President Obama and the Hip-Hop Nation

With the Inauguration of President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, America is indeed entering a new phase of its history. The stench of the dirty laundry of its racist past has wafted from the beginning of the African slave trade into the 21st century. The thought of America electing an African-American as president was unimaginable fifty years ago, unthinkable twenty years ago, and improbable ten years ago. President Obama's appeal has reached across gender, racial, generational, and party lines. During the election, Obama scored big with the Hip-Hop generation voters. His "Change" campaign slogan appeared to galvanize the masses and invigorate the youth. But what effect will his presidency have on the Hip-Hop Nation?

Hip-Hop music at its core has always seen the world through a political and social lens. Songs like Fearless Four’s “Problems of the World Today”, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”, Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” and Divine Sounds’ “What People Do For Money” all addressed social issues that ate at the core of the African-American community, while artists like Public Enemy, Paris and KRS-ONE wrote songs that spoke from a political perspective. Now we have elected a President who has a political agenda that focuses primarily on re-knitting the social fabric of our society. How will the Hip-Hop community respond to the social paradigm shift? Will we begin to see artists move toward recording more positive and uplifting social commentary? Some have called Hip-Hop the “Black CNN” because of its ability to speak on the ills of our society. But why is our music so unevenly represented toward negativity?

How will the Black Hip-Hop community embrace President Obama during his presidency? Will Hip-Hop give him a “ghetto pass card” or will he be subject to the same scrutinty that other president’s that have preceded him has been subjected to? Obama will be in a very precarious situation. There will be many who will scrutinize every move he makes. They will keep score of every failed objective or slow reform. Nowhere will this be more prominent than outside of the black community. But with many members of the African-American community hanging our hopes on his success, how will we handle his perceived failures? While it is important that we hold the President accountable for his actions while in office, it is equally important that we begin to hold ourselves accountable for our actions from this day forward. As African-American men, it is our mandate that we uphold a higher standard of social responsibility for the benefit of our children.

What will President Obama’s lasting legacy be in the hip-hop culture? Will young African-American males begin to emulate the image of our president instead of the image of a street hustler? We need to recognize that being black is not a singular ideology. Being educated, wearing a business suit, and speaking proper English do not make us less black. Using the same criteria as a barometer for blackness, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Stokley Carmichael, Medgar Evers and many other leaders of the civil rights movement would not be considered black enough by the same standards.

I look forward to the maturation of Hip-Hop music, and while we revel in the thrill of the present, let us begin to pave the way for a new consciousness for tomorrow. In order for us to bring about change we must first change our mindset. So let us be the change that we seek in our society.