Conversations in Maine 1993

THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE THE U.S.A.

SHEA HOWELL: The first thing Louis emphasized was that Americans don't
understand what is going on in Europe. We have no grasp of how Europeans look
at what is going on in Bosnia. From the European point of view one of the
byproducts of the cold war had been 40 years of peace. Prior to that time the
history of Europe had been conflict, tribal war. So Europeans are responding to
what is happening in Bosnia not with images of the holocaust but with images of
tribal warfare, harkening back to that instability which is very
frightening to people. He said that part of this was clearly the clash between
Christians and Muslims; that Christians had tried to intervene with no success;
that the Muslim world was coming in as peacemakers and it looked as if that was
going to be one of the better options. But when Iran offered 20,000 troops, the
United States threw up its hands and said "No way are we going to allow 20,000
armed Iranians into this area." The way that the U.S. positions itself is very
naive. We have no understanding of the depth of what people are worried about
because if this conflict moves to Macedonia Turks and Greeks will come in. So
Europe sees the spectre of constant warfare.

He also talked about the difference between the Eastern bloc and the West and
how hard life has become for people in Eastern Europe. He used the example of a
friend of his whose mother had been director of an apartment complex for many
years, making a fair living. She lost all that; overnight it was just gone. In
this case the family was able to move her somewhere else. But for whole layers
of people real  survival questions which people have taken for granted as
solved have been opened up. It is hard for us to conceive what people are
undergoing, how ordinary life is just gone, blown away.

He said that when you look at what is going on in the world, people are aware of
the North-South tension, but they don't realize how Asia and the West are
talking past each other. At the June UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna the
West put forward its concept of universal and individual rights while Africa
and the East talked about the community and group rights. (In the United States
we are seeing some of this for the first time in the challenge that the
Ypsilanti community has raised to the right of GM to move its plant.)

GRACE BOGGS: The African nations talk about their rights as nations and as
people to development. The Asian nations, who are feeling their economic power,
are challenging the universality of the Enlightenment concepts of individual
rights. China is developing by such leaps and bounds that by the next century
Japan may be only an Asian Switzerland. Louis gave me a copy of the Paul Kennedy book PREPARING FOR THE 21st CENTURY which paints a very grim picture of the future of Africa--except for some examples of economic self-reliance at the grassroots level.

RICK FELDMAN: It isn't clear to me that what China is doing is so profoundly
different.

GRACE: China sees herself consciously pursuing a course rooted in Chinese
culture which is very different from Gorbachev's in the former Soviet Union.
For example, liberals in the U.S. think that educating thousands of Chinese
students in this country will bring Democracy to China - just as the West
thought that sending missionaries to China would bring Christianity to China. In
the Chinese countryside the peasants have absolutely no use for these urban
intellectuals. They think things are just fine in China because of the
capitalistic opportunities. And many of the students themselves are
opportunists. They may express allegiance to democratic rights but they don't
really believe in them.

SHEA: Louis emphasized the connection between the concept of individual rights
and the Enlightenment and Christianity. One of the byproducts of this in the
West has been the notion that "I am individually responsible for what is going
on around me," which leads to the notion of responsibility for your government
and the concept of Self-Criticism. He saw both of these as absent in China.
Despite all that Mao thought and said about Self-Criticism, he said, the
Chinese are not self-critical. Instead they have a very fatalistic view of their
government, that it does what it is supposed to do, and I, the individual, am
not responsible in any way. The notion of Self just isn't there. So when the
West comes in with this notion of Self, pushing universal and individual rights,
it has no resonance in China because it comes out of a cultural context that is
not shared. He said that it is much clearer that people have responsibility
within a group, within a community context. In a world governed by fate, you
are either lucky or unlucky.  What struck me was the tremendous vitality he
saw in China around economic activity contrasted with the fear and almost
paralysis in Europe. On the international level the African nations are
begging. You get the feeling that the economic center of the world is moving
to the East and to China, and neither Europe nor Africa has that. same kind of
energy now. Lamentably it looks like Africa is going to be almost totally out
of the picture. The power of the Enlightenment and what it fueled in Europe and
the world is gone; his sense is that Europe is old and tired and played out and
that China is resurging and re-emerging.

GRACE: The departure of the U.S. has left Europeans feeling their
powerlessness.

RICK: Did he see the nation-state coming to an end?

GRACE: In another context we talked about the helplessness of the nation-state
in the face of transnational capitalism. I remember when people talked about the
end of the nation-state because it could not provide a defense to the atom bomb.
That seems almost abstract and speculative compared to today's actual complete
disregard of national boundaries by trans-  national corporations. 1992,
remember, was the year when the European Community was going to make Europe a force in the world.

RICK: What NAFTA is supposed to do for North America.

GRACE: Louis sees Mao as an anomaly in the history of Chinese civilization. He
was the only one to raise the notion of the responsibility of the Self and of
Self-Criticism. With his departure the old fatalism reinstituted itself. The
Chinese people, he says, are not Maoists. He recalled that in the first
millenium, after the first Emperor had established China in 221BC, there was a
great philosophical struggle between the Legalists and a man named
Dong Zhong Shu (Hsun Tzu) who talked about what goes into the re-civilizing of a
society, the ideas and structures that are necessary, and he recommended that I
look him up in THE SOURCES OF CHINESE TRADITION, a book that we used in Louis'
 

FROM TAO TO MAO class back in the 70s.

Another very interesting byproduct of the visit. When we met Louis and Itty by
pre-
arrangement in Bangor (we had driven from Detroit; they had taken the bus from
Boston), Shea and had been talking in the car about how and why it was that in
the various political organizational crises that Jimmy and I had been in
together, I was usually considered the trouble-maker, even when my position on a
question was the same as Jimmy's. One reason is that Asians have been such an
insignificant minority in this country and in most organizations I was the only
one. So I had no natural "constituency." I believe that has shaped the way
that I have functioned and how people have related to me politically.

For example, I probably depended a lot on my relationship to Jimmy. I lived what
I some-times described as a "borrowed identity." But this also gave me the
incentive to create another identity for myself as a Detroiter, as the citizen
of a Place, because I didn't have the wherewithal to create an ethnic identity.
I wasn't going to create my Chinese identity on the basis of discrimination
because the discrimination which I had experienced as Chinese didn't begin to
compare with the black experience in the U.S. And I could study the language
and culture of China but I hadn't been raised in a Chinese community. So I
had to create my identity as an organic intellectual coming from a non-organic
position.

RICK: That is an interesting distinction between Ethnicity and Place.

FREDDY: As Louis talked what came through was how little we know about Europe
and about China. I just wished we had had more time.

GRACE: I was impressed also by how we are misinformed and kept uninformed by the
media. I also kept thinking how important our contribution is as Americans who
are engaged in struggle for and around alternatives because there is so little
elsewhere. Driving up from Detroit I was reading to Shea from Peter Marcuse's
MISSING MARX, a Personal and Political Journal of the year l989-l990, which
Marcuse and his wife spent in East Germany as it was coming apart at the seams.
What comes through in his account was how little opportunity the East German
people had to carry on political struggles of the kind which we have been
carrying on in Detroit -- struggles which are helping us to redefine the city
and develop our vision of the future. The East Germans complained a lot and they
told wonderful jokes which made clear they had no illusions about the system.
But because they were not able to carry on practical struggles, they had
nothing to put in the place of the system when it fell apart. As I look back
over the years it becomes clearer to me how the struggles you carry on over
concrete issues and the way you carry them on (e.g. Crime, Casino Gambling, Ford
Auditorium) are essential to the creation of your vision of the future.

RICK: One of the discussions I had with Mark (a Detroit Summer volunteer)
driving to Syracuse was about how easy it was for my generation because we had
the struggles in Asia, Africa, Central America, to inspire us. However
idealized they might have been, the spirit was there of people coming together
and making great changes. We need a method of analysis and concrete projects to
get inspiration. Otherwise we can't think beyond individual change.

GRACE: Over the years I continue to read Mao because whatever was happening in
China I related to him as both a philosopher and a very practical strategist. I
feel that we got the best of that through his writings and that they can help
us create a new American Dream.

FREDDY: Why wasn't he able to get more people to go along with him?

GRACE: He was able to get a heap of people to go along with him to make the
revolution. It was after the revoluton that he didn't have the answers to all
the contradictions of post-revolutionary society. Louis compares me with Zhou
Enlai, why I am not quite sure.

SHEA: As I understand it , he says that Zhou was from a privileged backgound and
an in-tellectual who put his considerable skills at the service of the
revolution. Mao said to Zhou, "You don't come from the peasant class," to which
Zhou replied, "Then we share some-thing; we are both traitors to our class."

