Comedian Richard Pryor, who died at the age of 63, was one of the greatest comedians of all time. He was a stand-up comic, singer, songwriter, actor, producer, and singer-songwriter. He is best known for his sketch comedy routines, but he was also known for being the first black man to write and perform a song called "Dogs and the Cats," which was written and performed by his brother, Ron Stallworth. In this episode, Ron talks about his relationship with the late comedian, how he got to know him, and what it was like to work with him. He also talks about the early days of his comedy career, and how he and his brother fell in love with each other, which led to him going back to comedy in the late 60s and early 70s, and why he decided to go back to standup comedy. He also shares his thoughts on the life and career of Lenny Bruce and the impact he had on the art form, and the legacy of the late standup comedian, George Carlin, who was also a close family friend of his late brother, Jimmy Seinfeld, who helped pave the way for him. Richard the Godfather in the early 80s and 90s. the man who paved his way to becoming the greatest standup comic of his day. He is buried in the shadow of a star. Thank you, Richard, for being who you were, and for doing what you did, and not only in comedy, but in life, but also in the art of being who he truly was, and who will be missed out on the legacy you left in the next generation. of great comedians who will live on in the history of greats who will forever be remembered as a great man. in our hearts forever. RIP Richard, you will always be a legend. -Jonestown. Jonestown Jon Taffer John Singleton Jimmy Seibert Jim Carlin Tom Bell . Jon Sellett Bill Paolo Barbu Rick Ross Joe Pesci Robert Downey Jack Och Michael Jordan Ronald Reagan Sam Cooke Bobby Rook Carl Roswell Bob Dylan James Blanchard Dennis Quaid Eddie Murphy Will Smith Mike Comrie
00:01:01.000It was strange to be in the room with him because when I was a 14-year-old boy, my parents took me to see live at the Sunset Strip, and I could not believe that anybody could be so funny just talking.
00:01:13.000That was my first experience with stand-up comedy.
00:01:15.000Other than that, I'd seen people perform on The Tonight Show and things along those lines.
00:01:21.000But with Bob Hope and some of these others, it's highly talented.
00:01:42.000But you can see the power of art, and it's connected to freedom, because I've always viewed Richard Pryor as the freest man in the 20th century, certainly the freest black man, along with Muhammad Ali.
00:01:51.000He's the freest black man in the 20th century.
00:01:57.000The choices that he makes has to do with his own sense of self.
00:02:01.000He doesn't care what other people think.
00:02:03.000He's looking for other people's approval, recognition.
00:02:06.000He's gonna be who he is, and he pays a major cost for that, of course.
00:02:11.000Anytime you're that free in a world of such unfreedom, you're gonna pay a major, major cost.
00:02:19.000Well, he had spectacular honesty, and I feel like what happened was Lenny Bruce opened the art form up, and then Richard Pryor took it to a new place.
00:04:57.000No, but the violence against Andy's sister is wrong, but prior, though, my man, he was wild, free, cruel, tender, genius, crazy, wrong as he could be,
00:07:20.000It goes back to those early comics in the history of the West who were willing to tell the truth, especially as it related to the everyday experiences of ordinary people.
00:07:36.000Plato's text itself, you know, the Republic, was grounded in an imitation of the comic writers who were the first to really delve into everyday people's experiences, not the well-to-do.
00:09:42.000But I'm just saying this in terms of just enhancing all of our lives.
00:09:45.000I mean, the comic writers, the comedians of various sorts, be they on the stage or be they on the page, are, I think, vanguards of the species in a very deep way, you know, because we as a species, We have to objectify our grief and our pain and our sadness and our sorrow.
00:10:05.000And it begins with moans and groans and you transfigure those moans and groans first into song, but song then moves into language.
00:10:13.000And the language is not rational language or philosophy and dialectic, but it's a language of stories, especially the stories that are self-critical.
00:11:05.000In most of our lives, you see, we're dealing with a whole history of a species.
00:11:10.000Of structures of domination, oppression, that's the history of the species for the most part.
00:11:15.000And there's moments in which there's breakthroughs, in which there's a freedom of spirit.
00:11:21.000And then you have some institutionalization of that, which is democracy.
00:11:25.000That's why democracies are so fragile and usually don't last that long because it cuts so radically against the sense of really wanting to be free.
00:11:43.000And when they're introduced to freedom and it really catches hold, they say, oh my God, it's a tremendous cost to be paid, but I like that.
00:12:31.000They're injustice and want to smile and walk around as peacocks rather than cut against the grain and have to bear witness and therefore end up on a cross or like Socrates, condemned.
00:12:42.000Most of the great figures that we know.
00:14:04.000In the 25th anniversary, I wanted to talk to you about it because that's the one I read, and it's so strange when you read something that's so current, even though it's 25 years old, it rings true.
00:14:19.000Sometimes does that feel futile, where you have the same issues that you spoke on 25 years ago, and there's very little change in those 25 years.
00:14:30.000No, it's a wonderful deep question though, man.
