No More Prisons,
featuring William Upski Wimsatt, Rip One, DJ Wicked and Gainon
E. Lyrical, Circle of Fire, Mic Crenshaw, DJ Magneto, Deena
Barnwell, Porterhouse Quintet
Viscount Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St., 233-7855.
7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 29. $5-$20 sliding scale.
Proceeds from the event go to Portland's Independent Publishing
Resource Center and New York's Active Element Foundation.
Local political organizations (Portland Free Mumia, K.I.D.S.,
etc.) will have information tables set up.
Willamette Week: The targets and subjects you
touch upon in No More Prisons are a little bit different
than in Bomb the Suburbs. I was wondering if you
were going for a different audience, because the first one
seemed more for hip-hop folks, and this one seems like it's
aimed at people who are into public service as much as hip-hip
culture.
Billy Wimsatt: I look at it a little differently. The
first book was for hip-hop folks and liberal white people,
basically. Who I'm targeting in this book is, I'm stretching
the spectrum. So instead of just hip-hop folks (who oftentimes
are, these days, not the poorest of the poor), I'm stretching
it to prisoners (who are the poorest of the poor), and not
just liberal white people, but rich white people.
To me this is a much more ambitious book than Bomb the
Suburbs. Because I was very comfortable with the two
worlds I dealt with in Bomb the Suburbs, and the
world of rich philanthropists and prisoners are new realms
for me. I've only been to jail, like, twice, for a day each.
I've had friends who've been to prison. It's a stretch for
me. I have money in my family, but I just found that out
recently, and I'm just getting used to the idea of myself
being "upper class," as opposed to what so many of ourselves
coming from privileged backgrounds imagine ourselves to
be, which is "middle class...." A lot of times when people
ask me how I got like this, if my parents were radicals
or whatever, I'm like, "No, my parents have become a lot
more radical, and know more black people." My parents, now
they know a lot of my hip-hop friends. People will call
my parents house in Chicago to invite me to parties or events,
and they'll be like, "Oh, you're Upski's parents...why don't
you come?" And my parents have gone to some hip-hop events!
And they'll talk to hip-hop people, where before they really
didn't have black friends. When i was in high school I started
bringing home all these magazines like The Nation
and Mother Jones and whatnot. And since I was always
getting in trouble my mom was always snooping in my business
to see what I was doing, and she started reading The
Nation and Mother Jones and she was like, "Oh
my god, the media is lying to us about Iraq!" She started
getting radicalized and she started radicalizing my dad
more, and it's exciting to see that happen in your family.
So that's what happened in my one family, my family family.
But my hip-hop family, though I see them less now that I
focus my energy more on privileged white folks, I'm bringing
them along too. We're meeting each other as adults now.
One of the original hip-hop folks in Chicago, his name was
B-Boy B, he was one of the original breakers and graffiti
artists in Chicago. And I ran into him like a year ago.
He has like three kids and a web-design company. He works
for Puerto Rican political prisoners and he's involved in
all this Puerto Rican activism, and his girlfriend's an
activist. Now he's one of the contributors to the Active
Element foundation. He's getting paid doing web stuff and
he's fucking political.
I was afraid at first that, because I focused less on hip-hop,
I would lose a lot of people. But that hasn't happened at
all. The hip-hop community is trying to expand, the kids
are growing up, and the prison system has devastated the
black community in America. So when I get on the bus and
the train and walk down the street trying to sell my book,
black folks are filling the book. This guy stopped me in
Manhattan and is like "what is that?" And I'm like, "Why
are you interested?" He says, "'Cuz I'm a fucking endangered
species!" Turns out it was this rapper who used to go by
the name Intelligent Hoodlum. Now he goes by Tragedy Khadafy.
And he's from Queensbridge, and he mentored Steel and Mobb
Deep. It's been amazing to me. I assumed that because i
was getting older and whiter that my audience would get
older and whiter, more educated and more affluent--like
readers of most every other book. But to the contrary, the
17-year-old who's in the next generation of black graffiti
writers in Chicago--who you'd expect to be the person who'd
say, "Yo, whassup, why aren't you talking about graffiti
anymore? Why aren't you talking about hip-hop?"--was like,
"Yo, you've matured. This is better than Bomb the Suburbs
cuz you're talking about what's really going on...."
