Dillard to host ‘Does hip hop hate women?’ conversation

Dillard University will host “Does Hip Hop Hate Women? A Conversation About Sex, Love and Gender Politics in Today’s Pop Culture” on Wednesday, Sept­ember 19, at 7 p.m. in the Georges Auditorium of the Professional Schools Building. This townhall-style meeting conducted by leading hip-hop intellectuals is free and open to the public.

Panelists will include: Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture; Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist; Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African and African American studies at Duke University; Treva Lindsey, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Missouri; Marc Lamont Hill, host of the show “Our World with Black Enter­prise”; and Akiba Solo­mon, a journalist with the news website Color Lines. Kevin Griffin of the New Orleans collective 2-Cent Entertainment will preside.

“It’s important that we consistently engage in dialogue about the ways women and men are portrayed in our society,” said event organizer Michael Wilson, an instructor of African world studies at Dillard University. “And by using hip hop as the vehicle to drive this discussion, students will be able to directly and critically think about visual literacy, identity, Black masculinity, homophobia, perceptions of wo­men, and how they overlap in media and public policy debates.”

The event is part of a series called “Rap Sessions: Community Dia­logues on Hip Hop” that has been held at Brown University, Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago and other schools. The panel aims to examine the tensions and animosities between young men and women that some hip-hop music exacerbates, and to present youth with viable strategies they can implement in their personal lives and organizations.

The Department of African World Studies and the Office of the President at Dillard Univ­ersity are sponsoring the event, along with Rap Sessions and 2-Cent Ente-rtainment. A reception with re­freshments will follow the discussion.

This article was originally published in the September 17, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper