A Sampling of Some Important New Books Being Published in 2016 (thus far)...

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome
by Alondra Nelson
Beacon Press; 216 pages

ALONDRA NELSON

 

We know DNA is a master key that unlocks medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life is both revelatory and endlessly fascinating. Tracing genealogy is now the second-most popular hobby amongst Americans, as well as the second-most visited online category. This billion-dollar industry has spawned popular television shows, websites, and Internet communities, and a booming heritage tourism circuit.

The tsunami of interest in genetic ancestry tracing from the African American community has been especially overwhelming. In The Social Life of DNA, Alondra Nelson takes us on an unprecedented journey into how the double helix has wound its way into the heart of the most urgent contemporary social issues around race.

For over a decade, Nelson has studied this phenomenon. Weaving together keenly observed interactions with root-seekers alongside historical details and revealing personal narrative, she shows that genetic genealogy is a new tool for addressing old and enduring issues. In The Social Life of DNA, she explains how these cutting-edge DNA-based techniques are being used in myriad ways, including grappling with the unfinished business of slavery: to foster reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink and sometimes alter citizenship, and to make legal claims for slavery reparations specifically based on ancestry.

Nelson incisively shows that DNA is a portal to the past that yields insight for the present and future, shining a light on social traumas and historical injustices that still resonate today. Science can be a crucial ally to activism to spur social change and transform twenty-first-century racial politics. But Nelson warns her readers to be discerning: for, the social repair we seek can't be found in even the most sophisticated science. Engrossing and highly original, The Social Life of DNA is a must-read for anyone interested in race, science, history and how our reckoning with the past may help us to chart a more just course for tomorrow.

Editorial Reviews

"Alondra Nelson takes us into a complex and endlessly fascinating space where genetic ancestry testing meets racial politics. With her unique and wonderful gifts for research and insight into genetic science, ethnography and history, The Social Life of DNA comes at a moment when the questions it raises about race and social justice couldn't be more pressing and urgent."
--Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

"Nelson explores this large, sprawling, fascinating subject with clarity, passion, rigor, and a keen eye for revealing detail....It is a brilliant work."
--Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School and author of The Persistence of the Color Line

"Using fresh genetics and writing like an investigative reporter, Nelson clears up the mystery about our society's rush to DNA."
--Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and The Genetic Strand 

"One of this generation's most gifted scholars examines the unfolding mysteries of DNA sequencing and the limits and promises of genetic genealogy at the intersection of race, politics and identity. Alondra Nelson brilliantly guides us on a journey of discovery in this cautionary tale of the high-stakes efforts to reconcile our racial origins and to find redemption as a country. Eye-opening, provocative and deeply humane."
--Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

"The double helix now lies at the center of some of the most significant issues of our time,' Alondra Nelson writes in this valuable and illuminating book. Since 2003, she has been following the ways that DNA intertwines with race, and The Social Life of DNA is her clear-eyed, sharp, and closely observed account of the phenomenon. It couldn’t be more timely."
--Jonathan Weiner, Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism at Columbia Journalism School

"Alondra Nelson’s account of how genetic data was transformed into contested political culture is a lucid as it is path-breaking. This exhilarating survey of how DNA became an agent in the politics of reparation and reconciliation has not only extended analysis of race and racism but created a new field of comparative research."
--Paul Gilroy, FBA, King's College, London, author of The Black Atlantic 

"The Social Life of DNA is a brilliant ethnography of the recreational uses of DNA. Besieged as our culture has become by beguiling promises of romantic heraldry and forensic infallibility, Nelson takes an unflinching yet sympathetic look at how popular yearning for ‘lost roots’ has led to DNA as metaphor: ‘reading’ our genes has become an inferential, often scientifically unsubstantiated link between past, present and future. It has emerged as the symbolic grounding for magical cures, heritage tourism, escapist fantasy, as well as legal actions for ethnic and racial reconciliation, reparations and repatriation. Timely and original, this book offers a nuanced and engrossing negotiation between genetic truth and ‘truthiness.’”
--Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and columnist for The Nation

"meticulously detailed study... adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans, but it is one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands."
-- Kirkus Reviews 

About the Author

Alondra Nelson is Dean of Social Science and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, and her reviews, writing, and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Science, Boston Globe, and the Guardian. She lives in New York City.

The System of Dante's Hell
by Amiri Baraka
AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series
Release date: February 16, 2016)

 

With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.

This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet's skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul--lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.

"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age...the special agony of the American Negro."
--New York Times Book Review

"A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno....Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest."
--Kirkus Reviews

Tales
by Amiri Baraka
AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series
Release date: February 16, 2016)

Praise for Amiri Baraka:

"Baraka's stories evoke a mood of revolutionary disorder, conjuring an alternative universe in which a dangerous African-American underground, or a dangerous literary underground still exists...Baraka is at his best as a lyrical prophet of despair who transfigures his contentious racial and political views into a transcendent, 'outtelligent' clarity."
--New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) on Tales of the Out & the Gone

The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka's seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal, it might be said, with the black man in black America. Yet these tales are not social tracts, but absolutely masterful fiction--provocative, witty, and, at times, bitter and aggressive.

