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The Green Face of Hip Hop:
Activist, Scholar, and Green Party VP Pick Rosa Clemente
Shares Her Vision for America's Future

By Serena Simpson

There is a person of color making history this election season, and it’s not who you’re thinking. She is hip hop activist-scholar Rosa Clemente. Chosen to be the Green Party’s vice-presidential nominee (as the running mate of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney), Clemente has brought into existence the first ever all-women-of-color presidential ticket.

But don’t look to Clemente to label her achievement. “I don’t like to be put in boxes,” she matter-of-factly told The New Agenda. In fact, Clemente has propelled herself outside of any box proscribed for a 36-year-old Afro-Latina from the South Bronx.

She was one of the original organizers of the National Hip-Hop Convention. And she has made a name for herself as an independent journalist. Ten days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, she traveled to the Gulf Coast to report on the disaster. And she is a historian, too. (Her master’s thesis at Cornell University was on radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s).

In addition, Clemente is a long-time community activist and a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement — an international organization that works to defend the human rights of people of African descent.

In the very near future, the VP candidate predicts that the American majority will be working-class people of color — many of them members of the hip hop community. This is the group that future leaders must be prepared to respond to, she argues.

This is where the Green Party comes in. “We’re getting to the people that are not necessarily apathetic, that want [government] to move in a direction, but not necessarily in that [two-party] direction,” she told The New Agenda. And she points out a parallel between the experiences of hip hop activists and Green Party members, saying that 9/11 and the Patriot Act have solidified both communities’ distrust of
the government. One of her favorite quotes is Frederick Douglass’s “power concedes nothing without a demand,” so rather than rallying for concessions from the-powers-that-be, Clemente has claimed her own political power.

The New Agenda caught up with her in July for a discussion on hip hop, politics, and her vision for what America’s future could look like.

The New Agenda: What do you hope to accomplish by running for vice president?

Rosa Clemente: I hope my run in particular gets us at the table. Right now, we’re not even in the building. Nobody responds to the needs of our generation — they completely ignore us. No major candidate has even used the words “working class” when we know that the majority of people are.

You’ve been a community activist for so long, how do you transition into the role of a national politician?

First, I’m not a politician, and I’ll never call myself one. Second, I’ll never transition. I’m an activist and an organizer. Whether I hold a leadership role in a tenants association or a leadership role in the United States government, I’m an organizer, and I’m always going to come to the table with the same values and the same principles of bottom-up leadership and decentralized leadership. I’m not trying to transition. It’s organic, and it’s natural, and that’s how it should be. [Elected officials] should be young people from the South Bronx that grew up dirt-poor and got an opportunity to get a degree — and were transformed by elders who clearly showed that it’s not about making money, not always about running nonprofits or becoming lawyers. All of those are necessary as long as we’re still working for the people. But for the majority, it’s like you go to school, then you get a job and are in your own little world. I’ve never operated that way. I don’t think anyone that represents the Green Party is trying to be like [that]; it doesn’t work. I don’t want to maintain the American government as it is.

America is a republic, a government of representatives. Whom do you represent?

I feel that I represent what the majority of American people are looking for in elected
leadership: people with integrity who are not criminals. People who are working-class, who stay within the community that they say they represent, who are held accountable, and who do what they say they’re going to do.

Do Americans have global responsibilities to make positive changes?

We shouldn’t have bases anywhere. No other countries have bases in the U.S., but we have bases everywhere. And we have to see ourselves as global people, because really there are no borders anymore. I’m an internationalist; I don’t just see my world inside the United States of America. More young people have to get hip to that. China is about to run the entire economic system of the world. Most of Latin America is moving toward socialism — that’s where the world is moving. If America chooses to stay here, it’s going be completely left behind. Because people really don’t need America anymore, to finance anything, to get oil, they just don’t. I come from the line of thought of letting people determine how they’re going to run their own nations.

People of color, youth, and working-class people have a volatile history with the police. How do we reform and move past this?

We’re dealing with a police state; that requires a mass movement, and it won’t come from the state reforming itself. It’s going to come from the people demanding something from that institution. Policing in America...is always going to be the hardest [problem]. If we can crack that, then we win. But it won’t come from the Democrats or the Republicans. On a national level, there would have to be a federal
prosecutor that strictly deals with police misconduct. It cannot be left in the hands of local or state government; they’re too interrelated. The officials protect the police; the police protect the officials. On a very personal level, I don’t trust the police, and I’ve never seen anything good that they’ve done. I’ve seen what’s happened to my husband, my comrades, and a lot of my activist friends.

You advocate for media justice. How do we change the media?

We achieve that by building our own and protesting theirs, particularly through their advertising. Media justice is so central to our struggle; it’s something you have to fight for everyday. I don’t ever see the mainstream media reflecting our values. If they did, this country would be rebelling right now. They learned that in the ’60s with the Vietnam War. They would tell how many soldiers died, and everyday more and more people would join the antiwar movement. People were watching the civil rights movement and seeing dogs sicced on black people and saying, “No, I have to be a part of that revolution to stop that.” When it comes down to it, there’s just going to have to be a rebellion, and I don’t mean a revolution with guns. It could be a general strike. Unless whoever gets in office makes some type of immediate radical change to what’s going on, there will be some type of uprising in this country.

What’s changed about activism since the ’60s and ’70s? Did we not learn from those generations, or are we too afraid to act on their lessons?

With the signing of the Patriot Act, everybody in America is scared. The main thing that was perpetuated — from 2000 to 2008 — from the government was fear. That fear is real and legitimate. Mad Americans are scared; people are scared to even wear a button. That’s what the ’60s did; they began instilling fear. America said, “We will shoot you; we will assassinate you. You can be the brother of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, or Fred Hampton Jr. If we can’t kill you, we’ll put you into jail. If you’ve been underground for 40 years, then we’re going to kill you when you’re 75.” They want to keep instilling this fear in us. So people have got choices: We’re either going to step up like our elders did and I’m sure they want us to do, or we’re just going to sit down and let the fears overtake us.

Click here for an extended audio excerpt from our interview with Rosa Clemente [26:00].