From pnews@igc.apc.org Ukn Jan 24 01:30:24 1993 Received: from totalrecall.rs.itd.umich.edu by css.itd.umich.edu (5.67/2.2) id AA28571; Sun, 24 Jan 93 01:30:23 -0500 Received: from log.css.itd.umich.edu by umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA07038; Sun, 24 Jan 93 01:30:22 -0500 Received: from redspread.css.itd.umich.edu by css.itd.umich.edu (5.67/2.2) id AA28566; Sun, 24 Jan 93 01:30:01 -0500 Received: from cdp.igc.org by redspread.css.itd.umich.edu (AA00286); Fri, 22 Jan 93 18:31:32 -0800 Received: by igc.apc.org (4.1/Revision: 1.56 ) id AA23716; Sat, 23 Jan 93 22:32:27 PST Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 22:32:27 PST From: Hank Roth Message-Id: <9301240632.AA23716@igc.apc.org> To: radical@redspread.css.itd.umich.edu Subject: Baraka Status: RO X-Status: /* Written 3:44 pm Oct 30, 1992 by pnews@igc.apc.org in igc:p.news */ /* ---------- "Baraka" ---------- */ From: Hank Roth Subject: Baraka <<< via P_news >>> {Excerpts from an interview by David Barsamian in the October (92) issue of Z Magazine} AMIRI BARAKA: STRAIGHT NO CHASER (Amiri Baraka is a well-known African-American poet, playwright, essayist and teacher. His most recent book is the AMIRI BARAKA READER, published by Thunder's Month Press. This interview took place on July 21, 1992 in Boulder, Colorado.} WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE SISTER SOULJAH CONTROVERSY? I've known Sister Souljah for quite a while, five or six years. She and my son Razz were and are very close friends. In the 1988 Democratic Convention, which I covered for Essence, supposedly; they never printed it, I went down with Sister Souljah, Razz and my other children to Atlanta and stayed in a hotel room for a week. Part of them seeing the 1988 convention was part of the ideological perception of what is happening in American politics. So I am familiar with her ideas. Two weeks ago she and my son Razz had a program at Abyssinia Baptist Church in New York. They packed the place, 2,500 people with another 1,000 people on the widewalk that Reverend Butts had to go out and talk to. So first of all, for the great majority of African peoplek, there is no question about who is more legitimate: Bill Clinton or Sister Souljah. That's not even a question. So we were standing on the corner and talking, Sister Souljah, Razz, my wife, and some other people, and people recognize her. A brother came up and said, "Sister, I want to tell you this: No matter whqt happens, I got your back." He repeated it. I think what Clinton was trying to do was to distance himself from black people in a very general way, or at least what he perceives as the militant fringe, and specifically he wanted to diss Jesse Jackson, Jesse, of course, is allowing himself to be dissed because he's got his head stuck up in that donkey, and the least evil thing that can happen to you with your head up in a donkey is to get dissed. You understand what I'm saying? But as far as Clinton and Soujah, most black people see that for what it is: Clinton trying to run some line on black folk when he doesn't know anything about Sister Souljah or her work. He's even quoting her out of context. He's trying to make it seem as if she's saying, "Go kill white people," when actually she's saying pretty much the same thing that Malcolm said: "These gang members think if they kill black people every day, what's so terrible about taking a week off just to kill white people to balance it?" That's a metaphor. For him to go and take that somewhere else is to serve his own interests. I think, finally, it's Jesse that allowed it to happen, because of his need to be in that context. If Jesse was doing what he needs to be doing, which is being at the head of an independent of new party, a party that would be that thing that he said the Rainbow would be, but then he coopted out to be a private Jesse Jackjson-serving mechanism, he wouldn't even have to talk to Bill Clinton. He wouldn't have to be dissed by Bill Clinton. He would be taking care of the business he needs to be taking care of: leading all of those people who are clear enough to know that the Democrats and Republicans don't serve their interests, who have to do with black, brown, Asian, white, Latino, whoever, knows that. That's what he should have been leading. He's forfeiting that. THERE'S ALWAYS THAT TRADEOFF OF TRYING TO WORK INSIDE OF THE SYSTEM RATHER THAN CREATING SOMETHING FROM THE OUTSIDE. YOU'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT TH ENEED TO DEVELOP A GENUINE ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL PARTY. That's the only possibility. W.B. Du Bois said in 1934, which shows how our education is so lacking that it took me until 1980- something to find it out, that after this, any black person who votes for the Democratic or Republican Parties ought to be called a jackass. That was in 1934. And it's not just black people, but the majority of the people in this land. Have they served your