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Ron Hayduk: How did you get to be called “The Honorable Rithm”?

George Martinez: It’s not like I didn’t have honor before I got elected, but the title Honorable was conferred on me in September 2002 when I got elected as the District Leader and the State Committeeman of the 51st Assembly District in Brooklyn. In that capacity I served as a member of the Democratic Executive Committee for Kings County [Brooklyn]. I am the first Hip Hop MC to get elected to political office in NewYork.

Life is your right, so we can't give up the fight.
—Bob Marley

Ron Hayduk: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about G.A.ME, Grassroots Artists MovEment and how it came into being, your relationship to it.  What’s it about?

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Yusuf Nuruddin: I spent some time yesterday reading your book The New H.N.I.C.*: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop, and I have a couple of questions about it.  First of all, could you give me the kernel or nutshell of your thesis?

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough…I desire to speak somewhere without bounds.”
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (245)

See, some do hiphop and forget how it started They claim their white complexion Ain’t the reason why their record charted Please! Man, it’s so easy to see When a white dude raps The public calls it novelty Even me, although I take it seriously

Some dislike me because of my r-a-c-e

Some say I'm too deep, I'm in too deep to sleep Through me, Muhammad will forever speak Greet brothers with handshakes in ghetto landscapes Where a man is determined by how much a man makes... "The 6th Sense"
-- Common

These groups [the black poor of the Mississippi Delta] learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it…Slavery, sharecropping, mechanization, and prison, wage, and migratory labor are just a few permutations possible within a plantation complex. None of these forms changes the basic features of resource monopoly and extreme ethnic and class polarization.
-- Clyde Woods¹