Month: January 2021

Afrofuturism is a term that I wish black people would leave in the past. It sounds alluring enough right? The march of progress, spurred by an unexterminable African diasporic imagination coupled with the blaring thrust of technological development. Okay, maybe not that alluring after all! But when we truly examine the term, its origins, it present relevance, we can see that it is nothing more than a genre/episteme born of the white amerikan academic world contained by the limits of nationalism, and the anti-black speculations that we have no history.

When first thinking about Afrofuturism, I hastened to explore its origins because I thought, ‘Well who cares who coined the term and where it came from, what does it actually mean TODAY?” But an exploration of the original article in which it was coined is extremely relevant to that latter inquiry, which I will address as well.

Afrofuturism was coined by a white amerikan critic Mark Dery who wondered why more African-Americans did not write science-fiction, because the genre seemed so apt to relate (to the other, always to the other– namely the white western world) our experiences. As he writes:

“This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers readily come to mind).”

Already we can see how Dery has to bend the terminology of what is conventional to science-fiction, “descendants of alien abductees” to talk about the abduction of Africans, relegating the horrors of the middle-passage to being a “sci-fi nightmare.” I’m most interested by the always present neglect to explode the idea of being an ‘African-American.’ The experiences of our ancestors cannot be disconnected from the experiences of Africans in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Canada for instance, and yet the containment of these borders is always present. But I did not expect this from a white amerikan academic, obviously. We already see here how genre/episteme and a bordered notion of blackness/africanness are at work in the origins of this term.

Dery sees science-fiction, a bastardized and minor literature at the time he was writing, as a mirror to the African-American experience. And I want to probe the idea of genre and nationalism again here. That our experiences in this land could be contained by the marker of ‘African-American,’ and that ‘Science-Fiction’ could standalone as some clearly defined genre. But more on this soon.

We must turn our attention to the most glaring and backwards of his passages. Dery defines Afrofuturism as such:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture– and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future– might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism.” The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?

To address his troubling antinomy first: It would seem then that Afrofuturism rests on the assumption that African-Americans have no past (a Hegelian treat), and thus the thrust towards an Afrofuture is an attempt at salvaging what scraps the empire that abducted us has left for us of that past. I place this squarely within the empire because Dery has placed us squarely within the rigid borders of ‘African-American.’ Or that we do have a past, and the natural telos, which posits us grasping that fractured past at the end of our aesthetic inquires through the tailor-made genre of Science-Fiction, will allow us to finally step into that identity of African-American, and be the best citizens we can be. I’d hope that my reader can now see the glaring holes in such a term, but if they still cannot, let us explore some of the figures most associated with Afrofuturism.

The largest problem with Afrofuturism is that the actors it forces to play the role cannot be held by such genres/epistemes/borders. Sun Ra for instance, someone who gets associated with Afrofuturism often but never once uttered the word. Sun Ra exists outside of the genres/epistemes of Science-Fiction, of African-American. The man was born on Saturn, and in the brief 79 years he spent visiting us here on Earth, he completely undermined and exploded the fact that this country, the USA, is a land built on myths and ruses.

Samuel Delaney’s supposed Afrofuturist mega-novel Dhalgren works in similar ways. It reveals that central to the land and the project of the USA is the inescapable reality of anti-blackness, and it doesn’t spend 800 pages trying to resolve that or recover some kind of African past that we can use to guide us in the future.

George Clinton’s mothership is about the destruction of Amerikan empire. The mothership burns down the empire and waits for the flames to cool off, having a funk dance party all the time.

This shit seems less about the future to me and more about laying clear the contradictions of the world that has to end for black people, and burning shit down as it stands now. But we will always be relegated to the future, we will always be made purely aesthetic objects for consumption, people will call Ra, Clinton, Perry and Delaney idiosyncratic and wacky, crazy and drugged out. But I honestly don’t believe that they were ever leading us towards a future. They were showing us what has been done to us, and through a black imagination that is unbounded, taking active steps to end the world as such. Not so that we could complete the project of being an African-American, and not to recover some idea of the African past (which we never lost, but just becomes submerged, for some, in some places). Because I don’t believe that African-Americans have a future. I believe that it’s a horizon line in which slave uprising and the destruction of racial civilization would mark not a recovery but something beyond Africa and even beyond blackness.

