For black youth, can hip hop can be this generation's salvation? Young blacks born between 1965 and 1984 belong to the first generation to have grown up in post-segregation America. Bakari Kitwana, one of black America's cultural critics, offers a sobering look at his generation's disproportionate incarceration and unemployment rates, as well as the collapse of its gender relations, and gives his own provocative social and political analysis. He finds the pain of his generation buried in tough, slick gangsta movies, and their voice in the lyrics of rap music, the black person's CNN.