00:14:33.000I appreciate the times that you spent reading Race Matters.
00:14:38.000But no, it's never futile though, man.
00:14:41.000It's never futile because you have a conception of victory that is not messianic or salvific.
00:14:50.000You're not trying to be a messiah to bring some kind of grand victory.
00:14:55.000You're simply trying to touch people's lives.
00:14:58.000So when you enrich and enable a person's life, the way in which you've talked about that right there, you're already talking about the ways in which you were touched.
00:15:06.000That means there was no futility at all.
00:15:43.000And love supreme is not love in the abstract, right?
00:15:47.000It's a love of beauty in its concrete forms.
00:15:50.000It's a love of goodness in its concrete forms.
00:15:53.000It's a love of truth in its concrete forms.
00:15:57.000Now, I'm a Christian, revolutionary Christian, so I got a love of God mediated through a Palestinian Jew named Jesus, but that's tied to a justice that comes out of prophetic Judaism, right?
00:16:07.000And we know Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these religions for me have no wholesale monopoly On how we understand the world, because they all emerge at various historical moments.
00:16:20.000But when it comes to this love that allows us to persist in a world in which cruelty and envy, contempt, manipulation, dishonesty, and that's shot through all of us.
00:16:36.000We're not finger pointing the name card.
00:19:32.000So, I mean, you can start with comedy with, you know, the clown who's walking around slipping on bananas or the sophisticated professor who doesn't realize that he got a banana hanging out the back of his pocket when he's lecturing with the students.
00:22:59.000But you can never get the full scale and variety of the human condition in any one tradition.
00:23:08.000I think one of the beauties of what you're saying here one of the beautiful things about what you're saying here is the complexity of human beings and When you're dealing with the situation between these girls that call themselves a squad and Donald Trump and you deal with these very simplistic Things like these chants of send her back or lock her up or they hate America or you know this this is simplifying things and Is so attractive to some people and so attractive during political discourse,
00:24:06.000I mean, he's had some, you know, relations to his mother and his brothers and sisters that were not ones of sheer manipulation and domination.
00:25:17.000I mean, the first thing that Trump was able to do was to expose the prepackaged commodities that we call politicians, that he came across as somebody who was just himself.
00:25:37.000Oh, I was a close friend of Hillary's.
00:25:39.000I've been at the same weddings and so forth, because that's how the elites circulate in the American empire.
00:25:46.000But then when they discovered, lo and behold, now he's posing himself as some kind of oppositional figure, and yet He's tied to big money, tied to big military.
00:25:56.000When he gets in, he brings in the old-school militarist people.
00:26:02.000He's still dropping bombs on the nine countries that have been dropping bombs for the last number of years.
00:26:08.000Tax cuts sound exactly the same than Mitch...
00:27:10.000The original sin was we had to decide whether we were going to coexist with indigenous peoples or dominate them.
00:27:18.000And the decision was, for the most part, genocidal effect in terms of domination.
00:27:25.000So it's a settler colonial society, a colony of Britain, you see.
00:27:30.000Then we enslaved the Africans who become the basis of our economy.
00:27:35.000And the vast majority of prophets made We're actually tied to slavery.
00:27:40.000That's why so many of the presidents, first presidents in America, were slaveholders and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court were slaveholders and so forth.
00:27:49.000That doesn't mean that certain democratic practices were not being enacted, but it was enacted for white brothers with property.
00:27:56.000The white brothers who had no property, they couldn't vote at all.
00:28:00.000The women, of course, couldn't vote until 1920. So they had domestic households in which they had to find some sense of fulfillment.
00:28:08.000That's what history of patriarchy and misogyny, in part, are connected.
00:28:12.000And then tremendous efforts come to expanding it.
00:28:19.000And this is why even when Brother Trump talks about socialism, he doesn't realize the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, who was a socialist.
00:28:31.000The song America the Beautiful, which is one of the most beautiful songs.
00:28:54.000John Dewey, democratic socialist his whole life.
00:28:59.000Helen Keller, deaf, mute, blind, graduate of Radcliffe, socialist.
00:29:05.000Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest Christian thinker of the 20th century.
00:29:10.000Democratic socialist, moral man in the moral society.
00:29:13.000Martin Luther King Jr., democratic socialist.
00:29:16.000Ella Baker, democratic socialism is as American as apple pie.
00:29:22.000But with the communists and the communist threat and the Soviet Union and all of its repression and regimentation and violation of liberties and killing of the culottes and so forth, in the American mind,
00:29:38.000socialism becomes associated with communism.
00:29:41.000So you saw Brother Lindsay the other day, right?
00:29:51.000And you see, what happens is in a neo-fascist discourse, it's true anywhere around the world.
00:29:56.000If you can define a community as pure, And then characterize those on the outside who are threatened as impure and then view yourself as those coming to the rescue to preserve the purity.
00:30:25.000I mean, the first city councilman from Harlem, Benjamin Davis, went to jail because he was a communist, you see, because they were the impure.
