And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.

After many years of hip-hop as a nation we should have the sophistication to accept that their are distinctions between the corporate manifestation of hip-hop, sold as a commodity and package with sensational race, sex and violent imagery, and the hip-hop culture that kids are living everyday at a local level, which often doesn't dabble in that terrain.

Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. It would be great if corporate America didn't do this, but there is a huge market for sex and violence and anti-Black representations in America and the world that doesn't begin or end with hip-hop.

I agree that a lot of mainstream corporate sold hip-hop is self-hating.

Hip-hop is a complex music and culture that has been reduced to a one-dimensional critique. Hip-hop's messages aren't all bad. Neither are they all good.

Hip-Hop's cultural movement is much larger than the corporate representation. The images most of hip-hop's critics point to are those manufactured by major corporations whether on television, via Viacom, or on the radio, via Radio One and Clear Channel.

My hope is to get young people to think about ways that they can translate hip-hop's great cultural movement into political power that can change the conditions for America's young, so that young people upon graduating from high school who don't have economic means to go to college can realize other options beyond joining the military and fighting in wars that enrich corporations like Halliburton which should feel guilty about profiteering off of a war that is being fought on the backs of those locked out of America's mainstream economy.