"We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important collection of Amiri Baraka's short stories. Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement's expression of the 'Black Aesthetic,' which took hold of the African American cultural imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka's great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka's oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation...Worth reading to see the way [Baraka] feverishly tinkered with ways to explore a multiplicity of black experiences. An intense and button-pushing collection." --Kirkus Reviews

 
These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present
by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue
W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition-- (October 19, 2015)

Editorial Reviews:

[A] timely, remarkable new survey of America since 1890 . . . required reading.” (Eric Herschthal - Slate)

“A tour de force: brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, and consistently insightful.” (Peniel Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life)

“This marvelous book weaves together a sweeping yet strikingly intimate narrative of the nation’s century-long struggle to make real its founding promise. It is learned, passionate history, expertly told.” (Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice)

“An invigorating, inspiring, much-needed exploration of the ‘American Century.’” (Beverly Gage, author of The Day Wall Street Exploded)

“Ambitious, wise, and briskly told…essential reading for anyone who cares about the course and fate of the nation.” (Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers)

“A pleasure to read, These United States offers a consistent interpretation of our history, explaining our strengths and the origins of our problems.” (Linda Gordon, coauthor of Feminism Unfinished)

“Written by two of our most innovative historians, this beautifully realized volume stimulates thought, informs with great clarity, and advances the craft of historical synthesis.” (Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself)

“This vigorous narrative shows how the debates and decisions of the twentieth century shape those we face in the twenty-first… Combines a novelistic grasp of individual stories with the broad sweep of change across time.” (Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, coauthor of Like a Family)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include twentieth-century U.S. history; African American history since 1865; U.S. women's and gender history since 1865; history of the American South; and reform movements. Her publications include Norton’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, which was one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books and the Washington Post’s Best Books of 2008, and she edited Who Were the Progressives? and co-edited Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights. Her first book, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Heyman Prize.

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of History and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights, and race. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Society of American Historians, and past president of both the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association. He is author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. His first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, won the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, and the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association, among other honors. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected The Origins of the Urban Crisis as one of its 100 most influential books of the past hundred years.

The Covenant with Black America - Ten Years Later
by Tavis Smiley
Smiley Books, 2016

 

In 2006, Tavis Smiley teamed up with other leaders in the Black community to create a national plan of action to address the ten most crucial issues facing African Americans. The Covenant with Black America, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller, ran the gamut from health care to criminal justice, affordable housing to education, voting rights to racial divides. But a decade laterBlack men still fall to police bullets and brutality, Black women still die from preventable diseases, Black children still struggle to get a high quality education, the digital divide and environmental inequality still persist, and American cities from Ferguson to Baltimore burn with frustration. In short, the last decade has seen the evaporation of Black wealth, with Black fellow citizens having lost ground in nearly every leading economic category.

So Smiley calls for a renewal of The Covenant, presenting in this new edition the original action plan—with a new foreword and conclusion—alongside fresh data from the Indiana University School of Public & Environmental Affairs (SPEA) to underscore missed opportunities and the work that remains to be done. While life for far too many African Americans remains a struggle, the great freedom fighter Frederick Douglass was right: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

With Smiley leading the charge, the time has come to finally convert the trials and tribulations of Black America into the progress that all of America yearns for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tavis Smiley is currently the host of the late-night television talk show Tavis Smiley on PBS, as well as The Tavis Smiley Show from Public Radio International (PRI). He is also the founder of the nonprofit Tavis Smiley Foundation, which has undertaken a $3-million, four-year campaign called “ENDING POVERTY: America’s Silent Spaces” in order to alleviate endemic poverty in America. TIME magazine named Smiley to its list of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People.”

Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American
by John Stauffer
Liveright, 2015 (1st edition)
320 pages and 160 photographs

A landmark and collectible volume―beautifully produced in duotone―that canonizes Frederick Douglass through historic photography.

Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer whose fiery speeches transformed him into one of the most renowned and popular agitators of his age. Now, as a result of the groundbreaking research of John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Douglass emerges as a leading pioneer in photography, both as a stately subject and as a prescient theorist who believed in the explosive social power of what was then just a nascent art form.

Indeed, Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of Civil War, he wrote more extensively on the subject than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were "riveted" by the war and wanted a speech only on "this mighty struggle." He frequented photographers’ studios regularly and sat for his portrait whenever he could. To Douglass, photography was the great "democratic art" that would finally assert black humanity in place of the slave "thing" and at the same time counter the blackface minstrelsy caricatures that had come to define the public perception of what it meant to be black. As a result, his legacy is inseparable from his portrait gallery, which contains 160 separate photographs.

