Book Review - Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics

Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics
by Cathy J. Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Review by Theodore Miller

In the recently published Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010), University of Chicago scholar Cathy Cohen positions the 44th President of the United States as the "Lecturer-in-chief to Hiphop America."  She describes President Obama as a leader who came to office in an election where black youth voted at the highest percentage of 18-24 year-olds of any group since the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. In hiphop, the concept of a "remix" is as ubiquitous and constant as hiphop itself. The remix is understood as an alternative version of a pre-existing song or concept, an indicator of the continuing vitality and dynamism of the cultural form, but also proof that the song that predated the remix, the narrative and soundtrack that came before, is not yet fully complete, relevant and realized. The "remix," then, relies on the original version(s) but differentiates itself with distinct and current facts and aesthetics, unique to that precise moment in which the remix is articulated.

In this remix Cohen takes on the coinciding narrative of post-racial America as articulated by President Obama in 2004 (as Senator) and in 2008 (as presidential candidate) and that of black youth pathology (the deviant behavior of the hiphop generation). Cohen stands as mediator between black youth and those elites (and others) who simultaneously chant "Yes, We Can [achieve a post-racial order]" and "No, They [black youth] Didn't" "hold up their end of the bargain." Democracy Remixed forcefully asks the question: how do the moral panic and neo-liberal policies of the nation-state play out in the lives and psyche of black youth despite their fundamental importance to American democracy.

The text utilizes five principle sources of information to interrogate this "racial truth telling" about black youth not holding up their end of the bargain and its socio-political impact: (1) a nationally representative survey and follow-up interviews by young blacks, Latinos and whites aged 15-25 prior to the election of Barack Obama, (2) a multi-phase data source from 2008-2009 compiled by the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Study that measured the impact of the heightened political environment surrounding the presidential election on individuals' political attitudes and behaviors, (3) qualitative focus group data from a cross section of heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual young people living in Chicago in both 2004 and 2009, (4) popular political moments during the first decade of the 21st century that reflected this purported "racial truth telling" and (5) extensive scholarship in sociology, political science and philosophy.  

With measured critiques, meticulously supported assertions, fresh insights on popular controversies and most of all, fascinating and rich data from thousands of youth, Cohen remixes the reader's conception of black youth- their problems and aspirations- in the age of Barack Obama. The text offers insights on topics as wide-ranging and relevant as youth perceptions on their own sexual activity, personal responsibility, rights to an abortion, representations of gender and race in rap music, relative racial equality for other minorities and so on. Cohen's work grounds a conversation on the political, social and economic consequences of black youth marginalization through the voices and perceptions of black youth themselves. In this alone, it is an extraordinary effort.

Hiphop culture generally, stands in as a recurring scapegoat and punching bag for a newer wave of black leadership in a post-Civil Rights era that some (not Cohen) think of as "post-racial."   Cohen, however, complicates what politicians, public intellectuals and entertainers and mainstream readers think they know about black youth and American democracy. Black youth, she notes, understand their choices, their cultural influences and their life prospects in far more nuanced ways than the master narrative suggests. She suggests Black youth are actively engaged in resisting and remixing contemporary manifestations of American power and democracy repeatedly and daily, one beat at a time. They seemingly occupy the "gray areas," those spaces in between what one might call political and civic engagement. Cohen's research unearths a complex matrix of "digital Democrats," the activist-oriented and those engaged in the politics of invisibility, that generation of youth that some previously reduce to a nihilistic underclass. Power and agency reside everywhere in hiphop America, in complex corners where children and youth simultaneously articulate and remix the culturally conservative politics of respectability and articulate and remix their own revolutionary politics of (structural) resistance.  

Democracy Remixed utilizes hiphop, a cultural form embraced daily by nearly 60% of Cohen's black respondents, as a lens for understanding the pervasive "partial truths" about black youth. While this is a text that only utilizes popular hiphop artists five times (Kurtis Blow and Eric B. for the misguided "funeral" organized by the NAACP for the "N" word; Eminem in the context of racialized benefits in rap music; Kanya West in the context of race, government and Hurricane Katrina; and Mos Def and Salt-N-Pepa in the context of the criminal controversy, march and protest in Jena, Louisianna), Democracy Remixed ushers in a new wave of hiphop scholarship.

Critics will argue that this is further fuel to the fire of self-destructive black victimization narratives, unproductive scholarship in an age when black youth ought focus more on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps like their current president did. Cohen's measured approach, however, offers a rebuttal to those narratives grounded in "de-centering race" as she closely analyzes the meta-narrative (one deeply rooted in black middle class ethos of respectability) and meticulously displays the foiled voices of black youth. In the end, she produces compelling evidence that black youth understand both (1) a lived experience characterized by police over-surveillance, educational inadequacy, and limited to no economic opportunity and (2) their own agency and complicity in poor choices and negative influences.

Like any fresh contribution to scholarship, one is left with questions after reading Democracy Remixed.  Cohen might say more, for example, about the economic implications of the systematic pathologizing of black youth and their own agency-efforts, including with respect to her brief discussion of buycotting and alternative economic expressions of black youth power (and powerlessness). To Cohen's credit however, she offers up several policy questions and directions about where we all go from here. Methodologically, she adds volumes of statistical information and qualitative research in succinct and accessible ways, interspersing popularized and critical contemporary political struggles with rich mico-level data. Substantively, she privileges the differential experiences of black youth and contextualizes them in terms of class, gender, age, sexual orientation and even religious affiliation.  The result is a vigorous reply to those who might think American democracy subsequent to the Civil Rights Movement in an increasingly multi-racial nation can be either understood or realized without a detailed listening to the Remix and the Word, those often-times contradictory narratives, beats, styles and moves emerging from the black voices and bodies that America so loves to hate and avoid. Respect.