Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
All, The world has lost one of the greatest and most profound poets of the past century, the extraordinary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. A legendary and iconic cultural and political figure of the Palestinian people (who traditionally deeply cherish, honor, and appreciate the art of poetry) Darwish wrote over 20 volumes of vastly popular and critically acclaimed poetry and his work was translated into over 20 languages throughout the world. Darwish was instrumental in making a global audience conscious of the heroic struggles of the Palestinian people for independence from Israeli colonial occupation and the ongoing fight for sovereignty and statehood This is a major loss but the tremendous legacy Darwish has left for people everywhere who revere art, freedom, and justice will never die. Kofi https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/middleeast/11darwish.html
Mahmoud Darwish, Leading Palestinian Poet, Is Dead at 67
JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian
exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely
viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of
the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston
after complications from heart surgery. He was 67.
Mr.
Darwish, a heavy smoker, was known to suffer from health problems.
Still, his death was received among Palestinians with shock and
despair.
Mahmoud
Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of mourning on
Sunday, saying that Mr. Darwish was “the pioneer of the modern
Palestinian cultural project,” adding, “Words cannot describe the depth
of sadness in our hearts.”
Yasir
Abed Rabbo, secretary of the executive committee of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, said, “No one could have imagined that
Mahmoud’s voice could disappear.”
The
Palestinian Authority will give Mr. Darwish a state funeral in the West
Bank on Tuesday, the first since Yasir Arafat died in 2004.
Twice
divorced with no children, Mr. Darwish had the straight hair, wire-rim
glasses and blue blazer of a European intellectual and was,
paradoxically for someone seen as the voice of his people, a loner with a
narrow circle of friends. He was uncomfortable in public, where he was
widely recognized, but he cared deeply about young Arab writers and
published their work in the Ramallah-based journal that he edited, Al
Karmel.
And
while he wrote in classical Arabic rather than in the language of the
street, his poetry was anything but florid or baroque, employing a
directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern
literary Arabic.
“He
used high language to talk about daily life in a truly exceptional
way,” said Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet and a close friend. “This
is someone who remained at the top of Arabic poetry for 40 years. It was
not simply about politics.”
Nonetheless,
politics played a major role in Mr. Darwish’s life and work. Born to a
middle-class Muslim farming family in a village near Haifa in what is
today Israel, Mr. Darwish identified strongly with the secular
Palestinian national movement long led by Mr. Arafat.
Palestinians in Ramallah, West Bank, held a vigil on Sunday in honor of Mahmoud Darwish, who died Saturday in Houston.Credit
Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr.
Zaqtan and Mr. Abed Rabbo said he was the author of Mr. Arafat’s
famous words at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974: “I come
bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the
olive branch fall from my hand.”
He
also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988
and served on the executive committee of the P.L.O. But he quit in the
early 1990s over differences with the leadership and moved firmly out of
the political sphere, lamenting the rise of the Islamist group Hamas
and what he viewed as the bankruptcy of Palestinian public life.
Mr.
Darwish first gained a following in the 1960s for his frank political
poems, and to some extent they remain the source of his fame. Among his
best known was “Identity Card” from 1964, in which he attacked Israel’s
desire to overlook the presence of Arabs on its land:
“Write down!/I am an Arab/ and my identity card number is 50,000/I have eight children/And the ninth will come after a summer.”
It
ends: “Therefore!/Write down on the top of the first page:/I do not
hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper’s flesh
will be my food/Beware .../Beware ... /Of my hunger/And my anger.”
There
were other harsh political works in the following two decades, but
those who knew Mr. Darwish said he had often expressed little pride in
them, preferring his more personal and universal poems. He told The New
York Times in a 2001 interview in Paris: “Sometimes I feel as if I am
read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians
think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my
mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.”
During
the war that led to Israel’s independence, Mr. Darwish and his family,
from the Palestinian village of Al Barweh, left for Lebanon. The village
was razed but the family sneaked back across the border into Israel,
where Mr. Darwish spent his youth.
Politically
active fairly early, he was arrested several times and was a member of
the Israeli Communist Party. He left in 1971 and lived in the Soviet
Union, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and France.
After
Mr. Arafat set up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza
in the mid-1990s, Mr. Darwish came to live in Ramallah, where he rented a
house. He said he never really felt at home there — he made clear that
exile for him was increasingly an emotional rather than a purely
political dilemma — and wrote more comfortably when in Europe.
He maintained a wide circle of literary acquaintances, including Israelis, and he said he fully supported a two-state solution.
His
work earned him a number of international literary awards and was
translated into more than 20 languages, more than any other contemporary
Arab poet, according to Mahmoud al-Atshan, a professor of Arabic
literature at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.
There
was at first some question of where he would be buried, as some close
to him sought to persuade Israel to let him be buried in the area of his
home village. But the mayor of Ramallah said Mr. Darwish would be
buried in Ramallah, the effective Palestinian capital of the West Bank.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Mahmoud Darwish, 67, Leading Palestinian Poet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper
Prose Shai'on 'an al-wattan (Something about the homeland), 1971 Wada'an ayatuha al-harb, wada'an ayuha al-salaam (Farwell, war, farwell, peace), 1974 Yawmiyyat al-hozn al-'aadi (Diary of the usual sadness), 1973 Dhakirah li-al-nisyan (Memory for Forgetfulness), 1987. English translation 1995 by Ibrahim Muhawi Fi wasf halatina (Describing our condition), 1987 al-Rasa'il (The Letters), 1990. Joint work with Samih al-Qasim Aabiroon fi kalamen 'aaber (Bypassers in bypassing words), 1991 Fi hadrat al-ghiyab (In the presence of absence), 2006 See poem entitled "Under Siege" by Mahmoud Darwish following the obituaries Palestinians plan big funeral for poet Darwish Sun Aug 10, 2008 by Mohammed Assadi RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry encapsulated the Palestinian cause, will get the equivalent of a state funeral in the West Bank on Tuesday -- an honour only previously accorded to PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Tributes for Darwish poured in on Sunday, a day after the 67-year-old writer died from complications following heart surgery in a U.S. hospital in Houston, Texas. "He translated the pain of the Palestinians in a magical way. He made us cry and made us happy and shook our emotions," said Egypt's vernacular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm. "Apart from being the poet of the Palestinian wound, which is hurting all Arabs and all honest people in the world, he is a master poet," Negm told Reuters in Cairo. Darwish's funeral in Ramallah will be the first sponsored by the Palestinian Authority since Arafat died in 2004. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning. People held candle-lit vigils on Saturday and Sunday in the darkened streets of Ramallah, where Darwish's poems were read aloud and some mourners wept. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said his country shared Palestinian admiration for "this great figure whose poetry, which reflects nostalgia and liberty, speaks to us all. "Mahmoud Darwish knew how to express the attachment of an entire people to its land and the absolute desire for peace. His message, which calls for coexistence, will continue to resonate and will eventually be heard," Kouchner said in a statement. The poet, born in territory now Israel, had made his home in the West Bank city since returning in the 1990s from a long exile during which he rose to prominence in Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). "The Palestinian question, in Mahmoud Darwish's poetry, was no longer a legend, but the story of people made of flesh, blood and feelings," said Zehi Wahbi, a friend of Darwish and a Lebanese television presenter and poet. For Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, Darwish was "the voice of Palestinian civilisation, with its pains, sadness and ambitions". Widely seen as the Palestinian national poet, Darwish's writing was much translated. Several of his books were translated into Israel's vernacular, Hebrew, though the nationalist message of his work was largely shunned in the Jewish state, where a plan in the 1990's to teach his poetry in state schools was quickly shelved. Darwish won new generations of admirers with work that evoked not just the pain of Palestinians displaced, as he was as a child, by the foundation of Israel 60 years ago, but also subtle paradoxes and broader human themes. He