In 2015 the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper declared that, with her eclectic mix of social justice and hip-hop, “Aisha Fukushima Takes Over the Planet”. Ms. Fukushima’s raptivism movement is not about taking over the planet, it’s about rapping a new one into existence and it’s going worldwide. Back when the 2015 interview of her was reported she had worked in 12 countries, today she has worked in 20 countries spanning 4 continents.
We talked to her about becoming a cultural activist, creating communities across borders, and art as a means for creating the space for change.
The following is an edited version of that conversation.
My parents were both booking agents at the time bringing artists the likes of James Brown, Funkadelic, George Clinton, Booths Collins, Aaliyah and many others to Japan. ... I think even that upbringing of going across from U.S. to Japan and zig-zagging around the world, so to speak, allowed me to start to question the boundaries and borders that we often see that are set up between people, between nations, and between different ideologies. Some of those early experiences really fed into what is now my cultural expression as a vocalist, as an activist, and founder of the global hip hop project, RAPtivism.
To go more specifically into the activism element of my cultural work, a lot of that stems from my upbringing. Thinking, not only of the histories of resistance that precede me and my family’s history and our collective history, but also thinking about secondary school and going to a school where I was one of few working-class students of color. Many of the students came from more affluent backgrounds where they might receive a Mercedes Benz for their 16th birthday or 100 dollars for every single ‘A’ that they earned. In that environment, I saw many different kinds of prejudices and many different kinds of -isms that would pop up everywhere from the classroom to the hallways to the cultural cool among most “popular” students.
Which would result in things like my even math teacher grading my tests differently as one of the few students of color in her class and pointing me out as a “bad student” when I asked a question in class. Or it could even pan out in something like the spirit week in my high school, where as a student government representative I was working alongside my peers to decide some themes for this annual tradition that we had and they decided to do a “thug day”. When I asked them what that meant they told me that it was a day to dress up like “black people” and black “ghetto” people…
It spurred me to want to do something in my community to help change that culture, which I saw getting stronger and stronger with each year of middle school and high school progressing. ... As a senior in high school, I started community organizing by bringing together a group of community activist artists ... all different sorts of art forms and media and having conversations about sexuality, religion, class, gender, feminism, and racism in our local community. This was really geared towards the young people in my community [but] to my surprise a lot of different people started showing up. including my teachers, to start having conversations about the injustices in our community and how we could change.
I found as a young person the arts was a perfect venue to start having those conversations because it allowed people to be connected, it allowed them to become a little more vulnerable, and it opened up a new space for folks to interact and reimagine the change they wanted to see. Also, it allowed us to share stories which I think is really key in allowing folks to see and recognize one another which I think is a building block when it comes to making change. To have some sort of element of recognition between and among folks, even a recognition of one another’s struggles and one another’s triumphs and ways we can win together can allow us to start to build a more equitable platform for the movements that we are making.