At last, all of these photographs have been collected into a single volume, giving us an incomparable visual biography of a man whose prophetic vision and creative genius knew no bounds. Chronologically arranged and generously captioned, from the first picture taken in around 1841 to the last in 1895, each of the images―many published here for the first time―emphasizes Douglass's evolution as a man, artist, and leader. Also included are other representations of Douglass during his lifetime and after―such as paintings, statues, and satirical cartoons―as well as Douglass’s own writings on visual aesthetics, which have never before been transcribed from his own handwritten drafts.

The comprehensive introduction by the authors, along with headnotes for each section, an essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an afterword by Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.―a direct Douglass descendent―provide the definitive examination of Douglass's intellectual, philosophical, and political relationships to aesthetics. Taken together, this landmark work canonizes Frederick Douglass through a form he appreciated the most: photography.

Featuring:

Contributions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. (a direct Douglass descendent)

160 separate photographs of Douglass―many of which have never been publicly seen and were long lost to history

A collection of contemporaneous artwork that shows how powerful Douglass’s photographic legacy remains today, over a century after his death

All Douglass’s previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics

317 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

“This illustrious book collects all 160 photographs of renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass and astutely places Douglass’s personal interest in photography into the context of his career and legacy…. This study provides a multifaceted, unique look at one of the most influential figures of American history.” (Publishers Weekly)

“This stunning volume presents 160 photographs, some for the first time, and they not only follow Douglass throughout his life but also place him within the times he lived…. Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier point out that Douglass saw the truth-telling aspects of photography and how it could be used as a tool in the fight against slavery, as photos both humanized African Americans and revealed the horrors of their enslavement. This tour de force is a must-have that will enhance history and reference collections.” (Patricia Ann Owens - Library Journal, Starred review)

“With 160 photographs, many never before seen, this book provides a strong visual history of Douglass and his era. Douglass believed that photography had extraordinary social power, and the inclusion of previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics show him to be an important theorist of the new art form.” (Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal)

“An impressive collection…give[s] a wonderful picture of the man, his intellect, and his devotion to his main cause, abolition…. The authors have pieced together an illuminating life portrait without extraneous biographical material, focusing intensely on their subject's belief in the strength of photographs.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“Douglass emerges here out of photographic technology's earliest years, with majestic beauty, and through the power of his own self-creations. The book is the result of intrepid research and brilliant analysis; it charts Douglass's life visually, allowing him to look back at us wryly, wistfully, wrathfully.” (David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life)

“Picturing Frederick Douglass marries all of my present interests: legacies of slavery; beautiful images of a beautiful man; and the first theory of photography as a democratic medium capable of social change. Stunningly original and elegantly written and designed, it will inspire anyone interested in the links between the visual and the verbal.” (Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs)

“In Picturing Frederick Douglass, Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier offer exhilarating scholarship and our idea of Douglass and our sense of photography in nineteenth-century America are deepened. This is brilliant and very moving work.” (Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton, Out There and Black Balled: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy)

“Picturing Frederick Douglass marks a significant turn in the long history of Douglass’s reception. Both as a subject for photography and as a critical theorist who reflected on the democratic, humane, and truth-telling powers of the medium, Douglass emerges in this beautiful volume in a completely new light.” (W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race)

“Striking…. The most exciting images in the book are those that show us how these 19th-century portraits became, over the decades that follow, a part of the symbolic surround of the modern American landscape…. The words in this highly visual book are perhaps even more powerful than the images…. Pictures conveyed a precision akin to religious truth, an affective prerequisite for social movements.” (Matthew Pratt Guterl - The New Republic)

“Nothing less than a masterpiece in the fields of biography, African-American history, and not least of all the neglected area of iconography…A riveting instant classic and a pure pleasure to behold.” (Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize and author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion)

“Picturing Frederick Douglass is to be shared, studied, read and repeated every six months, not only in the classroom but in our living rooms…Beautifully researched and storied…A true treasure!” (Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black and the acclaimed documentary, Through a Lens Darkly)

About the Authors:

 
John Stauffer is professor of English, American studies, and African American studies at Harvard University.

Zoe Trodd is professor and chair of American literature in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is professor of African American studies in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.

 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.

Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. is descended from two of the most important names in American history: he is the great-great-great grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great grandson of Booker T. Washington. He is also the Founder and President of the public charity, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, which uses education in schools across the U.S. to address and prevent contemporary forms of slavery or human trafficking in communities.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
by Angela Davis
Haymarket Books, 2016

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul
by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
Crown Books, 2016

A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society

America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race problem.

Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America--and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR. is a professor at Princeton University, teaching in the religion department and the Department of African American Studies.

Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith
Basic Books, 2016

In 1962, boxing writers and fans considered Cassius Clay an obnoxious self-promoter, and few believed that he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. But Malcolm X, the most famous minister in the Nation of Islam—a sect many white Americans deemed a hate cult—saw the potential in Clay, not just for boxing greatness, but as a means of spreading the Nation’s message. The two became fast friends, keeping their interactions secret from the press for fear of jeopardizing Clay’s career. Clay began living a double life—a patriotic “good Negro” in public, and a radical reformer behind the scenes. Soon, however, their friendship would sour, with disastrous and far-reaching consequences.

Based on previously untapped sources, from Malcolm’s personal papers to FBI records, Blood Brothers is the first book to offer an in-depth portrait of this complex bond. Acclaimed historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith reconstruct the worlds that shaped Malcolm and Clay, from the boxing arenas and mosques, to postwar New York and civil rights–era Miami. In an impressively detailed account, they reveal how Malcolm molded Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, helping him become an international symbol of black pride and black independence. Yet when Malcolm was barred from the Nation for criticizing the philandering of its leader, Elijah Muhammad, Ali turned his back on Malcolm—a choice that tragically contributed to the latter’s assassination in February 1965.

Malcolm’s death marked the end of a critical phase of the civil rights movement, but the legacy of his friendship with Ali has endured. We inhabit a new era where the roles of entertainer and activist, of sports and politics, are more entwined than ever before. Blood Brothers is the story of how Ali redefined what it means to be a black athlete in America—after Malcolm first enlightened him. An extraordinary narrative of love and deep affection, as well as deceit, betrayal, and violence, this story is a window into the public and private lives of two of our greatest national icons, and the tumultuous period in American history that they helped to shape.

THE MUSICAL LEGACY OF AMIRI BARAKA: The Modern Jazz Critic As Cultural Historian, Creative Artist, Social Theorist, And Philosophical Visionary

BY KOFI NATAMBU
© 2014

This essay is dedicated to the memory and eternal presence of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014) who was not only a  great artist, mentor, friend, colleague, and comrade but  also-like he was for so many others around the world-a towering influence on my art and life

"Wailers"  (To Larry Neal and Bob Marley) by Amiri Baraka

David Murray--Tenor Saxophone

Steve McCall--Drums and Percussion

From the film "Poetry in Motion" (1982).  Directed by Ron Mann:

"Leroi Jones has learned--and this has been very rare in jazz criticism--to write about music as an artist."
--Nat Hentoff, Jazz & Pop magazine, 1966

“ ... Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made...Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude that produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of Jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes which produced it...The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy...” 

--Leroi Jones, "Jazz and the White Critic," Downbeat magazine, 1963; later reprinted in his book of critical essays and reviews Black Music (William Morrow & Co. 1968)
 

“Jazz and the White Critic” was a challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.”
--John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

 
In the name of sheer historical accuracy and perhaps even ultimately a triumphant kind of poetic justice the following emphatic statement bears repeating as often as possible: For fifty years from 1963-2013 Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones) wrote and published the most profound, influential, and strikingly original body of musical criticism in the United States, as well as some of the most significant--and enduring--cultural and social criticism generally that this country has produced since 1945. This is especially true of his stunning and groundbreaking work in the musical genre of 'Modern Jazz' and his extensive, dynamic, and typically incisive examination of the music's rapid evolution since 1900 in both its visionary "avant garde" modes as well as its more traditional vernacular styles and expressions.

An essential aspect of Baraka’s critical writing on jazz however is also rooted in a deep consciousness and visceral understanding and love of the rural and urban blues/rhythm and blues traditions not only in formal and aesthetic terms but as a complex and historically cumulative social and cultural statement about the ongoing meaning(s) of the content of these musics in both their structural and lyrical dimensions. Thus an appreciation and respect for the ideological complexities and contexts of African American culture as an important economic, social, and political reality as well as an essentially protean artistic force is integral to fully engaging and grasping what Baraka is primarily focused on and concerned with in his writing about the music.

Thus it is not surprising that Baraka's first book about the music, originally entitled Blues People: Negro Music in White America became a seminal, widely acclaimed, and subsequently never out of print historical text. Published by the then 28-year-old writer in 1963, the book was also importantly subtitled in at least a few of its other many editions as "The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It." Disdained and even dismissed in some quarters by some haughty and self-important highbrow critics, both white and black, as being too steeped in what they perceived as a fundamentally reductive sociological emphasis in Baraka's analysis of the blues as art and history (a highly inaccurate and quite dubious line of argument echoed in a particularly patronizing and intellectually self serving manner by the celebrated African American novelist and cultural critic Ralph Ellison) Blues People clearly marked a major new turning point in not only the history of Jazz and blues criticism in the United States but in its perception and intellectual appreciation and understanding by music critics generally. Not surprisingly this new consciousness was also beginning to be reflected to some degree in its public reception by audiences.