And what of the term today? Surely it has tried to encompass the black/African diasporic experience beyond the borders of just Amerika but where does that lead us to? Wakanda? A supposed haven outside but inside racial civilization STILL? No, all Afrofuturism has the possibility of doing is enclosing the black subject within the parameters of this world. It does not seek to end the world, but to move more harmoniously in it, and thus, it is nothing but a neoliberal attempt at sanitizing our rhythms, movements, echoes. We must move on.

The inimitable Phil Spector passed on the 16th of January in a Northern Californian prison hospital, another victim of COVID-19. Now, I don’t believe in prison, I believe that Spector should have been fed to the hounds long ago specifically for his abuse of then wife, and voice who gave him his fame, Ronnie Spector. It is apt that Phil Spector’s production technique and philosophy was termed the “Wall of Sound,” a technique which involved the incessant reproduction of and layering of sounds and instruments to the point where such as thing as the voice is de-individualized, and the resulting cacophony of sound is total, like a wall. This could never point to a radical collectivity though, only one white man’s attempt at cementing the white sonic universal. The organization of sound and cultural memory into a colony contained by four walls. Spector used a very small room to record many of his famed tracks, cluttered with instruments. He would make the musicians play again and again in a test of attrition hoping that they tire out, lose their individuality and become lost in the wall. Ronnie’s voice however could never be contained by the trappings of this rigidity on such a song like “Be My Baby.” Her voice moves like an erratic marker on the facades of a uniform city reinforced by glass and steel. Not for the sake of some idea of individuality either, but with the black voices who came before and after her. It is fitting that Spector lost his voice completely a few years prior to his death. The silence of his passing finds no echo.

Steve Kerr recently had this to say on Steph Curry’s recent 62 point performance:

And I’m reminded again of how this myth of Steph Curry, which is palatable to whiteness, white culture, and thus, the universal persists. The career of Steph Curry I would add, is also palatable to the myth of Amerikan nationalism. You don’t have to be the biggest, strongest, richest, smartest, but just work hard at your craft and you can achieve greatness. I present below a mock podcast I made in 2016 discussing how Steph Curry is more beloved by white and non-black consumers because of colorism, the values he markets himself on, and the general alienation of players in the NBA. Lebron, AD, and Giannis are all 6’9″ and above and can dribble the basketball, shoot (minus Giannis), and control their bodies in a way that players of that size were not able to do in Steve Kerr’s era. But that is not the result of this alienated “freak of nature” status. It is the result of putting in thousands of hours at the gym, just as Steph Curry has put in thousands of hours at the gym. They are seen as unobtainable and “naturally” gifted, feeding into the myth that black people are better athletically than white people or other races, which we are supposed to accept because it is presented to us as positive, but is nothing more than the leftover of vile race science and anti-blackness. That history presents comments like this. I present a different narrative. Listen below:

 

Soul is a film about the bureaucratizing functions of the white racial state on black life and black death, both of which can and will at every turn seek to be subsumed, commodified, standardized and weaponized against the historical pasts and futures belonging primarily to black people in this world. We see this in what the film terms as The Great Before and The Great Beyond, two zones in which the film’s protagonist, an Amerikan black man, Joe Gardener spends inhabiting. These zones are surveilled by Soul Counselor’s or Sorter’s (Before) all of whom are named Jerry (some weird fucking meta-comment on the commodification and alienation of work IDK), and a singular omnipresent figure, the Soul Counter (Beyond) who is named Terry. In The Great Before, souls who have yet to pass into the Beyond are chosen according to a system that is never explained, to mentor new souls in the ways of life before they are born on Earth so that those souls can be given the tools to find their purpose. This zone is very cute, light and flora interact in majestic beauty, the Counselors are amicable and have pleasant voices, guiding and overseeing the rigorous pairing of souls yet to pass on and new souls. The new souls are child-like, sponges for learning. The Counselors oversee the “You Seminar,” the place where new souls develop and must obtain their badges (7 or 8 of them) which will activate an Earth Pass (yes like a passport) so that they can be born. This is in stark contrast to The Great Beyond which is simply void minus the bridge that takes dead souls into the light. Terry the Soul Counter is out of sight, in the background making sure that every soul who has passed ends up in the light. Terry is drab, calculating, only focused on the task at hand. He’s a cop, and very proud of it. There is never interaction between Terry and souls passed on.