FREDDY: What I got from Louis was "Don't follow the media because they are
mis-directing you" and we still don't know what China or Mao was about. There is
a riddle going on there. We also don't understand Europe.

GRACE: Bosnia raises the spectre of the Ottoman Empire and what that meant to
Europe. All of a sudden what took place 700 years ago is of enormous
significance.

RICK: The Greeks hate the Turks as much as much as they hate anyone in the
world. That is what the furore about missiles in Turkey was about.

GRACE: We also read a lot about the Muslim population in China, but Louis says
we shouldn't underestimate the skills of the Chinese in pacifying minority
populations through economic incentives.

RICK: Except in Tibet.

GRACE: Louis wasn't defending China. He was trying to help us understand the
dead weight of Confucianism and how Mao was the only one to break free from
that.

FREDDY: It was to Mao's credit that he fought as he did and succeeded to the
extent that he did.

RICK: Did he talk at all about the effects of economic development in China on
Confuc-ianism?  

SHEA: He thought Confucianism would triumph over capitalism or
that capi-talism in China would be very much shaped by Confucianism.

RICK: He writes like poetry. Does he talk that way? What does he look like?

FREDDY: Boyish, although he's close to retirement, and slender. There was a
keenness to him in catching what people said. He's a great listener.

WHAT TIME IS IT?
SHEA: We usually start off our conversations by discussing What Time It is.  I
remember Jimmy starting last year by recalling the meeting which Ping Ferry
had convened at Princeton in 1962 to discuss the Triple Revolution and saying
that he wished Oppenheimer were here because of the tremendous changes that
have taken place and the need for a new way to look at these changes. The other
thing we have been saying for years is that the 21st century is upon us, which
it really is. But before moving too quickly to the 21st century I think we ought
to look back because lots of what was solid over the last ten years particularly
has now become unstuck in many different ways. We should take some time to look
at that because if you look at some of what has been unstuck, it might give us n
idea of what we have to look for in heading to the 21st century.

The first most obvious thing is that the cold war is over. We sat here two years
ago and listened over NPR to the tanks in Moscow. But I don't think any of us
had any real sense of what that would mean, not only in terms of global dynamics
but in terms of what would be unleashed in Europe. Particularly after our talk
with Louis, I think of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Death
and Pestilence. That is what has in my mind replaced the images of people
cheering the collapse of the Berlin Wall: Europe moving from a period of
relative stability to one of conflicts and tensions existing before World War
II and the cold war. So what do we mean by the end of the cold war? How is that
changing the configuration of the world?

The second thing I think of is the tremendous mobility of capital. Rick raised
the question yesterday of the end of the Nation -State because of its inability
to have any impact on the decisions as to where forces of production are
located, global markets etc. Without the cold war framework there really is
nothing to restrain the shifting of capital, where it is going, why, how.

The third thing is the emerging of cultural forces, more specifically religious
forces, in the world in ways that were not there10 years ago, even when we
talked about the resurgence of Islam in the Iranian Revolution and how that
resurgence was in part a rejection of Western culture and technology. One thing
we talked about with Louis was this sense of spiritual emptiness on a global
scale that has marked the dominance of Western consumerism and materialistic
culture, however we want to label that. There really has been a turning from
that and with it a resurgence of Islam and Christianity and the tensions in both
between progressive and rightwing fundamentalist movements.

The fourth thing I thought we ought to look at was something Rick talked about.
This is the first time in my life and I would guess in the lives of Freddy and
Grace (I am trying to think generationally) where there is no revolutionary
struggle anywhere in the world that we can look to as a sign of hope. On a
deeper level globally nowhere is there a living sense that people together
collectively can struggle to make progressive change. The level of cynicism that
must carry for people younger than us is more than people our age can begin to
grasp.

The final thing I would want us to look at is that where we see hope is in the
struggle for community and the kinds of struggles that are emerging,
particularly struggles that are moving beyond race, beyond gender, beyond
ethnicity into new configuration all together, creating new economies, new ways
of living within cities and small towns as well, and where DETROIT SUMMER fits
into all that.

Those are the things I think of when I ask WHAT TIME IS IT.

GRACE: I had been reading about the chaos and lack of a new vision in Europe
before Louis' visit but he really gave me a sense of how Europe is overwhelmed
with fears of 700 year old conflicts emerging and the possibility of re-igniting
religious wars. And only a few years ago 1992 was going to be Europe's year, the
year of the European Community! The collapse of Russian Communism meant
something to a few radicals in this country but not to most Americans. But
Socialism and Communism were European visions, so there is now a vacuum in
Europe that it is hard for us to appreciate. One thing Louis said was that the
Europeans miss the Americans, that they felt having the Americans in Europe
brought not only protection but hope. I think there is more potential for
creating a new vision here than in Europe at this point. That puts quite a
responsibility on us.

Another thing Louis talked about was the end of the Enlightenment, the end of
secularism. People are looking not for denominational religion but for those
things in religion which fulfill the human and community need for the sense of
the sacred, a sense of shame and guilt. That is an essential part of a people
redeeming, reclaiming, rebuilding, respiriting, re-civilizing itself.

Another thing that I think is important is that black unity is breaking down -
not only in the sense of class divisions between the middle class and the
so-called underclass but in the critique of black cultural nationalism. That is
why I think the current issue of RACE AND CLASS is so important in raising the
distinction between the organic intellectual and the private intellectual. It
opens up the possibility of new thinking among blacks. It has been a long time
in coming; Jimmy was raising these questions 20 years ago.

Finally, on this question of no revolutionary struggles anywhere, we have to
recognize the degree to which we built our hopes on Third World liberation
struggles. Now we have to recognize that the very concept of the Third World
was a creation of the cold war period, i.e. of a particular historical
conjuncture. Now what we used to call the Third World includes the two extremes:
the East Asian "little tigers" as well as the African nations which are likely
to be in desperate straits for quite some time. So, while we still have to think
globally, we don't have anyone else but ourselves to depend on. DETROIT SUMMER is so important because it combines practical activity with a vision of
respiriting and redefining.

FREDDY: We have been living on the old revolutions but the old revolutions were
materialistic revolutions. That is what we were operating on. A lot of that has
to be undone. Before we go to the next stage, more has to be undone. We
shouldn't have been so surprised by what Louis said.

RICK: I think we should look at the picture of the DETROIT SUMMER kids. We are try-ing to understand the world somewhat through their eyes, what questions
they will be confronted with. As always when we ask WHAT TIME IS IT? we are
trying to free our-selves from our old ideas, ideas of the past. I was thinking
how this is August 22: it is 25 years since the Soviet tanks rode into
Czechoslovakia, 25 years since the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, 25
years since Martin Luther King was assassinated. Pretty much until the Reagan
years the struggle was still around what was happening to Socialism,the moral
authority or lack of moral authority of the U.S., the Latin American
revolutions. All that has pretty much come to an end. The only exception that
proves the rule about the Third World is what is happening in South Africa. What
kind of economic development will take place in this industrialized Third World
nation? We know there is no easy road. What really will happen there?
      The formulation that this is a period of Economic Integration and
Political Dis-integration and cultural fighting and conflict captures for me how
difficult this period is. I like how Shea put together the end of the cold war
and today's unbridled mobility of capitalism. l can see Jimmy arguing how
important the Soviet Union, despite our criticism of it, was to keeping
capitalism in check. There are no bad guys now, which is tough.

      I don't understand enough about this spiritual search. It sounds
like Hillary Clinton and Michael Lerner's Politics of Meaning. There is some
truth to it but it doesn't have depth any more. When we talked about it 10-12
years ago it had more meaning because it was new. We need a lot more substance
to it. One symbol of hope to which the younger generation looks is the X of
Malcolm. Is there something out there which can be built on or does everything
have to be created anew? How different is the public discussion now of Black
Cultural Nationalism from yesterday's conflict between Black Cultural
Nationalism and Marxism? How much is it tied to the male-female issue?

      I think one of our responsibilities in this period of great changes
is to put forward 5-10 books that we think people should be reading to get a
sense of this stage in history. .

      Is there hope for an organization like the NAACP now that a guy like
Ben Chavis is in charge? Or is he only going to give it some new life but not
move it in a new direction?