enjoyed a following across the Arab world, where he had the kind of readership contemporary poets in English and other European languages, eclipsed by novelists, can only dream of. "He turned the Palestinian cause into songs that transcended the cause and all other Arab issues," said Abdel-Rahman al-Abnoudi, a prominent Egyptian poet and a friend of Darwish. Darwish gave voice to Palestinians' dreams of statehood, helping to craft their 1988 declaration of independence. He penned the words Arafat spoke at the United Nations in 1974: "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand." (Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem, Thomas Perry in Beirut, Alaa Shahine in Cairo and Tamora Vidaillet in Paris; Writing by Alistair Lyon, edited by Richard Meares) August 9, 2008 Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish Is Dead at 67 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian cultural icon whose poetry eloquently told of his people's experiences of exile, occupation and infighting, died Saturday in Houston. He was 67. The predominant Palestinian poet, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won numerous international awards, died following open heart surgery at a Houston hospital, said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Born to a large Muslim family in historical Palestine -- now modern-day Israel -- he described his people's struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity. ''He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,'' said Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist and lecturer in cultural studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Darwish first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, ''Bird without Wings.'' It included the poem ''Identity Card'' that defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number -- a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments -- and vowing to return to his land. Many of his poems have been put into music -- most notably ''Rita,'' ''Birds of Galilee'' and ''I yearn for my mother's bread'' -- and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs. He wrote another 21 collections, the last, ''The Impression of Butterflies,'' in 2008. Qleibo described Darwish's poetry as ''the easy impossible,'' for Darwish's ability to condense the Palestinian narrative into simple, evocative language -- breaking away from the more traditional heavy, emotive and rhythmic verse of other Arab poets. Darwish wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, read by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat when he unilaterally declared statehood. The declaration was symbolic and had no concrete significance. Darwish's influence was keenly felt among Palestinians, serving as a powerful voice for many. ''He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,'' said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi. ''He embodied the best in Palestinians ... even though he became iconic he never lost his sense of humanity. We have lost part of our essence, the essence of the Palestinian being.'' Last year, Darwish recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as ''a public attempt at suicide in the streets.'' Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel's independence. He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers. ''When we think of Darwish ... he is our heart, and our tongue,'' said Issam Makhoul, an Arab lawmaker and veteran member of the Israeli Communist Party. Darwish left Israel in the early 1970s to study in the former Soviet Union, and from there he traveled to Egypt and Lebanon. He joined the Palestine Liberation Organization, but resigned in 1993 in protest over the interim peace accords that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed with Israel. Darwish moved to the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1996. His work is widely admired on the Arab and Palestinian street. In Israel, it evokes different feelings. In 2000, Israel's education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish's poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system. In 1988, a Darwish poem, ''Passing in Passing Words,'' was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel's parliament as an example of the Palestinians' unwillingness to live alongside Jews. The poem suggested that Darwish called for Jews to leave the region. Adel Usta, a specialist on Darwish's poetry, said the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated. ''He created a national Palestinian identity that no other poet could achieve,'' Usta said. Darwish married and divorced twice. He does not have any children. Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and longtime friend of Darwish, said he traveled to a hospital in Houston, Texas, ten days ago for the surgery and asked not to be resuscitated if it did not succeed. She said Darwish had a history of heart problems, and had been operated on twice in the past. Akram Haniyeh, Editor-in-Chief of the Al Ayyam newspaper and a close friend of Darwish, was by Darwish's bedside in Houston. He said Darwish underwent an operation on Wednesday and there were complications.
Mahmoud Darwish, poet of the Palestinians, diesSat Aug 9, 2008 By Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry his fellow Palestinians embraced as the voice of their suffering, died on Saturday after heart surgery in Texas.
President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning to honour the 67-year-old writer who, a close friend said, never came round from a major operation two days earlier.
"The passing of our great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the lover of Palestine, the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project, and the brilliant national leader, will leave a great gap in our political, cultural and national lives," Abbas said.
"Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts," he added. "Mahmoud, may God help us for your loss."
The death of a man whose life and words were tightly bound up in a struggle for a Palestinian national rebirth that seems little closer now than when his first work was published in 1960 immediately triggered a wider outpouring of popular emotion.
As news from Houston filtered through, people, some weeping, gathered round candles in the darkened streets of Ramallah. The poet had made his home in the West Bank city since returning in the 1990s from a long exile during which he rose to prominence in Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Palestinian television interrupted programmes to air film of Darwish, the "national poet", reading from his work. Officials said his body would be flown back for burial in Ramallah.
He won new generations of admirers with work that evoked the pain of Palestinians displaced, as he was as a child, by the establishment of Israel 60 years ago, but also did not shrink from criticism and touched on broader human themes, like love.
An intensely private man who largely lived alone, he enjoyed a mass following across the Arab world, where he had the kind of readership contemporary poets in other languages only dream of.
Palestinians at home and abroad spoke of intense, personal feelings of bereavement. "His death is a loss to the Palestinian people, to the Palestinian cause and to freedom-loving people around the world," said Ahmad Ibrahim, a banker in Ramallah.
Philosophy professor Abdel-Rahim al-Sheikh was choked with emotion: "I cannot speak now. My soul is not helping me."
EXILE
Just last month Darwish packed out a hall for a reading in Ramallah and millions watched on television an event to mark the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe.
In 1948, Darwish was among that half of the Arab population of Palestine driven from their homes, in his family's case near the port of Haifa. They later returned to live in the area.
Jailed several times, Darwish left in 1971 for the Soviet Union. Exile in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Paris followed.
In 1988, Israel's parliament debated one work which incensed Israelis who saw an attack on the existence of the Jewish state -- though Darwish said he wanted an end only to their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: "So leave our land. Our shore, our sea. Our wheat, our salt, our wound," he had written.
"Take your portion from our blood and go away".
In 2000, an Israeli minister proposed adding Darwish to the school curriculum -- but the proposal went no further.
Darwish served on the executive committee of the PLO but broke with Arafat when the two disagreed over the 1993 Oslo accords on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Fifteen years on, negotiations appear to most observers to be going nowhere. Violence, a split between Abbas and his Islamist rivals in Gaza and continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank leave few Palestinians hopeful of a viable state.
Last month, Darwish, a heavy smoker who had twice before undergone major heart surgery, spoke to Reuters of his fading health and his gloomy assessment of the world he would leave.
His last works are imbued with a sarcastic humour and a sense of both Israelis and Palestinians, however antagonistic, bound irredeemably together to share an uncertain future.
"Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile," he said.
"History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor."
In a new poem called "The Written Script", Darwish related a dialogue between a victim and his enemy who fall into a pit:
He saw Israelis bent on suicide, taking Palestinians with them, if the occupation of the West Bank went on: "A killer and his victim die together in one hole," he says in the piece.
Another recent poem "The Dice Thrower", told how Darwish saw death coming yet he clung to life: "To Life I say: Go slow, wait for me until the drunkenness dries in my glass.
"I have no role in what I was or who I will be.
"It is chance and chance has no name.
