From: Hank Roth <odin@halcyon.halcyon.com>
Subject: I'view with Amiri Baraka
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 07:47:15 GMT

<<< 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)
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