JACKIE VICTOR: One thing on a different level. Something happened this year that we shouldn't ignore - the Gay Rights March, the biggest march on Washington
ever. This weekend's 30th anniversary of the "I have a Dream" march isn't
expected to be near as large. I have been seeing people from different worlds
talking about their coming out ex-periences and its being accepted in a totally
different way. I don't know what that means in the larger scheme of things. But
I think there is going to be a ripple effect that we don't understand right now.
I appreciate how Shea broke things down in five categories. We have to be
careful not to be too apocalyptic. One thing I am thinking is that the post -
revolutionary movement is not going to be as glamorous as the liberation
movements. The building of communities, of a new society, is not like a good
guy/bad guy thing. What happens when the struggle for power ends and the
struggle for transformation begins?

      Another thing - and I don't know the significance of it - are these
universal questions: the environmental summit last year and the UN Conference on
Human Rights in June. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are taking on a new
role because of new technology and new layers claiming leadership and
responsibility for the 21st century. "We have been waiting for governments to
act and they haven't been working for positive change. So basically we are going
to stop working with them so much." So at the environmental summit they came up with things they are going to do, charters etc. I think the same thing happened
at the Human Rights Conference,but because it happened through the UN the
governments played a more important role. I get a sense of this mainly through
my friend Bob Russell who was at both conferences. We need to look at the role
of technology in connecting and empowering these NGOs. The period may not be as apocalyptic as it seems.

ANN PERRAULT: The thing I have been thinking about is that we are in a time when things are more connected. One reason why male-female dynamics, family things and cultural things are at a peak is that things are changing between certain
elements that we tend to hang on to. So we are more open to create in ways that
are beneficial to everybody. Intuitively women do that pretty well.

SHEA: I by no means meant to see all gloom to the world. What I meant was the
need to rid ourselves of things that have been really deep in us. Everything
that has shaped our thinking isn't there any more. None of it. So the need to
be open rather than to define is really important. I think it implies a different kind of politics. What I saw in DETROIT SUMMER this year was a tension between the old and the new, the masculine and the feminine, the need to define rather than the need to go with. I felt it throughout DETROIT SUMMER. I tend to go with these instinctual responses.
      The other thing is in terms of Hope. What has been with me during
the last year has been Elise Boulding's book BUILDING A GLOBAL CIVIC CULTURE in
which she talks a lot about NGOs and the role that women around the world play
in creating new ways of living. I think you are right, Jackie, that this has
none of the glamour of the revolutionary struggle. It also has none of the
violence. I think that being able to look at those as signs of hope is
different for me and has different symbolic impact on the world. Somewhere I
read that up until l985 the gap between generations was 20 years; now they are
talking about a generation being 5 years. The changes are so intense,so rapid
and so profound that the gap between the l5 year old and the 20 year old is
bigger than that between the 20 year old and the 35 year old. As I looked at the
dynamics of DETROIT SUMMER this year I could see that some of the older college
kids were able to relate to us more thn they could to a 15 year old. I often
give the example of the 18 year old in my class giving a speech which was
essentially a complaint--that his 11 year old brother got a computer at the same
time that he did and got to handle it much more quickly. So, he said, when I am
on the job market people like my brother who have grown up with the computer are
going to be so much better at it than I am. Here was an 18 year old  afraid of
becoming obsolete! That is a real feeling out there. Even the way we look at
generations is shaped by a different sense of how the world has moved.

GRACE: I wish Jimmy were here. If he were, there would be a different dynamic.
The question of how people are going to make a living would have been much more
central to the discussion. I raise this because we need to understand how easy
it is to slip away from that and to get into other modes where we are not rooted
in reality. Also about the feminine thing. There is the Yin and the Yang.
Jimmy always brought a particular thrust, a sense of political challenge to the
power structure, to capitalism, which is missing or subdued in gatherings that
are predominantly female. My life with Jimmy was based a lot on our
understanding that we were different but complementary. Listening to his
objections to and criticisms of my views I could see that there was an
incompleteness in my approach. Jimmy's thinking was circular, not linear.
Everything was interconnected.If he were here, I think he would have been
talking not only about the mobility of capital but what the mobility of
capitalism has meant to the mobility of populations, how, e.g. Asian-Americans
are now the fastest growing immigrant group in this country,and all the things
that implies for U.S. politics and the question of Race.What is happening in
Europe today is connected to the mobility of capitalism. There is a sea change
taking place in populations with all these migrations.
      Also we haven't discussed the question of NAFTA. I feel that the
opposition of workers to NAFTA opens up the possibility of talking about jobs
in a new way. In challenging Free Trade and global markets I think workers are
creating an opening that we have to take more seriously. Boutros Boutros Ghali
wrote a disgusting article on the OpEd page of the NYT the other day. He said
Multilateralism is the Democracy of international society, and I thought "What
bullshit!" He was boasting about how he had gotten agreement of the nations on
the Security Council but he hasn't a clue as to why these nations are so
powerless internationally.
      What is our responsibility to the NGOs? They are an important
development but I worry that their philosophical foundation is too superficial;
they don't appreciate the sea-change that is taking place with the end of the
Enlightenment and the need to go beond Rights. I think what is important about
the Gay Rights movement is not just rights for gays but what Ann emphasized,
how we are being forced to give up fixed categories that we hang on to.
      On the Malcolm X question, I recommend the RACE & CLASS articles. I
also recommend an article by Stephen Carter on the August 15 NYT OP/ED page
which I read Shea on the way up. Carter challenges the double standard of
liberals on the question of Religion. I.e. they welcomed Martin Luther King's
use of religious rhetoric to give deeper depth to the struggle for civil rights
but challenge the right of conservatives to do the same in support of their
positions. Other things I have been reading are: Paul Kennedy: PREPARING FOR
THE 21st CENTURY; George F.Kennan's AROUND THE CRAGGED HILL, and P.D.James: THE CHILDREN OF MEN, a science fiction novel narrated by an English Professor in 2020 A.D., 25 years after the last children were born on earth because in l995 male humans worldwide stopped producing sperm. Can people behave in a civilized way to one another if they can foresee the end of the human race?

SHEA: Everything I know about the world essentially places Europe as central.
Even the revolutionary struggles of the past period were essentially in
opposition to Europe or extensions of Europe of some kind. Now I feel that the
world is shifting in terms of economic energies into totally different
configurations, with Asia playing a different and pi-votal role. Driving up
here Grace and I talked about the global migrations taking place on a scale
unknown heretofore. Whole masses of people. The images I have are not only of
people going into Europe to work but masses of Africans moving about because of
famine or because they're being driven out. We have cultures mixing in a way we
have never seen before. All that without any center. Everything is loose now.

GRACE: It would be worthwhile re-reading the article from the 12/15-1/8
Economist which Louis sent me. "Looking back from 2992: The Disastrous 21st
Century."

FREDDY: I am delighted at the way the discussion has gone, but I feel funny
because I am trying to tie something in from the past. I have a strong feeling
that something needs to be done. You suggest these books, Grace, and they're
marvelous. But I'm scared that what happened in the 60s will happen again. The
young people came but the old generation had nothing to contribute. So the young
people did marvelous things but they also made errors which weren't necessary. l
realize nothing can be pure. l like what Detroit Summer does. But I think it
needs more depth. When I mention it to people, they say, "Oh, what Carter is
doing (Habitat for Humanity)." It needs to be explained.

RICK: There were great sea changes in the 50s and 60s: the Chinese revolution,
the civil rights movement, U.S.consumerism, the American Dream being fulfilled.
But Ella Baker was more than a facilitator, not just going with the flow. I
think there is a difference be-tween facilitating and giving leadership. I am
trying to respond to the issue raised by Fred-dy. There is something about
political struggle, making choices. What is the significance of the move to the
East? How does it really affect us?

SHEA: We are always talking about great sea changes. I can recall sitting at
Grace's kit-chen table, discussing NOAR's State of the Nation document and Grace
saying we hadn't captured the great sea-change taking place. That's
true.Certanly the last years of this century have seen great changes. l979: the
Iranian revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, Three Mile Island. But to borrow
another of Grace's sayings about the old man saying the prayers of his youth,
it might be helpful to separate out what is different. The first thing that is
different now is that we have never seen so clearly on a global scale the
opportunity for creating a new vision for progressive change which is as ripe
here as anywhere in the world, and that perhaps because, as Jimmy was always
saying, the U.S. is more of a world than a nation, what we do here can have a
tremendous impact on a world that is changing.

      The second thing is that I don't think we have ever seen so clearly
the destruction of economic capabilities in relation to multinational
capitalism, i.e. the inability of people to make a living because of what has
happened on the corporate level. So people can say, "There have to be these
adjustments because of technological changes." But it might take a hundred years
to move from major stuff to lots of small businesses. Well, that's our
life-time. I think we are agreed that in l980 we opposed the GM Poletown plant
because we wanted to save the community which was being bulldozed for the plant.
 We recognized the value of the community. But not because we saw the need for
creating community self-reliance as the only way to individual survival. I think
that today we can say we need the community because without the community there
won't be individual survival.