"I call the doctor 10 minutes before the death, 10 minutes are sufficient to live by chance." (Additional reporting by Wafa Amr, Joseph Nasr and Houston bureau; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)
Poem by Maumoud Darwish Under Siege
Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens of broken shadows, We do what prisoners do, And what the jobless do: We cultivate hope. *** A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent For we closely watch the hour of victory: No night in our night lit up by the shelling Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us In the darkness of cellars. *** Here there is no "I". Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay. *** On the verge of death, he says: I have no trace left to lose: Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand. Soon I shall penetrate my life, I shall be born free and parentless, And as my name I shall choose azure letters... *** You who stand in the doorway, come in, Drink Arabic coffee with us And you will sense that you are men like us You who stand in the doorways of houses Come out of our morningtimes, We shall feel reassured to be Men like you! *** When the planes disappear, the white, white doves Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves Fly off. Ah, if only the sky Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me]. *** Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank— And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass... *** [To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way to find one’s identity again. *** The siege is a waiting period Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm. *** Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment Were it not for the visits of the rainbows. *** We have brothers behind this expanse. Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep. Then, in secret, they tell each other: "Ah! if this siege had been declared..." They do not finish their sentence: "Don’t abandon us, don’t leave us." *** Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day. And ten wounded. And twenty homes. And fifty olive trees... Added to this the structural flaw that Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas. *** A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved For my clothing is drenched with his blood. *** If you are not rain, my love Be tree Sated with fertility, be tree If you are not tree, my love Be stone Saturated with humidity, be stone If you are not stone, my love Be moon In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon [So spoke a woman to her son at his funeral] *** Oh watchmen! Are you not weary Of lying in wait for the light in our salt And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound Are you not weary, oh watchmen? *** A little of this absolute and blue infinity Would be enough To lighten the burden of these times And to cleanse the mire of this place. *** It is up to the soul to come down from its mount And on its silken feet walk By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime Friends who share the ancient bread And the antique glass of wine May we walk this road together And then our days will take different directions: I, beyond nature, which in turn Will choose to squat on a high-up rock. *** On my rubble the shadow grows green, And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat He dreams as I do, as the angel does That life is here...not over there. *** In the state of siege, time becomes space Transfixed in its eternity In the state of siege, space becomes time That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow. *** The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day And questions me: Where were you? Take every word You have given me back to the dictionaries And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz. *** The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse I did not look For the virgins of immortality for I love life On earth, amid fig trees and pines, But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure. *** The martyr warned me: Do not believe their ululations Believe my father when, weeping, he looks at my photograph How did we trade roles, my son, how did you precede me. I first, I the first one! *** The martyr encircles me: my place and my crude furniture are all that I have changed. I put a gazelle on my bed, And a crescent of moon on my finger To appease my sorrow. *** The siege will last in order to convince us we must choose an enslavement that does no harm, in fullest liberty! *** Resisting means assuring oneself of the heart’s health, The health of the testicles and of your tenacious disease: The disease of hope. *** And in what remains of the dawn, I walk toward my exterior And in what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps inside me. *** Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the Blackness of this tunnel! *** Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces: Greetings to my apparition. *** My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me, A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees A marble epitaph of time And always I anticipate them at the funeral: Who then has died...who? *** Writing is a puppy biting nothingness Writing wounds without a trace of blood. *** Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall To another like a gazelle The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid, And that we are the guests of eternity. Translated by Marjolijn De Jager Submitted by C.K. Mahmoud Darwish Copyright 2008 The Associated Press
Of course this article was inevitable and mind numbingly predictable given the persistent and ever annoying habit so many whitefolks today (and some clueless pollyanna blackfolks as well) have of not so surreptitiously patting themselves on the back for finally 'evolving' from a racist Apartheid "past" into a glorious and 'mainstream' "post civil rights"/"post-race" present (and presumed future). But it is precisely this kind of lazily self aggrandizing and dangerously delusional political thinking that African Americans of EVERY generation must guard itself against if it is to continue to deal in a truly serious and sustained manner with the ever manipulative, opportunist, and falsely egalitarian claims and heavily skewed structural dimensions of the endless uses of racism (as ideology and social control mechanism) in the United States political, economic, and cultural system. There are a large number of absurd, outrageous, and obviously false assumptions and positions being taken in this article, but none is more egregious and disingenuous than the ridiculous notion that somehow all these black Buppie Ivy League graduates participating in "mainstream" politics today roughly between 30-45 years of age are somehow "changing" or fundamentally transforming the terrain of "black politics" or "American politics" in general (which in the context of the rather dubious ideological presuppositions and stances of the journalist's POV amount essentially to the same thing).
What pompous nonsense! Let's get a serious grip here. Though I personally enthusiastically support Barack Obama for the American Presidency this year I (and I assure you the overwhelming majority of the African American voters who also support him) are not under any illusions whatsoever that one man or even a gaggle of black Harvard/Yale/Cornell/Dartmouth/Brown/Princeton graduates yadda, yadda, yadda could possibly make a serious dent in the massive interlocking machine of political economy, social/cultural values, and severe psychological contradictions and utterly pathological fears, anxieties, and hatreds that structurally and clinically determine/over determine the form and content of so-called "racial relations" in the United States. The mere fact that there were for example more African American senators in 1870 (2) than there were for the next 120 years, and there has only been one more (Obama himself) in the last 18 years speaks volumes about where "black politics" are--both now and in the "the past" . After all while I deeply respect and even admire Obama's considerable political acumen, intelligence, and organizational/oratorical abilities I know for dead certain (and you do too!) that a black man named BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA with two black American parents and a darker skin complexion than the current one has would never have been elected Senator from Illinois, or if he had he would most certainly not ever become an actual major party nominee for President--even if he had twice the number of Ivy League bona fides and credentials as Obama, 10 times the political and life experience, and the profound oratorical powers of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass COMBINED. And of course the "reason" for this fact is depressingly but unavoidably simple--we still live in a very racist society (just as we still live in a very sexist, classist, and homophobic society as well). There's no getting around or "beyond" any of this--I know it, Obama knows it, and "Your mama" knows it (no matter what "color" she may be). Which is to say of course that most extremely complex, deeply rooted, and thoroughly vexing historical realities can't be simply eliminated or "changed" by rhetorical or declamatory fiat. Thus any talk of a static ahistorical "black politics" (or its assimilated 'golden mean' absorption into the always/already fetid and corrupted waters of the "mainstream") is inherently out of touch with any credble empirical or philosophical 'reality'--especially in the social, economic, and political spheres of American history.
It's as if some of these younger black politicians and aspirants for "higher"(?) office have still not fully grasped some fundamental and very important lessons of American/African American history--that there is no "post" anything. I hate to have to invoke old Willie Faulkner's hoary but oh so necessary admonition that "the past" is not only not "dead" but it's not even "past." For all of their "advanced" liberal humanities education some of these brothers and sisters seriously need to look far more carefully around and to ask themselves some very painful questions about HOW AND WHY so many millions of Americans in general not to mention hundreds of millions of people throughout the world--African Americans included included--are currently being devastated by the ravages of a global system of capitalism that is as always absolutely merciless in whom it attacks, plunders, and sacrifices for the paramount goal of profit. That anyone could seriously suggest at the very late date in human history with even the 'best of intentions' that the twin evil brother of racism is not still fully functioning and alive and well in the wealthiest and most powerful Empire the world has ever known--and that anti-African American attitudes, values, and behavior is not still thriving both institutionally and in stark personal terms--is not merely being naive and engaged in willful self denial but pure sophistry as well. After all, Barack Obama means many things to many people but he could not possibly be the poster boy for anything identified as or called the "end of black politics" or "post civil rights" in the hopelessly sophomoric, reductive, and adolescent terms that the writer of this article means it or the people of whatever hue or class position who rather stupidly agree with him. Like all the other heavily advertised 'Ends' (of History, of Ideology, of Race, Of Time) that so many "conservatives" keep pushing (like super ambitious dealers who are even more addicted than the junkies they serve) this inane notion will very soon go the way of all these other ahistorical pseudo magic tricks of pseudo-intellectual fantasies, wishes, and dreams. Or as we used to say way back in the '60s--"Nothing comes to a sleeper but a Dream..." But no matter what "color" you are it's clearly way past time to Wake Up, isn't it?
Kofi
August 10, 2008
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PREVIEW Is Obama the End of Black Politics?
By MATT BAI This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
Forty-seven years after he last looked out from behind the bars of a South Carolina jail cell, locked away for leading a march against segregation in Columbia, James Clyburn occupies a coveted suite of offices on the second and third floors of the United States Capitol, alongside the speaker and the House majority leader. Above his couch hangs a black-and-white photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Charleston, with the boyish Clyburn and a group of other men standing behind him onstage. When I visited Clyburn recently, he told me that the photo was taken in 1967, nine months before King’s assassination, when rumors of violence were swirling, and somewhere on the side of the room a photographer’s floodlight had just come crashing down unexpectedly. At the moment the photo was taken, everyone pictured has reflexively jerked their heads in the direction of the sound, with the notable exception of King himself, who remains in profile, staring straight ahead at his audience. Clyburn prizes that photo. It tells the story, he says, of a man who knew his fate but who, quite literally, refused to flinch.
On the day in early July when Clyburn and I talked, Barack Obama, who is the same age as one of Clyburn’s three daughters, had recently clinched his party’s nomination for president. Clyburn, who as majority whip is the highest-ranking black elected official in Washington, told me that on the night of the final primaries he left the National Democratic Club down the street about 15 minutes before Obama was scheduled to speak and returned home to watch by himself. He feared he might lose hold of his emotions.
“Here we are, all of a sudden, in the 60th year after Strom Thurmond bolting the Democratic Party over a simple thing, something almost unheard of — because he did not want the armed forces to be integrated,” Clyburn said slowly. “Here we are 45 years after the ‘I have a dream’ speech. Forty years after the assassinations of Kennedy and King. And this party that I have been a part of for so long, this party that has been accused of taking black people for granted, is about to deliver the nomination for the nation’s highest office to an African-American. How do you describe that? All those days in jail cells, wondering if anything you were doing was even going to have an impact.” He shook his head silently.