What happened in the '80s was a lot of consciousness not
married to organizing, not coupled to any concrete political
organizing. You had Chuck D talking about training 5,000
black leaders in the next 5 years, and KRS-ONE talking about
building schools to educate all of humanity. But what's
gone unnoticed is the past 2 or 3 years are, to me, the
golden age of hip-hop political organizing thus far, organizations
growing out of hip-hop that are actually doing something.
In the late '80s there were really no political hip-hop
organizations in the country. There was the Zulu Nation....
Now I could name you 50 organizations around the country
that are hip-hop oriented that are doing actual political
organizing, like the Third Eye Movement in the Bay Area.
In the Bay Area, there's this ridiculous ballot initiative
that would lock up 14-year-olds with adults and make it
a felony to do $400 worth of graffiti. None of the mainstream
civil-rights organizations that are supposed to fight these
things was doing jack shit about this ballot initiative.
So Third Eye Movement, which is a hip-hop based organization,
got together and researched what corporations funded Prop.
21, like Chevron, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Hilton.
And Third Eye protested everything [the corporations] did.
First they got Chevron to pull out their funding. Then they
got Pacific Gas and Electric to pull their funding, and
write a letter to all their employees saying [Pacific wasn't]
supporting Prop. 21, and give Third Eye Movement
money. Then Third Eye surrounded all these Hilton Hotels
and had these hip-hop protests, like, "You declare war on
us? We declare war on you!" They were scaring everyone away
from going to the Hilton! It was fucking amazing!
The foundation that me and my friend started, and that
No More Prisons is supporting--the Active Element
Foundation--is funding Third Eye Movement and 13 other organizations
in Cali. So you have the emergence of the first hip-hop
based philanthropic entity. Hopefully, within a couple of
year's there'll be a bunch more, so when the system tries
to fuck with young people and the hip-hop community, we're
gonna have a little bit o' something for their ass!
And Portland is ridiculous. I don't know exactly what the
laws are, but Portland is infamous for giving felonies to
graffiti writers for not even doing that much graffiti.
Hello? Why don't you let them freeway walls, or let them
paint some viaducts and beautify the place? Why is the only
way we know how to deal with young people doing anything
different is to lock their asses up, so they become career
criminals, can't get jobs and can't vote? That's really
the way you tear a society apart.
But I love Portland. Another big part of No More Prisons
is about urban planning, and from that standpoint Portland
is by far the most interesting and progressive city in America.
So much of what we're trying to get other cities to do is
be more like Portland: have more public spaces, have urban
growth boundaries so suburban sprawl can't eat up the whole
countryside and destroy the city. Portland probably has
about 5-10 times as many attractive urban plazas as Chicago.
In Portland, there's all these beautiful plazas where you
can just hang out; in Chicago, when you say "meet me downtown,"
there's nowhere to meet. One thing I hope people from Portland
do when they go other places is insist those places become
more like Portland--even though it is a white-ass city!
Well, since you brought up Portland and planning, let
me ask you this: a lot of yuppies are moving downtown and
taking over sections that used to have poor housing. They're
turning it into a city-shaped suburb, with non-communal
condos instead of housing projects, while the minorities
are being spread out further on the fringes. When people
are that scattered, do you have any suggestions for uniting
those groups, when they're not as centrally located as they
would have been in an urban environment?
Yeah, that's becoming the urban issue of the decade.
Honestly, I don't know what the fuck to do. That'll probably
be one of the challenges I'll take on in my next book, cuz
I really don't know what the fuck to do about gentrification.
It's eating the heart out of our cities. I'm trying to collect
good ideas from around the country, like rent control, and
tenants organizing to buy up their buildings. Essentially,
the same thing is driving gentrification that created suburban
sprawl: rich developers, and the government people they're
in bed with, are dictating how we're gonna live. The piece
of the solution I'm focusing on right now is finding cool,
exceptional rich people, so once we figure out what to do
to stop this, we'll have people with some type of power,
clout, money, and real-estate expertise, so we'll have a
fighting chance to stop the destruction of the soul of our
cities....
The ideas of what needs to be done has to come from the
bottom up. But the grassroots activists and leaders need
rich and powerful allies. One of the myths of social change
is that momentous change has been done strictly by poor
and working class people, without rich and powerful allies.
