A "Hip Hop Task Force" in Congress? Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Hip Hop as a political force for change

[00:00:00] I am brother Cornel West and this is Hip-Hop Can Save America I'm going to talk about my free sub-stack newsletter at MannyFaces.substack.com that's filled with all kinds of stories of Hip-Hop innovation, inspiration and generally Hip-Hop news that

[00:00:42] isn't about dumb sh**. For everything Hip-Hop can save America, Hip-Hop can save America .com. For everything Manny Faces, MannyFaces.com. And if you find value in this work, you can support it. We'd love to have you aboard as a supporter at patreon.com slash

[00:00:55] Manny Faces. Now let's go. The thing about Hip-Hop today is it's smart. It's insightful. The way that they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable and a lot of these kids, they're

[00:01:15] not going to be reading the New York Times. That's not how they're getting their information. So Hip-Hop didn't invent anything, but Hip-Hop reinvented everything. Representative Jamal Bowman from the great state of New York. Good morning sir. Good morning. How are we doing?

[00:01:50] I'm doing all right. I'm glad to be with you. I'm always glad to be in space with New Yorkers. I'm a New Yorker that did that thing that we do when I moved to Atlanta.

[00:01:57] So I apologize, but you know, I still... Did you do it before or after Freak Nick? I will not be in the documentary. Do not worry. Some of our friends might be, but we'll see. We'll see when that drops. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

[00:02:18] And it's good to see you again. I know we crossed paths very briefly over last summer. It's good to see you again. If you would, I'd like to start where we're at and we'll work back a little bit. Obviously the thing, although, you know,

[00:02:29] we've been on each other's radar possibly, but the thing that caught my attention, of course, was the this Hip-Hop task force that's been launched up there on Capitol Hill. If you could, if you would mind, give me maybe a description of

[00:02:40] the mission of that initiative and what that's all about. Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me. Good to see you as well. We want to leverage the power, the brilliance, the popularity, the creativity, the social justice and political infrastructure of Hip-Hop

[00:03:01] to build political power here in Congress. We want the entire Hip-Hop community and culture and family to become a quote unquote lobbying group that is pushing members of Congress to do the right thing for the communities we come from. You know, Hip-Hop has always been a voice

[00:03:19] of the youth, a voice of the struggle, CNN of the streets, if you will. You know, telling the stories that the real CNN or the western CNN didn't always want to tell. And so, you know, Hip-Hop has always been that.

[00:03:35] But that needs to be leveraged to create policy change and the investments that we need in our communities. You know, one of the reasons why the stories in Hip-Hop continue to be about so much struggle is because of horrible policies

[00:03:50] that lead to, you know, continued gun violence, addiction, lack of affordable housing, lack of mental health care, lack of childcare, lack of wealth. On and on and on, the stories remain as they are because of the horrible policies that often start in Washington.

[00:04:07] And so this is about building political power and working within the entire Hip-Hop community, culture and family to do so. Yeah, indeed. You know, we talk about where we hear very often critique of the music or parts or snippets of the culture that are,

[00:04:22] you know, shown to, you know, the masses and that seems to be representative of the entirety of the culture and all that can be. And that's not true. And we always say when you fix the conditions that create

[00:04:32] the circumstances where the content comes from, you'll have a better chance that having more enlightening aspects spread to the masses. That's exactly right. You know, that that's common sense. So don't treat the symptom, treat the cause, right?

[00:04:47] And so what is at the core causing the conditions in our community at the core of poverty, at the core of neglect, that the course marginalization, racism, discrimination at the core of all that is bad policy in a history of discriminatory policy

[00:05:05] that has harmed certain communities over others. I mean, we all know that. And so let's use Hip-Hop and work with Hip-Hop to change that. Yeah. So what does that look like? I guess in practice, you know, what is the task force consist of?

[00:05:17] Who's involved? Who do you want to get involved? And what would be sort of the actual steps or things that are happening that that task force would be tasked with doing? Yeah, we need and want everybody and anyone involved. You know, when we talk about building political power,

[00:05:33] I mean, just look at it this way, there are five hundred and thirty five members of Congress, one hundred in the Senate, four hundred and thirty five in the House. Each of those members has to run political races and campaigns

[00:05:45] to win elections on the House side, as every two years on the Senate side, as every six years. So how we have in conversations every day to inform who we're going to support in an election. You know, that's one aspect of it.

