Ryan ChartrandAfter being forced to cancel his first scheduled appearance at Cal Poly due to a foggy runway, hip-hop expert Bakari Kitwana will be giving his lecture, titled “The King Legacy and the Hip-Hop Generation,” tonight.
Kitwana is a former executive editor for The Source, co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention, and author of “The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture,” which has been adopted as a textbook on over 100 college campuses in the United States. He is a hip-hop political activist who gives about 50 lectures a year and works closely with hip-hop artists such as Chuck D, The Roots, and the first hip-hop DJ, DJ Kool Herc.
His lecture Tuesday night will focus on “the emergence of hip-hop as it grows out of the civil rights movement,” Kitwana said. “What it is that we are able to reproduce of the civil rights movement in hip-hop.”
Brenton Smith, a civil engineering junior and student assistant for the Multicultural Center, originally planned the event for Black History Month.
“It’s a topic that people don’t usually think of,” Smith said. “I want people to see a different side of hip-hop that MTV and BET don’t show you.”
Kitwana said that he will lecture on the history behind hip-hop culture to show the root of the issues he will discuss, and will primarily lecture on the United States.
When asked whether or not his lecture would be tailored to better suit Cal Poly’s diversity issue, Kitwana said, “definitely.”
“My focus on hip-hop is raising the question: How do we create a cross-racial political movement?” Kitwana said, adding that his book “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race Relations in America” explores the same question.
Recent news events such as the Don Imus firing will also be discussed. Kitwana was asked to talk to Fox News about the relationship between hip-hop lyrics and the Don Imus firing, but said he regrettably couldn’t make it because he had a lecture scheduled at the same time.
Kitwana will lecture tonight at 6 p.m. in the Christopher Cohand Performing Arts Center, room 128.