The anthology includes poems and lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and commentaries on parenting and relationships - all from the perspective fathers and sons born at or during the same time that hip hop culture was birthed. In addition, the book will be accompanied by extraordinary photos of the contributors with their families.

The book begins with a strong contextual discussion of demographic shifts in family formation in the U.S., especially the growth of out-of-wedlock birth rates from roughly 5 percent in 1965 to the current 32 percent, the impact of public policy on family formation in communities of color, and the influence of hip hop culture on individual conceptions of family formation and fathering. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) – the nation’s welfare system – along with the child support enforcement system are particular concerns.

The next section fleshes out the historical, sociological, and cultural context, examining the impact of welfare, child support, criminal justice, and employment policies on family formation and fathering. Key to this section is the role of hip hop as an influential cultural phenomenon that shaped the individual writers' conceptions of sexual behavior, family formation and fathering.

In addition to the more analytical material there are distinctly more personalized and anecdotal pieces, giving voice to the writers’ full range of experiences with the fathers or father figures in their lives. The writings illuminate how those relationships influenced their impressions and decisions regarding fatherhood, sexual responsibility, family formation, and parenting — representing both healthy, loving relationships, as well as estranged or vulnerable father-son connections.

The book ends by discussing questions regarding the future of family formation, child-rearing, and community-strengthening within communities of color - as presented in Section Two. Here contributors address whether and how policy and culture can influence the realization of healthy definitions of fatherhood and parenting and more responsible sexual behavior. The section is also intended to provoke greater public discourse within the African-American community on topics like abstinence, advancing careers over marriage and family formation, marriage (the institution), out-of-wedlock births, co-habitation, fathering for the non-custodial parent, and co-parenting for separated parents.

April R. Silver is a highly respected entrepreneur, activist, and writer whose life's work embodies one core belief: creativity can heal, politicize, and ultimately elevate our lives. In 1993, she founded AKILA WORKSONGS, Inc. to promote that belief. The company provides lecture management, public relations, and consulting services mostly to artists and arts organizations. She has earned a golden reputation for providing extraordinary service and has done so for some of today's most recognized and powerful artists.*

Ms. Silver received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Howard University (African American Literature minor). There, she helped lead the historic student protest of 1989. That role garnered her national and international recognition as a student activist. After the protest, Silver served as student government president (son of Amiri Baraka and current Deputy Mayor of Newark Ras Baraka was the Vice President). During her term, Silver also doubled as the founding president of The Cultural Initiative, Inc. (CI) and co-produced the nation's first hip hop conference. In its inaugural year (1991), CI highlighted then newcomers Common, Busta Rhymes, and other hip hop talent. Many Howard and conference staff alumni, such as Sean Combs, credit CI for their start in the entertainment business. The groundbreaking annual event ignited new conversations and long-lasting changes in the positioning of hip hop within the academy.

Fulfilling one of her childhood dreams, April became a junior high school teacher and taught English in some of New York City's most neglected communities. She established extra-curriculum and after-school programs that focused on the literary arts, academic achievement, and character development. She emerged as one the most effective teachers in her schools.

In addition to teaching, April has always been dedicated to service. She has sat on several boards and honorary committees, including the International African Arts Festival and the historic Hip Hop Nation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. April also founded the artist-activist organization Co-Motion (in response to the killing of Amadou Diallo) and co-founded HipHop Speaks! (town hall meetings conceived by Kevin Powell).

Since 1998, Ms. Silver has been a member of the New York Chapter of the Recording Academy (popularly known as The GRAMMYS). In 2000, April conceived of and chaired the chapter's first hip hop and R&B conference. In 2004, she did the same with PoetrySpeaks! (featuring Mos Def, Miguel Algarin, and others). Also in 2004, the chapter elected her to its Board of Governors. In 2005, it elected her as a Vice President. Her newest initiative advocates for the revision of the GRAMMY award category for spoken word artists, and she chairs that committee.

Since late August 2005, Ms. Silver has turned much of her volunteer work toward the Hurricane Katrina/Rita relief movement. She continues to organize and collaborate with activists, grassroots organizations, and service agencies to support survivors who have been displaced. She also founded Artists For Life, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing art, culture, and healing to the Gulf region.

In keeping with her mission, April ensures that AKILA WORKSONGS annually donates thousands of dollars worth of service to independent artists and organizations.

For her nearly 20 years of service, April's work has been recognized by peers and media. She has received a number of distinguished awards and in 2002, Essence Magazine profiled her in its "Work and Wealth" section. For her views and perspectives on art, culture, and politics, she has been featured, profiled, or quoted in Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Ebony, Ms., The Network Journal (cover story), and many others. Internationally, she has appeared in ADLIB and Black Music Review (Japan), Black Echoes (London), and on Radio Netherlands. Regularly, she is called upon to guest or guest-host on popular shows including XM Satellite Radio, CNN, BET, and other outlets.

Silver co-hosts My Two Cents, with Keith Boykin and Selwyn Hinds - a new music/talk show to air on the re-vamped BETJ (formerly BET Jazz).