00:30:35.000Now, communism needs to be radically called into question.
00:30:40.000In terms of its dominating forms like the Soviet Union and China on the mile and so forth and so on.
00:30:46.000But at the same time, when you look at Karl Marx and his critique of capitalism, this is prior to Lenin, prior to Stalin, he says capitalism is tied to this obsession with profit that puts profit before people And it will generate oligopolies in which there will be grotesque levels of wealth inequality and the only way that poor and working people will be able to gain access to any resources through organizing and mobilizing.
00:31:14.000Now you can accept that Marxist insight without being a Marxist.
00:31:31.000But there's so many people that find the idea of socialism attractive because it combines this idea of a community with a nation and that we're all tied together.
00:31:42.000And we obviously have some socialist aspects to our civilization in terms of, like, utilities and taking care of the road.
00:31:50.000We're not going to outsource the military.
00:31:54.000There has to be some kind of governmental control.
00:31:58.000But the problem is this, that we have to view democratic socialism as a moment in the larger movement of democracy.
00:32:09.000My dear brother Jeff Stout, who's one of the great philosophers and thinkers of democracy, calls them egalitarian freedom traditions.
00:32:20.000And that's simply a way of saying That if you look at the world through the lens of the masses of people who are poor and working people, what are the conditions under which they can have security from domination?
00:32:37.000What are the conditions under which they can have dignity by holding forms of oppression at arm's length?
00:32:48.000You see, if capitalism vis-a-vis feudalism can generate liberties and freedoms, I'm for it.
00:32:56.000And that's precisely what the middle classes did when they broke from feudalism in Europe or broke from feudalism in other parts of the world, right?
00:33:04.000You had to overthrow kings and queens in the name of personal liberties.
00:33:09.000But those personal liberties were confined too often to white brothers with property.
00:33:15.000And the white brothers with no property?
00:33:18.000They're either trying to hold on to their whiteness or they become like the white brothers with property, or they make moral choices and say, I want to be a person of integrity.
00:33:27.000I want to fight with the folk who are being excluded.
00:33:31.000And this is one of the problems in talking about race and white supremacy in America, because, you see, we think too often in monolithic categories.
00:33:39.000There's never been a white supremacy without fighting against white supremacy and that includes white brothers and sisters.
00:33:48.000There's a tradition From Ann Braden, from Miles Horton, you know, of Highlander Center, you got that wonderful picture of Rosa Parks.
00:33:56.000She was at Highlander Center four months before she was arrested, before she sat down on a bus in order to stand up for justice.
00:34:05.000Right there at Highlander Center under Miles Horton.
00:34:19.000So his Thanksgiving dinners were very complicated.
00:34:22.000But that's true for a whole lot of white brothers and sisters who fight against white supremacy.
00:34:27.000And Braden, Rabbi Abraham Joshua, Edward Said, you have a whole tradition of white brothers and sisters who've been fighting against white supremacy.
00:34:46.000And that middle class brother from Iowa, you ask him about white supremacy.
00:34:50.000You ask Brubeck about white supremacy.
00:34:53.000You ask any of the, Paul Desmond, all of these folk who are connected to traditions in which black humanity, brown humanity is seen and affirmed.
00:35:06.000You had a point in the book Race Matters that resonated with me that I never really thought of before.
00:35:12.000And what you said was that because of the fact that the United States has this deep history of slavery and the slavery of African Americans, that white people became white people instead of Polish and German and Italian.
00:35:28.000Instead of it being like most other countries where the Italians think of themselves as Italians and the Greeks are the Greeks, those were white people.
00:35:42.000You've got these scholars of American studies.
00:35:46.000Neil Payne is one of the towering ones, but it goes all the way back to Brother Alexander and David Roediger and some others who've been talking about the way in which whiteness was created.
00:35:57.000Take, for example, an Irish brother who goes to Ellis Island.
00:36:01.000His people have been dealing with 800 years of vicious British colonialism and imperialism, vicious attacks, various famines that were in some ways created or at least enabled and so on.
00:37:44.000And so in that way you can see the discourse of whiteness, blackness, brownness, redness and so forth become so deeply rooted in American law, American structures, American perceptions and this is why the arts are so crucial because it's primarily in the music And in the arts,
00:38:05.000where the breakdown of white supremacy begins to take place in the country.
00:38:42.000Maybe they're just as creative, imaginative, intelligent, just like us.
00:38:46.000Then they hear the music and they say, ooh, they got something going on on the black side of town that we don't know.
00:38:52.000It's like you're going to see Pryor, right?
00:38:54.000If somebody had told you, oh, Brother Joe, White supremacy America tells you that black creativity, black intelligence, black genius doesn't exist.
00:39:02.000And you go see pride with your parents and you go away thinking, this Negro's a genius.
00:39:11.000And then you recognize, oh, there's a whole tradition of prior, and we can go on and on from the Coltrane, Sarah Vaughn, and on and on and on, right?