This time, however, a lot of the old activists stood in the path of an African-American’s advancement rather than blazing it. While Democratic black voters embraced Obama by ratios of 8 or 9 to 1 in a lot of districts, the 42 House members in the Congressional Black Caucus, for a time, split more or less down the middle between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the country’s leading black ministers and mayors trended toward the Clinton camp. Clyburn himself declined until the very end to endorse a candidate in this year’s primaries, saying that his leadership role required him to remain neutral, but he made no effort to disguise his relief at having been able to invoke that excuse. “Being African-American, sure, my heart was with him,” Clyburn told me. “But I’ve got a head too. And in the beginning my head was with Clinton. The conventional wisdom was that this thing was going to be over in February.”
He then recalled a moment, just after the Georgia primary in early February, when he ran into John Lewis, the legendary civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, on the House floor. Lewis was in anguish over the primaries. He had endorsed his friend Hillary Clinton, but his constituents had gone heavily for Obama, and he was beginning to waver. As Clyburn remembered it, Lewis told his old friend sadly that after all these years, they were finally going to see history yield to the forces they had unleashed. “And I’m on the wrong side,” Lewis said. (Later, after weeks of public vacillating, he would switch his allegiance.)
It is hard for any outsider to fully understand the thinking that led many older black leaders to spurn the candidacy of a man who is now routinely pictured, along with ’60s-era revolutionaries like Angela Davis and Malcolm X, on the T-shirts sold at the street-corner kiosks of black America. (“You’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it,” the comedian Chris Rock joked to a Harlem audience while introducing Obama last November. “You’d say: ‘Aww, I can’t call him now! I had that white lady! What was I thinking?’ ”) Conversations like those I had with Clyburn and Lewis, however, begin to illuminate just how emotionally complicated such internal deliberations were.
On a surface level, those who backed Clinton did so largely out of a combination of familiarity and fatalism. If you were a longtime black leader or activist at the end of 2007, you probably believed, based on your own life experience, that no black man was going to win the nomination, let alone the presidency. (“If anybody tells you they expected this result, they’re not being honest with you,” Clyburn cautioned.) You knew the Clintons personally, or at least you knew their allies in the community. Who was this Obama, really, aside from the resonant voice and the neon smile? As Charles Rangel, Harlem’s powerful representative and a strong Clinton ally, told me recently, “Of course I would support someone I knew and had liked and had worked with, versus someone I’d never heard of.”
But maybe it wasn’t only what you didn’t know about Obama. What did he know about you? Obama was barely 2 years old when King gave his famous speech, 3 when Lewis was beaten about the head in Selma. He didn’t grow up in the segregated South as Bill Clinton had. Sharing those experiences wasn’t a prerequisite for gaining the acceptance of black leaders, necessarily, but that didn’t mean Obama, with his nice talk of transcending race and baby-boomer partisanship, could fully appreciate the sacrifices they made, either. “Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through,” Rangel says, “and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.”
For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next— those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after — have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” In any community shadowed by oppression, pride and bitterness can be hard to untangle.
The generational transition that is reordering black politics didn’t start this year. It has been happening, gradually and quietly, for at least a decade, as younger African-Americans, Barack Obama among them, have challenged their elders in traditionally black districts. What this year’s Democratic nomination fight did was to accelerate that transition and thrust it into the open as never before, exposing and intensifying friction that was already there. For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle — to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.
“I’m the new black politics,” says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. “The people I work with are the new black politics. We don’t carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but that’s just the way it is.
“I don’t want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here,” Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. “Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He’s the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that.
“But it’s like watching something that you’ve been working on all your life sort of come together right before your eyes, and you can’t see it,” Belcher said. “It’s like you’ve been building the Great Wall of China, and you finally put that last stone in. And you can’t see it. You just can’t see the enormity of it.”
The latest evidence of tension between Obama and some older black leaders burst onto cable television last month, after an open microphone on Fox News picked up the Rev. Jesse Jackson crudely making the point that he wouldn’t mind personally castrating his party’s nominee. The reverend was angry because Obama, in a Father’s Day speech on Chicago’s South Side, chastised black fathers for shirking their responsibilities. To Jackson, this must have sounded a lot like a presidential candidate polishing his bona fides with white Americans at the expense of black ones — something he himself steadfastly refused to do even during his second presidential run in 1988, when he captured more votes than anyone thought possible.
Most of the coverage of this minor flap dwelled on the possible animus between Jackson and Obama, despite the fact that Obama himself, who is not easily distracted, seemed genuinely unperturbed by it. But more interesting, perhaps, was the public reaction of Jesse Jackson Jr., the reverend’s 43-year-old son, who is a congressman from Illinois and the national co-chairman of Obama’s campaign. The younger Jackson released a blistering statement in which he said he was “deeply outraged and disappointed” by the man he referred to, a little icily, as “Reverend Jackson.” Invoking his father’s most famous words, Jesse Jr. concluded, “He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”
This exchange between the two Jacksons hinted at a basic generational divide on the question of what black leadership actually means. Black leaders who rose to political power in the years after the civil rights marches came almost entirely from the pulpit and the movement, and they have always defined leadership, in broad terms, as speaking for black Americans. They saw their job, principally, as confronting an inherently racist white establishment, which in terms of sheer career advancement was their only real option anyway. For almost every one of the talented black politicians who came of age in the postwar years, like James Clyburn and Charles Rangel, the pinnacle of power, if you did everything right, lay in one of two offices: City Hall or the House of Representatives. That was as far as you could travel in politics with a mostly black constituency. Until the 1990s, even black politicians with wide support among white voters failed in their attempts to win statewide, with only one exception (Edward Brooke, who was elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1966). On a national level, only Jesse Jackson was able to garner a respectable number of white votes, muscling open the door through which Obama, 20 years later, would breezily pass.
This newly emerging class of black politicians, however, men (and a few women) closer in age to Obama and Jesse Jr., seek a broader political brief. Comfortable inside the establishment, bred at universities rather than seminaries, they are just as likely to see themselves as ambassadors to the black community as they are to see themselves as spokesmen for it, which often means extolling middle-class values in urban neighborhoods, as Obama did on Father’s Day. Their ambitions range well beyond safely black seats.
Artur Davis, an Alabama representative and one of the most talked-about young talents on Capitol Hill, recently told me a story about his first campaign for Congress, in 2000, when he challenged the longtime black incumbent Earl Hilliard. Davis was only 32 at the time, a federal prosecutor who graduated from Harvard Law School, and he saw Hilliard as the classic example of a passing political model — a guy who saw himself principally as a spokesman for the community rather than as an actual legislator.
After a debate in which Davis pounded the incumbent for being out of touch with the district, Hilliard took him aside. “Young man, you have a good political future,” Davis recalled Hilliard telling him. “But you’ve got to learn one basic lesson. You’re trying to start at the top, and you can’t start at the top in politics.”
“With all due respect, Congressman,” Davis replied, “I don’t think a group with 435 members can be the top of anything.”
Davis lost that race, but he won in a rematch two years later. Now he’s weighing a run for governor.
One telling difference between black representatives of Davis’s generation and the more senior set in Washington is how they initially viewed the role of race in this year’s primaries. Older members of the Congressional Black Caucus assumed, well into the primary season, that a black candidate wouldn’t be able to win in predominantly white states. This, after all, had been their lifelong experience in politics. Not only did Davis, who grew up in post-segregation Montgomery and supported Obama, reject this view, but he also wouldn’t concede when we talked that Obama’s race was, on balance, a detriment.
“Race was a factor in the contest between Obama and Clinton,” he told me. “There’s no question race will be a factor with Obama and McCain. But I’m not sure it plays out as neatly as people think. There’s no question that some young cohort of white voters were drawn to Obama because they like the idea of a break with the past. A young, white politician from Illinois might not have gotten that support. So race probably cost Obama some votes. And it probably won him some votes. That’s the complex reality we’re living in.”
When I met last month with Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark who at 39 is already something of a national sensation, he told me that he had just finished reading, belatedly, Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father.” He said passages about Obama’s youth in Hawaii had reminded him of his own experience with subtle racism in the affluent, mostly white suburb of Harrington Park, N.J. “You know, what it’s like growing up every single day and having people ask to touch your hair because they’ve never seen hair like that,” Booker said. “To have the entire class laugh and giggle when somebody pronounces ‘Niger’ as ‘nigger.’ The constant bombardment of that kind of thing really affects your spirit, and it’s every single day. Like when people want to come back from a vacation and compare their tan to yours and joke about being black.”
