Racial Profiling has affected the hip hop generation more than any other in history. Now hip hop itself is under attack. Starting in New York City, and spreading across the country, police and the government forces have targeted the hip hop industry for surveillance, criminalizing hip hop and hip hop culture.

The workshop will cover the formation and activities of the Rap Intelligence Unit of the New York police department and show the binder distributed among police departments across the country. The connection will be made between these moves against hip hop, and the COINTELPRO attacks on youth of the Black Power era.

Participants who attend will not only participate in a conversation about the history and present problem, but also dialog about ways to recognize, and prevent it in its new form. The workshop will be in English, and there will be "know your rights" and racial profiling and rapintelpro handouts.

The format of the workshop will be a panel led by King Downing (national coordinator of the Campaign Against Racial Profiling and a member of the Free Ya Hood Coalition) and others TBD. He was instrumental in exposing and confronting Rapintelpro when it was first exposed during the annual Memorial Day Hip Hop weekend, where he worked with Miami-based rappers to fight the problem.

King has done interactive presentations about this in communities and colleges across the country, and has appeared in three documentaries on hip hop profiling: Black and Blue, by QJ3 (which aired on BET), Freedom Files: Racial Profiling (which aired on Court TV), and Free Ya Hood, an independent film produced by CARP-ACLU and a coalition of grassroots organizations who deal with police brutality. Free Ya Hood was a selectee at the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, and we also applying to screen it at USSF.