black America's cultural critics, offers a sobering look at his generation's disproportionate incarceration and unemployment rates, as well as the collapse of its gender relations, and gives his own provocative social and political analysis. He finds the pain of his generation buried in tough, slick gangsta movies, and their voice in the lyrics of rap music, "the black person's CNN".

Bakari Kitwana was the Executive Editor of The Source from 1994-98 Editorial Director at Third World Press and a music reviewer for NPR's All Things Considered. He currently freelances for the Village Voice, Savoy, The Source, and the Progressive, and his weekly column, "Do the Knowledge," is published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is the author of The Rap on Gangsta Rap and The Hip Hop Generation. He lives in Westlake, Ohio.

"A must-read for those interested in hip-hop." "While Kitwana makes clear arguments about what has affected Black youth over the last twenty years, from lock-ups to loitering laws, he doesn't simply enumerate the issues on a continuous loop, he looks toward solutions."