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Rosa Clemente doesn’t take things at face value. My first
clue about that was when when the Green Party vice-presidential candidate nixed
my plan to record our conversation using Freeconferencecall.com. She said she didn’t like that kind of service because the providers store the audio files on their servers, where they can be datamined.
So, while I took notes as quickly as possible, we set off on
a stimulating chat about the Green Party and the campaign that she and her presidential running mate, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, have mounted for the 2008 election.
Clemente, 36, is a veteran progressive activist with strong
ties to the hip-hop community. That’s fitting: she was born in the South Bronx in 1972, in the same place and roughly at the same time as rap icons such as DJ Kool Herc and the Sugar Hill Gang were creating a world-changing cultural phenomenon. Clemente says she became an activist as an undergraduate student at SUNY Albany, where she interned at the New York State assembly and “got to see what was not happening.”
As a graduate student at Cornell University, she researched such movements as the Black Liberation Army and the Young Lords. She went on to become heavily involved in grass-roots movements against police brutality, the Rockefeller drug laws and the prison industrial complex, among other causes. She also became a widely-published free-lance journalist, writing for such outlets as Clamor Magazine, The Ave. magazine, The Black World Today, and The Final Call.
Clemente helped found the National Hip-Hop Political
Convention in 2003 and is widely known as a Hip-Hop activist. She said she got involved with the Green Party in 2004, and already supported Cynthia McKinney when she became the party’s VP pick. The
Green Party, she noted, is composed of autonomous political parties with candidates running in several countries around the world. While the Greens vary ideologically, the US party subscribes to a core set of principles that include a commitment to democracy, social justice, economic sustainability and ecological wisdom McKinney and Clemente are on the ballot in 32 states this year, and Green candidates are on
the ballot in 248 local races.
Clemente argues that the Green Party’s values are more
responsive to the needs of the hip-hop generation – voters born since 1969 – than either the Republican or Democratic parties. While both Barack Obama and John McCain pitch their campaigns to middle-class voters, Clemente said most members of the hip-hop generation are working class. For too many of those workers, Clemente said, “We have no job creation. We don’t have a liveable
wage. There are still people making $5.00 hour” at a time when the minimum wage is between $6.55 an $7.25 an hour, and some advocates say
it ought to be more like $10/hour.
Clemente also decries the “school-to-prison” pipeline in
many poor and working class communities, where dropout rates are 50-55%. The prison-industrial complex is the “overarching nemesis” of the hip-hop generation, creating a culture that profits from criminalizing young people instead of tapping their potential.
A McKinney-Clemente administration would reverse this trend
by shifting economic priorities to the creation green-collar jobs a la Van Jones’ book, The Green Collar Economy. Jones’ organization, Green for All, is actively working
to create new opportunities via sustainable development.
Green dismisses critics who say that she and McKinney are
taking votes away from Democrats, and especially that they dilute support for the first African American Democratic nominee. “I don’t care; [Mc Kinney] doesn’t care. We’re not Democrats. We’re supposed to take votes away from them.” According to Clemente, the Democrats have “completely capitulated to the Bush
government.”
While Barack Obama’s campaign is targeting young voters,
Clemente maintains that his policies don’t respond to their needs. According to Clemente, Obama “capitulated on the war. He’s just gonna draw down troops and transfer them to Afghanistan.” Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden is “a warmongerer.” Most of Obama’s young
supporters are middle class, leaving large numbers of African American and Latino students cold. In fact, she said, 49% of those voters aren’t registered.
I asked Clemente what she thought of Obama’s injunctions to
African American parents to do a better job. “I don’t even respond to.. that Bill Cosby Black/Latino thing,” she said. She opined that there is a group of “elite” black people who are “ashamed of us.” You can find poor and black and brown people taking care of their kids every day, she added, and you can find wealthy and white people who neglect their children. She argued that we are always asking working-class people to be more responsible, but we don’t
