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“What We Got to Say” examines a political period in hip-hop history during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This dissertation was partly inspired by contemporaneous examples of systemic oppression inside the criminal justice system as well as racial hostility that developed out of a series of police officer-involved shootings. It was in large part inspired by an intellectual curiosity to explore the connection between the failures of the modern civil rights movement and the politization of hip-hop. It argues that a hip-hop social movement emerged in this period to protest Ronald Reagan’s expansion of the criminal justice system: the War on Drugs. The use of hip-hop culture, public rhetoric, and mass media as evidence was guided by a “new social movement” theoretical framework that emerged in the early-to-mid 1980s. The goal was to reimagine hip-hop-generated political activism during the height of the War on Drugs through the prism social movement theory to determine hip-hop’s function as a Black sociopolitical struggle. The hip-hop social movement consisted of cultural productions in rap, politicized hip-hop films, anti-state critiques in rap journalism, and sociopolitical statements that hip-hop activists made in the mass-media. They produced political critiques that condemned hyper-social surveillance, extraordinary scrutiny, militarized policing, as well as mass incarceration. In doing so, the examined participants effectively placed the government, crime politics, and the criminal justice system on proverbial trial. The main points of this dissertation include the carceral state and how it plagued Black life in the post-civil rights era. Hip-hop-generated activism that nationalized the destruction of a racialized carceral state. Also, hip-hop activists that consisted of rappers such as Public Enemy, KRS-ONE, NAS, Ice-T, N.W.A., and 2Pac Shakur; filmmakers like Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Albert and Allen Hughes; as well as a handful of hip-hop journalists that emerged in the late 1980s. The dissertation shows that a group of racially conscious and political culturalists used the hip-hop cultural movement, evolving technology, and a newfound access to major record distribution centers and mass media platforms to wage a national protest. |