No doubt these were searing experiences for Booker, and I had to wince as he ticked them off, recognizing too much of myself and my white classmates from the 1980s in the imagery. But as Booker himself noted, they are a world away from the reality that was pounded into civil rights activists like his parents, to whom racism meant dogs and hoses and segregated schools and luncheonettes. You can imagine what James Clyburn — still haunted by the vivid memory of the moment he found out that his erudite father had never been allowed to graduate from high school — would make of the lifelong trauma caused by suburban kids asking to feel your hair.
A Rhodes scholar who graduated from Stanford and Yale Law, Booker won his office in 2006 after first running unsuccessfully in 2002 against the incumbent, Sharpe James, who governed Newark for an astounding 20 years (and was sentenced last month to prison time on federal corruption charges). James was the very model of the Black Power mayor, a defiant spokesman for his community and a deft conjurer of America’s racial demons. James derided Booker as a suburban outsider and questioned his blackness. (“You have to learn how to be African-American,” James said in a speech directed at Booker, “and we don’t have time to train you.”) Booker famously took up residence in a city housing project, but his relationship to Newark’s black community was, and still is, more tenuous and complicated than his predecessor’s.
When I asked Booker if he considered himself a leader of the black community, he seemed to freeze for a moment. “I’m Popeye,” he replied finally. “I am what I am.” He paused again, then tried to explain.
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” he said. “I don’t want people to expect me to speak about those issues.” By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. “I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.” Since the mayor of Newark is rarely called upon to discuss such topics, I got the feeling that Booker does not see himself staying in his current job for anything close to 20 years. “I don’t want to be the person that’s turned to when CNN talks about black leaders,” he said.
Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn’t really to “transcend race.” Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn’t have to obscure his racial identity.
“So Obama’s the first one out there on the ice,” Booker told me. “This campaign is giving other African-Americans like myself the courage to be themselves.”
Given this generational perspective, it is easy to understand why Obama’s candidacy was greeted coolly by much of Washington’s black elite. Obama joined the Congressional Black Caucus when he arrived in 2005, but he attended meetings only sporadically, and it must have been obvious that he never felt he belonged. In part, this was probably because he was the group’s only senator and thus had little daily interaction with his colleagues in the House. But to hear those close to Obama tell it, it was also because, like Booker and other younger black politicians, he simply wasn’t comfortable categorizing his politics by race. One main function of the black caucus is to raise money through events, because many of the members represent poorer districts. Obama, already a best-selling author by the time he was sworn in, should have been a huge fund-raising draw, but he never showed much interest in headlining caucus events, and he was rarely asked.
Jesse Jackson Jr. warned his colleagues in the black caucus of the risks of shunning Obama’s candidacy, reminding them of the political aftermath of Jesse Jackson Sr.’s campaigns in the 1980s. Back then, too, most black Congressional Democrats sided with the white presidential candidates, and Jackson carried many of their districts in 1984 and virtually all of them in 1988, driving up voter registration in the process. A result, over the next few election cycles, was a flurry of primary challenges, the retirement or defeat of several incumbents and the arrival in Washington of a new class of black congressmen, including James Clyburn. Jackson’s message was clear: even if Obama lost, there could be a cost for opposing him.
Still, most in the caucus didn’t take Obama all that seriously as a potential nominee, and neither did the Clinton campaign. They calculated that he would need a huge share of black votes to wrest the nomination from Hillary, and her advisers, white and black, considered that a near impossibility. “There was an arrogance and a complete dismissiveness in our campaign against Obama, that he was a lightweight, that he couldn’t get black support,” one senior Clinton aide told me recently. “A lot of the black leaders didn’t know him, didn’t think he was black enough, didn’t think he was of the civil rights movement.” This point about whether Obama was “black enough,” a senseless distinction to most white voters, came up often in my discussions. It referred to the perception among some black leaders that not only had Obama not shared their generational experience, but also that he hadn’t shared the African-American experience, period. Obama’s father was a Kenyan academic; his family came to America on scholarship, not in chains.
Internally, Clinton’s strategists set a goal of receiving half the black vote in the Southern primaries, though they calculated that they needed as little as 30 percent in order to beat back Obama. It seemed like a sure bet. Last fall, as the primaries neared, their own polls had them winning more than 60 percent of black voters.
Within hours of Obama’s victory in Iowa, however, Clinton’s black support began to crumble. Black voters, young and old, simply hadn’t believed that a black man could win in white states; when he did, a wave of pride swept through African-American neighborhoods in the South. Nor did those voters apparently have the deep affection for Hillary Clinton that many of their ministers and local pols did. Carol Willis, a Clinton aide from the Arkansas days who was leading the campaign’s outreach to black voters, told me, “I always heard people saying: ‘I know Bill Clinton. I don’t know Hillary Clinton. So I’ll give Barack Obama a closer hearing.’ ” Internal polling in both campaigns after Iowa showed Obama suddenly garnering closer to 75 or 80 percent of the black vote in primary states.
From then on, the Democratic nomination fight sometimes took on the feel of one of those contentious diversity workshops, with every word parsed for its racial undertone and every emotion rising to the surface. What did Bill Clinton mean by “naïve” and “fairy tale”? Was it an accident that Hillary Clinton used the word “spadework” to deride her opponent’s record? Clyburn and Bill Clinton had long and tense phone conversations because of several comments the former president had made. The one that bothered Clyburn the most, he told me, came when he read in a South Carolina newspaper that Clinton had referred to Obama as a “kid.” “I grew up in the South, where men like Barack Obama, who right now is older than Bill Clinton was when he ran for president, were called ‘boy,’ ” Clyburn told me. “And that’s what a kid is — a boy.” The most damaging moment for Bill Clinton, though, came just after the South Carolina primary, when he waved away the victory by comparing it with Jesse Jackson’s wins there in 1984 and 1988. “There was something about the condescension on his face when he said it and the dismissiveness in his voice,” Artur Davis recalled. “It was a verbal pat on the head.”
In March, shaken by the persistent controversy over comments pulled from the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an icon in Chicago’s black community and Obama’s former pastor, Obama gave his now famous speech on race. It was aimed, for the most part, at reassuring white voters over the Wright controversy, but it also marked the first time that he publicly addressed the generational divide his own campaign had exposed among black Americans. “For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation,” Obama said, “the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and bitterness of those years. . . . At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines or to make up for a politician’s own failings.” Some older black politicians may have recognized themselves in Obama’s subtle criticism, but those I spoke to said they took pride in seeing a black candidate articulate their experience to white America.
A lot of black incumbents who supported Clinton now find themselves trying to explain how they ended up so disconnected from their constituents, and many are preparing for their strongest primary challenges in years. (In a primary last month, John Lewis, who had run unopposed since 1992, had to beat not one but two primary opponents, including a 31-year-old minister named Markel Hutchins who designed his campaign to look just like Obama’s, right down to renting the same office space and using a red, white and blue logo in the shape of an “O.”) So far, incumbents facing insurrection over their endorsements of Clinton have easily dispatched their challengers, leading to a collective exhalation inside the black caucus in Washington. But then, as Jesse Jackson Jr. tried to remind his colleagues, the history of black politics is that such challengers are often heard from again.
On the first Tuesday in July, I traveled to Philadelphia, the site of Obama’s landmark speech on race, to see the city’s mayor, Michael Nutter. Known as a reformer during a 14-year stint on the City Council, Nutter played a central and intriguing role in this year’s presidential contest, emerging as the black face of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Pennsylvania at a time when she desperately needed — and got — a solid victory in the state. Nutter certainly wasn’t the only visible black politician to campaign for Clinton deep into the primary season, but he was, in some ways, the least likely. Nutter is only four years older than Obama, Ivy League-educated, bookish and doggedly unemotional. He is, in short, the very prototype of the new generation of black political stars. But unlike Cory Booker or Artur Davis or Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, Nutter sided with Clinton, and he enthusiastically campaigned for her.
I was curious to know whether Nutter, who was elected to a four-year term just last fall, was bracing for the consequences of that decision. About 9 of every 10 black voters in Philadelphia pulled the lever for Obama, according to exit polls, and I heard at least one black Obama backer in Washington vow to make Nutter pay for his apostasy. On the day that I visited him at City Hall, his aides had been reviewing the video of a sermon from last fall in which a prominent black minister in the city suggested that Nutter might have a “white agenda.”
It was late in the day when Nutter and I sat down at a long conference table in his office, accompanied by the sounds of subway trains rumbling underneath and R & B music piped in from mounted speakers. He told me that he had made his decision methodically and had felt no pressure at all from his constituents.