      The third point is that I think the gay movement means the end of
Identity politics in the U.S. because it makes clear that Identity is much more
complicated than the way it was defined narrowly in the 60s. I.e. you could
only be black, not both black and a woman.Well, by God, it's black women who are
raising questions about nationalism at the deepest level, and they are doing it
as African Americans and as women. "Don't pigeonhole me any more," that's what I
see the gay movement saying; it is shattering the old Identity
politics, creating new political space in that sense. So the question of the
principles by which we relate to one another are much more important than they
were 10-20 years ago when Jimmy was arguing for the need to go beyond thinking
biologically. We kept saying it but what did it mean to people? Now I think
things have moved beyond biology. So we are at a very different place and the
challenges are very different. So I'll play Grace's role and say we need to be
open and face the new questions.

GRACE: "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his conditions of life and his
relations with his kind."
Over the years every time I've quoted that passage from the Communist Manifesto
you and Rick have said "You said that years ago." It's not just that the
nation-state is powerless in the face of multinational corporations. Allende
said that in l972 at the UN. But there is a corruption about national politics
 today that is qualitatively different. E.g. the way Weinberger and the Defense
Dept. rigged the Star Wars test in order to get the Soviet Union to bankrupt
itself by putting more money into the arms race and also to get Congress to
appropriate more money for Star Wars. Technological changes are demanding that
we create new forms of government. Kennan says that he always believed that the
U.S. form of government with its separation of powers was the best in the world.
 But he now questions its adequacy in view of the way that elections are
controlled by the media and the way that our government has allowed auto and air
travel to destroy community and advertising to destroy our very concept of
Truth.

JACKIE: Grace raised the question of the NGOs. I'm not sure who the NGOs are,
but I see Detroit Summer as an NGO, part of the community building that is going
on around the world. There is a whole layer of organizations that claim some
amount of knowledge and perspective about what is going on in communities. I
want to discuss this more when we come to Detroit Summer. What is our
responsibility to the NGOs? They provide us with a way to relate to the
international community. Our responsibility is to find out who they are and the
similarities etc.

GRACE: I think of the NGO people as middle class professionals who operate
around government institutions. There has to be another level of activity that
goes deeper into the grassroots.

JACKIE: My sense is that there is this layer. If not, we need to create it.

RICK: Zola felt it at the Conference in Nairobi. At the same time it has become
profession-alized. What is important is holding to the vision of transformation
of masses of people at the grassroots and the struggle for power.

ANN: What is economic survival? and what kind of models are we going to create?

SHEA: In terms of people who come to mind, I think of Roberto Mendoza. One of
the great changes in this great sea change is the role of indigenous peoples, a
self-conscious international group who see themselves as articulating spiritual
oonsciousness to the planet.This is very new. Where that will take us we don't
know. It is coming out of the feminine energy and the sense of connectednesss to
the life of the Earth. The NGOs have helped these people gain a voice on a
global scale, which is really part of where we are heading and which moves it
out of the Hillary Clinton concept of spirituality.



DETROIT SUMMER
This session was transcribed and circulated last fall.


JAMES BOGGS LEGACY
GRACE: Most of the decisions that were made in the first weeks after Jimmy died
were made by me in consultation with Jimmy's family. Because Jimmy was so active
up to two days before he died, I wasn't really prepared for his death even
though he had been in the Hospice program since May . Our original intention
was to have just a private family service, but the children were concerned that
their friends had nothing to come to (Jimmy's body had been cremated). So we
decided to have a community service following the family service on July 31,
and a lot of people came even though it was decided on at the last minute. In
planning the program I had thought that family members would speak first, but
as it turned out there was really no division between family and community
people.   I also made the decision on my own to speak at the Malcolm X
Conference the day after Jimmy died so I could show the film clip of Jimmy
from the "Think Dialectically, not Biologically" workshop emphasizing that
Malcolm challenged us to struggle against our own weaknesses. Kenny, Pat and
John et al organized a memorial for Jimmy on their own at that conference.
Marcia Brown called from Newark to say that she and Mac did a half hour memorial for Jimmy on WBAI. NOAR people in Seattle held a Memorial. THIRD WORLD
VIEWPOINT is printing a number of Jimmy's most recent articles in the coming
issue. Max Elbaum, the editor of CROSSROADS in Oakland, called to ask for
information on the Memorial for their fall issue and said they are planning to
publish an article on Jimmy's work, probably written by Phil Hutchings. I don't
know what else is going to happen. Nick had been planning to come to Detroit
this summer to work with Jimmy on a  Malcolm X Autobiography of but he waited
too long. Kenny organizing the memorial at the Malcolm X Conference was one
reason why I decided to put out the brochure with the Free Press and Northwest
Detroiter articles because I thought it important that Jimmy speak for himself.


      There are at least two questions in this matter of legacy: (1) the
ideas and (2) the role that Jimmy played, e.g. he woke up almost every morning
with a Letter to the Editor on his mind. He was always insisting on the need to
be political, to have a clear position on and not straddle issues, which he
called being"ultra-democratic.". He always dealt with ideas and positions and
not with personalities; he was absolutely opposed to attacking the personality
of people he differed with or any kind of character assassination of people in
the "Movement."               I asked Rick to draw up some
questions.

RICK: This is the first time I have been in this kind of discussion: how do you
deal with the death of a comrade and friend? It is a very personal and also
very political question because of what Jimmy meant to so many different people
at different points in his life. The tendency is to quote one aspect of a
person, one incident, and that becomes the image.
I have had the opportunity ever since l973, when I read "But What About
the Workers?" to work with Jimmy and be in an organization with him. We have had the experience of people splitting and separating. I remember how, at the 20th
anniversary of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION in 1983 (when Ossie and Ruby were present) how everyone had a different political agenda and saw the book from that point of view. It was like myths were being created. That is a historical
inevitability and you can't stop it. But I think we have a responsibility as a
group in Detroit to figure out how we can put forward his legacy in a way that
will advance what were his concerns in l993 and also shape the October 23
Memorial in a way that will celebrate him and what mattered most to him. To
figure this out in a principled way is a sensitive question.
      What are our responsibilities to the spirit and practice of Jimmy
Boggs? How do we keep that alive? Just by putting out the brochure Grace made
a decision. In it she put the things she thought were key at this point: Black
and White; not being too damn democratic, the rebuilding of cities. Those were
choices. People are going to see that. When I think of Jimmy, whatever the
group, the audience, it was the same Jimmy, he raised the same questions. Where
was humanity going and how do we encourage young people? We don't leave
everything to young people but how do we encourage their initiative? He was
always asking the largest questions and the smallest questions. What process do
we need to create to ask those questions? How can these questions be asked in
the context of DETROIT SUMMER which was the latest _expression of Jim's
commitment to Detroit, to young people and to the advancement of humanity
through a social movement? How do we utilize the media to keep these questions
and his spirit alive on TV, radio, in print and in our own publications?

      What were Jimmy's  main ideological contributions? Transformation,
creating Leadership, Revolution, not Rebellion, being American, the changing
role of Class and Race, the role of Cities. What about the scholarships,
fellowships, foundations which some people have suggested? Do we want to have
this kind of discussion with a larger group of people in the Dettroit area as a
way of fostering an ongoing political dialogue? Is that possible or would it be
trying to create a unity that isn't there? People may want to discuss other
historical examples of people who have died.

MICHELLE: Jimmy used to say that you couldn't step into the same Detroit River
twice. I don't think we can find one answer that is definitely the way. As the
world turns, it changes. One thing I liked about Jimmy is that he was aware of
these changes, but even though the players might be changing, there was still
this need to be more human. So it wasn't only one set of rules to be locked
into. He was always conserving; that is why he read so much. He was soaking in
this knowledge. This is the way the river is flowing today and this is how we
are going to get across the stream. I don't think he ever saw just one stream.
He just saw us as going through the river of Life. Things are changing but this
is where we are headed and as long as we keep certain things in focus, what
happens all around us, we will be all right. I never heard him say, "Don't do
that." If you stay focussed on transforming, if you stay human, the rest of the
world is going to fall in place. But if you give up your humanity, your sense
of being you and who you are, then you are just another cog. No matter where
you put him, he was still himself. I don't think he was undemocratic. He was
uncompromising in being himself. You could put him with a group of Martians and
he was going to be himself; he wasn' going to be a Martian just to keep the
peace. I think that is what young people, and people from all walks of life
respected in him. You didn't have to agree with everything but you liked him and
you had a terrific respect for him and you also knew that he respected you for
being you. But if you were wishy-washy he would be the first to tell you. I
don't think we will ever find a final answer but we can keep the shore in sight
and deal with the different currents.