Despite its ill-informed detractors Blues People also firmly established Baraka as a major intellectual and literary force to be reckoned with because he was not afraid of expressing a strong and independently assertive viewpoint alongside a persistently sharp critical analysis of what the music has meant to black Americans from the standpoint of not only individual citizens or artists but of the mass culture generally. He insisted on an interpretive POV that saw class relations as well as "race" in terms that established a clear hierarchy and division of attitudes and values that informed one's deep affinity for or relative indifference to the various forms and expressions of the blues as creative/stylistic form and artistic identity as well as a distinct and thus substantive and independent sensibility in the larger society as a whole. Consequently Baraka declared that the purveyors of the blues sensibility and its primary cultural progenitors were not only the artists and the intellectual connoisseurs of the form (i.e. critics, academicians, and scholars) but the so-called 'ordinary citizens' who loved and represented and embodied the art themselves (the actual "Blues People" of the book's title). Therein, Baraka insisted, lay the music's true power and ultimate potential as both a creative and social/philosophical force.

In that light it is important to consider that as the great poet Langston Hughes and many other critics and commentators pointed out when the book made its initial appearance that Blues People was in many ways the intellectual and critical culmination of a contentious historical debate raging then (and even to a great extent today) within Black America as well as the larger society over the cultural and thus political and ideological value and meaning(s) of the African American experience and the role of its various artistic forms and artists who through their creative work publicly represent and embody this cultural history. In Baraka's analysis the music serves as both a crucial narrative record (literally as well as on vinyl) of what black people have experienced and an ongoing emotional and psychological register of the impact and effects this experience has had on them and their larger spiritual, existential, and philosophical conception of themselves. As he puts it in his original introduction to the book in 1963:

"In other words I am saying that if the Negro in America, in all its permutations, is subjected to a socio-anthropological as well as musical scrutiny, something about the essential nature of the Negro's existence in this country ought to be revealed, as well as something about the essential nature of this country, i.e. society as a whole...And the point I want to make most evident here is that I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene...When America became important enough to the African to be passed on, in those formal renditions, to the young, those renditions were in some kind of Afro-American language..."

Baraka also was deeply concerned with how and why these specific musical traditions, techniques, and innovations took the various forms and stylistic identities that they did from the dialectical standpoint of their creators' dynamic, and critically informed engagement with their aesthetic material. One of Baraka's major strengths as a critic is his emphasis always on the process of the creative act in the course of expressing ideas and emotions via the integral elements of music making. This is a major even central aspect of Baraka's writing as a music critic that he strongly maintained and greatly enhanced in all future critiques and celebrations of Jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues following the publication of Blues People.

In Black Music (William Morrow, 1968), his second book devoted to the extraordinary social history and cultural identity of this musical art, Baraka lays out what amounts to a very erudite and casually elegant book-length manifesto on the most advanced, radical, and innovative developments in modern Jazz during the culturally and politically tumultuous 1960s. A trenchant and mesmerizing collection of many of the finest theoretical essays, feature articles, and music reviews that he had written for various national magazines and journals from 1959-1967, Baraka not only critically interprets the revolutionary music of this fascinating historical period but discusses its myriad meanings and values from the direct viewpoint of the individual musicians themselves. What results is a series of riveting, complex, and always critically challenging portraits of these musicians as dedicated cultural workers and the often visionary perspectives that these artists embodied and conveyed to their audiences. Baraka especially draws the readers' attention to the largely black working class and sometimes even more economically challenging (i.e. poor) social and cultural milieu that so many of these musicians and their peers and colleagues lived, created, and performed in. In doing so he reminds us that many of the most profound, lasting, and useful modern art expressions in the United States (and elsewhere) are not merely or exclusively the products of the academic “Ivory Tower” and foundation grant institutions nor are they dependent on the often fickle largesse of wealthy patrons. In fact as Baraka amply demonstrates in his analysis the evidence everywhere of the deep desire and demand for aesthetic, economic, and political self determination among this intrepid generation of musicians, composers, and improvisers is one of the major principles animating their work and overall vision. One of many brilliant examples of this analytical focus can be found in Baraka's intricate, detailed, and powerful dissection of the general aesthetics and cultural values of such legendary and even iconic musicians, composers, and improvisors of the post 1945 modern music era as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Milford Graves, Don Pullen, Bobby Bradford, and Roy Haynes, among many others who emerged as a self consciously radical, innovative, visionary. and transformative force in the music since the late 1950s.