00:39:19.000And so people begin to think, especially white brothers and sisters, our parents have been lying to us when it comes to black intelligence, imagination, and genius, and humanity.
00:39:31.000And yet the structures make it difficult for us to come together.
00:39:34.000We're talking about up until 1960. That's a long time though.
00:39:37.0001776 to 1964 and 5. That's a long time for both slavery and neo-slavery to be in place.
00:39:48.000And here we are now, 54 years later, trying to create a multiracial democracy, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
00:39:57.000And it's already been enacted in the jazz groups, Sly Stone's bands, multiracial.
00:40:07.000The comedies, the studying of the comedies that you all have.
00:40:10.000You sit down with comics, you all talk about the genius across race and gender as if it's a natural thing.
00:40:19.000The white supremacist and male supremacist categories of whiteness, blackness, all in different silos.
00:40:26.000But it's so hard to do it on the ground.
00:40:28.000See, part of the problem of talking about race in America, that's why I've been very critical of a number of contemporary black intellectuals, because white supremacy cuts so deep in the culture, people begin to think it has magical powers, and somehow it just floats above American history as if it's just part of our DNA in a biological way.
00:40:48.000But all conceptions of race in the modern world are grounded in predatory capitalism.
00:40:56.000So that the talk about whiteness and blackness becomes a way of rationalizing social structures like slavery and Jim Crow.
00:41:07.000And it has to do with trying to extract labor resources.
00:41:13.000It's an attack on their humanity and identity.
00:41:44.000But in modern conceptions of race are tied to modern conceptions of predatory capitalism, here and abroad, which includes imperialism, which includes empires.
00:41:53.000So the United States comes out of the British Empire.
00:41:56.000We engage in a heroic, courageous revolt against the British Empire.
00:42:58.000Do you think that much like this country is an experiment in self-democracy, a very recent experiment, when you look at human history, right, the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been human, there's really only been a couple of years, a hundred years of this.
00:43:10.000Do you think that that's maybe the lens that we should look at something like democratic socialism through?
00:43:16.000Not that it can't work, but that it hasn't been implemented correctly before.
00:43:24.000See, what makes not just the United States, there's been democratic experiments all around the world in various circumstances.
00:43:31.000We become central stage because we become a world power that understands itself as a democracy with all the contradictions that go hand in hand with that.
00:43:42.000Begin as a settler colonial enterprise.
00:44:09.000You see, Rockefeller and Company had private militias that were bigger than a lot of public armies to make sure workers were not able to engage in collective bargaining.
00:44:18.000I was in San Francisco just yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, which is now lodged in the Longshoremen's Association, which is fascinating.
00:44:26.000The Commonwealth is a well-to-do ruling class.
00:44:38.000They were just trying to ensure that ordinary people gain access to jobs with a living wage, decent education.
00:44:46.000This is one reason why I spend so much time with my dear brother Bernie Sanders, right?
00:44:50.000Because it's a democratic project that simply says, how come poor children can't have access to some of the things that the children of the well-to-do have?
00:46:43.000And it's a strange narrative when you consider all the things we talked about already, like what we need with the fire department and the police department and all the different ways that socialism does form utilities and all the different ways that socialism does form a part of our culture and our community.
00:47:03.000Why do you think that that is this narrative and how does that narrative get reshaped?
00:47:07.000Because that narrative of that the only reason why people want socialism is because they want a free ride.
00:47:15.000But the one is that first we have to listen very closely to our right-wing brothers and sisters and conservatives and middlers because oftentimes, I mean, they're human beings like anybody else,
00:47:51.000What is the connections of getting into the prep schools and the Ivy League schools and so forth, even though they work, it's still a kind of free ride.
00:48:01.000So if they're preoccupied with this issue of being free ride, we tell them, let's make sure that people do work hard and sacrifice and therefore in some way deserve what they have.
00:48:15.000Now, if just based on that principle, The upper echelons of American society would be indicted.
00:50:48.000I was on the plane the other day, and the pilot says, I hope you all are able to take a few minutes of your time, because we've got a family outside waiting for the body of someone just killed in Afghanistan.
00:52:39.000But when you get capitalism with no democratic accountability, what do you get?
00:52:44.000You get a predatory capitalism with gross wealth inequality and everyday people, the masses of poor and working people fighting for crumbs.
00:52:54.000And there's also this denial of it amongst the most patriotic.
00:53:29.000I want to put a smile on my grandmama's face in the grave.
00:53:33.000And she told me as a Christian that if the kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little heaven behind.
00:53:42.000And heaven takes the form of laying bare the humanity of each and every one of us, especially the least of these.
00:53:50.000That's the 25th chapter of Matthew, right?
00:53:52.000What you do to the least of these, you do unto me.
00:53:56.000The orphan, the widow, the poor, the children, the elderly, the workers, the gays, the lesbians, the trans, especially the trans these days.
00:54:06.000They're just trashed like I don't know what.
00:54:08.000But they're black folk, they're brown folk, they're white poor.
