The New Black Youth Culture

By: Bakari Kitwana

For our parent's generation, the political ideals of civil rights and Black power are central to their worldview. Our parent's generation placed family, spirituality, social responsibility, and Black pride at the center of their identity as Black Americans. They, like their parents before them, looked to their elders for values and identity. The coreset of values shared by a large segment of the hip-hop generation - Black America's generation X - stands in contrast to our parents' worldview. For the most part, we have turned to ourselves, our peers, global images and products, and the new realities we face for guidance. In the process, the values and attitudes described above anchor our worldview.

Our parents' values maintain a strong presence within our worldview. But in cases where the old and the new collide, the old - more often than not - is superseded by the new. For example, Black pride is still an important part of this generation's identity. In fact, the hip-hop generation has embraced the idea of Blackness in ways that parallel the Black consciousness raising of the late 1960's and early 1970's. The popularization of the Afrocentric movement from the late 1980's through the 1990's, pro-Black lyrics on the contemporary rap scene, as well as traditional hairstyles (dreadlocks and braids, for example) adopted by many hip-hop generationers all speak to this. Regardless of whether this is a brand of hard-core nationalism or a lukewarm, flash-in-the-pan bou-gie nationalism, the fact remains that when many hip-hop generation youth have to choose between personal financial success at the expense of what the older generation considers communal cultural integrity, individual gain generally comes first.