HARI In-House Blog

Submitted by domcorleone21 on

 

Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 12:00pm
The Hiphop Archive & Research Institute
104 Mount Auburn St., Floor 3R, Cambridge, MA

 

This event is free and open to the public. A Q&A will follow the panel discussion. 

 

An internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement, Bakari Kitwana is the Executive Director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 100 townhall meetings on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. The former Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, he is the co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which brought over 4000 18-29 year-olds to Newark, NJ in 2004 to create and endorse a political agenda for the hip-hop generation.

Kitwana is the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop and the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. His groundbreaking 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation popularized the expression “the hip-hop generation” and has been adopted as a coursebook in classrooms at over 100 college and universities. Kitwana served on the organizing committee for the 2013 Black Youth Project convening that launched the millennial Black activist group BYP100. In 2015, he edited an essay series for Mic.com on race and policing, “Shifting Perceptions: Being Black in America.” He holds Master’s degrees in English and Education from the University of Rochester.

 

The Hiphop and Presidential Elections Video Archive

The purpose of the Hiphop and Presidential Elections Video Archive is to curate a searchable, digitized video collection focused on the intersection of hip-hop and politics. This archive will document hip-hop generation and millennial generation- specific perceptions, insights and views on gender, race, art, media literacy and activism as they relate to electoral politics and youth civic engagement. The video archive will consist primarily of video recordings of hip-hop artists and thought leaders who participated in up to thirty interactive townhall discussions convened by Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential election years.