interests? Look at the quality of your life. Have they served your interests? Whether you vote for them or don't vote for them. Have they served your intersts? If they don't what should you do? If you don't want anything to serve your interests, then there's nothing I can say that will interest you. But if you think that you want to live better---and I'm not talking about the abstractions of philosophy, although U can deal with those. I'm trying to talk like Amilcar Cabral, the great Guinean revolutionary, who said, "The people are not fighting for ideas. They're fighting to better their lives." If you want to better your life, the Democrats and Republicans have not done that. It's time to get another kind of thing. That's what I'm saying. >From the old Greek mythology, Sisyphus was doomed to roll his rock up the hill forever. Every time he got it up to the top of the mountain, the gods would roll it back down. I'm just saying that we go through distinct periods of very sharp social insurgency. Actually it never stops. But three distinct periods: the 19th century anti-slavery movement, which ended with the Civil War, betrayed then by the destruction and the reconstruction, the creation of the Klan, the dismissal of all the civil rights bills passed in the 1860s, by the 1880s they were dead, dead, dead. The 1876 Compromise which removed the troops from the South, disarmed the black militia, gave the South back to the slavercrats. By 1895 they brought in Clarence Thomas. He was called Booker T. Washington then, to say, "This is the way it needs to be. The wisest of my race understgand the folly it is to agitate for equality." Which is again Tom Ass Clarence. At the beginning of the 20th century you've got Du Bois and Panafricanism, the whole Niagara movement, the NAACP, the Urban League, Marcus Garvey, the Unita, the AFrican Blood Brotherhood, the Russian Revolution, the Harlem Renaissance...al of these things pushed the rock up the hill again. By the 1930s the bottom drops out of the economic system, the Klan reappears, the whole thing goes backwards until we win the war. Any time there's a boom, the economy goes up. Any time there's a bush, it's peace time. Again, during the SEcond World War, the rock goes back up the hill. You had the threatened March on Washington so you had the Fair Employment Practices Commission. It's all right for black people now to work on these factories, on military projects. Much advancement because of that, The Second World War, which is why post-Second World War you have all these "message pictures," Twentieth Century Fox, GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT, PINKIE, and LOST BOUNDARIES. All these things taking up the questions of racism and anti-Semitism. Then you get McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Korean War, the whole Cold War in terms of struggling with the Russians about the world market, the Rosenbergs get murdered, Du Bois gets fired from the NAACP and finally exiled. Paul Robeson gets his passport taken away. But in the face of that you have the Civil Rights movement coming up in the mid-1950s, dialectically. A brother told me, and I think it might be something to think about, that it was a distinct tradeoff that the establishment made in allowing some kind of development in the black liberation movement and the civil rights movement to the degree tha they divested themselfs of their left. To the extent that they could trash the Robesons. At first they trashed Langston Hughes, although he made a comeback and denounced everybody. But he tried to straighten himself out at the end. But they could trash the Du Boises. For 14 or 15 years the NEW YORK TIMES would not print his name, indicted as an agent of a foreign power for pursuing the question of peace. Twenty-seven witnesses by the government against Du Bois as an agent of a foreign power. His attorney, Vito Marcantonio, calls one witness: Albert Einstein. The judge says, "Oh, no, I'm not going for that." Du Bois died the night before the MArch on Washington, in exile in Ghana, after declaring at age ninetyfive that he's a member of the Communist Party. Incredible. Then things back up: the civil rights movement, the black liberation movement, King, the Montgomery bus boycotts, SNCC, SCLC, the whol student movement. Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Party, pushes it back up the hill in the 1950 and the 1960s, until...they kill Malcolm X, they kill Martin Luther King, they kill Fred Hampton and Bobby Hutton, Medgar Evers. That's what Sisyphus means. Every time you drive it up, it comes back down. (You can read the entire article by subscribing to Z Magaine. One year is $25. Send remittance to Z, 116 St. Boltolph St., Boston, MA. 02115) -------------------------------------------------------------- P_news on Fidonets and p.news on PeaceNET are conduits for news and views, including articles like these from the *Left* wing press, organizations and other sources.