These zones of action are what I would term, bureaucracy, made up of agents who seemingly have complete authorial control over what happens in the world that we know based on a system that ultimately benefits them. And of course, the film brings together two aberrations, one Amerikan black man and one Amerikan white woman to comment on.. it’s unclear really but the seeming post-racial/multiracial Amerikan fascist project is evident. But I read these two aberrations as the film’s indirect attempt at showing the gaps in a system such as this (it’s all bullshit). And before someone comments, yes, #22, the aberration who has resisted seemingly thousands of years of being born because she thinks Earth isn’t worth it or whatever and she’ll never find her purpose is a white woman. She tells Joe Gardner that she can choose any voice she wants to but specifically chooses the voice of a white woman because it is “annoying.” Of course the assumption here is that the voice of a white woman would annoy a black man (an idea not at all flushed out because at that point in the film she doesn’t know that he is black YET the point remains because even after that she sees his memories– with her hundreds of years of knowledge from the likes of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures– she chooses to stay with this voice). The film specifically chooses these two actors, these two agents of explosive historical racial-schema as its main protagonists. They knew what the fuck they were doing. Everyone has already commented on how fucked it up it is that a white woman inhabits the body of a black man, that he gives up his life so she can find her purpose and all of that, but the ending truly shows how this bureaucracy is founded on the punishment of blackness. So Joe Gardener has given up his Earth Pass and and is about to go into the light when a Counselor stops him and gives him a second chance. And this is what she says:

We’re in the business of inspiration, Joe, but it’s not often we find ourselves inspired. So, we all decided to give you another chance.

This is where I was like.. WOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE. First of all, of course they are a business, a corporation. There is something behind the word “business,” the “You Seminar,” the exploitation of souls that just want to die but are coerced into mentoring new souls, new souls that cannot escape the purgatorial zone until they are inundated by the anti-black human project; the fact that this business can only be sustained through GREAT people and their mentoring capabilities. If you remember, when they were going through all the souls that failed with #22, it was all famous people, people who some might deem great, including who Joe Gardener was supposed to be, a world renowned doctor. Who or what chooses this system of inspiration, of greatness? Surely a failed black jazz artist could never be human, could never be great in this system, could never be inspiring to the sonic universal, to the white universal at large, because blackness is not inspiring for the world. It is only consumable, it is only fungible. The fact that these counselors could just say fuck their whole planned and rigorous system, fool Terry into thinking Joe Gardner actually passed, and give him a second chance based on inspiration of his GREAT action shows how horrifying this system is, in that, if he DIDN’T INSPIRE the omnipresent Counselor’s, he would not have been given a second chance. His life and death would not have been deemed “different” or worthy of inquiry. Be an exceptional nigga or you just another nigga dead. The two zones elucidate the economy of the reward and punishment, ah yes, more dialectics.

 

 

Further notes:

It is a film in which black myth and metaphysics as they pertain to sound are congealed into the white sonic universal (getting into the zone while soloing or improvising in jazz music) as opposed to their historical and present realities of black improvisation connecting us to a black radical tradition that is greater than any great beyond or before. Now, I’m no musician, but even I have felt that startling moment when I conk out an aberration (mistake, realization) using the blues scale on the piano or the trumpet and I am Horace Silver, I am Bud Powell, I am Mary Lou Williams, I am Don Cherry, I am Woody Shaw. I know that this moment cannot be contained in some universal “zoning out” which the film shows, in which every human activity acts according to the same predetermined and pre-ordained laws.

If you’ve been following my blog for a minute you know that up until this post I identified with being a black prole. I looked at moments (of an accumulative process located in black movement) like the uprisings that took place over the murder of George Floyd, the Rodney King riots, and Ferguson as moments where proletarians, who are only ever meaningful in this country because of the labor they provide, came together to fight back against the white supremacist state. But it always felt funny to me then, and the meaning is crystallizing now. I realize that though there are some proletarians in the streets, they certainly weren’t any kind of catalysts or primary force of the movements and rhythms I have witnessed in my lifetime. And I realized this through a number of things I have learned.

