Free It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation by M.K. Asante Jr Page A

citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
    “But it’s different now. It’s not like it was
backntheday,”
Shandel insisted. She was right.
    The struggle ain’t right up in your face, it’s more subtle
But it’s still comin’ across like the prison tunnel vision
.
     
    — THE ROOTS, “DON’T FEEL RIGHT ,”
GAME THEORY
     
    The racism our parents’ generation endured—legal segregation, lynching, hoses, dogs—was certainly more “in your face” than today, and that is precisely the danger of today. What we are experiencing is the manifestation of what President Richard Nixon told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
    One of my students, Ryan, explains the frustration of knowing something is afflicting you, yet being unable to clearly identify it. “It’s like a huge mosquito,” he tells the class. “No, it’s a big-ass wasp with a deadly stinger that you can’t see but it is constantly biting you,” he says about invisible institutional oppression. “Eventually, since you can’t see the damn thing, you start to think that there is no big-ass wasp, that maybe something is wrong with you. But I know, from reading and just being aware, that the wasps are real!”
    Young people are the most dangerous clan of folks to the oppressive power structure, because we are, many of us for the first time in our brief lives, thinking critically about the world we were born into and are outraged. We have always been instrumental, not only in recognizing the flaws in our society, but engaging in corrective action. When Huey Newton founded (along with Bobby Seale) the Black Panthers he was just twenty-four years old. The Panthers were a response to the state-sponsored racism that oppressed the masses of Black people. They asked, as former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal asked the graduating class at Evergreen State College during his historic commencement speech that he delivered from death row, “Why was it right for people to revolt against the British because of ‘taxation without representation,’ and somehow wrong for truly unrepresented Africans in America to revolt against America?” Furthermore, they understood that “For any oppressed people, revolution, according to the Declaration of Independence, is a right.” The Black Panthers created the Ten Point Program that set an agenda to address what they considered to be the most urgent needs of oppressed people.
    WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.
WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.
WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANTEDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY.
WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.
WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U.S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR ALL PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY.
WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
     
    What struck my class most as we read the Ten Point Program—which concludes with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the