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.

Locally lived hip-hop culture that is giving many of America's youth the tool they need to survive and thrive in America, in the face of public policy that have written too many young people off.

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.

We live in a society that refuses to set a standard for what we will allow American entertainment to expose to our children. I think we need to set a standard that is entertainment industry wide, not just limited to hip-hop.

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.

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.

I'm not a poster boy for misogyny and I don't think hip-hop should be either.