Philosophical: Anchored in Critical Hip-Hop Theory

The Cultural Soul Project is anchored in Critical Hip-Hop Theory. This means we understand hip-hop as a legitimate cultural art form that reflects the lived experiences, lived realities, and cultural sensibilities of those who have been shaped by life on the margins in inner-city urban America, and it can provide profound social commentary and social critique on the systems and structures that have a disproportionate and detrimental impact on the lives of People of Color.

The Cultural Soul Project has a deep concern with how marginalized populations formulate and negotiate identity, while simultaneously finding a sense of meaning, being, and purpose within various contexts of marginalization. As such, we submit that hip-hop, an indigenous, inner-city cultural art form created in postindustrial urban America, can provide hope, possibility and resistance against the social, structural, and psychological marginalization that one confronts in society.

The Cultural Soul Project contends that hip-hop, as a cultural art form, can provide vivid articulation about the social conditions and social realities of inner-city urban living, while providing respite from, and having fun within, the contemporary reality of inner-city urban life. At the Cultural Soul Project, we assert that a Critical Hip-Hop Theory has the capacity to be transformational within the context of inner-city urban America and creative with the resources at its disposal.