KEY POINTS:
Fanon Che Wilkins learned about of the significance of his first names from a very early age. But while being named after revolutionaries Franz Fanon and Che Guevara creates expectations in people, he's never felt pressured by the legacy.
"I always saw it more metaphorically," says Wilkins on the phone from Japan where he is associate professor of African-American History and Culture at Doshisha University.
He says the message he got from his parents - both activists in the 1960s American civil rights/black power movement - was more along the lines of: "Here are two people we think were very important, we hope you are able to recognise and get some sustenance from what they did."
Wilkins, who will be delivering a public lecture at Auckland University on June 4 entitled "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People", says his parents always gave him permission to be himself.
"I was not a Che Guevara or Franz Fanon, I was Fanon Che, which was something different. That's the hip-hop side of me. Hip-hop is always about how one can have the courage to be oneself."
The title of his lecture comes from American rap artist and hip-hop producer Kanye West, who shocked America with the statement on September 2, 2005, during a Red Cross benefit concert on NBC for Hurricane Katrina relief.
Wilkins says at the time the statement resonated with him. "I knew there was going to be a lot of backlash, so I immediately wrote a piece called 'Thank you Kanye!'."
The essay became viral, rapidly spreading across internet sites, reiterating West's view that racist media images were depicting black people as "looters" and whites as "finders" of food and basic necessities. Wilkins says West captured what many were thinking - that the response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster was woefully slow.
"It was clear for many of us that we saw what was to come. And that was neglect, because this was not a new phenomenon."
Wilkins sees West's call to action as a pivotal moment that not only dispels ideas of youth apathy and political cynicism, but also shows how hip-hop is a force to be reckoned with. That may be a bridge too far for many, but in Wilkins' view hip-hop artists have reconstructed the history of the black freedom movement.
Get him started on the topic and Wilkins becomes a stream of hip-hop propaganda.
"Alongside some of the romantic notions of bling, excessive materialism and even misogyny - what some of us call the negative and downside dimensions of hip-hop - there has been this consistent and persistent way in which hip-hop has sought to valorise the oppressed."
Wilkins sees hip-hop as a lens for understanding the past - "a resource of intelligence and insight given its 30-45 year history".
As for the downside, Wilkins says there is a long tradition in black musical genius of engaging the sacred and profane simultaneously.
"Hip-hop is a kind of cultural space, a gathering space where the sacred and profane are engaged in many ways on equal terms."
The key, in the immortal words of Ali G, is keeping it real.
"Hip-hop tries to engage the world as people see it or experience it - to try to bring a social realism to the world, to try to break through the fakeness that exists in the world and to try to reveal things as they are."
Take graffiti for example. "Graff is not just about urban destruction and decay - the spaces in which it emerged were already destroyed. These were already places where people were essentially working to survive, the product of years of social neglect by the federal government."
In Wilkins' view, hip-hop's essence - that what's fuelled its emergence is a lack of resources and deprivation - is yet to be fully probed and understood. .
But if there's any doubt that hip-hop is a potent force, Wilkins says just look at what the "cultural juggernaut" has done to the halls of academia.
"The new scholarship comes from hip-hoppers themselves who are in the academy," says Wilkins, citing a host of books and university courses - Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, by Imani Perry; Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose and "turntablism" now being one of the most popular courses at Boston's Berklee College of Music.
Hip-hop is also at the centre of discussion about the way in which Barack Obama has mobilised young voters in his campaign for the American presidency.
Wilkins cites the efforts of Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, and others in encouraging young people to register to vote as further evidence that generation X is far from "preoccupied with its own self" and lacking concern for social activism.
Wilkins own path to radicalism is more complicated. His parents were members of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick"), one of the principal organisations of the 1960s American civil rights movement. His father was there at the time of the 1965 Watts rebellion in Los Angeles - "a politicising moment for him." And in 1970, when he was six months old, his mother went to Cuba for a month with the Venceremos Brigade to cut sugar cane and show solidarity with Cubans.
From age 3 to 6, Wilkins also went to a liberation school in Atlanta, Georgia where before each meal the chant (fist raised) was: "I will eat all my food, to grow big and strong, to work in the struggle for African people".
Wilkins says his own politicisation came when he took a year out of his studies in 1994 and spent time in Cuba and Africa, mainly in Zimbabwe. It was there, and at the 7th Pan African Congress in Kampala, Uganda, that he got in touch with African-Americans in Africa, including prominent SNCC leader and "honorary prime minister" of the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael.
From here Wilkins developed his ideas for his PhD research on the African diaspora and the overlooked global implications of the black power and civil rights movement. His argument was that African-Americans from 1955 through to the 1970s were identifying with anti-colonial struggles all over the world, especially in Africa - struggles similar to the protests against segregation laws in America's southern states.
Wilkins argues global solidarity, particularly with African liberation movements, had a profound effect on African-American activists.
It's a historical analysis that disrupts the master narrative of the civil rights movement. The received wisdom is that it began with the integration of schools in 1954, leading to demonstrations and boycotts.
With the support of the Kennedy brothers, Lyndon Johnson and the leadership of Martin Luther King, it culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then, after the assassination of King and the rise of Black Power, the movement came to an end.
The reassessment Wilkins is talking about disputes both the chronology and geography of the civil rights movement and argues that what happened in the US was not exceptional or distinct from global influences.
That the US Federal Government, for example, was strongly influenced by international opinion when dealing with the civil rights movement - especially when new African nations were sending diplomats to Washington DC in the early 60s only to find they were turned away from hotels because of segregation.
Wilkins says he is disappointed by how the ideals of the Zanu PF party in Zimbabwe have degenerated and agrees that events there indicate a serious need for a regime change. But not surprisingly, he is able to shift the focus back to hip-hop.
"What connects Zimbabwe to hip-hop to Katrina is the courageous stories of everyday people under tremendous odds still finding their way."
And the message he wants to get across in his lecture? "I want to demonstrate how hip-hop has been a humanising agent for people of colour, the oppressed and the marginalised and that there is a lot to be gleaned from its insights and its intelligence."
* Fanon Che Wilkins speaks at Auckland University's Business School in Grafton Rd at 6.30pm on June 4.