Dedicated to “John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit” Baraka's Black Music posed a tremendous intellectual and artistic challenge to a entire generation of artists, critics, and cultural/political activists (and I might add is still doing so some two generations and 45 years later!) to begin to seriously address and attempt to resolve many of the major structural and institutional problems and crises facing not only our creative artists in the realms of music, literature, dance, filmmaking, visual and media art, etc. but our larger communities as well. Toward that end the book provides an important ongoing subtextual narrative about the insidious political economy of the music business and its direct and indirect effects on the musicians themselves who not only have to withstand and tragically negotiate the oppressive and exploitive impositions of white supremacy/racism in all its guises but the even more comprehensive venality of corporate capitalism in the studios, clubs, theatres and general commercial venues where the music was being recorded and/or performed for various live audiences during an era when Jazz, despite its growing richness and vitality in a creative sense, especially was suffering greatly economically as a result of its clearly limited reception and appreciation by the larger society. This unfortunately also included the growing commercial interest in and support for pop, rhythm and blues, and rock musics (resulting in the increasing exclusion and marginalization of Jazz and blues) in the national black community.

Finally, the flagship essay of Black Music that opens the volume contains one of the most prescient, eloquent, historically significant, and intellectually honest essays ever written about the “Modern Jazz” dimension of African American music. Entitled "Jazz and the White Critic" the piece had originally appeared in Downbeat the largest national 'mainstream' Jazz magazine in the country in August, 1963 just before the appearance of his first book on the music Blues People later that year. What remains essential about this prophetic essay is its analytical insistence that the philosophical and cultural aspects of African American music like that of all major aesthetic traditions throughout the world is key to acquiring a genuine knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the art. As he states in his concluding paragraph:

“We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that.” (Italics mine)

The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues  (William Morrow, 1987)

The long awaited arrival of Amiri's third full volume of music criticism in 1987 published some twenty years after Black Music and twenty-five years after Blues People was not only well worth the wait but added still more brilliant wrinkles to his long-term critique of the music, its artists, and the larger social, economic, and political contexts that it existed and persisted in. Both a dynamic synthesis and extension of previous writing about its historical identity as well as an celebratory examination of its contemporary expressions, The Music is divided between a series of poems that center on Jazz and the blues by both Amiri and his wife, Amina Baraka, which takes up a third of the text, an extraordinary political play entitled The Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Musical by Amiri that uses both “avant-garde” as well as more traditional Jazz and blues elements, techniques, and styles in an updated and innovative operatic context. Most of the actors in the production are the musicians themselves who both play and sing their parts. Such important and highly accomplished 'avant' Jazz musicians of the post-1970 era as the tenor saxophonist David Murray, drummer and percussionist Steve McCall, violinist Leroy Jenkins, and the pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers.

The last third of the book features 26 virtuosic and typically incisive essays, reviews, liner notes, and feature articles by Baraka written for and published by various national magazines, journals, and newspapers in the 1975-1987 period as well as some new and important critical essays written specifically for the book. Covering everyone and everything from Miles Davis (in a masterful 1985 article for the New York Times) to the history of Jazz and other African American musics in Greenwich Village in NYC to a series of briliant book and music reviews of books and recordings about and by such major musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Woody Shaw, Cecil McBee, Gil Scott-Heron, Chico Freeman, Ricky Ford, and Craig Harris. There are also a scintillating collection of extremely informative, lyrically written, and politically astute theoretical and critical essays like "Where's the Music Going and Why?", "Jazz Writing: Survival in the Eighties", "The Phenomenon of Soul in African American Music". "Masters in Collaboration", "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" "AfroPop", "The Class Struggle in Music" and "The Great Music Robbery." There is simply not enough space in this piece to do justice to the crackling intellectual firepower and truly impressive depth and scope of Baraka's writing here; suffice it to say for now that he (re)proves all over and once again exactly WHY he is the preeminent American music critic of the past half century by a very wide margin with virtually no real contenders in sight. Long out of print (and criminally never republished in paperback!) one MUST track down this 1987 hardcover classic and read what it says about a massive range of issues and concerns with respect to the music in not only aesthetic and ideological terms but from the equally profound standpoints of literature (and rhetoric), social theory, cultural history, and political analysis and journalism. One will not come away disappointed. If only the academic departments of 'American and African American Studies' (and all other so-called "ethnic", "humanities", and "cultural studies" programs generally) had professors, public intellectuals, and social activists of Baraka's caliber and clarity running them instead of the often pretentious, biased, and myopic fetishists of "language and culture" who too often ride herd in these fields in U.S. colleges and universities today, we would all be much better informed about the actual strength, beauty, and complex reality of the multiracial and multinational society that we all in fact inhabit. As Baraka makes clear in the essay "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" from what is finally a GREAT book:

"Each generation adds to and is a witness to extended human experience, If it is honest it must say something new. But in a society that glorifies formalism, i.e. form over content, because content rooted in realistic understanding of that society must minimally be critical of it--the legitimately truthfully new is despised. Surfaces are shuffled , dresses are lengthened or shortened, hair is green or blond, but real change is opposed. The law keeps the order and the order is exploitive and oppressive! The new music reinforces the most valuable memories of a people but at the same time creates new forms, new modes of expression, to more precisely reflect contemporary experience!"