SHEA: I am very uncomfortable about carrying on a legacy or thinking about that
and I am trying to figure out why. It doesn't sit right with me. I decided early
on that I would never justify anything by saying "That is why Jimmy would have
done or said." I think of what we have gained from Jimmy in terms of what to
look at, ways to think about the world, things he represented and stood for that
I want to be a part of me. But it is a tricky business.  I feel that doing
the work that needs to be done is the best way to carry on what Jimmy meant
for any of us. I can think about how to plan a Memorial, but it is hard for me
to think about an abstraction other than that are certain things we all look
at, that we all share.

FREDDY: I am also uncomfortable about the Legacy business. There was plenty to
learn from Jimmy.. But it is like saying we are no more. The fact is that we
are going on. We are living what Jimmy lived. I could tell all kinds of
anecdotes about Jimmy, particularly walking on this island. They asked "Who is
this man?" but invariably he had them eating out of his hand. They see
themselves as very democratic. Jimmy was what he was. I want that to come
through and that will come through in whatever is published.

GRACE: I see everybody nodding, but at the risk of being the fly in the ointment
I don't think it is as simple as that. A number of times in the last year when
Jimmy wasn't at meetings John G. would say in the course of the discussion, "
I've been wondering what Jimmy would have been saying if he was here." And I
welcomed John's saying that openly because I also felt something was missing
when Jimmy wasn't there. It is not that anybody is going to be Jimmy. But he
played a certain pivotal role in political discussions so that you always knew
something was missing when he was not there - and it was not just that he was a
black man. During this last period he was very conscious of that in relationship
to DETROIT SUMMER, that the role he played in terms of demanding a more
political posture was absent. It is complicated. l don't want to be a political
widow but I know there are political widows - minor ones as well as major ones.
So I'll be a minor one. I know I can't play a lot of the roles that Jimmy played
- in part because our life together was his playing one role and I another -
e.g.his seeing the cup half empty and my seeing it half full..

RICK: Putting forward ideas because Jimmy said them is what I think Shea is
referring to. There are different things we need to get from this kind of
discussion.

MICHELLE: Julia said she missed Jimmy not being around. Not that he would come
in and say something but that he raised questions which made you think. I don't
want to see a legacy where we all put on Jimmy coats and say "Jimmy said" like
Confucius said. But to carry on his legacy is to raise those questions. That is
what Julia felt was missing. She said he would raise the questions which would
take everyone to another level. To carry on his legacy is to do certain things.
Like I carry on my grandmother's legacy by continuing to do certain things she did. When I was taking Julia home that Tuesday night, she said it bothered her to see Jimmy at the point where he couldn't say what was on his mind. She said that maybe we could have a collection of his speeches and use those at the beginning of DETROIT SUMMER orientation as the basis for a discussion. At other forums also. E.g. when Grace showed the clip of Jimmy at the Malcolm X Conference you could see that people were ready to talk. That to me would be continuing Jimmy's legacy. But if we all put on little Jimmy coats, he would probably come back one night and say, "What the hell are you doing?" He would tell Shea to go back being Shea. "You are doing a damn poor imitation of me." That's all we could do, poor imitations. But we could use his writings and books.

MARGO ADAIR: One thing Jimmy was against was charismatic leadership. To turn him into that now is not what he was about. He would always question things, he would always take sharp political stands and he was able to do that without
conveying the message of stuffiness. He didn't have an agenda about what the
other person should be thinking. That created a context of exploration. It was
his way of dialoguing with people, respecting where people were. It would be
interesting to ask what kinds of questions he would raise. On economics, on what does the vision mean now, what is facing us right now? He did it in a way that didn't convey judgment against the other person, so it really gave people something to think about and not feel they had to come to some conclusion in his head. There was a real openness to explore. He could take these really impossible, oppositional positions and never convey a message or judgment about the other person. He was getting people to think, not getting them to think with him. It was not "Think what I think." or "do this whether you agree or not." He was respectful whatever conclusions people came to.

RICK: This could be a funny kind of discussion because there were so many
different parts to Jimmy. He was also part of a lot of splits but he kept moving
forward. I think there is a question about what responsibility we have to the
public image. To publish certain speeches means making certain choices.

GRACE: And if we don't publish certain things, we are also making choices.

RICK: There were a lot of different parts to Jimmy. We make our own myths. Just
as one person may see him as open, I see him as making sharp choices, taking
sharp positions. That is the part I liked. It is more than quoting Jimmy. We are
making decisions by what we publish and the kind of Memorial we have.

GRACE: One of the things Louis said when he was here was that we have to decide
how much we are going to be a part of the myth-making. Because you make myths
about people who die, you make myths about complex people, about people who mean
some-thing. Different people make different myths. Down the road we may not all
be making the same myth. We are proceeding step by step. The next step is the
Memorial. I remember making the decision at 3:30 Thursday morning to speak
Friday night at the Malcolm X Conference . There was nobody to consult. I
decided to do it to make sure that Jimmy spoke in his own words at the
conference so it wouldn't just be people putting words in his mouth.

ANN PERRAULT: Out of DETROIT SUMMER has come a need to have a place for people.
People have talked about buying a place. I have been thinking about Land in
Detroit, trying to create an ecological base for folks. I think this group
would be a great one to create a 5-10 year plan to put something like that
together, a business plan, a non-profit doing something on farming, fishing,
solar energy, political discussion, ecological discussion, training people,
everything Jimmy stood for.

MICHELLE: People are going to have their own spin on Jimmy. Out of the Memorial people are going to be hungry for information. I think the people organizing the Memorial should set the direction. I have thought about the building and I thought it would be nice to have a place. If I were an inquiring mind and heard about Jimmy Boggs, I would want to read him. There should be things available but there also should be a place that you can direct people to where you can see what Jimmy was in action because Jimmy was more than talk. There also should be a place to market the ideas. Because there will be myths but there also
should be facts, directed myths. If you don't take control of it, someone else
will. The proceeds could go to build this environment where you could see it in
action. People who want to do something should know whom to contact, a certain
group, a certain organization. Right after Grace showed that video clip of
Jimmy, they found ways to in-corporate it in what they were doing. Either you
do it or someone else will. We need to do Marketing that promotes a vision
through discussion and supports ongoing action rather than just building a myth.

GRACE: That raises a lot of practical questions. Let me tell you about some
suggestions from other people. In the spring Chris Alston, who is black and an
old radical he helped organize the CP in Birmingham, Ala in the 30s, which took
a lot of guts - called to propose organizing a foundation in Jimmy's name. I
wasn't enthusiastic; all I could think of was letters from the IRS. I sounded
out Clem and Vera (she's chairperson of SOSAD) and Vera liked the idea. She
said she'd like to have a room at a university where young people could come to
read and be encouraged to think. Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings , who have been
very generous in their support of SOSAD, DETROIT SUMMER etc., suggested some
youth fellowships for DETROIT SUMMER.       We have quite a bit of video
footage on Jimmy. Frances Reid is using it to produce a 10-15 minute video for
the Memorial. John G. is thinking of making postcards with quotes. He's done
that with Schumacher.  Clem has had someone compile Jimmy's columns in the
newsletter for possible publication as a pamphlet. In this last period those
were Jimmy's favorites. He wanted to give a set to almost every person who came
to the house. We need to think about materials, a place. But I also recall what
happened with Coretta Scott King and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for
Social Change. A lot of conflict and splits took place over who was going to
control it. Of course, there was a lot more money and prestige connected with
that.

For years the SWP controlled Malcolm's written legacy because he had made so
many speeches for them after his split with Mr. Muhammed. They were the most
supportive in giving him a platform. Their monopoly wasn't broken until a
whole new generation of black intellectuals who could write about Malcolm was
created after the rebellions. It took years. I remember being with Ossie and
Ruby in their Detroit hotel room when two of Malcolm's brothers came by to ask
their advice on how the family could regain control of Malcolm's legacy. It was
some time in the 80s, 20 years after Malcolm's death.

There is also the question of my own energies. I feel I have to spend a fair
amount of my remaining years (1) pursuing ideas and activities I have been
pursuing; and (2) organizing the materials in our house. That is going to be
time-consuming. I don't want to be head of a foundation.

RICK: You can always be a name on a letterhead.

MICHELLE: What I like about Ann's idea is that it would provide a place,a safe
environment for young people like Mary where they could build for the future.
The foundation crossed my mind.

ANN: All of that can be done. If someone wants to do a foundation, let them do
it. People aren't jumping at your door.

