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• Mr. Kitwana's official site
• Article by Mr. Kitwana
• National Hip-Hop Political Convention

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Tavis: Bakari Kitwana is the former executive editor of "The Source" magazine and a contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered." He's currently a columnist for "The Cleveland Plain Dealer" and the author of books like "The Hip-Hop Generation." His latest, though, is called "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America." I know I done lost you now, but I'll explain in just a second. Actually, Bakari will. Bakari, nice to have you here.

Bakari Kitwana: All right. Thank you.

Tavis: All right. Let's back up before we get too deep in this. Why white kids love hip-hop. We all understand that. Well, we don't understand it. You're gonna explain it, but we get that part. It's that subtitle: "Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America." I suspect we should start with some definitions. So let me throw 'em at you. You define 'em...

Kitwana: OK.

Tavis: And then we can make sense of this conversation. Wangstas.

Kitwana: Wangstas is an expression made popular by 50 Cent...

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Kitwana: Just basically signifying a fake gangster. One of the things I'm trying to do in the book and the subtitles that take off from one of the chapters where I talk about films that deal with the issue of white kids and hip-hop, and one of the things that I see as a reoccurring theme in the films are people who are, you know, the ideas of people who are pretending that they are something that they aren't...

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Kitwana: Or they're people who think they are pretending they are something that they aren't, and so wiggers is an expression that was used, became popular in the mid-eighties, the early nineties when white kids who were into hip-hop, those kids, their friends and others who ridiculed them, that was an expression that was used that they called them, and then the wannabes is the expression, you know, popularized by the Spike Lee film "School Daze."

Tavis: All right. So if you're watching and keeping track and keeping notes, you don't wanna be any one of these 3 things. You don't wanna be a wangsta, you don't wanna be a wigger or called a wigger, and you surely don't wanna be a wannabe, but that said, tell me what we're trying to get across in the book here.

Kitwana: Right. Mostly, the book kinda looks at the phenomena of white kids and hip-hop as hip-hop has exploded on the national stage and has become mainstream American culture. Just looking at the phenomenon of, you know, what does this mean? I think mostly people take the position that it's something to be derided. It's something to be ridiculed, that it's something not to be taken seriously, that hip-hop is gonna go the way of rock 'n' roll or that white kids are gonna turn out like the black kids that society has said...-full of these pathologies.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Kitwana: What I'm trying to do in the book is to get past all that and to look at what's really happening that is unique and different as white kids and hip-hop and popular culture meet in America, you know, now.

Tavis: All right. So what's the short answer, then, for--to the question, rather, of why white kids do, in fact, love hip-hop?

Kitwana: Right. I don't think there is a short answer. I think people want a short answer. I think that most certainly the economics has shifted in the country. I think that young white Americans are struggling with a question of what it means to be young, white in America now as the economy has changed, as the idea of what white privilege means has shifted. In the early seventies and in the late sixties, we talked about manufacturing jobs going overseas. Now we're talkin' about middle class jobs going overseas. We're seeing a rise of poverty in this country, something like an increase of 3 million people in the poverty rolls between 2000 and 2003. We're seeing a higher cost for education and it being less affordable for people across the board. So I see young white kids in crisis, in their identity of what it means to be young in America and one of the things I talk about in the book is a rise of prescription drug-...the prescribing of drugs for psychiatric problems for young people, school age children increasing over the last decade. I talk about this and I make the comparison to this to the rise of incarceration amongst young African-Americans, a growing sense of alienation increasing across the board for young American people.

Tavis: This number varies, depending on which, you know, source you cite, but you either hear that 60% of rap music, hip-hop music, is purchased by white kids, as high as 72%. So somewhere between 60 and 70%, we are told, of hip-hop music, rap music, is purchased by white kids. Does that mean--first of all, do you buy those stats, number one, and number 2, if you buy those stats, does that mean that white kids as we know just have access to more income than black kids do? Or does it mean, uh, I think more significantly, on some level at least, that hip-hop's audience has changed?

Kitwana: Right. I think that hip-hop's audience has changed. I don't agree with the statistics.

Tavis: Right.

Kitwana: One of the things I do in the book is I have a chapter dedicated to looking at the statistics. In fact, some of the most recent, uh, guesstimates or claims are as high as 80%. What I do in the book is I look at where this idea comes from. No one has done a demographic study with any consistency to be able to make that claim.

Tavis: But you know that number's high, though, and you know that number's high because, first of all, you got white artists like Eminem who are selling records to white kids.

Kitwana: Right.

Tavis: And you see the way the white kids are dressed. You see them driving in their cars down the street, bumpin' their music. I was at the stoplight the other day, and I heard this thing bumpin'. You know, it was bumpin' so loud, I had to kind of roll up my window to get my groove. I think I was rockin' some Frankie Beverly and Maze, and this bumpin' was drownin' out my Frankie Beverly and Maze, 'Back in Stride Again.' So I had to roll up my windows to finish gettin' my Frankie groove on, but I looked...-just happened to look over, and these 2 white kids, you know, bump--and all I could do was laugh, so the signs are everywhere that whatever that number is, Bakari, it's a high number.