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music  (University of California Press, 2009)

After an astonishing forty five years of endlessly writing, teaching, and lecturing about African American music all over the world it was an absolutely thrilling and inspiring surprise to find yet another extraordinary volume of music criticism by Amiri in the 21st century. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press, 2009) is an epic 411 page text of 84 essays, reviews, liner notes, articles, and precise literary portraits of and about musicians and their art over a fifty year period.. Taking on a huge canvas of critical themes and musical personalities Baraka carries off one can only be described as a penultimate triumph of the art and craft of music criticism at its highest possible level. In a stunning display and critical synthesis that includes an encyclopedic knowledge of the music, a razor sharp attention to the historical nuances of the music and how it it has stylistically evolved and mutated over the years, and finally a thoroughly independent theoretical and critical perspective on the music in aesthetic, historical, and social/cultural terms, Baraka compiled and summed up what constitutes a comprehensive philosophical treatise on Jazz and blues music in U.S.--and by extension the world-- over the past century.

In this quest Digging joyously and fastidiously examines the work, philosophy, craft, and vision of such GIANTS as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, David Murray, Art Tatum, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Cyrille, Barry Harris, James Moody, Jackie McLean, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Hopkins, Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tolliver, Odean Pope,John Hicks, Von Freeman, Jimmy Scott, and Reggie Workman (WHEW!). Baraka also writes with great insight, intelligence, and passion about such exciting and important emerging musicians and composers of the past two decades as Vijay Iyer, Rodney Kendrick, Ralph Peterson, Jon Jang, and Ravi Coltrane,

Finally Digging is an intense, wide ranging, and deeply philosophical and scholarly meditation on, and relentless excavation of, the multidimensional aspects of the music's varied diasporic genealogies, and a celebration of its ongoing presence and importance on both a national and global level. Amiri incorporates everything he has learned and experienced in the both the music and his life (and their endless interconnections). This synergy of the personal and aesthetic gives the book an organic unity and focus that shapes and informs the text as the essays strive to fuse an understanding of politics, history, ideology, and art with a larger vision of "what it all means." Confronting this complicated task is handled beautifully in such sage and critical essays as "The 'Blues Aesthetic' and the 'Black Aesthetic: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture ', "Jazz Criticism and Its Effects On the Music", "Black Music As A Force for Social Change", "BoperaTheory", "Jazz and the White Critic: Thirty Years Later" , "Newark's "Coast" and the Hidden Legacy of Urban Culture", "Blues People: Looking Both Ways", "Miles Later" and "Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History, Mesage". "Cosby and the Music", and "The American Popular Song: The Great American Song Book" among others. In other words NO ONE has written about American music with a wider, deeper, and more informed LOVE, UNDERSTANDING and KNOWLEDGE than Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones or what ithis music means to the artists who create it and the millions of blues people/citizens from all over the world who listen, dance, sing and live their lives to and with it. On this and much much more besides, Amiri has--as always-- the 'last word' (for now) on the subject:

"...So Digging means to present , perhaps arbitrarily, varied paradigms of this essentially Afro-American art. The common predicate, myself, the Digger. One who gets down, with the down, always looking above to see what is going out, and so check Digitaria, as the Dogon say, necessary if you are the fartherest Star, Serious. So this book is a microscope, a telescope, and being Black, a periscope. All to dig what is deeply serious. From a variety of places,,,the intention is to provide some theoretical and observed practice of the historical essence of what is clearly American Classical Music, no matter the various names it, and we, have been called. The sun is what keeps the planet alive, including the Music, like we say, the Soul of which is Black."

Kofi Natambu
Berkeley, California
April 9, 2014
(Paul Robeson's 106th birthday)


BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED MUSIC CRITICISM BY AMIRI BARAKA  (aka Leroi Jones): 1963-2009

Blues People: Negro Music in White Music. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow, 1963

Black Music. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow and Company, 1968

The Music: Reflections On Jazz and Blues. by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka. William Morrow and Company, 1987

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. by Amiri Baraka. University of California

Nate Chinen On the Humanity, Depth, Power, and Clarity Of Amiri Baraka

http://jazztimes.com/articles/122887-the-gig-amiri-baraka-blues-person

The Gig:   Amiri Baraka, Blues Person 

By Nate Chinen

March 15, 2014

JazzTimes

Remembering a poet and playwright of incandescent power

There were a lot of contested vantage points in the appraisals that surfaced in the wake of Amiri Baraka’s death, on Jan. 9, at 79. This was probably inevitable, and possibly fitting. Not to imply that Baraka—a poet and playwright of incandescent power, and a critic of dauntless conviction—should be reduced in memoriam to a firebrand. While he inhabited that role at times with a kind of fearless relish, his was a far more thoughtful, nuanced and necessary voice than any of his detractors could allow. The mere fact of that dissonance speaks to the central preoccupation of his life, which was the struggle of African-American society against systemic forces of oppression—and all of the ways in which black art held the tools of transformation, or resistance. How you received that message had a lot to do with how you saw the struggle.

