Stay tuned for the release of my first full length book By Any Media Necessary: Why young people of the Hip Hop generation need to use media to organize for a more just an sustainable future.

The Break Down:

Consume

This chapter explores the current media landscape and what pop-cultural media is most targeted at and most appealing to young people, low income communities, and communities of color. It also explores how these models of entertainment perpetuate the dominant ideology, and examines the power structure that governs these media.

Analyze

This chapter examines the necessity for more comprehensive media education that cultivates in youth the ability to challenge the examples that they see of their communities in corporate media structures. It also proposes ways of incorporating media literacy education and social justice learning into traditional classroom settings, as well as models for self-education.

Respond

This chapter gives young people, organizers, parents, and teachers resources for creating and disseminating their own media. It also explores the differences between organizing for media accountability and organizing for social justice using media, as well as why it is vital that both types of organizing happen in a collaborative way.

Produce

This chapter is an annotated curriculum for practical application of the theories and practices proposed in the first three chapters. This curriculum explores models of alternative media, as well as how to create commercial quality media on a shoestring budget, and understanding the techniques that make pop-cultural media so successful, in order to utilize these tools for more equitable representation of youth and other disenfranchised populations.

Amplify

This chapter is a framework for disseminating the messages crafted through the curriculum above, as well as models for using media in community organizing. This chapter also proposed measures for how to evaluate successful organizing initiatives, and explores how to track those results. Lastly, this chapter examines the potential long term affects of repeating this five step cycle in order to create a paradigm shift in the dominant media, wherein the leadership is more diverse, representative, and accountable to the priorities of the communities which it claims to serve.

Special Sneak Preview:
Excerpt: Introduction

At the turn of the 20th century, Americans for the first time began to think of media outside of newspapers and books. Radio, and then films and television became a new way of communicating fictional stories, news, and dominant ideology. In the second half of the 20th century, and entering into the 21st, Americans and the rest of the world have seen technology change media so quickly and drastically that there are new means of communicating these ideas every year. While many have seen these new technologies as a means of democratizing this traditionally centralized one way communication, and the technology has certainly changed the face of mass media culture in some ways, the dominant ideology is still communicated in a one way cultural economy that keeps the message creation in the hands of a privileged few. Legislation and the economic structure in the United States has ensured that this power remains in the same hands, centralizing the control of communication through unjust ownership policies created and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission which favor those who have the economic means to compete in this ownership structure.

The ramifications of this centralized control is that all of those who do not have control in creating the media are forced to view their images through the lens (or speaker(s)) of this very specific controlling party. Thus, the dominant ideology advances the agenda of this ruling class, gender, race, and age demographic. So while there is certainly media that is created for the consumption of women, people of color, those of lower economic means, those identifying as GLBTQ, and youth, this media is rarely, if ever controlled by people from these demographics. Further, while there is a dominant feminist film theory, film theories concerning people of color, a dominant queer film theory, and scholars like Pepi Leistyna have recently taken on the issue of class as in his film Class Dismissed, there is little study into the ramifications of youth consuming images of themselves created predominantly by adults. Though there are certainly economic and hegemonic structures in place to keep people of color, women, GLBTQ people, and those in lower economic classes from creating mainstream media, there are much stronger legal and social structures in place to keep youth out of the editing room and the board room.

Youth today have grown up in a pop-cultural era increasingly dominated not only by rap music, but by the categorizing bricolage of Hip Hop culture, and the expanding tools through which they are able to experience and participate in that culture. In 2002, Bakari Kitwana published The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and The Crisis in African American Culture, which outlines a very narrow definition of the Hip Hop Generation as African Americans born between the years 1965-1984. While I agree that there is a distinct set of challenges facing Americans who were born following the civil rights era and who came of age during Reagan era politics, and that institutional racism in the United States consistently undervalues people of color in discourse, policy, and social status, I would like to cite Jeff Chang in disputing this narrow classification. In the prelude to his 2005 book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, Chang explains his decision to detail this history through the present. “The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative” (1). To close the book on the “Hip Hop generation” at 1984 ignores the relevance of today’s Hip Hop culture on dominant pop culture, ideology, perceptions of diverse communities, and policy. It is easy for someone like myself, who works with youth and who grew up with the first wave of commercial Hip Hop music- Def Jam records, Run DMC, and then later Heavy D and Salt ‘n’ Pepa- to get up on a pedestal about old school and lecture about five elements. However, to not acknowledge the potency and power of today’s dominant rap music culture is to effectively not listen to the issues of young people today. Whether or not I agree with the content of artists like 50 Cent, as a youth worker and media educator I would be remiss to ignore the impact that his music and perceived lifestyle have on the perceptions young people have of themselves, their communities, their priorities, and the perceptions that outsiders have of communities of color and urban communities. To disregard that impact as a part of Hip Hop culture would be to dismiss young people as arbiters of culture. It is critical that we ask ourselves what these trends are saying about our culture and society. So what is the Hip Hop Generation? “[It] brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as ‘post-this’ or ‘post-that.’

“So you ask, when does the Hip Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us its over” (Chang, 2). This narrative is the product of my own recognition that I am no longer of the “next generation,” that half the stuff I thought I knew when I was 16 is straight up wrong, that half the stuff I think I know now was probably more accurate when I was 16, and that being the “down” white girl is a tenuous tight rope act that may push some nerves and may nod some heads. For better or for worse, this is my pen knife to paper, my call to arms, and with crossed fingers and good intentions, my contribution to the cypher.

In the next hundred or so pages I will explore how adolescents have become a predominant demographic in our mass media culture, and how their images have developed over time. I will explain how film theories regarding women, people of color, class structures, and those identifying as GLBTQ can be applied to a similarly disenfranchised population of American youth, and why it is important to align these misrepresentations. I will show how dominant images of young people in American mass media culture have consistently reverted to a model of either demonizing or patronizing the youth that they are portraying, and how these images are detrimental to not only youth development, but to bridging the generational gap between youth and adults. I will explore how the current generation of young people, and all of those who come after them are and will be functioning in a world never before imagined, through the constantly evolving technology that they have grown up with, and examine why film theory needs to be applied not only to youth, but to emerging media technologies. Lastly, I will present a model for how young people, youth allies, and other disenfranchised populations can use media to organize for a more just and sustainable future.