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Hip-Hop Resists War

By Mario Hardy Ramirez Africa

mmediately after September 11, I observed that our reaction (when I talk about us, I mean the peace and justice movement) in many ways was a one of shock and awe way before the term was coined. But it was also one of confusion. It was one where many of us in the peace and justice and antiwar community took a lot of time, trying to understand, like everyone else, what happened. And then we tried to frame our response, trying to intensely come up with a way to couch the issue.

While we were doing that, the people on the other side weren’t mincing words. In our circles, we were talking in terms of “we can’t say this,” or “how do we say that?” The other side had no problem saying what they thought immediately: They were going to kill a bunch of brown folks.

A lot of people ask me, “what was your feeling after September 11?” I tell them, my immediate feeling was one of hope. As soon as I saw what was going on, once it settled into my mind what was actually happening, my initial feeling was one of hope. Because as naive as it may sound from somebody like myself—who’s been through things like prison, growing up in extreme poverty, immigration, the bombing of my family on May 13, 1985, all of these things—still I find myself saying, “You know what? Maybe this time they’re gonna get it. Maybe this time they’re gonna learn. Maybe now they’re gonna understand what they’ve done, maybe now we’re gonna understand, and things are gonna change.”

That hope was very short-lived. What made it short-lived was the immediate push to war.

Immediately after September 11, I was blessed to travel around the country to talk to other people and not just about what I know or what I think I know. I flew out to the West Coast and drove back. On the drive back, we came through Arizona, Oklahoma, rural Texas, Arkansas—not exactly the activist community. In many of these places I was asked to do radio and television and to debate military personnel. And one of the things I found was that a lot of the opinions that were being spewed on CNN, Fox News, MTV, the mainstream media outlets that people my age tune into, were the same. And the activists were coming and saying, “Well, you know, with the climate the way it is, the political climate, with patriotism and this ... ”

A lot of that existed, but one of the things that I had the privilege to see is that there wasn’t only the unquestioning loyalty, patriotism and support of the war of terrorism. There was a lot of opposition, and a lot of that opposition was not necessarily all rooted in what’s considered the activist community. One of the things that happened is that questioning was silenced.

I talked to oilmen in Texas, I talked to farmers in Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia. We had forums and town hall meetings with people from Native American reservations in Arizona. One of the things that we found was that although a lot of people weren’t necessarily coming out and denouncing the war, or coming out and denouncing George W. Bush and the war on terrorism, people were asking questions. And the questions people asked had to do with pipelines going through Afghanistan, the creation of empire. Again, these are people who are considered the small people, you know, the farmers, people hit hard by the government on a lot of levels.

From Cuba to Camden
I’d like to talk about my experience in the communities that I serve or represent. I came to the United States in 1980 from Santiago de Cuba; my family came as part of the Mariel boatlift. After coming to the United States and doing my mandatory amount of time, as all Cubans must, in Miami (Miami’s sort of like “GO” on a Monopoly board for Cubans—if you’re Cuban, you have to pass there one way or another), I had the good fortune of being able to grow up in the beautiful people’s republic of Camden, NJ.

Camden is one of the most impoverished cities in the United States. That was pretty much what framed a lot of who I am—coming to Camden and seeing the contrast between it and Cuba. I never knew I was poor until I came to the United States. I never went without meals when I was in Cuba, I never went without luxuries such as light and running water. When we came to the U.S., abject poverty and having sleep for dinner was pretty much the order of the day. What saved my life at the time, in 1981, was hip-hop music and hip-hop culture. In my mind and in my daily experience, hip-hop is at ground zero of what’s considered the grassroots movement.

When I talk about hip-hop, I’m not necessarily talking about what you see on cable’s BET or MTV or listen to on mainstream radio. When I talk about hip-hop, or simply say the words “hip-hop music” or “hip-hop culture,” people respond “Well, they’re misogynist,” or “They’re violent.” Right now, hip-hop culture is the most powerful marketing tool on the planet. It crosses generational lines, racial lines, economic lines, geographic lines. Hip-hop is the way to sell whatever it is you want to sell to the entire world, whether you’re trying to sell Big Macs or Coca-Cola, or whether you’re trying to sell the U.S. military. Hip-hop is the main tool used to do that. So, I feel a responsibility to clarify who we are and what we’re about.

What you see in the mainstream—that’s not hip-hop. It’s not our culture. It’s not what we’re about. In 1981, hip-hop music to me signaled an end to a lot of the intensity of the gang violence that I saw growing up in New Jersey between New York and Philadelphia. Hip-hop is a culture of peace, is a culture of love, it’s a culture of unity and togetherness—and above all it’s a culture of resistance. Resistance is one of the five founding principles of hip-hop culture.

The Message
Like we saw with rock and roll, when a culture comes through that the generation before doesn’t understand or can’t accept, the first thing they do is they wait for it to die on its own. Hip-hop music came to me through a song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five called “The Message” that talked about everything from homelessness to veterans returning from Vietnam and drug addiction, high incarceration rates, unfair treatment of elderly—it dealt with all of these grassroots issues.

