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Shiloh and Shamir Maloney say the theme of the 2006 Allied Media Conference (AMC), “From Truth to Power,” resonated with them. They’re MCs and members of Elementz youth center in the West End. The AMC had a familiar beat and message. They could relate to it.
The AMC is an annual gathering in Bowling Green, Ohio for radicalized journalists, ‘zinesters, filmmakers and storytellers. It’s where you go if you make media that’s on the fringe.
For most of the event’s eight years, it’s attracted Punk Rock publishers and hippie activists — typically white youth — looking to change the world. It still does that, but something’s changed; Shamir and Shiloh are brothers, but they’re also brothers. The AMC did something that, for media, is as rare as diamonds on public streets: It integrated. This year there were more black faces from Cincinnati than white.
Elementz offers community and connection for disaffected youth, providing them with a space and classes in graffiti art, DJ-ing and Hip Hop dance. Shiloh, aka “Buddah,” is 18 and sits on the Elementz board. He says he and more than 10 other young people attended AMC to develop organizing skills and meet people working the same platform in other cities.
“It’s just, basically, trying to better yourself,” Buddah says.
To Buddah, Hip Hop is a vehicle for social change.
“I don’t think you can do arts organizing without the politics,” he says.
Connecting with Palestine
Race and its implications on America were the booming undertone at AMC.
Filmmaker Elena Herrada presented interviews with elderly Mexicans from Detroit who had been deported and later repatriated during the Great Depression. She described a Latino trail of tears — a 30-day exodus by Model A Ford that drained an estimated 15,000 Mexicans from the Motor City, leaving many dead along the way. Gathering the tales of this trek was difficult.
“Forgetting is to Mexicans what remembering is to Jews,” Herrada said.
Cinematographer Jackie Salloum spoke about her film, Sling Shot: Hip-Hop, a documentary about her trip to Gaza to meet its first Hip Hop MCs. Her film chronicles the lives of the Palestinian performers as they go to their first show — they look extremely American in numbered sports jerseys and shorts — and the context in which they live, in a country divided by a separation wall.
This invisible history was part of what Buddah says he learned at the AMC.
“I didn’t know these youth in Palestine had found Rap and took that as a way to express themselves,” he says. “It’s crazy how their struggle is similar to the black man’s struggle here in America. That sort of made me look at the war on terror in a whole different light.”
Buddah’s anger buttresses his resolve to campaign for Elementz’ mission: trying to get more kids into the center, to raise more money and to work the organization’s door-to-door campaign to rally support for more city job programs for local youth, he says.
Shamir, 15, listens attentively to a session by Mark Gonzalez, a Los Angeles high school teacher and poet. Gonzalez asks people from different regions of the country to share lists of problems that plague their communities. Unequal education, filthy water, poverty, STDs, youth and adult miscommunication, lack of diversity, racist incarceration, homophobia and the war — the list is a long, bitter scroll but gives activists points of unity, Gonzalez says.
“To me this is something we haven’t talked about: What are we fighting against?” he asks.
The discussion rolls into white privilege and class privilege and how the oppression injures the oppressor as much as the downtrodden.
“Stand up and speak out,” Gonzalez says. “Maybe that’s our point of unity on all these issues, standing up for all these issues.”
But solidarity isn’t enough.
“When you’re locked up and I’m in my home, I’m in solidarity with you,” he says. “But when we’re in alliance, you’re locked up and I’m locked up and we both need to be free.”
Cincinnati as a ‘Third World country’
Shamir says it’s encouraging to see Hip Hop used as a learning tool at the conference.
“It just shows you how everybody across the world can participate in Hip Hop, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing,” he says. “It can be a positive thing.”
Obalaye Macharia, a Cincinnati poet and agent provocateur of the Hip Hop poetry collective The Village of 144K, says media is so important that he couldn’t miss AMC. Macharia says he was excited to learn about “the whole youth media movement that’s happening. … I like what other activists are doing to create political consciousness. The stuff we’re doing is going to move a little slower because we’re in a Third World country. Cincinnati is a Third World country.”
At the AMC keynote, organized by Cincinnati native Dani McClain, media activist Deepa Fernandes sums up the conference’s goals.
“Who controls our news — how powerful that is in the very fight for our lives,” Fernandes says. “We need to build a social movement with that at the center. … How do we go beyond just speaking to ourselves? How do we get out there?”
In this transactional, multi-cultural movement that’s building, Hip Hop is the language of the movement, the currency of the oppressed and the opportunity for transcendence. ©
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.