FREDDY: Not quite. We all agree there should be something. What form it should
take is another question. I don't like what Kenny did in organizing the memorial
at the conference without saying anything to Grace.

MICHELLE: People just can't do what they want to.

RICK: We can't control what is going to happen. We can only influence what we
are part of. Who is attracted, who volunteers their time will influence what
happens. There are all these tendencies : Nationalists,Environmentalists, Gays,
Internationalists. Some people will say : "I don't want to work with that
person." So there is a lot to figure out. That goes with the encouraging.

MARGO: Around the country I see people moving out of sectarianism. Everybody is
not moving at the same pace, and some people are not moving at all, but I see a
different spirit, people working together. I am not saying there are no dangers
but I think it is more important to encourage things. It is not about control.

GRACE: I agree there is a movement beyond sectarianism, but the pace at which we
move has to have something to do with reality. When I first heard about Kenny
organizing the Memorial at the Conference, it troubled me, but then I said to
myself, "I can't control what happens. People are going to do what they are
going to do. But that means I have to do what I think should be done." That is
when I decided to put out the little brochure with the Free Press articles.
There is a struggle going on around Cultural Nationalism and I expect it to heat
up. I also expect people with the Cultural Nationalist position to quote Jimmy
on their side even though he's been fighting it for so many years. Opposing them
with counter quotes is a waste of time. Everybody spins their own myths. That
is what happened around Malcolm. If anyone was moving beyond narrow nationalism
at a rapid pace, it was Malcolm in his last year. Yet for nearly 30 years the
nationalists have been prefacing their own views with "Malcolm said."

MARGO: Anybody can quote anybody to pursue their own agenda. But if you start a
foundation or a center, legally you are the one.

SHEA: The questions I have are fairly pragmatic. Much of Jimmy's intellectual
work was challenging currents within the black movement. One of the things I
know about the world is that people are much ore likely to take you seriously
when you are dead. That Jimmy has died makes it more likely that this is the
time to publish a collection of speeches, articles. A year from now there will
not be the momentum. So one question is "What things do we want to challenge by
putting together certain collections?" For instance, it hasn't escaped my
attention that Grace is putting together stuff around the "organic
intellectual." There is this whole thing right now about black intellectuals in
the university making a living unrelated to the community. Do we want to put
some things together to challenge that and to provide support for people already
making that challenge?

Secondly, there is stuff around Sexism. Are there things we want to raise
around that?
Then there is the need to create a new economy. For the last number of years
the majority of Jimmy's speeches have been around the economy. Do we want to put
together a coll-ection of those and also put together some plans for action?
Michelle used the phrase:
VISION, THOUGHT, DISCUSSION, ACTION. Do we want to create an enactment around
DETROIT SUMMER and an extension of DETROIT SUMMER, e.g.Place. The Cultural
Nationalists have been grabbing Jimmy and they will keep doing that. The things
Grace sanctions will have more weight. For this period there are certain
controversies that we may want to enter into, out of respect for the fact that
this is where Jimmy was heading. We can always put together speeches etc. and
get out a thousand copies. The question is do we want to get out a book or
write articles that get to a larger audience. Perhaps some videos aimed at
high school kids. We could do something with music, ask kids, "What do you think
about your future? What do you think about the city of Detroit?" That would be
fun to do and there are people who would like to do that. It would have meaning
and be a helluva way to recruit kids. We could include discussions with Tracey,
Julia, Becca, Aaron, Jesse. At DETROIT SUMMER you meet people like these. That
takes energy and time which is not used to do something else.

GRACE: A number of things I thought about in preparation for the Memorial. The
Video on which Frances is working. A Pamphlet with Jimmy's SOSAD articles
which are focussed on young people, going beyond Civil Rights, Rebuilding
Detroit and Citizens, Not Subjects. Janice suggested a booklet of Tributes. I
think that is a great idea. We could
cut down on the number of speakers that way. New Life Publishers could do it.
The October Memorial, as contrasted with the Family-Community one the week after
Jimmy died, will have more people coming in from out-of-town, which means there
has to be some gathering besides the Memorial itself. We've been talking about
some Roundtables co-facilitated by youth and adult DETROIT SUMMER volunteers to
give people an opportunity to come together and discuss. Bearing in mind that
people are coming from out of town, we will have to get out our invitations
right after Labor Day so people have time to plan. If we get out a Tribute
booklet, I wouldn't try to get out the SOSAD columns for the Memorial, even
though John G and I have already started working on it.

These are some of the things we have to talk about, now in a very concrete way,
while what Ann is projecting will take a lot of advance planning. For the next
few months at least I see Field St. continuing to be the center - not that I
want to be the center but because over the years, as Ron Scott said, when people
in Detroit wanted to do something, they would say "Let's go see what Jimmy
Boggs has to say." All kinds of people remember sitting on that couch - whether
they actually did or not. It was like a rite of passage in Detroit.

RICK: I think the most difficult part of the Memorial will be trying to figure
out the Roundtable Discssions. It would be wonderful if the idea of a Place
could be presented at the Memorial. That depends on the energy and drive of
people.

MICHELLE: Maybe at the end of her remarks Julia could invite people to the
Roundtable by saying what she wrote in the newsletter: "Challenge yourself
always by asking quesions and act by what you believe but don't be afraid to
fail. As long as we remember these lessons, Jimmy lives on through us. And as
far as I'm concerned Jimmy lives on."

MARGO: When people come, it is because they want to keep the dream alive. On a
pragmatic level you can ask for pledges.

GRACE: I would feel very funny about that.
MICHELLE: There are people who will want to continue to be committed.

         (The remainder of this conversation dealt with Memorial
details).


HIP HOP
      One of the things we were reading this summer was the July-September
l993 issue of RACE & ˆCLASS, with the theme "Black America: The Street and the
Campus." In the Introduction the editor, A. Sivanandan,writes:

      "Black America is in ferment. There is rebellion afoot. But, as yet,
it is a rebellion waged in the cultural realm - over cultural issues such as
identity and belonging and nationhood or, if over political issues such as
racialised poverty and police brutality, still with cultural weapons such as
music and film. The first is being wrought in the lush groves of academia, the
second on the mean streets of the city. The first, though affording the black
dispossessed a sense of worth and a pride of place, leads them finally into an
inward- looking reactionary nationalism, incapable of contesting the system that
dispossesses them. The second, though expressing the raw anger of the street
against oppression and exploitation, is in itself oppressive of women and
exploitative of the young - a capitalist project,in effect, and of no real
threat to the system either.
      "What compounds the problem, though, is that whereas in the 60s, the
rebellion on the street swept into the campus and politicised it, today those
very successes have enabled the campus either to stand aloof from the street and
romanticize it, or to 'join' the street and lead it back into a romanticised
Africa. Where once, that is, there was an organic relation-ship between the
street and the campus producing the organic intellectual, today the street
cultures of resistance have been appropriated by academia and 'disciplined' into
literary theory and cultural studies,and therein depoliticised. Or they are
being drained of their revolutionary energy by being drawn into cultural
nationalist culs-de-sac."

      We asked Michelle who has an intimate knowledge of Hip Hop in part
because of her close relationship to her 21year old son,Terrance, to lead a
discussion of two articles in this issue: "Rap, Race and Politics" by Clarence
Lusane and "Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal
Illusions" by Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews.

MICHELLE: When you begin to talk about Rap and Youth and Movement there are
three things to think about. (1) the role the media plays in defining the
culture, specifically how they talk about male/female roles. What most people
know about rap comes from the media. (2) Then there are the politics of Youth.
Often we talk about young people not having any politics.   But if you look
at Rap, there is politics. More specifically, there is black nationalism, the
influence of Malcolm X, of Farrakhan. The Lusane article leaves out the whole
Zulu Nation and the 5%ers which have political overtones. In some ways,even
though some people are not strictly into one of these, they are influenced by
them. (3) The third thing is the influence of Rap not only on movement but on
mainstream America because parts of it have already been assimilated, not only
commercially but politically. For example, during the Presidential election
they found it necessary to talk about Sister Souljah in the whole business
between Clinton and Jesse Jackson.

