I heard that Amiri Baraka was the mastermind behind the September 11 terrorist attacks. I read it on the Internet somewhere. Now, let’s see, where was that cite…
Ah, yes, here it is!
Gee, I don’t think the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks should be New Jersey’s Poet Laureate. I mean, really, he ought to be in jail for a thing like that, at the very least.
Hey, it’s his fucking poem, he can put whatever he wants in it. Moreover, you can only speculate on what he believes, unless you know him. Do you know him? Have you discussed his views with him? How do you know so much about what the fuck he believes? He can also believe what he wants as well, I don’t really care, a lot of people are uniformed about stuff. It’s not a white paper, an investigative report, it’s a fucking poem! You don’t like if fine! You don’t understand it fine as well, but are you chasing behind every artist that has said something that’s, disparaging to people of color, the french, germans, catholics?
Where can I get the text to the full poem. What do you think that it means? It’s anti semetic because it has the word jew in it?
EasyPhil, he’s not just “any poet.” He’s the poet laureate of New Jersey. He’s not just scrawling “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, America’s bad, and Jews are too,” on the nearest bathroom wall, he’s reading it at a national convention. That may not be an investigative report, as you say, but it’s still a very big deal. Being in a position like that carries certain responsibilities, like not representing your state with a poem that could very, very easily be conceived as Antisemitic.
I do not know him personally, but I have heard him talk. In his speech he openly admitted that his plays are chauvenistic, and also anti-white. He didn’t directly say anything about anti-semitism, but the implication was certainly there.
And it’s not a matter of him just being another “uninformed” person, he is being willfully ignorant. He was told that the 9/11 story was false, provided with concrete evidence that it was false, and refused not only to retract his statement, but even to admit that it was false. And why? Because he heard it on the internet.
The difference between him and any other poet spewing out racist garbage is that he is in a position which carries prestige, and that prestige is given with certain expectations, like the idea that he won’t go off and spread blatant lies in his poetry when he’s representing NJ as the poet laureate. It wasn’t artistic liscense, it was stupid.
Well, here’s “Black Art”
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~hbeavers/281/baraka-blackart.html
I couldn’t find “Tom Postell”
It’s not that I don’t understand Bakara and his poems. I do. Bakara hates people. He hates whites for slavery and segragation. He hates Jews for controlling the world. He hates “black leadership” for their concilatory stances towards race relations and their belief that change can come through legal means.
I understand the man. I just find him and what he believes abhorent and ignorant.
“Slimy bellies of the owner-jews”? In exactly what context, praytell, would that be inoffensive?
From that same poem:
*Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff
poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite
politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. . . tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh
. . . rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . *
I guess we don’t have a hot button word for Irish or Italian bias.
Maybe “anti-white”?
Jebus, I can’t believe you would defend this piece of tripe, Phil.
Baraka is clearly a racist, clearly an anti-semite, clearly anti-white. He is a vile, disgusting human being. Yes, this is America, and he has freedom of speech, and therefore has the freedom to espouse racist anti-semitic lies. That doesn’t mean it is your job to defend a racist anti-semitic liar. That doesn’t mean we must appoint a racist anti-semitic liar “Poet Laureate”.
What a waste of skin. I am personally offended to belong to the same species as Baraka.
I’m not exactly sure I see your point. You said that there was no evidence of antisemitism in his poem. Captain Amazing provided you with quotes from other poems showing antisemitism. And now you’re mad that he didn’t highlight all the other prejudices inherent in the poem? The quotes provided were provided to show a specific kind of prejudice, and they did just that. It’s not surprising that the other prejudices were there, though, since as CA said, this guy seems to hate just about everybody.
Well, the fact that he’s anti-Semitic doesn’t prevent him from being anti-Irish or anti-Italian.