00:54:42.000The American dream doesn't go far enough.
00:54:45.000The American dream says, I'm going to work hard, sacrifice, and get mine, and live large in some vanilla suburb, maybe with a trophy spouse, and feel good about myself.
00:54:58.000You say, nothing wrong with wanting to gain access to resources.
00:55:50.000We're talking about deep joy, deep love.
00:55:53.000We will remember those who raised their voices and said, in the name of something bigger than my ego and my narcissism and my hedonism, and we all have it.
00:56:34.000Well, there's this conversation that's happening now, right?
00:56:36.000And there's a conversation that's based on the information of recognizing the fact that so many people have wasted deep aspects of their lives, long, long lives pursuing meaningless things and recognizing that there is a lot of injustice in this world and that people are afraid of admitting that injustice because then they would somehow or another be complicit in the enactment of that injustice.
00:57:02.000I think it's one of the things that people are terrified of when you talk about We're good to go.
00:57:36.000If we have these disenfranchised parts of this country that have been that way forever, there's a guy that's been on this podcast who was a police officer in Baltimore.
00:57:45.000And he talked about how when he was a police officer, he recognized the systemic racism and how crippling it was.
00:57:53.000And one of the things that he recognized was they found a piece of paper that was a blotter report of all the different various crimes that were committed from the 1970s.
00:58:01.000It was some year in 1970. It was the exact same crimes in the exact same communities that he was dealing with them.
00:58:11.000Recognizing the redlining about the fact that there was areas where black people were not allowed to buy homes, that they kept them in these communities, the same crimes kept occurring in the same places, and all they were doing was going in there and arresting people.
00:58:23.000And nothing changed and nothing was fixed.
00:58:25.000And as a police officer, he was realizing and just becoming aware of the fact that he's a part of this system.
00:58:34.000He didn't want to be a part of the system anymore, but he was a part of this system that is creating this problem.
00:58:40.000When you address that though, the people that don't suffer in those communities that aren't a part of that community, there's a natural inclination to resist.
01:00:01.000I don't believe in innocent people no matter who they are, no matter what color.
01:00:04.000But at the same time, John Brown had a love of black people much deeper than many black people have of themselves because he's willing to die for black people.
01:00:11.000But the same is true within, let's say, black communities.
01:00:14.000You've got, okay, 1% of the population in America who own 41% of the wealth.
01:00:18.000You've got three individuals who have wealth equivalent to 160 million fellow citizens.
01:00:23.000But within the black community, the top 1% of black folk have over 70% of the wealth.
01:00:29.000So that means you've got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias out there.
01:00:34.000Who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities.
01:00:40.000So it's all about representation rather than substantive transformation.
01:01:06.000Mary Ellen Pleasant and others, and Martin King and others, are challenges for those of us who do have some resources to still raise our voices.
01:01:16.000Because you can be black, We're highly well adjusted to injustice, economically, in terms of race and so forth.
01:01:49.000That falls directly into the culture of superficial spectacle.
01:01:54.000Last thing we need is just spectacle with no substance in that way.
01:01:59.000And this is a battle within the communities of peoples of color because it's not going to be a matter of just pointing out white supremacy.
01:02:09.000Of course, white supremacy is a fundamental foundation in part of the country.
01:03:24.000Of the moral and the spiritual, the centrality of the artistic, especially the musical and especially the comics, as the vanguards who represent a freedom and a courage and a vision to connect us as human beings.
01:03:40.000Because you can't really be a comic with a wholesale Nazi ideology.
01:03:46.000Now, you can be a Nazi genius like Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher and a genius and a thug when it comes to politics, you see.
01:03:54.000But a comic has got to be able to be open enough to deal with the incongruity and inconsistency and the sheer absurdity of it all.
01:04:04.000You talked about moments of freedom earlier, and I recognize that as one of the greatest things you ever see when someone's on stage and they're killing.
01:04:12.000There's moments where everyone's together.
01:04:14.000They're all together, locked up in the laughter, and they're all together.
01:04:18.000There's a sense of community that you share with the people that are in the room.
01:04:22.000It does bring people together, even if it's for brief moments, for a few seconds or as long as it takes.
01:04:36.000And see, in a democracy, you see, it's those moments that constitute the memory of what could be as opposed to what's in place.
01:04:49.000You know, the great August Wilson, the great playwright, black playwright, deeply influenced, he said, by the blues...
01:04:57.000Baraka and Bearden, Romain Bearden, the great painter, and Mary Baraka, of course, from Newark, like yourself, just like Sarah Vaughan and Philip Roth, right there from Newark.
01:05:06.000He used to say that performance authorizes alternative realities for the audience that gets them to unsettle their conventional perceptions of the world.
01:05:20.000And that's what great artists and great comics...
01:05:23.000But that's what you do in strange times, though, brother.
01:05:26.000That you bring in the fact that we're living in such a grim moment, what I'd call, you know, the American empire in decline.
01:05:33.000And we all need to call for its regeneration, its democratic revitalization and regeneration.