[00:05:59] The other aspect of it is what policies are moving through Congress and which ones are not moving through Congress. And how are we engaging with each other to build the infrastructure to lobby and ensure that the policies we want to move forward are moving forward.

[00:06:18] So it starts with, like I said, we want any and everybody, but it starts with a lot of smaller conversations, right? Smaller conversations here on the hill, smaller conversations in our living rooms and then building out the infrastructure from the grassroots

[00:06:34] up and out so that we can build power in every corner of the country from a grassroots perspective towards, you know, making the policy changes and getting the financial investments that we need in our community. So all hands on deck, but it starts with just a lot of

[00:06:52] conversations, brainstorming and then building that out. As you can tell by what I've named to this show, I feel like hip hop has a very unique ability to overall help uplift humanity and improve society.

[00:07:06] This is one of the ways we advocate and talk about all of the ways here very often, and I'm a leading voice for that in areas, including education. And I want to go back a bit, if you would,

[00:07:17] to kind of how you got to here in your position here before Congress. You, of course, started an academy, you are a principal, so your heart was in education for a long time. If you just let me know kind of a little bit,

[00:07:28] the brief background of your educational background and why that part is core to what you're doing today. Yeah, I mean, I worked in education for 20 years before running for Congress. I was an elementary school teacher in the South Bronx

[00:07:42] for about five or six years before becoming a high school guidance counselor and dean of students at the High School for Arts and Technology in the MLK campus for three years before writing a proposal and opening my own district public not charter district public middle school

[00:08:00] in the Northeast Bronx, where I served as a principal for 10 and a half years. And in that entire experience, I worked in what we call title one schools. These are schools that are chronically underfunded. And in New York City, they're chronically underfunded

[00:08:14] and serving mostly black and brown kids. And by brown, I mean Latino, I mean Arab, I mean South Asian. I mean the diaspora, if you will. Right. And so I was always incredibly frustrated, you know, when you compare in their city,

[00:08:29] for lack of a better term, schools to like schools in the wealthy white suburbs. And those schools had every resource they needed to help their kids thrive and realize their full potential. And our schools and our communities always lack those resources.

[00:08:48] Now, because of that, that actually gives birth to a lot of our brilliance and creativity, our hip hop that we then go on and share with the world. But also because of that, we haven't always benefited economically and socially from the culture that we created.

[00:09:04] We as people of color. And so, you know, that's all that always frustrated me. And at the same time, we see the consistent harm being done to our kids and families and communities. You know, the year before I decided to run for office,

[00:09:19] 34 kids died in a K to 12 school system in the Bronx and 17 died of our suicide. And there was no real conversations happening in our political infrastructure about the connection between our kids, our schools and the horrible policy.

[00:09:32] And so that's when I ultimately decided to run for office after finishing my doctorate in 2019. But I also come from that, you know, I lived right at least Harlem. I lived on the East Side and went to public schools my entire life.

[00:09:47] I grew up during the crack cocaine epidemic and impacted my family. And so and I also grew up during the Golden Age of Hip Hop, where Harris won Chuck D. Rockham, Big Daddy Kane, you know, X plan were doing everything in their power to give us knowledge itself.

[00:10:04] And so I actually credit that and my amazing mom towards me becoming an educator and giving me my philosophy by political philosophy even even before I knew what was aware that that was the case. Right. Right. Well, yeah, Hip Hop.

[00:10:20] And good moms birthed a lot of folks doing that kind of work for sure. Absolutely. And I got to give some props to my dad, you know, another educator, a distinguished professor of sociology taught for years decades at SUNY Old Westbury, my dad. Oh, there we go. Yes.

[00:10:35] Oh, Westbury. Oh, yeah. Yes, indeed. So I was just going to say, if Hip Hop came out of that area as well, some some classic. I grew up in Westbury. So, you know, shouts to, you know, shouts to Long Island, Shouts to Strong Island.

[00:10:49] Dr. Dre from your MTV raps, mom taught at my school. So yeah, we were ingrained in Long Island. That's right. That's right. Now, the education tip I talk to and I consult with a bunch of educators

[00:11:00] who either use or want to use hip hop as a tool for educating. And sometimes it's to bring hip hop into the schools as a field of study to learn the history and learn all the, you know, different aspects of the culture,

[00:11:12] but also as a tool for learning other, you know, subjects. As I'm sure you know, a lot of hip hop based education initiatives, they they center around culturally relevant or culturally responsive and culturally affirmative pedagogy. And that's all important work. And so we advocate for that.