Kitwana: I think it's a substantial number, but I think that we're playing a game of racial politics when we say that white kids buy most rap music. In America, we don't say with great frequency that white Americans are the primary people on the, uh, welfare rolls, but they are. We have a governmental agency's statistics to demonstrate that, but people don't go around saying that.

Tavis: But to your point, though, there's a reason why one would make the case about welfare and other social ills because we don't want that pathology to be singularly associated with black people.

Kitwana: Right.

Tavis: What would be the reason for playing racial--how is it playing racial politics to say that white kids buy rap music?

Kitwana: I think that it's doing a number of things. One, it's suggesting that the buying power of young African-Americans is not as substantial as it is.

Tavis: OK.

Kitwana: I think the other thing that it's doing is it's helping to create a comfort zone for people who want to do business with the music industry, and so it's clear to me that the audience--the audience for white kids has been partially manufactured by the music industry. I mean, if you look at the concert attendance, how that's shifted, which is in some cases more radical than the buying audience, and you have...-you know, you have eyeball estimates if you go to concerts where you can see this, most certainly amongst independent artists, but I think that there is a clear intention to demonstrate...-and the music industry is, uh...record executives were the ones who first began to say that white kids were buying most hip-hop. Then you had the emergence of a company called Soundscan. I interviewed the founder of Soundscan. His name is Michael Shalett.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Kitwana: And he's told me that they don't do over-the-counter--they don't measure over-the-counter demographic sales. They just do, uh...it's just a hard sale. It's not a demographic dollar.

Tavis: So maybe it's not racial politics. Maybe it's brilliant marketing. If you put out there in the public domain for debate and discussion that white kids are buying most of hip-hop music, and white kids say, yeah, we are, they feel empowered by that and they go buy more...-maybe it was a brilliant marketing scheme.

Kitwana: Well, I think it's a little bit of both. Because I think that--

Tavis: Because if I was a white guy, I would have said that. "White kids are buying my...-white kids are buying the stuff that I produce and own."

Kitwana: Right, but I think that when you start to deal with concerts, even still, there's an idea that if there is a hip-hop event going on in an area where there are gonna be a lot of black people, there's a fear associated with that. In the early days of rap concerts, most certainly by the time you started to move into the early nineties, when you're starting to get these high-platinum sales, you have police and other organiza--uh, law enforcement shutting down rap concerts because of this fear of young African-Americans gathering. If you can demonstrate that the audience and the venues are not gonna be significantly black audiences, where, of course, we have these pathologies that we think young blacks are gonna do all this violence, then, you know, I think we're dealing with some racial politics.

Tavis: You raise another issue in this book that I'm not sure, respectfully, we are in sync with in terms of agreeing. But I think it's a fascinating conversation to have, and that is the potential, at least, of the hip-hop generation to be a significant voting block.

Kitwana: Right.

Tavis: There have been a number of folk trying to tap into that from P. Diddy on down the list. A number of folk tried to tap into that, certainly in this last election cycle. Number of folk trying to tap into that voting block. I'm troubled by it because just as black folk are not a monolith when it comes to voting, the hip-hop generation certainly ain't a monolith when it comes to voting to the extent that they vote at all. So whatever that number is of white kids buying music, if there are a bunch of white kids who love and appreciate hip-hop and they're part of this hip-hop community, and a bunch of black kids clearly are part of this hip-hop community, you can't assume that just because they're all young or because they all love hip-hop that they can be seen as a "voting block."

Kitwana: Right. I agree with that to a certain extent. I think that the distinction that has to be drawn is we have to understand hip-hop as a cultural movement. If we don't understand hip-hop as a cultural movement, and we only understand it as music, then I would agree with you that that case can't be made, but when you start to look at this generation of young people that have been politicized by public policy of the seventies and the eighties and increasingly moving into the nineties, then I think we do have an identifiable voting block. When you start to look at the issues that matter to young people, one of the things I do in the book is I talk to white hip-hop activists and I talk to them about how they feel they differ from their parents who they refer to as white liberals, many of them, and they think that they're further to the left of white liberals, these white hip-hop activists. I think that there are issues that matter to this generation, that this generation can be mobilized around, that are consistent because of the effects of globalization on this generation of young people where you're looking at our parents' generation, if they had jobs, those jobs, and they were working class, those jobs afforded them to buy a home, to take their families on vacation, they may be able to buy a car or two, maybe have a job that paid benefits. That's not a reality for this generation of young people who aren't college educated and that, to me, jobs that pay a living wage is one of the most important issues around which I think the hip-hop generation voting block can move a political agenda, in addition to some of the things that are happening in terms of education.

Tavis: Well, we ain't started to even scratch the surface on the conversation that could be had and I suspect will be had by those who pick up the new book by Bakari Kitwana, "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America." I'm just laughing at my white friends watching who I've introduced 3 new words into their lexicon: wangstas, wiggers, and wannabes, but I digress. Bakari, nice to have you here.

Kitwana: Thank you.

Tavis: All the best to you. Up next, musician and composer Danny Elfman. Stay with us.