If you look at any successful social change movement, you'll
see that the leadership comes from the bottom up, but one
of the critical next phases is recruiting the rich allies
and privileged people who are willing to be exceptions to
the status quo. That's the part I'm working on, because
the grassroots people are just getting their ass kicked.
I've had so many friends get evicted. What the fuck can
they do? They wanna buy property, buy buildings so they
can own their own shit and not get evicted. That's the first
solution I hear coming from the grassroots: "Yo, we need
to own our own fucking buildings." But they don't have the
money, they don't have the capital, they don't have the
credit lines with the banks. The activists groups that are
trying to do anything are being evicted because they can't
pay their rents. To even have a glimmer of a fighting chance,
we at least need to own our own strongholds of resistance,
y'know? So that's where rich and powerful people come in.
It's critical to have more of them on our side. 'Cuz poor
people, grassroots people, homeless people, activists with
nothing are just getting wiped the fuck out of the game,
and not even getting the chance to voice opposition. Developers
are so strong. And the stranglehold that corporate interests
have over municipal government and urban planning is so
complete--you need power to fight power.
Now, you're not really talking about any widespread
social change, you're talking about little bits at a time,
creating an oasis in the storm, then working from there
as a home base to change from the bottom up....
Yeah, for starters. That's a good metaphor: We need an oasis
from the storm, we need more oases from the storm...Reading
Frenzy, and Street Roots, and all these little glimmers
of culture, and politics, and people opposing the status
quo are really all we've got. We need to support those institutions,
build more of them and strengthen them, network them, and
strategize so we can have a fighting chance.
You seem to have two sides to your personality. One is
a healthy skepticism, skeptical about what people promise.
The other is an incredible amount of optimism, to always go
out and keep fighting because you see hope for improvement
in the future. How do you balance those two?
Well, it's interesting because people are beginning to accuse
me of going overboard with the optimism. In Bomb the Suburbs,
there was a hell of a lot more dissing going on, a lot of
saying how wack everything was. Two things have changed. The
first thing was, I took activism for granted. I didn't think
of myself as an activist because I said, "Ah, they're out
there doing their thing. They're not really winning, so I
don't wanna lump myself with that cuz it's not appealing and
they're not accomplishing much." So I distanced myself from
the whole "let's change the world" thing. And most of the
people I knew thought it was really corny. I think the thing
that really changed my mind happened accidentally. I got hired
by the Rock the Vote, which was this MTV thing, and they sent
me out as a talent scout to find the most incredible young
activists in the country, and they were gonna put a few of
them on MTV. I met all these people my age, and all the time
and energy I put into hip-hop and writing about it, they put
into actually changing the system--incredible, incredible
victories, and the incredible sophistication of young people
knowing how to deal with the legislature, which to me was
incomprehensible. I'd never known my city councilperson, let
alone walked into the state legislature thinking I could have
some influence. And I met young people who did, and I thought,
"Shit, this is the next level." Like, hip-hop has been taken
away from us, has been co-opted. Everything that was once
cool has been co-opted by major corporations, with the help
of hip people at, like, Weiden and Kennedy. And they're just
doing their job--they're bright, creative people, and that
was the best paying job they could find--so I don't hate 'em,
but the only thing left to me that's still cool, that isn't
a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney/AOL/Time-Warner/Viacom/Sony
is fighting the system. That's the one thing you can't co-opt.
So that's where the excitement is to me. The thing that's
given me optimism is now I know hundreds of people who have,
in one way or another, fought the system and won. Most people
can't even name one person. So the fact I know all these people
gives me hope because I know what's going on. People are like,
"How can you be so optimistic?" And I'm like, "Let me introduce
you to about ten dozen people, and you'll see where I'm coming
from." That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to introduce
the promising but cynical young people of America to their
peers, and to stories of what amazing things young people
are doing that aren't in the media. And we're building a movement
to fight it. Five years ago, there wasn't a single hip-hop
organization on a college campus; now there are about 50.
Five years ago, there wasn't a prison activist organization
on a college campus; now there are about five, and on our
tour we're gonna probably start about 20. That's what begins
to build an infrastructure of people who can fight this shit.
And it doesn't take that many people. So I'm much more optimistic
now about how to change the world, because I have a hell of
a lot better idea how to do it. [Pause] That's my two cents.
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 23,
2000
|