On the lecture circuit, Ms. Silver speaks regularly and has keynoted, paneled, or moderated at over one hundred campuses and conferences across the country.

April R. Silver lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"From Education To Get Money: The Challenge of Parenting in and Beyond the Hip-Hop Generation"

By Bakari Kitwana


“We expose ways for the youth to survive
Some think its wrong but we tend to think it’s right
So make all them ends you can make
Cause when you’re broke, you break.”
—Snoop Dogg
Little Ghetto Boys



Unlike the dominant mythology of the hip-hop generation* — namely the narrative of Black boys with missing fathers raised by their mothers — I grew up having a healthy relationship with my father. The pent up frustration, the tales from the darkside of a father not being present at critical rites of passage, of being forced to seek out surrogate fathers in street culture were not my reality. And even now as I recall coming of age in the hip-hop generation, rarely do I think of my parents as separate entities, mom over here and dad over there. When it came to parenting, they were a single unit and when I think of my father as a parent those are my first memories.

My father was born Samuel Dance in Weeksville, NC, a rural strip of farm land about 30 miles south of the Chesapeake Bay, nestled between the Dismal Swamp and the Albemale Sound off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was an unusually cool weekend in the fall in 1930, as my grandmother remembered it. Twenty years later, my parents married. In those days both my mom and dad were farm laborers. White potatoes were a thriving North Carolina industry then. And before automation, the work was done by hand. At the same time, the east end of Long Island enjoyed a lucrative white potato fall harvest. Every year after the North Carolina July harvest, to make ends meet, my parents migrated to Long Island for work in the fall with a crew of relatives and childhood friends before returning home. It was 1955 when they decided to stay.

Eleven years later, I was born in Southampton, New York, the eighth of nine children. By the time I reached elementary school, my father was doing masonry work and my mom worked nights as a hospital union worker. I grew up literally across the railroad tracks in the working class Black community of Bridgehampton, which along with similar small enclaves in Easthampton, Sag Harbor, and Southampton made up what the local folk by the mid 1970s jokingly called “The Other Hampton.” When I was 18, complications from an automobile accident years earlier claimed my father’s life.

Before that, most of the details I remember about my father’s parenting centered around the two main pillars of my childhood life outside of home: church and school. My parents had an obsession with matters of the soul. They were very much concerned that we knew not only the power of prayer, but that we knew how to do it and how often. They wanted me to live as clean and respectful a Christian life as possible. They also expressed this through their church membership and attendance. There were Sundays, and sometimes Saturdays, when the family spent nearly as much time at the fire and brimstone style Pentacostal church we attended as at home. A deacon in the church, my father took great responsibility and care for its maintenance from cleaning to handyman duties. My father was also superintendent of the Sunday school. On the surface, this was an oddity in that my father’s formal education went only to the second grade. On closer inspection, given his obsession with education, it wasn’t as inconsistent as it seemed.

The end of my father’s formal childhood schooling came about as a result of financial necessity: his mom needed him to work to help support the household. So as an able bodied 7 year-old he joined the other able body folk and thus began a work ethic my parents would pass on to me. Their emphasis on education is the only concern they had during my childhood that paralleled their focus on spiritual health. Education for them like most of their generation, represented an end-all-be-all. It wasn’t until my father was in his late 40s that he attended night school, where he finally learned to read and earned his high school equivalency. In the meantime, any grades less than an A brought home by me or my siblings were duly rewarded with a spanking. My father was the disciplinarian and was fierce with it. I don’t recall when it clicked for me that education was crucial, but I knew that without excellent grades, I’d have to face my father’s wrath. As a child, being a student was my job. Therefore, I should work at it to the best of my ability, which in my parent’s eyes meant being the best. There was no wavering on this.

The long-term result in my family was that although neither of my parents finished high school, all of their children were college graduates. But the idea of education as an end-all-be-all for most previous generations of African Americans was somehow still lost on our generation. We came of age with the deterioration of the public education system, rising college costs, decline of living wage jobs with benefits, the crack-cocaine explosion, war on drugs, escalation of incarceration from 200,000 in 1970 to over 2 million by the year 2000. It is no wonder that education failing to be a panacea is a recurring theme in hip-hop culture: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Kanye West’s College Drop Out, the many hip-hop artist high school drop outs — from Jay-Z, Nas, 50 Cent, and Eminem who like the Notorious B.I.G. worked this reality into their rhymes — “considered a fool cause I dropped out of high school.” In the midst of these upheavals, for us education was reduced to at best a tool.

If education—which had been a primary pillar of traditional Black American identity—was lost with the coming of the hip-hop era, then what has replaced it? As the 1970s turned to the early 80s, those of us who grew up hip-hop were caught up in the transition of the American Dream. Once defined as a good paying job, modest home in the suburbs and a comfortable middle age life, the new American Dream was now millionaire status by 25 with all the trapping of extreme success: pricey cars, private jets, ostentatious mansions, exotic vacations, excessive jewelry, phat bank accounts, diversified investments and more. Through it all, consumer culture tied to individual worth was its handmaiden from economic elites to ghetto fabulous. The emphasis that used to be placed on education had within our lifetime been shifted to the “get money” 80s, 90s and beyond. This transformation was a global capitalistic phenomenon that was defined nationally as Reaganomics. Its celluloid presentation came in the form of the 80s flicks Wall Street, The Firm and later the hip-hop influenced New Jack City. Overnight, we have seemingly gone from a community who celebrated education and social uplift to one buried in stereotypes, where women are defiled and degraded, and money at all costs, by any means necessary, is our generation’s end-all-be-all.

