Kyle Mays, who teaches at the African American Studies Department and the Native American Center at UCLA, says Hip Hop “builds solidarity between the two communities,” which share a complex history of slavery, displacement and state violence. Mays is author of the book, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in North America.Water rights and climate change are connected with larger political empowerment issues. “We need to somehow deal with the issue of returning land to native peoples,” said Mays, who is of Black and Native American ancestry.
The book is a meditation on a way of life that is joyous and abundant without ever asserting that we must all convert to Pentecostalism.
Gay liberation didn’t originate as a single-issue movement, and must confront neoliberalism and gentrification as well as anti-queer violence.
Society needs prison abolition in order to heal, but people living in prison need basic humane conditions in order to survive.”
Chicago media care more about the safety of a killer cop and the Jesse Smollett saga than victims of the city’s rabidly racist police.
Hundreds of thousands of inmates’ voices have been imprinted, potentially ensnaring millions of family members, friends and supporters in the huge surveillance net.
