NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8415

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From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: I'view with Amiri Baraka
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{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)
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