01:05:54.000We all have insecurities, anxieties, and fears knowing that our bodies will undergo extinction one day very soon.
01:06:01.000And therefore, to deal with those insecurities and fears and anxieties, you have to have certain structures of feeling and value that give you some sense of worthwhileness as you move through time, from mother's womb to tomb, right?
01:06:15.000And it's only in biographical time, because we only got one life this side of the Jordan, and there's no person who's a messiah.
01:06:24.000Now, people will tell you they are, but you say, okay, just call it.
01:06:27.000Be self-deceived and drink your coffee.
01:08:22.000But that's one of the more important parts of being a person, right, is to...
01:08:25.000Really, your diet of what you take in, in terms of whether it's your art or whether it's your education, try to take in the best and most inspirational and the most spectacular versions of human endeavors.
01:08:54.000Yeah, I mean, and you understand the role of excellence with the Greek score, I tell you, that plays.
01:08:59.000But to be able just to turn on our television and see Brother LeBron James do his thing, that's another context that cuts across race, class, gender, and so forth.
01:09:26.000Muhammad Ali, along with Richard Pryor, it was the freest black man in the 20th century.
01:09:32.000But see, the boxing is so crucial as well as the other sports because for black people, every other sphere in the society is unfair and unfree.
01:09:45.000But when you get in that ring and the referee is fair, you finally get fair competition.
01:09:52.000That's why Jack Johnson was such a threat.
01:09:54.000Remember when Jack Johnson was knocking white brothers out?
01:09:57.000There would be racial riots against black folk, killing black folk all across the country.
01:10:01.000Don't you get the idea that just because he beat the white man in the context of fairness that you can beat anybody?
01:10:43.000And with Muhammad Ali, you know, you got someone who was just himself in the context of a social movement that was taking place at the same time.
01:10:56.000So he would associate himself with the Black Freedom Movement called the Civil Rights Movement.
01:11:26.000The Nation of Islam probably had about 0.1% approval in the country, and probably about 4 or 5% in the black community, because at that time, black folk and black Christians were just afraid of the black Muslims.
01:11:43.000But it was Malcolm X who, in all of his genius, made it so broadly conceived that That even Christians like myself, I'm a Jesus-loving, free black man, but I can't live my life without Malcolm, you see?
01:12:18.000The great stories he tells in the autobiography of Malcolm X, one of the great classics, really, and memoirs in the history of American civilization.
01:12:26.000But he's very misunderstood in terms of the cultural narrative of who he was?
01:13:19.000See, one of the great gifts of the artists, and I speak about this especially in the black tradition, is what we could call soulful kenosis.
01:13:30.000K-E-N-O-S-I-S. Now, kenosis means self-giving, self-donating, and self-emptying.
01:13:42.000So if you go to a James Brown concert, that brother goes for four and a half hours and gives everything, every fiber of his being.
01:13:51.000And at the end of every concert, what does he say?
01:15:29.000See, when Curtis Mayfield sings his songs that the radio won't play, when he's told not to go to the rallies and he shows up with his guitar anyway and plays We a Winner, That's self-giving, self-emptying.
01:15:45.000And I tell that to the young musicians these days, because a lot of, you know, in the culture of spectacle, nowadays, you get these performers, they just show up and think they ought to get a standing ovation for 10 minutes, say, no, Negro sang a song first, man, shit!
01:16:15.000I think she's the greatest entertainer.
01:16:18.000Of our day, I've been very critical of her because there's a sense in which she's still tied to the cultural superficial spectacle in terms of the way she looks and girls in formation and so forth.
01:16:29.000But at the same time, she's also grounded in the tradition.
01:16:32.000And there's a new movie that she made.
01:19:02.000And so I put a lot of pressure on them.
01:19:04.000One of the things that I bring a lot of critique to bear is, see, I am deeply shaped by...
01:19:10.000The dramatics, the delphonics, the main ingredient, the whispers, lakeside, James Brown's band, George Clinton Bootsy's band, I'm shaped by the emotions, I'm shaped by the Jones girls, the miracles,
01:19:25.000the temptations, marvelettes, all those were groups that expressed their soulful self-emptying in a form of sweetness.
01:19:37.000See, I believe in sweetness and kindness.
01:19:47.000Why is it we don't have large numbers of groups that sing in tune with a beauty and a sweetness and a gentleness and a kindness?
01:19:56.000When you hear the voice of David Ruffin sing Ain't Too Proud to Beg, the vulnerability, the flexibility of it, the intensity of it, And it goes straight to your soul.
01:20:10.000That's why the people keep listening to David Ruffin from Why Not Mississippi.
01:20:15.000I would say the same with Ted Mills of Blue Magic.
01:20:19.000I get the young folk, let's just stop.
01:20:21.000Let's just listen to Ted Mills of the Blue Magic.
01:20:24.000Let's just listen to Russell Tompkins Jr., the stylistic.
01:20:29.000Oh, Brother West, you just old school.
