What role can the African American Studies Department play in addressing the issue of mass incarceration?

In the book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander provides a historical context on how the United States successfully created a permanent underclass or racial caste by criminalizing African Americans, particularly, African American males. Is there a way that Afro Studies can utilize Hip Hop to raise the awareness about this issue among Hip Hop and post-Hip Hop generations? Has Hip Hop been used in the past to discuss the jailing of African American men to support the labor needed to fuel the prison industrial complex/ If so, when and how, and by whom?

What is the New Black Studies?

This is a huge question. Black Studies in its origins was about creating historical awareness, redefining and developing what knowledge is, being inspired by as well as inspiring local black communities, and confronting White imperialism head on with undeniable data not politics as it relates to addressing the notions of oppression perpetuated by the capitalist class. One highlight of Brown's Dude, Where's My Black Studies Department, was his discussion on the Malcolm X Consciousness Conference organized by Laney College in Oakland, California. He made reference to it as the new Black Studies (p.113).

It appears that he described it as such because it was a return to the founding tenets of Black Studies which was to insure that there was a community connection. Moreover, Brown discussed how some of the panelists, some who were former Black Panthers suggested that each Black Studies department must have a part of their program that channels students back to their community to do work. Is that what's missing? Will that create the awareness that black students of the Hip Hop and post-Hip Hop generations need in order to be spirited to address the issues that are impacting impoverished African American communities today? Or is it just a fleeting notion, a fleeting notion of the belief that today's black student can find the throwback spirit of struggles that led to the development of the original Black Studies. What if, by chance, they found that spirit of yesteryear, would that be enough to revitalize Black America?

I suggest that what is missing today is the "moral panic" of White America. History has shown that speaking truth to power does not work, nor does "in all deliberate speed." Brown made reference to Cornel West's assertions that young people are sleepwalking intellectually, and that he need to use a powerful oral tradition to wake them up and connect them with the democratic process necessary to change the conditions that plague the black community. West used Hip Hop as a way to connect. Is Hip Hop an answer, or has Hip Hop been co-opted and commercialized to a point that makes it's agency ineffective? Is there something else on the horizon?

When University of Illinois IPOWERED civic engagement scholars from Dr. Patterson's Afro 498 course, participated in a community based discussion on the redevelopment efforts in a North Champaign neighborhood, they immediately responded with fervor and outcry against the proposed plan, and used the verbiage of gentrification to describe what was going to happen if the residents in this historic African American community signed on to the plan as presented. As a result, members from the steering committee came to class to dialogue. The conversation centered around how to develop the space without creating yet another example of Black Americans being displaced for the sake of progress. It was the spirit of those students, graduate and undergraduate, black and white that challenged the city's proposed plan and policies through the historic tenet of community engagement from a Black Studies department within a predominately white institution.

Noted black scholar, Manning Marable, made the point before he passed away that in order for Black Studies to have meaning in the 21st Century, it must be digitized. How do we digitize black studies? who will create the code for syncing the oral traditions to the legacies of the black lived experience? Who will create the code that breaths life into the print traditions that binds so many black scholars? How do we scale up Black Studies in a traditional, print based environment. An environment that dictates what knowledge is and maintains the mechanisms that gate keeps that knowledge with promotion and tenure. How do we merge indigenous knowledge into the equation? How is this measured, who measures it? who determines it's success or failure? These are just a few of the tough questions that need answers if there is to be a New Black Studies in the 21st century.