I am up and about my daily business of bringing down The Man. When everyone else wakes up here on the East Coast I will call Columbia to inquire of contact info for Mr. Robin D.G. Kelley. More on that interview soon.

Many folks know that I wrote the story in How To Get Stupid White Men Out of Office about the National Political Hip Hop Convention.

Tonight, I was talking with my friend Mark Armstrong, and we discussed the whole Asian/Black/Hip Hop debacle. Here’s a sample of our convo:

Mark, I’m tired of all this Asian/Black bullshit. Black folks need to have an African-American Hip Hop convention.

“Didn’t we just have one?”

Ha! It started out that way…

Okay, basically, when the idea for the Hip Hop Political Convention was first percolating, it grew from a passage in Bakari Kitwana’s book The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. Notice how the title does not read “Young Blacks and Other Youth of Various Other Ethnicities Also Harmed By White Imperialism and the Crisis in African American and Other Cultures Also Harmed By White Imperialism.”

The very idea, or impetus of Bakari’s book is that young blacks are the Hip Hop Generation, and Mark was of the same mind in our conversation tonight. Similarly, when the activists behind the Hip Hop Political Convention made the initial plans for the event, many of them were of a Nationalist mind-state. They assumed, and I would have too, that in planning the event that they *were* planning a convention for black youth to come together and resolve our issues on our own terms. This is not quite what happened, as attendees of the event will tell you. It flowered into a multi-culti sort of affair. While goodness is good from wherever it comes, feelings are gonna have to start getting hurt if black folks come together in 2005. A lot of our closest friends may have to be non-invitees, but I strongly believe that the need for a majority, if not all black faces present in one place at one time working on issues critical to black communities…I believe this would be symbolically important to many of us who would be present there. It’s time.

To read the story about the Hip Hop Political Convention, go just about anywhere that sells books or go online for a copy of How To Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. Here is an Amazon.com page with some pretty good reviews at the bottom. There are some non-favorable reviews, but folks who like this book *really* like it.