01:21:05.000You Italian working class brother from Hoboken?
01:21:08.000That's right, because I'm tied to excellence and sweetness.
01:21:12.000Now, Frank Sinatra, he sings some sweet, gentle songs now.
01:21:17.000But the younger generation these days, they've got him and some others who are beautiful, don't get me wrong, but it's smaller and smaller.
01:21:25.000But it's partly a matter of the oligarchs in the recording industry.
01:21:30.000See, Boyz II Men, in a way, is the last great group singing performative act that connected to the dramatics and delphonics that I'm talking about.
01:23:17.000I mean, Pendergrass, he had his sharp cars, but when that genius got into the studio and saying, love TKO, you don't give a damn what kind of car he got.
01:29:23.000If there was a drug that you could take that made you feel the way you feel when a great song comes on, you'd want to take that all the time.
01:32:16.000I was blessed to have dialogue with B.B. King on a number of occasions.
01:32:22.000He was really the king in a lot of ways.
01:32:25.000King, not because he was the greatest blues artist, but because he was a great blues artist who, through his personality and through his generosity, was able to create such a presence that he becomes the king in that way.
01:33:06.000And by college, he meant just studying with Byrd, with Armstrong, with Duke, with Rutherford and Mary Lou Williams and the others.
01:33:15.000And I always tell him, I said, I don't know about that because, you know, genius and excellence comes in a number of different forms.
01:33:21.000Most jazz musicians don't have the genius of a Robert Johnson.
01:33:26.000And yet, you know, Charlie Christian's guitar is more complicated in a variety of different ways than Robert Johnson, too, so that You have to be able to be flexible enough to see the differences, the development, building on the genius of those who came before.
01:33:41.000So you can end up being a very good guitar player who plays some unbelievable chords that Jimi Hendrix created.
01:34:09.000And here again, you see, you have that common humanity that cuts across color.
01:34:17.000There's a lot of controversy these days about cultural appropriation.
01:34:21.000Can white brothers and sisters really...
01:34:24.000I'll be part of a black genre and so forth and so on.
01:34:28.000I had a dialogue at my class at Harvard this spring where I teach a course on black intellectual tradition, and I include some white intellectuals as part of it.
01:34:39.000There's a strange career, Jim Crow, for example, by the great C. Van Woodward.
01:34:43.000History of Jim Crow, which is the Bible.
01:34:46.000Martin Luther King said it was the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement.
01:34:48.000Woodward was a white Southern brother.
01:34:50.000And I asked him, they said, we don't understand completely, Brother West.
01:36:07.000David Hume, colonized by the British Empire, responding in their own creative ways, and by the 20th century, they soaked in rhythm and blues, too.
01:37:56.000And the momentum of culture, like, I just got back from Italy.
01:38:00.000They're so different, but yet they're so similar.
01:38:04.000There's a momentum of the way they live their lives.
01:38:07.000It's very unique and unusual, and I think that's one of the great things about traveling is you get to see, oh, well, the way we live here, especially here in Los Angeles, which is preposterous.
01:38:17.000I've never lived in LA. I mean, Sacramento, I grew up, but I never lived in LA. Where do you live now?
01:39:19.000I mean, one of the sadder features of our moment, given all the joy of reveling in each other's humanity and music and so forth, is that you've got impending ecological catastrophe, escalating nuclear catastrophe.
01:39:39.000Economic catastrophes of grotesque wealth inequality all around the world.
01:39:44.000Spiritual catastrophe in terms of intensifying forms of depression, suicide, wasted lives, lack of self-respect, not believing in oneself and thinking that the only way you can really make it is by imitating the mainstream forms of conformity.
01:40:02.000And then the political catastrophes of right-wing movements all around the world.
01:40:07.000And by right-wing movements, what I mean is the rule of big money, big military, and then scapegoat the most vulnerable and try to convince the most vulnerable that it's their fault that they're in the subordinate positions that they are, rather than giving them a fair chance,
01:40:48.000Not allow it to have the last word, but you've got to wrestle with it.
01:40:50.000When you're talking about your concern about nuclear catastrophe, impending nuclear catastrophe, are you talking about what's going on right now with Iran?
01:40:58.000Well, I'm thinking about Russia, Russia, China, U.S. missile heads, Iran, North Korea, the possibility of war, U.S. bombing, precious Iran.
01:41:07.000Iranian brothers and sisters are as precious and priceless as anybody else.
01:42:21.000And how they become top dogs, tied to the U.S. top dogs.
01:42:25.000Now you always have, again, those Jewish voices and organizations.
01:42:29.000That are critical of Israeli occupation, critical of any actions of human beings, including Jews, that need to be called into question.
01:42:37.000But it's hard to keep track of the rich and priceless humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters under occupation, second-class citizenship, when it's very clear that Jews have been so viciously treated for 2,000 years in the history of the West as well as the history of the Middle East.
01:42:58.000And yet we have a moral duty to keep track of the preciousness of Palestinian babies, just as we ought to keep track of the preciousness of Jewish babies.