[00:11:27] And a bunch of people that I talk to as well, of course, there's always institutional pushback. You have to sometimes just start a whole damn school to get around some of that stuff. You know, there's also states we hear about, like, you know,

[00:11:40] what's going on in places like Florida where it's like they may not be down for, you know, hip hop based education anytime soon. Oh, not at all. Yeah. So there's a lot of pushback that we have to deal with again,

[00:11:51] the perception of hip hop and rap having, you know, such a bad reputation. How can these things work their way into policy? We get a little bit frustrated when we say we got to fight so much to just get a pilot program educators in a title one school,

[00:12:05] get the funding and the grants and it's great, but it doesn't always get the board of education to back it. And so it gets frustrating because we want to see these things on large scale. We know they work, we have the receipts, the research,

[00:12:17] the kids grow up and become fantastic people. It's all there. How difficult is it? And what do we need to do to make these things happen in policy, either at a state level or even federally? How complicated is that to ever, you know, happen?

[00:12:32] Yeah, you know, this is where the task force comes into play. And this is where, you know, organizations like the hip hop caucus and organizations like yours come into play as well. We need people to run for school board at the local level.

[00:12:47] You know, and let me just take a step back and say this. There are many within the hip hop family and culture and society, if you will, who don't really mess with politics, right? They don't like it. They don't get down with it.

[00:13:00] They don't trust it and rightly so, right? Because it's a good reason. Yeah, for good reasons, right? It's a system that has not just failed us but harmed us historically. So we get that. But I think it is really important for the task force

[00:13:15] to also engage in civic education and civic engagement to start bringing people in who have decided to stay away from it. And the reason why is when we have to be engaged because things don't change in a democracy unless we are engaged.

[00:13:32] And so the fact that I mean, take me as an example, you know, I had never run for office before. I did everything I could, you know, for many, many years learning as much as I could about politics.

[00:13:42] And then ultimately, you know, I decided one day to run for office and not just any office to run for Congress. And I ran for Congress against a 31 year incumbent who was chair of a powerful committee and we won. We beat him by 16 points.

[00:13:55] And now I'm in Congress having conversations like this with you and starting something called the hip hop task force that looks to build more power. And so we have to be in the game to change the game.

[00:14:07] You can't stay out of the game and look to change it from the outside. Yes, there needs to be work done on the outside in terms of agitation and organizing and movement building for sure. But we also need to find folks to run for office at the

[00:14:21] at the at the school board level, at the at the town council level, at the county level, at the state level, at the federal level. You know, a lot of us, I count myself. I didn't even know what all that was about.

[00:14:36] Like I didn't I knew president, I knew governor, I knew mayor. That's it. I didn't know all these other people who are critical, critical to the decisions that are made in our communities every day. And I could tell you right now, there's probably tens of millions

[00:14:51] of people who like me don't have that education. And so this is about the task force is about creating that civic engagement infrastructure for all of us to learn as much as we can. And then what for office?

[00:15:05] The last thing I'll say is, you know, a lot of these races and these local municipalities, man, people ain't even paying attention. They not even voting. You know what I'm saying? You could you could get 100 votes and win a race and be on the school board.

[00:15:18] You know what I'm saying? And so, right, you know, like, like once we start leaning in, like in my in my case, I realized that this guy was in Congress with 20,000 votes in the district that have 450,000 registered Democrats. How does that work?

[00:15:33] Only 20,000 people are voting and this guy is in Congress. He's chair of a committee with all his power. No, we got to change that structure. And so it doesn't take a lot, but we got to get in the game to change the game. Yeah, I hear that.

[00:15:48] And you know what? That's it's that education piece. It's very often missing getting that out. And the same thing for hip hop when when we tell people that hip hop does all these great things, sometimes even hip hop heads are jaded these days.

[00:15:59] You know, we don't think that it has that ability anymore. It's think it's totally been commodified and totally taken over by, you know, capitalist interests. And I'm like, listen, I just sat on a panel in Atlanta about the intersection of hip hop and social justice.

[00:16:12] And we had some folks on the ground that are doing that work. They're not as big as, you know, hip hop caucus, but they're doing no less important work. But it's also like pockets pockets here, pockets there.

[00:16:20] How can we coalesce and get that kind of at least have a network of folks? So I think that maybe I'm speaking for you, but I think that's something that the task forces may be well suited for bringing some of those

[00:16:31] smaller orgs together that all have these kind of absolutely. We're trying to organize the universe, man. Hip hop is like a Marvel universe. We're trying to organize it because it's, you know, you just the artist themselves, man, and the diversity of the artists across time.