The song spurred a trend. And the trend was that we talked about our experience. We saw what was outside of our windows and doors and communicated it to the rest of the world. Issues like police brutality, fathers, brothers and uncles coming back from war with disease, homelessness, rape, and violence.

In the mid-1980s, in Philadelphia we had something called the Power 99 countdown. The countdown was on mainstream radio. Each night, at nine o’clock, they would play the nine most requested songs of the day. And I remember every night, my friends and I would be right in front of the radio, listening to mainstream commercial radio. And every day, the top three of the Power 99 would always start with songs like “Fight the Power,” by Public Enemy. Public Enemy always had at least two songs in the top three at that time. You had KRS One and Boogie Down Productions’ “Illegal Business Controls America,” and Queen Latifah talking about “Ladies First” or “Unity, U-N-I-T-Y.” This was urban radio. This was Black and Latino and inner-city radio. These were our most requested songs , and that was what hip-hop was and still is to many of us.

How long do you think that “Illegal Business Controls America” is going to be one of the top nine most requested songs on commercial radio in inner cities? I remember thinking, “Damn! If this is where hip-hop is now, imagine where we’re gonna be 10, 15 years from now?” But now we have “Bootylicious,” we have “Pass the Courvoisier,” we have “Move, Bitch, Get Out the Way” in the top nine songs in the Clear Channel era.

In the mid-1980s, a lot of us hip-hop kids, we took off the fat gold rope chains and started putting on X medallions, and started rocking dashikis and Malcolm X hats. This was hip-hop, this was hip-hop organizing, that’s what hip-hop music and hip-hop culture was and still is about.

This government tied to kill the culture, the religious right also tried to kill it. The Senate held hearings. At town hall demonstrations, just like they did with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard albums in the 1950s, critics burned CDs. Then they came up with the warning label, like an “R” rating that was supposed to kill hip-hop. They tried to take hip-hop to court in two cases that went to the Supreme Court, and hip-hop prevailed.

They could not kill hip-hop. The pattern is that when this society tries to kill off a culture and is unsuccessful, their next step is to buy it. And that’s exactly what happened with hip-hop. They bought our culture, and now they’re spoon-feeding it back to us trying to convince us that that’s who we are. I have 12-year-old boys hollering to 12-year-old girls on my block, “Yo, bitch, c’mere!” And I say, “Yo, man, what are you talking about?” And they say, “You don’t understand, old head, that’s hip-hop.” And I’m telling them, “No, man.”

I hear a lot of brothers on my block talking about their guns—they have rhymes, they’re very talented—about their guns, about how much ammunition they have and about how they’ll spray up the whole block. But I remember a time when the street gangs in Philadelphia, in Newark, NJ, and in the South Bronx, like the Latin Kings and Queens and the Universal Zulu Nation, came together. Instead of battling it out with guns and knives and chains and bats, they started to stand on their head, grab the microphone and rock the mike and battle that way. It was a form of nonviolence. That’s what hip-hop was; that’s what hip-hop still is to this day. Hip-hop is a format for us to express ourselves, stand up and resist.

One of the things that we do through AWOL magazine is have artists like Michael Franti and Spearhead, Medusa, Immortal Technique, Eryka Badu, Mos Def, Chuck D from Public Enemy, KRS One, as well as young people from the streets, tell the world that MTV and Clear Channel and BET are not telling you who we are as the hip-hop generation. And hip-hop is putting some major pressure on a lot of people. We’re raising our voices in the counter-recruitment movement, in the antiwar movement, we’re raising our voices on the fronts of women’s rights.

If you pick up AWOL magazine and listen to the CD, you may not hear the Quaker peace testimony (with all due respect to the Quaker peace testimony), you’re not gonna hear the nonviolent pledge of resistance. What you will hear is what nonviolence means to our community. You will hear ideas about what nonviolence is and about being able to retake power. Some of that may have to do with people who decide to pick up guns, some of that may have to do with people who decide to throw something through the windows of Starbucks (which I personally think is a good idea), and you have people who decide to hold candles and have vigils.

I think that’s one of the things that we have to be doing in this movement at a grassroots level to be able to move forward. People who advocate pacifism need to be doing what they’re doing. People who advocate destruction of property, you’re talking about coming at that enemy—the oppressor who’s responsible for the blood spilling in my neighborhood and the blood spilling 8000 miles away all over the world—then one of the things that we want to do is to use our culture and our mode of expression to be able to open the debate, to be able to talk about these things, about tactics, about strategies. We want to be able to come together, and to be able to join as family and to be able to resist.

Contact: CCCO, 1515 Cherry St., Philadelphia, PA 19102; (215)563-8787; info@objector.org; www.objector.org.

Mario Hardy Ramirez Africa is the Third World Outreach Coordinator for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.