Nutter said he sat down with both Clinton and Obama after his election as mayor and quizzed them about urban issues like housing, education and transportation. Race, he said, hadn’t entered into this thinking. He understood, he said, why the prospect of a black president after hundreds of years of discrimination was “powerful stuff” for a lot of his constituents, but he had a greater responsibility, and that was to run the nation’s sixth-largest city. “In the context of what I do for a living, I’ve not figured out a black or white way to fill a pothole,” he said, in a way that made me think he had said this many times before. Nutter was a delegate for Bill Clinton way back in 1992, and he said that the former first lady had shown a “depth of understanding” of what cities like Philadelphia were facing. It probably didn’t hurt that Obama endorsed one of Nutter’s opponents in last year’s mayoral primary, either.
Nutter said he wasn’t bothered by comments that the Clintons or their surrogates made during the campaign that had so incensed other black officials. “I think there was a lot of sensitivity, some warranted and some unwarranted,” he said. “It’s based on your life experience, and it’s generational. You know, if you have a sore on your arm, you don’t necessarily have to touch the sore to feel the pain. You can touch another part of your arm. You’ve still got a certain sensitivity to it. So if race is the sensitive thing, then anything that even gets close to it — sounds like it, looks like it, feels like it — is it.”
I asked Nutter if, during his private conversations with Obama early in the campaign, the subject of race and the historic nature of his candidacy came up. He stared at me for a moment. “Um, I knew he was black,” he said finally. “I’d really kind of picked up on that.”
Later, when I mentioned that it could be hard for a white journalist to understand all of the nuances of race, he looked over at his press secretary, who is black, and interrupted me. “He’s not black?” Nutter deadpanned, motioning back at me. “You guys told me it was a skin condition. I thought I was talking to a brother.” Nutter is known to have a dry sense of humor, but I also had the sense that he was tweaking me in these moments, watching with some amusement as I tried to navigate subjects that white and black Americans rarely discuss together. He seemed to think I was oddly preoccupied with race.
In fact, Nutter seemed puzzled by the very notion that he should be expected to support a candidate just because they both had dark skin. “Look, I never asked anybody to be for me because I was black,” he said. “I asked people to be for me because I thought I was the best candidate when I ran for City Council and when I ran for mayor. I’m proud of the votes I received. I’m proud I received the votes of the majority of the African-American community and the majority of the vote from the white community. But I never asked anybody to give me anything because I was black. I asked people to give me a chance because I thought I was the best.”
For most black Americans, Obama’s candidacy represented a kind of racial milestone, the natural next phase of a 50-year movement. But for Michael Nutter, the reverse was also true: not supporting Obama’s candidacy marked a kind of progress, too. The movement, after all, was about the freedom to choose your own candidate, white or black. In a sense, you could argue that it was Nutter — and not those black politicians who embraced Obama because they so closely identified with his racial experience — who represented the truest embodiment of Obama-ism. Here, perhaps, was a genuine postracial politician, even if that meant being, as John Lewis put it, on the wrong side of history.
I asked Nutter if he found it insulting to have me come barging into his office, demanding to know why he didn’t pick the black guy.
“It’s not insulting,” he answered. “It’s presumptuous. It demonstrates a continuation of this notion that the African-American community, unlike any other, is completely monolithic, that everyone in the African-American community does the same thing in lockstep, in contrast to any other group. I mean, I don’t remember seeing John Kerry on TV and anybody saying to him, ‘I can’t believe you’re not for Hillary Clinton.’ Why?”
It’s inspiring to hear Michael Nutter say that governing a city isn’t about race, that there’s no black or white way to fill a pothole. And yet, it’s also true that in any given American city there are likely to be more potholes in black neighborhoods than in white ones — along with more violence, more unemployment and more illiteracy. Having grown up in West Philadelphia, Nutter knows well that while the decisions he makes as a mayor have no racial antecedents, rarely do they affect the races equally. “The challenge there is never forgetting where you came from,” he told me. “So, yes, I am mayor of all Philadelphia, but I am quite well aware of, and raise on a regular basis, the fact that the majority of people who are killed in Philadelphia are African-American, that the overwhelming majority of people who have health-care challenges are African-American, that education has tremendous disparity gaps. Unemployment, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, housing — all affect the African-American community at a disproportionate level as opposed to everyone else.”
In this way, post-Black Power politicians like Nutter and Booker embody the principal duality of modern black America. On one hand, they are the most visible examples of the highly educated, entrepreneurial and growing black middle class that cultural markers like “The Cosby Show” first introduced to white Americans in the 1980s. According to an analysis by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, almost 37 percent of black families fell into one of the three top income quintiles in 2005, compared with 23 percent in 1973. At the same time, though, these black leaders are constantly confronted in their own cities and districts by blighted neighborhoods that are predominately black, places where poverty collects like standing water, breeding a host of social contagions.
That both of these trend lines can exist at once poses some difficult questions for black leaders and institutions. Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the evils and objectives were relatively clear: there were discriminatory laws in place that denied black Americans their rights as citizens, and the goal was to get those laws repealed and to pass more progressive federal legislation at the same time. You marched and you rallied and — if you had the bravery of a James Clyburn or a John Lewis — you endured blows to the head and to the spirit, and eventually the barriers started to fall. Things become more complicated, and more confounding, however, when those legal barriers no longer exist and when millions of black Americans are catapulting themselves to success. Now the inequities in the society are subtler — inferior schools, an absence of employers, a dearth of affordable housing — and the remedies more elusive.
This confusion over the direction of the movement has all but immobilized the nation’s premier civil rights group, the N.A.A.C.P. Synonymous with the long journey toward racial equality since its founding by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in 1909, the organization has, in recent years, lost much of its cachet with younger black Americans. In 2005, the N.A.A.C.P.’s unwieldy 64-member board hired Bruce Gordon, a former Verizon executive, to retool the organization. Gordon’s premise was that civil rights was no longer simply about protesting discrimination — that African-Americans were now stymied not only by institutional barriers but also by conditions in their communities. He proposed that a new N.A.A.C.P step into this breach, organizing services that might include SAT prep classes or training for new parents. He also created a new class of online members who didn’t have to pay any dues, adding more than 100,000 members to a group whose paying membership had declined, in Gordon’s estimate, to under 300,000.
Gordon’s agenda was always controversial among the N.A.A.C.P.’s board members (“Most of them are older than me,” the 62-year-old Gordon told me), and after a little more than 19 months in the job, Gordon resigned. In May, after a highly contentious process that divided the board once again, the N.A.A.C.P. hired the youngest president in its history, 35-year-old Benjamin Todd Jealous, the chosen candidate of Julian Bond, the civil rights leader and the N.A.A.C.P.’s board chairman.
You might expect Jealous, a native of mostly white Monterey County, Calif., and a Rhodes scholar, to have shared the racial experience of other emerging black leaders. But generational lines are rarely that neatly drawn, and when we met for breakfast on Independence Day, I was surprised to find that Jealous spoke about race not like Booker or Nutter but much like his heroes of an earlier era. The N.A.A.C.P.’s main job, he told me, was to be the place where African-Americans could turn when institutional racism assaulted their communities. He mentioned the racially charged arrests of six black teenagers in Jena, La., in 2006, as well as the suspicious death, just a few days earlier, of an accused cop killer in his suburban Maryland jail cell.
“It’s still a human rights struggle,” Jealous told me. “This isn’t a struggle that began in the 1930s or 1960s. It’s a struggle that began in 1620. It’s a struggle against slavery and its children.”
Jealous’s main difficulty in rejuvenating the N.A.A.C.P., though, may have less to do with the racist power structure than with a new class of black competitors online. And in this way, what’s happening among the black grass roots mirrors what’s been happening in the Democratic Party over the last several years, as loyalty to institutions and leaders has given way to a noisy conversation about how to better hold them accountable. A new generation of black activists is now focused on reforming institutions, namely the Congressional Black Caucus and the N.A.A.C.P., that they say have become too mired in the past and too removed from their constituents. And as in the rest of the political world, this rebellion is happening on the Internet, driven by ordinary Americans with laptops and a surprising amount of free time.