[00:16:49] And as fans, we gravitate towards maybe a handful of artists that almost become like like like profits to us. So like messengers to us who like really guide us in how we live our day to day

[00:17:01] lives, I mentioned those in my life when I was a kid who kind of did that for me. And it exists everywhere in every corner of the country. And so that that is the power right there.

[00:17:11] All of a sudden, you know, you know, we got we got the Democratic Party. We got the Republican Party. We got the working families party. We got all these parties. Man, man, one day we could maybe have a hip hop party. You know what I'm saying?

[00:17:22] And not one day, one day soon, you know, where people are platform of the social justice items that we talked about before to win races in their local municipality. And so the sky is the limit to what we can do with it.

[00:17:38] Yeah. What's great about that is it's all inherent in hip hop. You know, this is it's all at the DNA. Sometimes we don't know how to articulate it, but we all have that, especially folks that are really, truly connected to culture.

[00:17:47] And what's great about it is it's a multicultural, multi denominational, multi generational, inclusive inviting culture probably is more than any other culture I could think of or ever known to exist. Come on, man. That's exactly it. It's the continuation of the civil rights movement.

[00:18:03] You know, we got we got we got Jewish brothers. We got Muslim brothers. We got Christian. We got Buddhist. We got Hindu. We got Latino. We got black. We got all kinds of black West Indian African, right? Well, got all kinds of Latino. We got Asian.

[00:18:16] We got it's young. It's older now, right? Because it's 50 years old. So you got people like my age who was 40, about me, 48 and people who's 12. Right. And so it's it's just the exact coalition we need to create a revolution here and around the world.

[00:18:32] And we're I mean, listen, those who are leaning into ceasefire right now, you know, in Gaza, that's hip hop. Those who are part of the Black Lives Matter movement. That's hip hop. You know what I'm saying? Like that that's that's who we are. Right. Yep. That always been.

[00:18:48] Yep. Amen. Two questions before I don't want to keep it too long. I got two quickies for you. One is also co-produced a couple of other media outlets that are political minded. One actually infuses hip hop into social justice journalism.

[00:19:01] So we interview folks about these issues that aren't being covered as much by the mainstream news and we actually invite independent hip hop artists to come and drop three 16s over the course of the of the episode.

[00:19:11] Yeah, we like to say it's like democracy now and Black Thought had a podcast baby. It's called it's called Newsbeat. And the other one is run by a really brilliant socioeconomic essayist. That one is you'll forgive my language. It's called Unfucking the Republic. So my.

[00:19:29] We we it's all, you know, kind of left leaning, certainly progressive leaning politics and they would they would be they would get at me if I didn't ask at least one political question around all this hip hop talk, which even though it's the same course,

[00:19:40] but it's on this air as well have heard the state of the union. Can you give us a state of the progressive union a little bit and what we can, you know, what progressive minded folks can

[00:19:51] look forward to this election season and what we also might need to watch out for? If you could. I know it's a big question if you could kind of run that down. Yeah, that is a big question.

[00:20:00] What progressive minded folks want to hear about and want to see and want to experience, they want more money in their pockets. They want people to be able to afford child care and transportation and rents and groceries and utilities. Like affordability is a big, big issue.

[00:20:21] We still have an economy that where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, the one 10 for 1 percent and the rest of us are struggling, man. And so we want an economy that's equitable, that works for everyone

[00:20:33] where people are earning a prevailing ways to have the opportunity to organize and form unions if they choose to so that they can collectively bargain and have prevailing wages and health care and affordable housing. So progressives want to hear a lot more about how the economy is moving

[00:20:51] in that direction. Progressives want to hear about how are we going to take a diplomatic approach to foreign policy as opposed to consistently using war in bombs and weapons to kill mostly black and brown people, including black and brown babies and innocent women and civilians.

[00:21:09] And so what's capturing that in this moment right now is the siege and the collective punishment and the bombardment and the humanitarian crisis that's taking place in Gaza right now. So progressives want to see a path forward immediately to a permanent ceasefire and a move towards freedom

[00:21:27] for the Palestinian people. And we want to see freedom for all people all over the world, whether it's Somalia or Gaza or Yemen or wherever, wherever people are subjugated and starving and under and constantly under attack. And then in connection with that, you know, diplomacy

[00:21:49] when we stop investing in war and start investing in our own communities, that's what we know our country is moving in the right direction. And so that is not happening at the level where we needed to happen. We spent nine hundred billion a year on wars.