Amiri Baraka
Photo by Jimmy Katz

Baraka was a jazz man to the bone; he recognized in the music an unsurpassingly potent and radical means of cultural expression. His writings on jazz, especially in the landmark 1968 essay collection Black Music, shed penetrating light on both the art form and its social context, which he understood to be more or less inextricable. His poems often made use of jazz rhythm, whether they were conveyed on the page or onstage. No one was ever better at bringing modern verse into performative contact with improvised music, as I was reminded most recently by portions of the superb five-LP set Call It Art: New York Art Quartet (1964-65) (Triple Point). (Reading his poem “Western Front,” Baraka sounds dispassionate but urgent, his intensity stretched taut just beneath the surface.) He had little patience for fashions du jour, and even less for the structural biases that slipped by under the guise of conventional wisdom. When he was wrong—everybody has his or her own tally of these moments—there was usually some value in determining precisely how wrong, and why.

He was born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, N.J., a student of musical and literary inclination practically from the start. He served time at Howard University and the U.S. Air Force, taking away different dissatisfactions from each institution, before he settled into Greenwich Village, where he became known by his byline, LeRoi Jones. He married the former Hettie Cohen, a fellow writer, and they became a fixture in downtown bohemian circles, aligning with poets from the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg), the Black Mountain scene (Robert Creeley) and the New York School (Frank O’Hara). Baraka’s subsequent repudiation of these relationships, including Hettie Jones, was a result of his deep dive into late-’60s black cultural nationalism. Feelings were hurt, and some in his previous white cohort judged him all the more harshly for it.

The common complaint was that Baraka, as he renamed himself, had jackknifed from the bluffs of poetry into the roiling sea of politics. There was some truth in this. “His writing didn’t go cold unattended (quite the opposite),” observes critic-bandleader Greg Tate, one of Baraka’s many heirs, in Ebony magazine, “but his writing career, as such, became enmeshed if not subordinate to his political fervor.” This enmeshing, made manifest in the Black Arts Movement, could produce riveting results—like Baraka’s immortal poem “AM/TRAK,” which claims John Coltrane as a kindred revolutionary spirit, “Malcolm X in New Super Bop Fire.” And if some of his politically charged jazz essays seem confined to their era, others stubbornly retain their relevance. A recent fracas over Terry Teachout’s biography Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham) sent me back to Baraka’s 50-year-old essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” and especially one of its chief assertions: “In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all.”

It so happens that I met Baraka on my first-ever feature assignment, a 1997 profile of a journeyman alto saxophonist named Julian Pressley for the Philadelphia City Paper. I was 20, an English major marking time between junior and senior years, and thought I knew what I was in for. I’d pored over Baraka’s more anthologized poems, along with Black Music and its historic precursor, Blues People. Partly because of my reading and partly because of his extra-literary reputation, I was expecting a bristly reception.

But when I visited Baraka’s house in Newark, I was struck by its air of warmth and inclusion, which probably had something to do with his second wife, Amina, a poet herself. Pressley had been booked to play Kimako’s Blues People, a monthly series in the basement. I remember the delight on his face when he sidled up to the stereo console and noted a CD on which he’d appeared, by the Odean Pope Saxophone Choir. (Baraka had reviewed it, pegging it as “the kind of item you press on people who don’t know it to show how hip you are, digging out the deep ones, the unknown ones.”) I also remember Baraka’s introspection as we conversed in his laundry room, where he spoke quietly, a can of Miller Lite in hand. Regarding the series, he said: “We’re trying to foster a self-reliant alternative culture as a reaction to popular culture.”

It’s instructive to recall the terms of that statement, delivered not as a provocation but merely a principled stance. I subsequently heard Baraka speak in public more than a dozen times, and always kept it in mind. Two years ago, reporting a story, I took bassist-singer Esperanza Spalding to a Baraka reading in Lower Manhattan. With Adegoke Steve Colson on piano, he delivered poems of scathing wit and earnest sentiment, including “Play Dat,” for the memory of pianists John Hicks and Hilton Ruiz. Spalding seemed as transfixed as I was, marveling afterward at his vitality.

More recently, at last year’s awards ceremony for the Jazz Journalists Association, Baraka gave remarks to induct a fellow lifetime achievement honoree, Willard Jenkins, invoking the related legacies of slavery and black literary achievement. When it was my turn at the podium, I thanked him for the challenge he laid bare, calling it “something that we dismiss at our great peril.” Baraka caught my eye as I left the stage, wearing a smile of sly bemusement. But I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.