“The African-American voting population is very much online,” Cheryl Contee, who in 2006 helped found the blog Jack and Jill Politics, told me. Contee, who is an owner of a digital consulting business, blogs under the pseudonym Jill Tubman, and hers is one of a number of sites that have emerged in just the last year as part of what’s often called the “Afrosphere.” “One of the things I talk to clients about is that the digital divide has changed,” Contee said. “It’s no longer along racial lines like it was in 1996 and 2000. Now it’s more economic and educational.” In other words, after lagging for a time, college-educated African-Americans are now organizing online in the same way as their mostly white counterparts at Daily Kos and MoveOn.org started doing several years ago.
One of most vibrant voices in this debate belongs to Color of Change, a Web site designed to replicate the MoveOn model among black Web surfers. Two Bay Area activists, Van Jones and James Rucker, founded Color of Change in 2005, a week after the images of devastated black neighborhoods began streaming back from New Orleans. The group now boasts about 425,000 members, about half of whom are white. The bulk of the membership is between the ages of 35 and 55 and probably falls into the categories of middle class or affluent — in other words, the very people who were once the N.A.A.C.P.’s base of support. Those members pay no dues but contributed about $250,000 during a three-month period in 2007 to pay the legal fees of the defendants in Jena.
As in the liberal online community at large, there is not a lot of ideological coherence among the emerging “black roots.” There is no clear action plan for how to bridge the divide between middle-class black families and the millions left behind, aside from the same basic antiwar, anticorporate ethos that permeates the rest of the digital left. But there is a strong sense that the leaders of the civil rights generation need some kind of retirement plan, and soon. “Victims don’t make things happen,” says Rucker, who previously worked for MoveOn. “Things are changing from where they were 30 years ago. The fights are changing. And you have an infrastructure that’s not producing results. Look at the incarceration rates, the difference between whites and blacks. What are the old organizations accomplishing?”
Most of all, the black roots make it clear to elected officials and civil rights advocates that being black doesn’t, by itself, make you a leader. Online activists have attacked the Congressional Black Caucus for, among other things, standing by William Jefferson, the black representative accused of stuffing a freezer with cash bribes. They have harshly criticized several caucus members, some for having endorsed Clinton and others, like Artur Davis, for not being sufficiently liberal. Some bloggers went after the Rev. Al Sharpton and the N.A.A.C.P. for reflexively coming to the defense of four black teenagers in West Palm Beach who were charged with taking part in an unusually horrific rape of a mother and her 12-year-old son. (Sharpton and the local N.A.A.C.P. claimed that the boys were being treated differently from accused white rapists in a separate case, who were freed on bail.) Color of Change claims to have raised more than $10,000 and some 50 volunteers for Donna Edwards’s successful Web-supported primary campaign against Representative Albert Wynn, a black incumbent who voted for the Iraq war.
“There are some members who need to go or to update and be accountable,” Rucker told me. “It’s not about getting rid of the N.A.A.C.P. or our members of Congress. It’s just wanting to be proud of our leaders.”
For some black operatives in the Clinton orbit — people who have functioned, going back to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the 1980s, as Democratic Washington’s liaisons to black America — the fallout from an Obama victory would likely be profound. “Some of them will have to walk the plank,” an Obama adviser told me bluntly. In their place, an Obama administration would empower a cadre of younger black advisers who would instantly become people to see in Washington’s transactional culture. Chief among them is Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago real estate developer who is one of Barack and Michelle Obama’s closest friends. “She’s poised to be one of the most influential people in politics, and particularly among African-Americans in politics,” Belcher told me. “She may be the next Vernon Jordan.” In fact, the last time I saw Clyburn, he told me he had just spent two and a half hours at breakfast with Jarrett.
Then there are operatives like Belcher himself; Michael Strautmanis, Obama’s former chief counsel and de facto younger brother, who first met Michelle Obama when he was working as a paralegal at her law firm; Matthew Nugen, a political aide who is Obama’s point man for the Democratic convention; and Paul Brathwaite, a 37-year-old lobbyist who used to be the executive director of the black caucus and who might act as a bridge between black congressmen and an Obama White House.
Should they win in November, Obama and these new advisers will confront an unfamiliar conundrum in American politics, which is how to be president of the United States and, by default, the most powerful voice in black America at the same time. Several black operatives and politicians with whom I spoke worried, eloquently, that an Obama presidency might actually leave black Americans less well represented in Washington rather than more so — that, in fact, the end of black politics, if that is what we are witnessing, might also mean the precipitous decline of black influence.
The argument here is that a President Obama, closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment, would have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice. What’s more, his very presence in the Rose Garden might undermine the already tenuous case for affirmative action in hiring and school admissions. Obama himself has offered only tepid support for a policy that surely helped enable him to reach this moment. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote: “Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing America to make investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school — a goal that, if met, would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it the most.”
Then there are the issues that Ben Jealous and others might raise: black men incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men, black joblessness more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. Just talking about such disparities as systemic problems could be harder for an African-American president — for any African-American, really — than it was before. “If Obama is president, it will no longer be tenable to go to the white community and say you’ve been victimized,” Artur Davis told me. “And I understand the poverty and the condition of black America and the 39 percent unemployment rate in some communities. I understand that. But if you go out to the country and say you’ve been victimized by the white community, while Barack Obama and Michelle and their kids are living in the White House, you will be shut off from having any influence.”
As a candidate, Obama has outlined an agenda for “civil rights and criminal justice,” aimed primarily at urban African-Americans. His platform includes refocusing the Justice Department on hate crimes, banning racial profiling by federal law-enforcement agencies and reforming mandatory minimum sentences (which disproportionately affect black men, especially those convicted on crack-cocaine charges). Obama’s black advisers caution, however, that no one should expect him to behave like a civil rights leader, marching alongside Al Sharpton to protest the next Jena or putting black causes ahead of anyone else’s. “It’s a very interesting question, but as a black person, you should feel confident that he will focus on your injustices and know that all the other injustices in other communities affect you too,” Valerie Jarrett told me. “There have been wounds in all the communities, not just in the black community. There are plenty of wounds to go around.”
If there is any American who can offer a glimpse of what it would be like for Obama as president, it’s probably Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. While most of the younger black politicians know one another only from the occasional encounter or phone call, Patrick and Obama shared a cup of coffee, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, in the mid-1990s and developed a close friendship. (The senator even borrowed some of Patrick’s oratory during the primaries, which led the Clinton camp to charge plagiarism.) Patrick was Coca-Cola’s general counsel and the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration before he became, in 2006, only the second black man to be elected governor in American history, following L. Douglas Wilder in Virginia in 1989.
When we talked recently, Patrick explained for me some of the inherent pressures that come with being a black executive in a state with a history of friction among the races. “You’re constantly tested by a whole host of factors to see whether you’re speaking for the entire Commonwealth or just for one community,” Patrick told me. “I don’t fit in any box, and I think that’s what the electorate has had to learn about me.”
Black ministers were slow to embrace Patrick after he supported gay marriage as a candidate and refused to back down. After a black child was shot and killed in Boston last year, Patrick told me, he sent a note to the family and prepared to attend the funeral service, but relatives held a news conference at which they criticized him for not coming by to pay his respects. (Patrick later grew close to the family.) I remarked that it was usually the city’s mayor who was expected to comfort victims of urban crime.
“Yes, but it’s not good enough for me to have the reaction that you just did, to say I’m the governor, not the mayor,” Patrick told me. “They expect more.” In other words, he was expected not only to be a governor but also to fill the traditional role of the black politician — that of spokesman, minister and conduit to the white establishment.
Patrick and I spoke just a week after Jesse Jackson was caught wishing Obama bodily harm. “You wouldn’t believe how many times in the last few days people have stuck microphones in my face to ask my opinion about Jesse Jackson’s comments,” he said, sounding a little exasperated. He had declined to offer one. “I don’t have to be the black oracle,” Patrick told me. “All I have to be is as good a human being and as good a governor as I can be, and the rest will take care of itself.” If Obama’s day comes, he might want to think about borrowing those words too.
Matt Bai, who covers politics for the magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”
Coltrane: The story of a sound. By Ben Ratliff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007
Book Review
By Kofi Natambu
"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.” ---Amiri Baraka , "Jazz and the White Critic," (1963)
“I am not playing “Jazz.” I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people…” --Duke Ellington (1930)
“I recognize an individual when I see his contribution; and when I know a man’s sound, well, to me that’s him, that’s the man. That’s the way I look at it. Labels I don’t bother with,” --John Coltrane (1966)
This is a curiously schizophrenic, self-serving, and ultimately shallow book. On the one hand it proposes to provide readers with a broad general outline of the ‘artistic history’ of John Coltrane’s career and on the other critically examine his ongoing impact and influence, musical and extramusical, on both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of musicians since his early death at the age of forty in 1967.