Firstly, I’ve learned that anti-blackness precedes the white supremacist, white racial state. So an effort to end the white supremacist state does not mean that non-black proletarians in the streets and beyond want to end anti-blackness. In fact, they cannot end anti-blackness, nor can they be in solidarity with us. I’ve written before about how solidarity is a sham because it creates a closed dialectic between blackness/anti-blackness. Non-blacks cannot hope to address anti-blackness when they pay no attention to the currents of blackness they consume.

Secondly, I’ve learned that there are so many managers of the revolution. So many. These managers want the end of this world, but in the same instant want a coterminous world based on their demands. Simply put, they desire a better, more efficient state still fueled by anti-blackness, namely, the exploitation and consumption of black people to the point where we become flattened. This is why we see so many pieces being written by non-black communists today such as endnotes, the vitalists, ill-will, decrying ID politics in an ahistorical fashion, theorizing on the George Floyd rebellions through the pinhole of “multi-racial revolt.” Of course their death drive moves towards civil war.

Third, claims of anti-work from nonblack communists and anarchists must reckon with the slave or they are useless. Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism writes, “. . . the African and Afro-American agrarian workers had supplied the critical surplus value that supported the transformation of the economy into an industrialized and ultimately capital-intensive one.” This is one way it can be read in a Marxist lens, but in a lens that is more palatable to how I’m feeling these days, it makes more sense for me to think about these black “workers” as slaves. The transformation of the Amerikan economy into a “capital-intensive one”, was because of the slave (and this is not just in the USA, but the entire Americas). Thus, there is something fundamentally different about the way a so-called black labor has developed in the Americas, and it cannot be captured and flattened by the proletarian. Explorations of anti-work that do not engage with these histories and ongoing functions succumb to circular Marxist arguments. But that’s the thing: all they can do is reckon; they cannot go beyond this mode of engagement or it would mean their internal and then external destruction

Thus all black struggle in the Americas is the extension of slave revolt. That is something that cannot be resolved until every plantation burns, until every settler dies. Until then, catch me playing trumpet. We only have ourselves black fam.

Love

A friend sent me this zine: https://dochub.com/rloggans/jo3xELpR3ZjmJLowJBa7nr/land-back-zine

It is supposed to be a zine on how the term “Decolonization” has become (neo)liberalized and run its course, how though there are limits with regards to the “land back” movement, that it is a more appropriate term to think through settler colonialism and ending it. I have no interest in defending decolonization, because its revolutionary black roots have been thoroughly divorced and misunderstood even in this zine which purports to understand that. It is an historical term that served its time, what more needs to be said? I’m more interested in the ways that the terms “Indigenous” and “Anti-blackness” both here and generally are used in an empty manner.

First we have to understand that these terms are not universal, they were not always there, and they do not encompass everyone and everywhere. What do you mean by indigenous? Indigenous to where? Blackness is indigenous too, blackness is indigeneity too, a way of living through the violence that slavery and colonialism enacted on people indigenous to Africa (also an invention). Land back is limiting in this manner because it says land back to the people indigenous to this land, what is known now as the USA, but doesn’t recognize the way that black people’s indigeneity is being lived through, broken apart, coming together, in a way that absolutely interacts with the presumed universal way that people use “indigenous” here in the states to mean native or native american. The zine offers that black people should be gifted land, as if 40 acres and a mule were not a thing that actually happened. If blackness is a construction then, an impasse of the colonial world on the way that we as black people move through and potentially beyond it, then how do we read it in tension with “anti-blackness?” To speak of anti-blackness, you have to speak of blackness, and not in a dialectic way, but, to think with the poet Kamau Brathwaite, using tidalectics. The use of “anti-blackness” within non-black indigenous and communities of color in the US feels so empty because the response is always we have to address anti-blackness in our communities but it is never coupled with we have to learn about the ways that blackness moves through our world constructions, our identity formations. We have to learn how blackness historically and currently orders and disorders our world and THE world. And it seems more and more to me that empty acknowledgement of the one is willful erasure of the other.