01:43:08.000And Gaza and Tel Aviv must have a spotlight in terms of what those human beings are going through on both sides of that divide, as it were, even given the asymmetric relation of power and And that structure of domination called the occupation.
01:43:29.000I'd say the same thing about Western Sub-Sahara under Moroccan domination.
01:43:35.000There's so many examples that we human beings generate that require our moral and spiritual witness and our analytical attention and our artists who can authorize an alternative.
01:44:04.000I mean, I would imagine when you're dealing with such an oppressed group of people that are living in such a precarious situation in time and history.
01:45:15.000To me, one of the uplifting features of being rooted in the arts and music is that no matter how ugly and vicious and hateful things are, it never suffocates the human spirit.
01:45:34.000Somebody gonna tell a joke and make you laugh.
01:45:37.000Somebody gonna sing a song and touch your soul.
01:46:34.000I mean, that's one of the reasons why even when I talk about, you know, Brother Trump as the gangster, I call him, we have created a fascist Frankenstein, and he's the creation of the worst of America in the way in which Martin King represents the best,
01:46:51.000and they are both America's apple pie.
01:46:53.000But any critique of anybody ought to begin with yourself.
01:46:59.000Ought to begin with who we are, because we all got gangster elements inside of us.
01:47:24.000And you know, one of the first things that come across to the brother is that he's just so glad to be there hanging out with the black brothers, cool and so forth.
01:47:33.000You could just tell he's just as square as a rectangle.
01:47:38.000You go listen to your Beach Boys, man.
01:48:11.000If Donald Trump's mother shows up from Scotland in 1930, black people been here nine generations, we ain't going to say, go back where you come from.
01:48:21.000Be part of this democratic experiment.
01:48:23.000We're on the other side, the chocolate side of town, but we welcome you.
01:48:27.000But don't say nothing about our brown brothers and sisters coming in from Mexico.
01:48:32.000Because if anybody's definitive about what is America, it's going to be red and black people.
01:48:38.000Because they're the ones who undergo the monstrous crimes against humanity, the genocide, the stolen land on the one hand, and the stolen peoples and the human bondage on the other.
01:48:49.000Those are the pillars, the worst pillars of the country.
01:48:52.000Then you've got democratic visions coming not just from Thomas Jefferson, but they're coming from the slaves like Frederick Douglass.
01:49:45.000And it's so, you know, it's so sad because here's a brother who speaks his whole personal identity on being a Christian.
01:49:55.000And you say to yourself, like, Brother Michael, I mean, as a fellow Christian, I'm not trying to call into question your Christian faith or nothing.
01:50:50.000You had some neo-colonial elites who cooperated, but it was the Roman Empire who put Jesus to death.
01:50:56.000It was the greatest empire of its day, very much like the Persian Empire.
01:51:01.000The largest, greatest empire of its day with Cyrus the Great.
01:51:06.000Now you got the Roman Empire putting Jesus to death.
01:51:10.000And here Jesus is sent there by the crowd, by the mob.
01:51:16.000And you say to Brother Michael Pence, so you're going to accommodate yourself to Donald Trump?
01:51:23.000You're going to accommodate yourself to policies that are so inhumane and barbaric just to retain your position and try to then rationalize it as a Christian?
01:51:39.000We need some music and some comedy to try to get in contact with his humanity to change him.
01:51:44.000But most importantly, you just need a social movement.
01:52:28.000Into the country, those who are eager and have energy, willing to work and sacrifice and the unbelievable contribution of voluntary immigrants to the making of America.
01:52:42.000Now, America is not a nation of immigrants.
01:52:43.000I don't like that language because it overlooks indigenous peoples and involuntary immigrants like black people.
01:52:50.000And slavery was not America's original sin.
01:52:53.000That's another neoliberal lie that you hear all the time on the corporate media, as if indigenous people's suffering has to be rendered invisible to highlight black people.
01:53:02.000What's one of the least discussed injustices of this nation, right?
01:53:07.000And then their current situation in these reservations with extreme alcoholism and drug addiction.
01:53:15.000Social misery, and they still got their rich music and poetry and resistance, but the social conditions are just...
01:53:22.000But they are the casualties of a settler colonial enterprise, and we'd rather act as if they don't exist.
01:53:29.000I mean, we black people became central because our labor and our imagination and culture became central, and we had a barbaric civil war, 750,000 people dead, each life precious.
01:53:42.000And that has been the central event in the shaping of America.
01:53:45.000So when people talk about race, they go straight to blackness, as if indigenous peoples in redness is not integral to.
01:53:53.000It's just that they've been really so invisible and the vicious attack has been so immense.
01:53:58.000Well, it's so complicated, too, that they have their own rules on the reservations.
01:54:43.000Trying to put pressure on the Obama administration to ensure that a pipeline was not We're good to go.
01:55:14.000Unified against the greedy corporate elites who were trying to promote this pipeline through Canada all the way down to the southern section of the United States.