I’m not defending what he’s saying, but I am questioning the motivation for grasping at any straw to call him an anti-semite. IMO, the argument is really weak as it pertains to the poem that’s the subject of the OP. You folks don’t like him, fine, don’t read his shit, that’s pretty simply isn’t it? He’s not a racist, because he doesn’t have the power to deprive people of their rights because of the color of their skin. A bigot? A hater of white people? Would you as a white person have a tendency to hate blacks if they had a history of bombing, your churches, lynching you as other black folks watched in glee? Would you write about that shit if you were a poet? I don’t know Imiri Baraka, I don’t know why he writes the stuff he does and I don’t pretend to know, you people seem to think you know. I say you don’t know shit, if you don’t know him, again, it’s poetry not “The Bell Curve”.
" . . . I am questioning the motivation for grasping at any straw to call him an anti-semite."
—Any straw? The man has provided us with entire haystacks!
“Grasping at any straw to call him an anti-semite”? Jeezus, your argument boils down to “well, he’s an equal opportunity offender”?
“Grasping at any straw to call him an anti-semite”? Jeebus, your “defense” is basically that he’s an equal-opportunity offender.
Hmmm. I noticed you didn’t try to deny the “liar” part.
So you’re maintaining that the examples pointed out here still aren’t persusasive enough?
One wonders whether anything would be.
Yeah, and I’m sure you’d say the same thing if it was some white supremacist in that office, spouting anti-black rhetoric badly concealed in crappy verse. “Don’t you see, it’s just a METAPHOR, you people are taking it way too literally…”
Racism is:
[ul]
[li] The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.[/li][li] Discrimination or prejudice based on race.[/li][/ul]
Odd, it doesn’t seem limit ‘racism’ to the ability to deprive anyone of their rights. It’s a state of mind (or a lack thereof, if you prefer).
Care to try again?
Speaking of tired, weak, lameass arguments…that one takes the fucking cake. You could use that statement to defend the words, philosophies, and actions of every single bigoted asshole you’ve never met personally. And it’d be just as pathetically inept a defense for them as it is for LeRoi.
I suppose he can, but what is your point? Whether given in prose, included in an editorial column, or distributed in leaflets, I see no reason to make allowances for statements that use bald lies to cast negative light on a group of people. We wouldn’t tolerate that elsewhere, so why here? I also think anti-Semite is a fair and accurate label for someone that embraces and propagates these lies. If you think that is OK, just say so, but desist with this nonsense that you can’t tell a great deal about his views from political poems that were penned for the purpose of communicating them. Perhaps you think his repeated reference to Jews is random?
He isn’t exactly Noel Coward.
Hmmm, the use of a public platform to sow hatred of a particular group, potentially depriving members of that group of opportunities, liberties or their personal safety.
You’ve met the criteria in your own severely limited definition.
Well, everybody’s addressed most of what you said, EasyPhil, but I’ll take this one and run with it:
God-honest answer? No. And you know what? The vast, vast, vast majority of African Americans who DO have that history do not, in fact, hate white people. And you know why? Because, to put it simply, they know that hating people is bad. They know that hating people based solely on their ethnic group is even worse. They know it because that kind of hatred is exactly what caused them to be oppressed in the first place.
I’m not saying that Baraka has never done any good in his life. He was a prominent leader in the African American cultural revolution. He helped a number of Black artists overcome the cultural barriers put up by people that hated them because of the color of their skin. But in “Somebody Blew Up America” and the poems that have been quoted in this thread, he has taken the hatred that he was fighting, turned around, and thrown it onto a wide variety of ethnic groups. He has been elevated to Poet Laureate, a position of incredibly high regard, and has abused that position by using it to spread hate-filled lies.
And you know what, EasyPhil? I don’t care if he’s an artist. He’s still wrong. And the fact that he has done so much in his life means that a lot of people may accidentally mistake the lies that he is saying for the truth, since he is so respected. It would be like the Pope endorsing the Nazi party. The difference between Baraka and some random skinhead somewhere is that he really does have the power to influence people; he’s obviously prominent enough to have a news story written about his actions. And that has responsibility with it.
Please tell me, in your words, EasyPhil, how you interpreted the poems in this thread in a non-racist way. Please show me how you interpreted them for yourself, so that it didn’t sound like he was lying. I’m curious.