Throughout, the author--Ben Ratliff, Jazz critic for the New York Times—engages in a highly digressive running commentary on what he thinks Coltrane’s career as player, composer, and cultural avatar means to the history of Jazz and to our understanding and appreciation of an individual American aesthetic and cultural icon.
However, these otherwise laudable, useful, and intriguing ambitions are seriously marred by Ratliff’s intellectually reductive presumptions about both the music he proposes to critique and examine and the cultural philosophy of the individual creative personality he wants to portray. The major source of Ratliff’s analytical flaws and blind spots (which are considerable) lies with his studied quasi-philosophical over-reliance and even lazy intellectual dependency on an empirical framework that consistently reduces profound and unsettling questions of aesthetic, cultural and expressive identity and philosophy to almost rudimentary descriptions and examinations of the largely academic categories of style, formal structure, method, and technique(s). Thus we are treated to quite a bit of admittedly lucid but predominately expository writing about how and why Coltrane’s music differs in cosmetic terms from that of other musical styles, traditions, forms, and genres in Western music particularly of the United States and Europe. However, the much broader and more specific historical, social, cultural, ideological, economic, and political contexts of Coltrane’s music (and persona) as it was actually created, produced, marketed, distributed and consumed in the society he and his music lived/lives in is either ignored or given very short shrift in Ratliff’s analysis.
Ratliff’s annoying and often condescending tendency to churlishly dismiss or discount the significance of the central historical roles that political economy, racism, and most importantly, competing cultural and aesthetic philosophies have played and continue to play in both the creative and social ecosphere of Jazz is a major weakness in a book that almost coyly demands that we accept, if not embrace, its highly problematic fundamental premises. These premises are the following: That Coltrane was not primarily interested in expressing and supporting creatively provocative ideas and values per se but in obsessively pursuing matters of craft, stylistic expression, and technical prowess; that Coltrane was not really interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of what he was playing or the form and content of the highly varied reactions of audiences to what he was playing and why; that the 1960s ‘black power’ movement had a negative or distorting effect on the study, appreciation, and understanding of what the complex musical evolution known as “late Coltrane” (1965-1967) meant to the artist and black and white American audiences alike. And that to fully grasp what Coltrane finally accomplished or was trying to do in his work one had to surrender to a romantic aesthetic notion rooted in the 19th century and later promulgated in the 20th century by the late modernist poet Robert Lowell (an aesthetic theory Ratliff suggestively paraphrases and appropriates for a historically different artistic and cultural context) that Coltrane and his music represented and embodied the “monotony of the sublime” found in other radical forms of American art making. Further Ratliff asserts that Coltrane was making a music of “his interior cosmos” and was finally consumed by a music of “meditation and chant” in the last years after December 1964 (and the pivotal appearance of Coltrane’s magnum opus composition suite ‘A Love Supreme’) until his death in July, 1967.
What Ratliff also fails to address and seriously investigate is the complex and varied receptions of, and responses to, this music by other musicians and the larger listening audience meant in terms of the history of Jazz up until the late 1960s (and by implication ever afterward). While Ratliff readily acknowledges and broadly surveys the intense chaotic volatility of art, society, and culture of that era (and Coltrane’s important, even mythic, participation in it) what he fails to provide is an informed analytical and theoretical critique of precisely why Coltrane, Jazz in general, and the larger society remained in a dire and fundamental conflict over what role the concept of “art” and its various uses and identities should or could be in the music. At one point Ratliff even mentions that as far as he knew Coltrane had never publicly used or uttered the word ‘art’ to describe what his music was about. I was hoping that Ratliff would subsequently examine what he thought this fact meant to his general analysis of Jazz as a musical aesthetic in the post-WWII period, but he simply chalked it up to Coltrane’s tendency toward verbal reticence in publicly talking about his music in openly intellectual terms and his personal indifference to categorical labeling. The result is a book that manages to raise important and previously neglected questions about the specific nature and identity of Coltrane’s work and his profound contributions to American music, while at the same time almost willfully refusing to take any discernible theoretical or ideological position(s) on what Ratliff himself as critic and historian thought Coltrane’s music and reputation represents.
It is Ratliff’s failure to seriously confront and intellectually engage the previously published critical literature on both Coltrane and Jazz of the 1955-1970 era that is most disapointing. Among this rather extensive body of texts is very important work by a number of African American intellectuals, historians, and critics like Dr. C.O. Simpkins (who wrote a major book on Coltrane as early as 1975—which Ratliff himself even curiously acknowledges as “one of the best Coltrane biographies” and then proceeds to say not one more word about), the late James Stewart who wrote a number of powerful and influential essays on Jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s, Bill Cole, prominent ethnomusicologist and former Professor of Music at Dartmouth College who wrote a seminal musical biography on Coltrane in 1976, the extraordinary poet and cultural historian A.B. Spellman, author of one of the most prescient books ever published on black avant-garde music ‘Four Lives in the BeBop Business’ (later titled ‘Black Music: Four Lives) in 1966, and finally one of the leading Jazz critics and historians in the entire modern canon of 20th century Jazz literature, the legendary poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones). It is especially revealing that when Ratliff does briefly mention Baraka’s work (he quotes part of a poem by him on Coltrane and also a small segment from an essay on Black nationalism in his art) he doesn’t really focus on Baraka as a music critic; rather he summarizes in a couple sentences what Baraka’s fundamental stance was in the late 1960s on the cultural and social uses and function of what black art is or could be. But tellingly Ratliff does not talk about or examine Baraka’s major Jazz criticism of this period (1964-1967) qua criticism. This omission is not merely incidental but goes to the heart of what Ratliff refuses to deal with generally in his text: the larger meaning of the contentious discourse raging then and now over what Coltrane and the so-called ‘Free-Jazz’ players and composers of the 1960s and ‘70s represented (and currently represents) to an understanding of the Jazz tradition and U.S. culture generally over the past century.
This is especially significant with respect to the philosophical acuity and depth of the major book of Jazz criticism that Baraka published in 1967 entitled ‘Black Music.’ Dedicated to ‘John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit’ this book, made up of formerly published magazine essays and articles comprises one of the most important statements ever conceived and written about the specific dynamics, formal and stylistic challenges, cultural theory, and ideological identity of the so-called black musical “avant garde” of the 1959-1967 era. Pivotal to this text’s visionary stance is the first essay from the book, which is quoted at the beginning of this review. “Jazz and the White Critic” published in 1963 and which initially appeared in Down Beat magazine, was a major advance in the history of Jazz criticism because it openly and courageously addressed one of the most important but largely ignored issues in the canonical history of Jazz writing—the contradiction and separation between the major black players of the music and the almost completely exclusive white writers and critics of the music. By raising questions about what this contradiction said and implied about Jazz music and its history as art, science, history, sociology, ideology, and political economy, Baraka revealed that what white critics said about the music, reflected intellectual, cultural, and personal biases that had to be acknowledged and taken serious account of.
Ironically, Ratliff as critic and historian ultimately avoids these and other related issues by insisting that the individual icon in Jazz (like Coltrane) is not only an indispensable touchstone in the music’s evolution but that even more importantly the bands that they and others lead are even more significant. As Ratliff puts it at the end of his study “The truth of Jazz is in its bands.” While this statement seems accurate enough on its surface with its philosophical emphasis on the time honored Western notion of the “artist” as being central to an understanding and appreciation of any cultural or aesthetic expression, it appears that Ratliff winds up failing to notice that Jazz is first and foremost a public, collective, collaborative, and thus social expression whose major focus is not merely on the players and composers involved but on the communities that it engages in any given cultural environment. Thus the role of the individual “genius” in the music’s identity and evolution is not the dominant one. Of course, the marketing and processed packaging of the individual musician (or ensemble) as readily available commodity in the economic context of the capitalist marketplace where commodities are routinely promoted, bought, and sold may give the distinct impression that the individual “great man or woman” is the most important driving force behind the music but that would be an ultimately false and greatly mistaken notion. Even with such astonishingly advanced and gifted players and composers as the late, great John Coltrane it would be far more accurate to suggest that actually “the truth of Jazz lies in its music.” As critic and historian Ratliff misses, neglects, or ignores this crucial point and his book (and his analysis of Coltrane) greatly suffers for it.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