      As to media defining culture, the first thing I found troubling in
Lusane's article is that the people he cites as giving validity to his argument
 are people who are very popular commercially. You have to go back and ask
yourself who owns the record companies - the same people who have owned them all
along. They are going to promote the people who will sell records. The media
tends to promote gangsta rap which is bang-bang, shoot 'em up, slap the 'ho' up
the side of her head etc. Get paid, get laid, shake your booty. As for
Afrocentrism, the ones they are really comfortable with are groups like Arrested
Development who wear Kente cloth but are sort of happy and peaceful and
non-violent.  Ex-Klan seems to be talking about "get back to your roots."
Lusane talks about the male-female roles being misogynist but again that is
what they promote. Two Live Crew is talking "get that booty." Both articles
talk about b.w.p. (bitches with problems) and the very negative images of black
women. They touch on Queen Latifah who is very positive but they miss the
whole group of female rappers who are positive. Most people's image of Rap
through watching TV is of angry young people in search of their African roots
and willing to kill in a moment. But that is not young people and not
reflective of all young people. The number of kids who are strictly into Hip Hop
is a minority. This is something we have to be very careful about. We can't
take the MTV version of black youth or the MTV definition of Hip Hop.

SHEA: I agree. I used to listen to the radio stations. About every month or so I
would spend a week listening to the popular radio stations. But about 10 years
ago I couldn't do it any more. It was like the gap between my experience and
what was coming over the radio was too great. So I lost that connection.Detroit
plays a lot of stuff you wouldn't hear in other places. What has happened to me
is that my window into rap music has been pretty much the MTV version, except
every now and then I will get a student who will talk about the political
implications of rap. They will take a song and give you the same kind of
anal-ysis of its revolutionary , progressive, whatever, depth that I can
remember giving to "Buy, Buy this American Buy." I think it is really valuable
to see that articles on youth culture are really slippery. Who are the artists
to listen to and look at, what do they represent and where do they fit in the
whole thing?

GRACE: Would you mind defining just what you mean by Hip Hop?

MICHELLE: Hip Hop is that whole culture which is based upon rap music as a
means of communication with one another, using a different language and a way of
dressing which denotes where you are in life and your philosophy based on what
you are feeling. It is the criss-cross look, the polo look, the baggy pants
etc. West Coast people are wearing the jeri curl. You can tell by their dress
and hairdo where people are coming from. There is this whole other group which
is not DMZ. They are saying we are going back to the old school. They are
making a complete statement about where they are coming from in life. People
who are really living Hip Hop have their own language.

GRACE: How long has Rap been around?

MICHELLE: Rap actually has been around forever. It is the extension of how
black people tell the story of their life, but it really sort of hit in the late
70s.

FREDDY: I remember staying on 6th Ave.and West 4th and not being able to sleep
because people were carrying on rapping.

MICHELLE: It was the Rap, Scratching and Break Dance thing. I think Africa
Bambatta was really beginning back there. Then it was "let's take it a little
further" and so on. There has been Rap but getting to Hip Hop was something
else. When they stopped making that split between House and Hip Hop was when
Terrance was beginning high school about five years ago. That's when the first
of the Rap movies came out with DMZ. Most people who say they are living Hip Hop
go back to that movie. They put something into their lyrics where before there
was a lot of sampling and scratching and mixing. With Hip Hop
the emphasis went from scratching and mixing to the lyrics. Scratching is
rubbing the record and mixing is taking a little bit from this music and that.
They would buy old records to do the scratching. That was the big thing in
early Rap, mixing styles. Then they would break dance to go along with it.
With the lyrics they began telling the story of their conditions and that is how
it started. Africa Bambatta was around this time. They started with the
scratching and the mixing and then started telling the story of where the black
man came from. There are a whole group of these, e.g. the Jungle Brothers.
They talk about living their lives, day to day things. That is when the gangsta
rap came up because they were talking about their experiences. It was the
story, the lyrics. Hip Hop people are the ones who grew up like that. Just
going by people I know, John Barfield who is in his middle 20s is not into Hip
Hop. He is a little bit too old. He knows Rap. On the other hand, my son who is
21 is dead into Hip Hop, living it, the whole shot. Tracey and Julia (Detroit
Summer volunteers) who are in their middle teens are not. They are on the
fringes.

GRACE: Is there a difference between Terrance who is in university and street
people who are not?

MICHELLE: Terrance is still very street, he talks the language of the
street.You can take him off the streets but you can't take the streets out of
him. At one point they took him off the air because they wanted him to play
more mainstream. He hangs out with people on the south side of Chicago who are
living Hip Hop, not those at the university. When we were in Northeast Harbor we
saw this white, blond young fellow who I doubt has ever seen New York with
baggy pants hanging down his back, the big shirt,the hat sidewise. That is how
the Hip Hop culture has crossed over and is part of the mainstream. Coca Cola
says we have to tap into this. New Kids on the Block became very popular .
Rap is rebellion and people at home felt it was OK. Parents didn't mind their
kids rebelling a little. They didn't want them liking Ice Cube. But everyone is
not into it. E.g. Tracey and Julia see a certain truth in it, that it is talking
about "my condition." But they don't listen to Hip Hop all the time. It is that
age thing.

GRACE: Is it more male than female.?

MICHELLE: There are females who are very much into Hip Hop.  They're naked,
shaking their booties. But there are women - Apache does one . He talks about
this gangsta bitch and she's just as down into it as he is. Yo-Yo. She is kind
of lightweight. You see it more in large cities. Hip Hop is bigger in Chicago
than in Detroit, and it's also big in L.A. and New York. In Chicago you see
young women wearing the Timberlane boots and the big hats. They dress Hip Hop.
They don't wear dresses.

FREDDY: There are clubs in L.A. where you can't go in unless you are dressed a
certain way and use the language.

MICHELLE: They have Hip Hop parties where the girls wear as much polo as the
boys. They buy these expensive polo shirts. But most of the artists who gain
commercial success are men because they reflect the image of the angry black men
or the happy one like Arrested Development which is about as non-threatening as
you can get. Ex-Klan did a video which was threatening because they looked very
militant and talked about Africa.They used the devil terms.

FREDDY: It is a language made up on the spot.

GRACE: This city thing interests me. I have been talking about this article by
Kleymeyer on Cultural Energy and Grassroots Development, in which he says that
cultural energy is necessary for grassroots development, but that in working
with the Kuna (an Ecuadorean community) he felt the tremendous generational gap
between the older Kuna who live in the village for whom Culture is a body of
inherited knowledge closely tied to their work over the years and to the reefs,
estuaries and jungles of the region; and the urbanizedyouth for whom Culture is
a solution to the riddle posed by modernization, the "immense and inert
heartwood that holds a tree upright in a gale." In other words, the youth in
the city, whether in North or South America, are displaced persons, creating a
community through a particular kind of music and through externals like dress
and esoteric language because they have no community. They are displaced from
their homeland,  faced with problems coming at them one after another, so they
create a community through dress and language as a way of asserting and
protecting their selfhood.

 FREDDY: It appears to be rootless but it isn't. It is deeply rooted, it is
like calypso.

SHEA: I found the Angela Davis article in the Wild Woman in the Whirlwind book
helpful.
MICHELLE: Angela Davis talks about how Sojourner Truth used spirituals not just
to sing about God but to send messsages. She talks about Ma Rainey and Bessie
Smith.

SHEA: Music is a way for people to talk about their lives. That is a
longstanding tradition. There has always been this oral tradition of African
Americans and Rap is part of that. When I was in L.A. recently we saw this photo
of the development of Dance from Africa to Break Dance. You could see the same
music and the same moves century after century, through slavery and
Reconstruction, the Minstrels and Break Dancing. Each time it was a little
different but there was a common thread.

MICHELLE: I listen to Rap and Reggae. Now there is the Ragamuffin style; they
are rapping and talking about politics. Shabba  is using Rap but in the "Shake
the booty" thing. When you go way back there are ways of talking, the tone of
voice. Rap does the same thing. It is based in history. Young people grasp it
and take it to a new level. A lot of young people grasp Malcolm, Farrakhan. A
lot of them are 5%ers. Even young people who are not Hip Hop are touched by the
influence of Rap. They go to Farrakhan because in part they are looking for an
answer, a message. 5%ers say they don't really buy heaven and hell. They
believe in Islam but Islam to them is I, Self, Lord and Master. Like Bob Marley
"A mighty God is a living man."  The Nubians (the Gods must be crazy) Someone
was trying to flex on god.He said, "Don't they know "the Gods must be crazy."
They are the Gods. What they do is going to affect our lives. They are not
looking for pie in the sky. They say "A white man's heaven is a black man's
hell." Terrance wants all the things the ruling class has. That is heaven to
him. "Who tells us when to work? The devil. What we need to do is get the skills
so that we can go to heaven." Heaven to them is having things. A lot of young
kids who might be 5%ers say "How come I don't have that good life I see on TV?"
Tracey is saying"Don't give me a vision way down the road. Show me what to do
today." The ones who listen to Farrakhan talk about the way he says we should
have our own jobs. We should support each other. How come we have to work for
somebody else? Rap is opposed to that. Terrance et al are seeking out
organizations, evaluations that will help them achieve heaven today, not when
they are dead and gone..