[00:22:03] Like Tupac said, we got money for war, but can't feed the poor. We should be able to provide housing and healthy foods and everything that people need mental health support, substance abuse support here in our country and we're not doing enough of that.

[00:22:16] So that's what we hope to hear and see. We don't know if we're going to hear and see that because unfortunately during these election seasons, you know, presidents like to speak to the moderate independent voter, which translates to white people in certain communities.

[00:22:34] And so that's why young people and people of color continue to stay away from all of this, but we still need to bring them in for sure. OK, fair enough. That's a good message and we can leave on one more question.

[00:22:46] If you don't mind, as you know, I like I said, I named this show Hip Hop Can Save America and it's a lofty goal, but perhaps we need a little bit more than just hip hop. But if you could, your interpretation when you first,

[00:23:00] I think we first crossed paths, you might have saw the logo. You might have heard about the show. You heard the concept. What did you think of? And what is your, I guess, idea of what that means?

[00:23:11] Man, I mean, first of all, it's something that I live and breathe as a child of hip hop. It's who I am. So it's like not even foreign. That that statement is out far to me is kind of speaking my language.

[00:23:27] But but Keras one on the entertainment album mentioned hip hop as a revolutionary tool to change the structure of racist America. Keras one mentioned that in 1989, right? And I still believe it is that thing. Music itself, right? Music. The power of sound, vibration, movement,

[00:23:52] the spoken word, the creativity is rooted in our spiritual texts as well, whether it's the Torah, the Bible or the other or the Quran. Right? And so hip hop is a spiritual creation and holds within a spiritual essence. And so when we talk about it as saving America,

[00:24:14] it's about America regaining its soul as a nation or finding its soul as a nation and and and leading from moral from a moral clarity perspective, as opposed to this policing the earth and punitive and discriminatory perspective. And so that's what I'm that's what hip hop saves America

[00:24:38] or can save America is all about. You know, when I think about it, it's what I feel in my soul. It can happen. I appreciate that perspective. We share similar feelings about the beautiful culture. So listen, I really want to thank you for your time.

[00:24:52] I'll be actually be up in your well, you're in Washington. I'll be in White Plains this weekend. I'll be doing a professional development for some K through 12 teachers up there. So it'd be nice in this stop and grass Saturday, Saturday. Send us the information.

[00:25:06] I want to send I want to send some staffers there to say hello. Oh, that's what's up. We can do that. I'll definitely do that. I'll follow up with you. And in the meantime, I hope I hope we get to cross paths again.

[00:25:16] Please keep us updated on the the task force, whatever you can use from whatever audience and folks that I have paying attention to me. I'd love to be personally involved as well. You know, we can we can kick it, sir. We can do it.

[00:25:28] Appreciate you, man. Thanks, Randy. I appreciate you. Anything else you want to share with the folks or we're good? Peace and love, y'all. Make sure you register to vote. Make sure you go out and vote. Do your research on who's running for what where. Don't just research presidents.

[00:25:43] Not just about president. It's about, you know, members of Congress, state legislatures, county legislators, local municipalities. Spend some time doing your homework on this stuff, y'all. It's critically important. That's what's up. All right, we'll spread the word. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time

[00:26:00] and hope to cross paths again soon. Peace and love. Many faces. You sick for this one. Sick for this one. Once again, thanks for listening to another episode of Hip Hop Can Save America, a.k.a. the world's most important hip hop podcast. My name is Manny Faces.

[00:26:19] You can find out more about the show at hiphopcansaveamerica.com. You can watch the show now as a live stream on YouTube, hiphopcansaveamerica.com slash watch. Check back for all the replays as well. The interviews from the live stream will be brought here

[00:26:31] onto the audio feed, so you always get the best of the live stream. You can also check out our substack newsletter. It's free at MannyFaces.substack.com filled with stories of hip hop innovation, inspiration, and in general, hip hop news that isn't about dumb.

[00:26:48] Eternal shouts to our consulting producer, Summer McCoy. Be sure to check out her dope initiatives, hip hop hacks and the mixtape museum. We'll be back soon with another dope episode, but check us out on the live stream as well. Monday is 9 p.m. Eastern.

[00:27:00] Hip hopcansaveamerica.com slash watch. Until next time, Manny Faces, wishing peace and love to you and yours.