I’m searching for two giants
Who have taken over Harlem
Like invasive species upon the racial state

I’m searching for two giants
One wearing the smile of the black thief
The other with the sad eyes of the all-knowing hound

I’m searching for two giants
With nothing to go on but their scraps of pure tone
Muddled shards thrown against the quick-crimping street

I’m searching for two giants
Disguised as street performers
Trained in the auto-didactic discipline of play

I’m searching for two giants
Having already amassed a mountain top
For their followers to climb

I’m searching for two giants
Dissolving in the midnight air
Alive again at every gesture of my mouth towards horn

I wonder if someone was listening to Charles Mingus when they came up with the title for the new film organized around the betrayal of Fred Hampton by William O’Neal entitled Judas and the Black Messiah. Of course I’m thinking of Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Here we have two holy subjects, the Messiah and The Black Saint paired with two miscreants, Judas and the Sinner Lady. If we examine the two titles, we find that these pairs are not formally in opposition to one another, but held together by the conjunction “and.” If we dig further into the meta-titles on Black Saint we come to a curious image: “Saint and Sinner Join in Merriment on Battle Front.” Why would these two figures which seem to stand diametrically opposed to one another, saint and sinner, join together in merriment in the very place they are supposed to be battling? And this is the beauty of the titles on this album, because the anonymity and generality of these images work against our desires to think about such images as a saint and a sinner in a binary, fixed, and definite manner: one good, one evil. It opens us up to the possibility that the distinction between the sacred and the profane is wrought with contradictions. The title of the film offers us no such freedom. There’s too many binding and static references; the title is forcing and indeed constricting our minds to place the figures of Fred Hampton and William O’Neal into roles where they cannot move. Did one expect anything less out of a Hollywood film?

William O’Neal is not a Judas figure, because Fred Hampton was not a Messiah. For one, Messiah’s work alone– well, they might have some help along the way, but in the end they are the ones who save us all. One of Chairman Fred’s recurring phrases for God’s sake was “Power anywhere where there’s people!” The man was informed by Marx, Mao to name just two, in the use of terms like “the masses” meaning the proletariat, meaning ultimately proletarian struggle. No one man can self abolish the proletarian class position not only for himself but everyone, as well as overthrow the ruling class. Hampton understood and lived that to the very end. It’s very tempting to compare the Messiah with the revolution for some it seems. They are both teleological in their basic sense, but Messiah’s deliver the believers to the promised land, while revolution, if I stand to think about it more critically, leaves a number of contradictions to be worked out in its asunder of the previous system (capitalism in this case). (This is of course one of my problems with revolution, namely, we never stop struggling). If we are taking the line that O’Neal is Judas, with the devil or evil being the ‘state’, this doesn’t work either. Because the state and the violence it produces is not evil. It’s not evil because evil can only exist in a world where there is ‘good’ on its opposite side. That gets us into binary thinking that goes nowhere. Hampton and O’Neal lived in, to follow David Theo Goldberg, a racial state. Amerika. A racial state he writes, “are states that historically become engaged in the constitution, maintenance, and management of whiteness, whether in the form of European domination, colonialism, segregation, white supremacy, herrenvolk democracy, Aryanism, or ultimately colorblindness or racelessness.” This management of whiteness is about superiority and power over all aspects of life be they economic, social, political, cultural etc. Evil is too unspecific and tame a word for how the state used O’Neal to assassinate Hampton. There is no formless form, no omniscient being under our feet responsible for all of the fucked up shit that happens to black people and black revolutionaries. It’s the organization of this country which keeps things flowing, which keeps multinational corporations on top and us at the bottom.

Hampton understood the forces that stand on top, and how they must fall:

We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense on what you call the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society working with people that we may never have a chance to work with. Maybe we could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn’t have to be hidin’ when we go to speak places like this. Maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people and your problems are right here in the valley.

We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding, went into the valley knowing that the people are in the valley, knowing that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing that our enemies are on the mountain, to our friends are in the valley, and even though its nice to be on the mountaintop, we’re going back to the valley. Because we understand that there’s work to be done in the valley, and when we get through with this work in the valley, then we got to go to the mountaintop. We’re going to the mountaintop because there’s a motherfucker on the mountaintop that’s playing King, and he’s been bullshitting us. And we’ve got to go up on the mountain top not for the purpose of living his life style and living like he lives. We’ve got to go up on the mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, that we are coming from the valley!

Fred Hampton, (SPEECH DELIVERED AT OLIVET CHURCH, 1969)

There’s no need for good and evil in Hampton’s eloquent image here of knocking the fake King off the mountaintop. Hampton understood that we need kick everybody off the mountaintop for good, and don’t nobody need to stand there, be they revolutionaries of capitalist exploiters. Yeah, we’re coming for them, but not to take their spot, rather, so the grass can grow again on the tops of the hills.