GRACE: What does it mean to be rooted? Obviously what they are doing and saying
is shaped by the conditions of their lives and the African American tradition,
using music to tell stories and send messages. But that is different from being
rooted. What is happening to young people essentially is that they are
uprooted, made rootless by our society, and the bigger the city the more
deprived they are of any roots, the more mobile they are.

FREDDY: I hear you but there has to be a beginning.

GRACE: Rap and HipHop are rooted in the African American tradition of using
music to telll the story of your condition. But that is different from the roots
that African Americans had in the South , living on the Land as contrasted to
being in the city. The difference between the Movement in the North and in the
South was that the movement in the South was rooted in a critique of white
Culture, not just the color but the values, the inhumanity of the culture.
Black people in theSouth were convinced that they were morally superior
(i.e. in the eyes of God) to whites . They didn't just want what white people
had because it was so clear that what white people had came from oppressing
black people. In the North, on the other hand, it was more "We want what they
have." The power and the material things. This is a very important difference
which comes out in the character of the music.

MICHELLE: I talked to Khalid (a Detroit Summer volunteer from Fresno) about
gangs and he said you join gangs because you don't have stability or sense of
community without the gang. It is the same with Hip Hop. People in Hip Hop can
talk about Rap all the way back to Africa Bambatta.In many ways Rap and Hip
Hop are their culture, their community. They know the history, the reason for
the splits. We can talk about the past of our community , what used to be on
that vacant lot, e.g. They talk about their group in the same way. That is
their community.

FREDDY: This started a long time ago in Jazz. They started the mixing, but it
didn't come out. Miles Davis has some of it .

SHEA: I see a lot of questions. 1) About Afrocentrism  2) Is this just another
way of fitting into "the materialistic, looking after yourself separate from the
community and the hell with everybody else" atttitude of today's society while
still maintaining a sense that you are different. Is Cultural Nationalism
another way of taking on the values of the larger society?

GRACE: That's why the question raised by Tracey at the "Seeds of the New
Economy" discussion was so important. What she wanted to know is why do so many
young people buy into the consumerism which is promoted on TV. Running through
the Barbara Ransby article as contrasted with the Clarence Lusane article is
something of that. Ransby questions Rap from the standpoint of the patriarchal
character of RAP and also the materialism.

SHEA: It's a question of Values. Having seen a fair chunk of the movies that
deal with young gangs I know this for myself. One of them, New Jack City, made
me physically ill. All the women were bitches and "hos"; there was a constant
assault on them.

MICHELLE: Why is there such a huge crop of this kind of movies? Is it to
perpetuate a new stereotype? If you are out there in the real community you
don't see every other guy yelling "Hey, bitch, Hey ho." That is the media
defining the culture, promoting violence and anticipating riots.

FREDDY: And being disappointed because there is no riot.

GRACE: A lot of people complain about the media promoting violence but no one
complains about the media promoting this image of black youth.

MICHELLE: I look at these movies as the black exploitation films of the 90s
like the Superfly films of the 70s.. I asked Terrance about consumerism,
especially when he started getting into polo. But it is also just a game. He
goes into Marshall Field's. buys this shirt, wears it to a party and then
returns it the next day for a refund. His friends spend a lot of money. In New
York a group made a song about Lucian who was a big shoplifter. I said to
Terrance,"Think about this stuff, you are listening to what Farrakhan is saying
but you are wearing polo and putting a lot of money into polo, which is probably
making Lucian very ill; he is puking all the way to the bank." He said his group
is talking about this. "Since we are setting the agenda for what is cool, maybe
we should be designing our own clothes line." But at the time polo is a
statement because to him the worst nightmare for a white person would be to
think that all these years he has been going into the polo shop, and here comes
Terrance with his knapsack and has more polo. It is like "I'm here; deal with
me." I said to him, "Think of all the money you are putting into polo that you
could be doing something else with." It begins with the label but it can take
them to the next step where they think about it. If he stayed stuck in polo, I
would be having a problem with it. Tracey wanted to be a part of the Seeds of a
New Economy discussion, not just a faciltator.

GRACE: There is no question that there is politics in the music and that as
things develop people can move. But I don't think you can depend on that alone
to bring change.

FREDDY: What did you expect out of this discussion?

SHEA: At the beginning of the Reagan era what I saw in a lot of young people,
black and white, was the desire to fit in, not be seen. On campus everybody
started looking like little business people. Conservative clothing, hair-dos.
Mid-80s on campus you began seeing the punkers, Hip Hop. These were people who
clearly were not going to fit in. It was like a new consciousness for youth was
being defined, in opposition to the mainstream. It was particularly clear in
Hip Hop. Even though there is this consumer element, there is the critique of
the mainstream. I think it is a resurgence of critical consciousness because
there was a period when this wasn't happening, when young people felt too
inadequate to define themselves. That has been changing in the last 5-10 years.

MICHELLE: I met this young Noah who is Nubian. He is in a quest for knowledge.
Tracey too. They will listen but they are making their own decisions and
judgments. "This sounds like b.s." They are on this quest for things to help
them make it through but not in the way their parents did. That is why I thought
it great that DETROIT SUMMER was intergenerational. But you have to talk with
them and let them challenge you because that is how they learn. I went to
Chicago for Christmas Eve with Terrance's friends and they brought in all these
great books. We talked about a lot of things in the Bible, not as a re-ligious
thing but as a quest for knowledge. This intergenerational thing is great but
not as mentor-mentee or teaching but as people on a quest for knowledge, willing
to give and take. To go back to Arrested Development they have accepted this
guy who is bringing something to it. He is not just a propagandist. He is a part
of the tribe that they talk to. Hip Hop is giving them a chance to say "I am not
going to fit in, I am different, you better reckon with me." It has stimulated a
lot of discussion and thought whether you are deep into it or only on the
fringes. I heard a defense of 2 Live Crew by a young person who goes to Malcolm
X University. He said he hated those videos but he said he couldn't sit back and
accept censorship of Rap and Hip Hop because it will go into other things. In
the car one day some Detroit Summer youth were talking about the 2-Live Crew
video - it has a lot of crotch shots and booty-shaking - and Voncia said, "I
hate that. Turn it off. I don't do that. Why do they show that? If I wear some
shorts, that video is going to make people say things to me."

Where young people are setting the agenda, they are taking positions,
particularly black women . It is making them more vocal. So you have black women
rappers like Queen Latifah " Ladies First." "The Evil that men do" is one of her
songs. It is making them take a critical look, making them grow. Rap and Hip Hop
are not stagnant, they are constantly evolving. Who knows where it is going to
go?

FREDDY: What about black magazines today?

MICHELLE: ESSENCE and EMERGE are pretty good. I don't read JET. It is like a
Who's Who, who's getting married, who is blending into the system. EBONY is JET
with bigger pictures.

GRACE: ESSENCE and EMERGE are giving black intellectuals a platform to write
about ideas for a popular audience. Two books which I found valuable this year
were RACE-ing, JUSTICE, En-GENDER-ing POWER, edited by Toni Morrison, and
MALCOLM X IN HIS OWN IMAGE, edited by Joe Wood. Both include articles by black
women intellectuals like Angela Davis, Patricia Collins, Paula Giddins and show
the new level of consciousness especially in wake of the Anita Hill-Clarence
Thomas hearings. (Another magazine reflecting the new critical consciousness
is RECONSTRUCTION, edited by Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy which
Ping Ferry shared with me on our way back from Maine). Out of this discussion I
hope Michelle will want to do a critical article for RACE & CLASS.

MICHELLE: Johnson Publications has sold out to a multinational corporation. it
won't even be black-owned any more.

An example of the manipulative role of the media is the way KFC wanted to use
Rap to sell chicken but refused to use Plato who is an excellent dancer (he
danced on a Michael Jackson video) because he is too black. They found someone
else who is a little fairer. If you look at the women on these videos, they all
look pretty much alike. A TV station in California called to do a story on
DETROIT SUMMER. They wanted to know if anyone was shot, whether the government tried to stop us, whether we had any gang problem. When I said "No" to all these questions, they said that it sounded like a worthwhile program but they needed something with a little more controversy.

What they show on the media is not what is happening in real life in the
community. The image we are being given is not the reality.  For example, I
know some groups where they refer to a woman as fee if it is a casual
relationship and "Earth " or "Wisdom" if it is a serious one. A lot of young
men know black women who are powerful people; they know what their mothers had to do to raise them and they have a lot of respect for them