As the father of an eight year-old son, what is the challenge of parenting a Black manchild in these times that promise little? I spend quality time with my son on a daily basis as much as possible. He knows that a day won’t pass that he won’t hear my voice. I call him from the road when I’m traveling and rarely spend weekends or more than three nights at a time away from home. We have dinner together most nights, routinely take walks and bike rides where we talk about current events, his day, my work, his thoughts, and his future. I am trying to teach him to talk to me so that when he needs me most, he will know that I am there.

I parent as collectively with his mom as I learned from my parents — when possible, more so. As we parent our son, we immerse him in nurturing and safe environments at home, school and play that reinforce a strong sense of his own value along with the value of others. We educate him at home and immerse him in the best schools we can afford. Lessons about the quality and quantity of food consumption and exercise are daily observations. In this age of consumer culture, we are very much concerned about media representations and are teaching him to be media literate. At the same time that we control his consumption, and teach him that if he must consume to be a conscientious consumer. Rather than television, friends, videogames, or extended child care, we intend to be his major influences and bear responsibility for his development into a young man ready to make a meaningful contribution to the world.

We take international trips with him as often as possible as we want him to see himself as larger than simply American, but a citizen of the world. We introduce him to art, music, family, spirituality, history, work and ethics in much the same healthy way as any parent wants for their children. It is the collaboration of our parents’ generation’s emphasis on education and our own generation’s “get money” era philosophy that have in part allowed us to do so.

On racial matters, I am trying always to strike a balance between a series of seeming opposites: We hip-hop generationers were raised at the tail end of the era where being Black generally meant you lived in a predominantly Black community. This is not my son’s reality. Again, options afforded us by civil rights gains of our parents’ generation and our own hip-hop era get money perspective. But his is a future where he must be cognizant of his relationship with and responsibility to other Black men, especially those less fortunate than him. Finally, when it comes to race, my approach to parenting considers daily that the country is no longer in Black and White and neither should his understanding of America’s race dynamics be solely defined as such. Still I must help my son to hold on to a sense of Black cultural identity and to respect the humanity of other cultures while understanding the white supremacist global culture that continues to adversely affect Black life.

When it comes to our generation’s music, despite being one of hip-hop’s most passionate defenders I’m very selective about the hip-hop music that I expose my son to. This means at times, the bulk of the music he listens to isn’t hip-hop or at best it’s hip-hop classics (the early to mid 1980s before profanity and adult situations came to be synonymous with our generation’s music). No strip club inspired or stereotype-laden music videos are part of his diet. This means as dead prez reminds us “turn [ing] off the radio” and cds that aren’t age appropriate when he’s in the car or at home. I’m old-fashioned in the sense that I believe that there is entertainment for children, entertainment for adults and entertainment that crosses the age divide. However, the adults in the room have to be adult enough to regulate that.

Forever a product of the hip-hop era, as I approach what used to be called middle age at a time when corporate marketing machines tell us daily that “40 is the new 30,” I reflect often on the major economic shifts that ushered in the hip-hop generation. Now a parent, I’m trying to understand the messages beyond the music. Among the questions that dominate my thoughts as a parent are the following: what kind of world will my son live in? How do we in our lifetime create a political movement that builds on the best of hip-hop and allows our children to escape the public policy of containment of the 80s and 90s which handicapped us and that already is reinventing itself anew in the present? How do we make spirituality without self-righteousness a critical part of our children’s lives? As a generation who peeped the flaw of our elders vision of education as an end-all-be-all how do we effectively articulate “get money” as itself no more than a tool as well? Just as we knew education alone was too limited, how do we teach our children that a get money philosophy is restrictive also?

As I think about which lessons of my father’s generation and my own to pass on to my son, more than anything my father said, I remember his deeds. So in my own parenting, I’m trying to pay more attention to the example I’m setting, the lifestyle I’m living, the company I keep, the causes I support. My hopes and prayers as a father is that my son will inherit a better world with better options; that he can live in a society that is respected for doing good rather than harm in the world; that he belongs to a generation that will use their education, their financial resources, and whatever new philosophies they devise to move the nation and world to brighter days far removed from the madness of our time. My biggest challenge as a father is to do my part to help bring this world into existence.
_____________________________

* In my 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture, I define the hip-hop generation as young Blacks born between 1965 and 1984. I maintain that usage throughout this essay. The generation born after this age group, those born between 1985 and 2004, often erroneously get lumped in with the hip-hop generation. However these are two distinctive age groups—even if the younger age group identifies with hip-hop culture.