I’ve found that people from other parts of the world tend to conflate what is US empire with the people living inside the US. This is not to say that those two things should be thought of separately. Of course they shouldn’t. But when people talk about “America” I don’t think they don’t really know what they are talking about. What people are you talking about? The people who say this are usually people who do not understand the way race operates in any other place besides where they live. Someone recently told me that they don’t care about the ‘cultural’ aspect of colorism, just the ‘political’ as they made a very generalized point about colorism in the US. At this point I knew I had to stop engaging, because this is a person who doesn’t know anything about the way race and blackness has functioned in Amerika. I don’t know about the American left because I don’t consider myself a leftist. I know about black people struggling and resisting in this country, and at every turn, black people have been the ones to make the connections internationally, intercommunally between what US imperialism and colonialism has done and is doing around the world with what has happened and is happening to black people right here at home. Have we had the power to interrupt and destroy that violent empire/structure? No. But to say “Americans vote for imperialists” and this is the reason why folks around the rest of the world have formed no alliances with Americans, as if that is the entire picture of what is happening in this fucked up country irks me. It’s a similar strain of thought I’ve experienced in México where people assume that just because you are from the US, that you are living a good life, when so many black people are incarcerated, in poverty, don’t have stable housing, live paycheck to paycheck, face state violence and repression constantly.

Those people aren’t interested in forming alliances because they aren’t interested at all in freeing black people in their countries or anywhere else.

Starting off Black August, I was thinking of the versus we had the fortune of witnessing earlier this year between Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, and how it rejected any kind of competitiveness under capitalism in lieu of a tidalectic exchange between two black women based in generosity, friendship. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I found currents between this exchange and one that occurred over 50 years ago between Nikki Giovanni and Lena Horne on the wonderful program Black Journal whose episodes were just made public. Giovanni sits opposite of Horne and begins the exchange/conversation with Horne with this poem:

I knew nothing of Lena Horne really, until recently watching Cabin in the Sky with my father. In an essay entitled The Mulatta on Film: From Hollywood to the Mexican Revolution, Cedric Robinson traces the ways in which the figure of the Mulatta, a sexualized threat of race mixture in the intended purity of the white social order surged after the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, until 1919, where she did not appear again until the ’40s. But even as they returned, the threat of their sexuality was “muted,” their Mulatta-ness not figuring into the plot. I was interested in this article and seeing the ways that Horne might engage with colorism and this trope in her exchange with Giovanni, but she sort of only gestures towards it: “I was made to look like someone not me. I was made to look like— I had to learn to sing and I was not allowed to imitate R&B records because they weren’t played very much and I was raised by middle class people who didn’t believe in singing the blues. And I was made to look like Heady Lamar.”

The major power of this exchange between the two for me lay in Horne’s telling of how young people are the ones who radicalized her. She says, “Since Greesnboro, as recent as that, and sit-ins, I was able to flee my establishment— stereotype because young people had freed me. And I think that since I always have been what I am inside that I’ve been able to survive. Because they didn’t really kill anything black in me.”

On Angela Davis, who at the time was still incarcerated she says: “What I’m so afraid of is that this is actually a calculated genocidal move in many instances because the threat— the kind of strength that these young people have, which may not always be comparable to the kind that our ancestors had, is so positive and so fearless that it frightens people and I don’t want to see this continue but sometimes I worry that it’s a concentrated, thought out effort to not have a young generation so strong and so beautiful.”

A hilarious bit has her talking about the time she struck a white man in Los Angeles:

“That probably was the first time I felt less lonely by the isolation that was imposed on me by the very nature of its and definitive isolation from my own people, from white people, this middle thing that I was in, had kept me very much alone spiritually too. And I got insulted, I had frequently done so, guy made me mad and I struck him violently, because I am violent in a way.—“

Giovanni playfully interjects: “You trying to say violence purges the soul?”

“No, he just made me mad and sometimes your madness just mounts into beautiful madness and I struck him and I got tons of mail and letters and telegrams from black people that said, “Hey thank you, how wonderful,” and I said, “My god, I’m not alone!” And that was in the ‘50s. And I had lived a long time without that feeling. And there’s so many young black people now that I see doing things that are revolutionizing me and the world.”

I love the way they look at each other throughout. Watch here.