When Mic Crenshaw came to Portland, it was sort of like shaking a personal Etch A Sketch. He wanted a fresh start. That is understandable.
He had left behind an on-going struggle with white supremacists in Minneapolis, Minn. His connection to the streets involved a lot of drinking and fighting, he says. He was ready for something new.
In 1992, Crenshaw made his way to Portland where his mother had relocated. He would rise to become the front man for the Portland live hip hop band, Hungry Mob. In 2001, Crenshaw won the Portland Poetry Slam Championship and has become one the Pacific Northwest’s well known emcees and social justice activists.
Combining activism, education and music Crenshaw’s community efforts led him and a colleague to create Globalfam, a company formed to deliver computers to young adults in Rwanda. Today, the company houses and produces Crenshaw’s music and manages the community projects in which Crenshaw and Globalfam are involved.
In March, Crenshaw became co-manager of KBOO with Monica Beemer, formerly the executive director of Sisters of the Road. Most recently, he has returned from a tour through the African continent as a member of the Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan. The caravan could loosely be described by the lyrics of KRS-One who gives hip hop an acronym: Her Infinite Power Helping Oppressed People.
Sue Zalokar: Tell me about where you come from.
Mic Crenshaw: I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. As a child, I moved around a lot and I wound up in Minneapolis finishing high school and taking some college classes. It was there that I became a political activist, primarily around issues of anti-racism and organizing youth to respond to racist violence and the Klu Klux Klan.
In 2004 in my journey, I was at a conference in Rwanda for Economic Justice and Youth Empowerment, Genocide Reconciliation and HIV/AIDS. One of the conditions of being at the conference was that I had to follow it up with two years of work in the United States that supported some of the objectives that came out of that conference.
We committed to helping some of the activists who were at the conference start a computer center in Burundi in central Africa. We have kept that computer center up and running since 2007 with computers donated by Free Geek here in Portland and shipped through funds raised at a hip hop concert at Wonder Ballroom. We recently were funded for three more years through a grant.
S.Z.: Corporate hip hop: Where do you, personally, draw the line? Is corporate hip hop genuine?
M.C.: Corporate hip hop is something that lies parallel to what I do. I’m in an industry where people who have the most exposure are people that are kind of groomed and sponsored by commercial interests.
We’re living in a time where people do what they do with a degree of independence — and control — over what they do. They are carving their own paths independent of the corporate entities.
S.Z.: The face of hip hop is changing... look at Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks ...
M.C.: I’m not that impressed with any of it. The thing is each generation has its pet issues that we get excited about — and for good reason. The reason to get excited about them is that these issues are part of long-standing issues.
The means of music consumption and distribution has changed, but the social issues are the same.
There is still police violence. The disparity between the rich and poor is getting wider. White supremacy is still at the root of a lot of our social issues regarding race and police and violence and social ills.
Police have been killing black people, young black and Latino men and women, without any recourse or accountability, for hundreds of years in this country.
That continues to happen. The way that people grapple with it in their own time is to treat it as if it is our problem currently, and it is. But often, it lacks a historical context to see that this has always been a part of our experience here in the United States.
S.Z.: It is a kind of gentrification — one that replaces faces of color with a white, blond face.
M.C.: The gentrification of music, of generally black genres, R&B and soul and hip hop and blues and rock ‘n’ roll … it’s happened in all of those genres. Art forms that were championed and developed by black people were taken over by a white music industry that first exploited the black artists for the benefit of commercial entities and then ultimately, removed the black artist from the genre and replaced them with white artists because the record-buying audience is primarily a white audience.
In the commercial structure of the music industry we see reinforcement of white supremacy as we do in other places in society. And whether it is Iggy Azalea or Eminem or Elvis Presley or any number of artists.
The thing to remember, though, is that the social conditions that produce the environment in which the blues was created, in which jazz was created, in which hip hop music was created, those conditions haven’t really changed that much. So there is always going to be an authentic expression that comes from the cultural experience of the people who are oppressed.
S.Z.: The day before Christmas Eve, Antonio Martin was shot in Berkeley, Mo., just a few miles from Ferguson where Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown last summer. Two officers in NYC were murdered in their vehicle the week before. Can you see any resolution to this growing rift between police officers and the public in general?
M.C.: There is going to have to be a cultural revolution — a political revolution that is underway as we speak. I don’t know how long it is going to take. I can’t measure what I will see in my lifetime, but these things are expressions of these ongoing struggles between the world that we exist in and the world that we’re trying to create — a world that is more just and equitable.
In that equation, police are a kind of occupying force that stands between the society that we desire – and when I say we, I’m talking about working-class people, poor people, people who are historically oppressed — and the society we have got.
The police are there to protect the interests of the people who control equal access and distribution to wealth and power. That is the only reason police exist. And until we transform things and have more equitable relationships across society, we’re going to be in a violent struggle.
Racism exists because white people brought it into existence.
You’ve got these cops killing unarmed children, in broad daylight, on camera. The question about whether cops should be wearing body cameras is almost absurd, because people get killed on camera all of the time and there is still no recourse.
You don’t have to be a scientist or an academic to see what is going on.
S.Z.: How do we untangle that? We’ve come so far since the civil rights movement, we have a black president for the first time in our nation’s history and yet …
M.C.: That shit was happening before there was a headline. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has done a study and they say every 28 hours a black person is executed by police or security or self-deputized white vigilantes.
S.Z.: You have recently returned from the Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan tour – a kind of cultural exchange. Tell me about the project.
M.C.: We do a week in various African cities. We started the project in 2013. This year, I participated in Cape Town, South Africa; Harare, Zimbabwe; Arusha, Tanzania and the Nairobi, Kenya legs of the tour. I have also become the lead organizer (for the Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan) in the United States. There are a number of organizers in Africa as well.
For the week that we spend in each city, we are hosted by local hip hop collectives that set up a number of events for us to not only perform music and give free concerts to audiences, but also to interact in the community. It is youth focused and all centers around this idea of how can we utilize hip hop culture as a tool for elevating consciousness and ultimately transforming lives.
This is an important project because it is organized by people who are cultural activists who have a priority to work with hip hop culture as a reflection of youth culture in African communities that are oppressed.
S.Z.: Where do you see the program heading in the future?
M.C.: My highest aspiration for the project is to bring African American and indigenous artists from the United States and for African and indigenous artists from Africa to be able to participate in the Caravan on both continents.
S.Z.: We are notoriously “white” and to a great degree, lean toward the left politically in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Portland. How can we do better in our communities to include and honor African ancestry and culture in a way that is inclusive?
M.C.: That is an interesting question. I think by supporting people who are already doing that work and who are already organized — be they individuals or organizations or community groups and programs.
S.Z.: What will 2015 bring for you?
M.C.: It will bring more results of the hard work of people who are oriented toward social justice.
sue@streetroots.org
