Abstract
Hip-hop has grown up. And the investigation of rap specifically, and hip-hop in general, has now grown into its scholarly adolescence. Harvard University boasts the “Hiphop Archive and Research Institute,” while Cornell has a “Hip Hop Collection” as part of their rare book and manuscript collections. And books like Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity (Hill 2009) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop–and Why it Matters (Rose 2013) provide a strong platform from which academics scrutinize the form and content of not only hip-hop’s aesthetic production, but hip-hop as a social movement proper. Now three and a half decades since The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” Chuck D—the frontman for the music group Public Enemy—acknowledges that “Rap is the CNN for young people all over the world because now you can hear from rappers in Croatia and find out what they talk about and how they’re feeling. Rappers from Italy, rappers from Africa. Rap has become an unofficial network of the young mentality” (1997:256).
Out of this remix of voices and perspectives comes Andreana Clay’s The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics, a book that attempts to illumine how “dominant representations of activism, which reflect previous social movements and struggles, inform how youth of color, members of the ‘hip-hop generation’ participate in social change processes” (p. 4). Clay, a sociologist at San Francisco State University, investigated two non-profit organizations for youths of color in Oakland, California: one, a high school youth-services center she calls “Teen Justice” (TJ), and the other an anti-oppression organization she labels “Multicultural Alliance” (MA).
For two years of ethnographic study, Clay examined how the youth of TJ and MA navigated the interactional, ideological, and institutional expectations, habits, policies, and laws that simultaneously constrained and enabled their activism. Clay’s book is particularly attentive to the crucible in which today’s young activists of color are embroiled: between “post-racial” discourse and racist realities; among a fetish for abstract multiculturalism that collides with segregated institutions; and amid a rising tide of neoliberalism that has all but dismantled inner-city schools even as it inculcates the mantra that individual hard work dictates one’s destiny in an ostensibly meritocratic social order.
Moreover, Clay finds that young activists navigate these everyday, Manichean realities while inundated with an oft-romanticized blueprint of 1960s “activism” and fostering their love for, and recognition of, the cultural resonance of contemporary hip-hop. The resulting picture is one in which activists manifest a cacophony of nostalgia, commodity fetishism, identity politics, postmodern proclivities, and a mélange of hope and cynicism as they attempt to remake a world based on the criticism and vision of hip-hop.
In seven chapters (and a methodological appendix), Clay treats the reader to an introduction, conclusion, and five substantive chapters that confront activism without a defined social movement in tow. Chapter Two explores how youth come to define social problems worthy of redress. Chapter Three takes on hip-hop as a central political and epistemological tool for young people’s understanding of social life and their ability to make connections with other youth. Chapters Four, Five, and Six show how race, gender, and sexuality collide in urban settings and how hip-hop provides a blueprint for youth activism and identity formation.
On the one hand, the book reads as a direct challenge to social movement theorists, whose focus of late on “frames” and “alignment” may miss post-structural visions of the diffuse operations of power in interactions and identity-formation processes (cf. Hughey 2015). For example, Clay’s depiction of how these youths conceptualize and oppose racial prejudice, segregation, and systemic inequalities shows how they refuse to divorce those critiques and modes of activism from queer sexual politics in heteronormative locations, anti-war movements, and attacks on the war on drugs and the hyper-criminalization of young people of color at the hands of police and criminal justice system administrators.
On the other hand, Clay’s treatment reads like a study in collective memory. These young people are uneasy with the title “activist.” They construct giants of 1960s activists and then bemoan living in their shadows; they embrace traditions of an imagined past against which they measure their own activities. Because many of the youth see the “activism” of the past as unyielding and quixotic in its high-minded pursuit of justice—from gun-toting Black Panthers to the riots of the Stonewall Rebellion—they often view internal conflicts or compromise with unsympathetic groups and ideas as beyond the pale. Hence, the reliance on hip-hop as both historiographer and political philosopher might reproduce the very constraints they seek to displace.
However, Clay’s ethnographic portrait of these two youth groups reveals participants that are neither cultural dupes nor Marxist revolutionaries. Rather, they come across as considerate, remarkable, and imaginative, even as they are hypocritical and disordered human beings—as human beings tend to be. Rather than focus on the latter inconsistencies, Clay shows how these groups use hip-hop (a principal specter that haunts their everyday lives) to disentangle and better understand the intersecting axes of power around which they all orbit.
While I would have liked to see more explicit engagement with contemporary social movement theories (as I believe The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back implicitly upends many an assumption endemic to the sociology of social movements), as well as a more critical stance on how and why these young activists create new pathways of action, Clay’s book is still a pleasant and enjoyable read. Useful for undergraduate and graduate courses on race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture, readers are sure to glean useful nuggets of sociological wisdom about our “post-civil rights landscape [that] challenges youth activists to employ new tactics and incorporate old ones in ways that may never have been intended, reflecting a hip-hop sample” (p. 188).