Josephine Baker

Notwithstanding the seemingly inexorable tendency for New York to become a theme park for hedge fund managers based on health clubs and million dollar condos, there are still some things that make living here worthwhile. One of them is the accessibility to high quality films that never make it to the hinterlands, especially those shown at specialty film festivals like the African Diaspora Film Festival that is running between November 23^rd and December 6^th this year.

I had the opportunity to see a documentary on Josephine Baker that will be shown on Friday, November 30^th. Directed by Annette Von Wangenheim, it is a fascinating look at a personality I had only knew by reputation before. Aptly titled “Josephine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man’s World,” it is a study of the very first Black female to become a major figure in the entertainment world. What I didn’t realize, however, is that Baker had much in common with figures such as Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonte, who used their fame and prestige to promote a progressive agenda.

Born in 1906, Baker was a highly successful chorus line performer by the early 1920s. In 1925, she made a debut appearance in the Théatre des Champs-Élysées and eventually became a regular at the Folies Bergères. Vintage films from the period show Baker dancing in erotic costumes with racist overtones, such as a string of bananas that one interviewee regarded as a phallic symbol as well. That was basically the mold that Baker was cast into in this period, one combining powerful racial and sexual motifs, such as this performance of “Haiti” captured on youtube would indicate. As repellent as the African savage imagery of her dances now appears, it must be remembered that this was an almost inevitable aspect of a Black popular culture forced to adapt to white tastes. Duke Ellington also performed “jungle” music and Louis Armstrong sang about “darkies” in Mississippi.

Josephine Baker became a French citizen in 1937 and a universally beloved figure, including some of the leading “high culture” figures as her fans, like Jean Cocteau and Ernest Hemingway. Her prestige was so overwhelming that the Nazis were reluctant to move against her despite her belonging to an “inferior” racial group. Using her ability to travel freely abroad and her knowledge of multiple languages, Baker became a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. She smuggled intelligence to the resistance in Portugal coded within her sheet music. After the war, she received the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur from General Charles de Gaulle.

An outspoken defender of world peace and racial justice, Baker transformed her beliefs into deeds by adopting 12 children from different ethnic backgrounds and countries after WWII. One, who speaks reverently about her in the film, was living in an Algerian refugee camp during the war of independence.

Josephine Baker became a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. She also continued performing until the night she died in 1975. An interview from that year sums up her career and contribution to humanity: “I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.”

Assata Shakur

Last night I attended a private screening of “Assata”, a 93 minute ‘docudrama’ written and directed by my old friend Fred Baker. Despite the obvious shoestring budget, the film has more impact that the average Hollywood blockbuster costing 1000 times more. It is the story of Assata Shakur, nee Joanne Chesimard, the sixty year old Black liberation activist who fled from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba.

Along with Mumia and Leonard Peltier, she was one of the most prominent victims of the American injustice system. For many young people first coming around the Black liberation movement today, she is a symbol of resistance as the New York Times reported on December 13, 2006:

The chancellor of the City University of New York yesterday directed the president of City College to remove the names of two fugitives linked to violent crimes from the entrance to a student clubroom.

Matthew Goldstein, the chancellor, called the designation of the room as the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center ”unauthorized and inappropriate.”

Ms. Shakur — once known as Joanne Chesimard — was a member of the Black Liberation Army convicted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. She is currently a federal fugitive living in Cuba. Mr. Morales, also in Cuba, was a leader of the Puerto Rican independence group known as the F.A.L.N., which claimed responsibility for a tavern bombing in Lower Manhattan that killed four people and injured others. Both were students at City College…

But the students were not ready to acquiesce.

Rodolfo Leyton, a City College senior and the center’s director, said students planned to speak to a lawyer, Ronald B. McGuire, and possibly ‘’seek legal remedies.” The center sued college and university officials in 1998 when it discovered a surveillance camera in a smoke detector across from it. That suit is still pending.

Mr. Leyton also said that while others view Ms. Shakur as guilty, ”we see her as a leader in her community who was framed and unlawfully convicted.” He said minutes of college proceedings in September 1989 dedicated the room to one of the groups still using the center, Students for Educational Rights. Others also use the space.

Fred Baker blends documentary-type material, including interviews with former Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver, now a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, with a love story revolving around two young African-American characters who are both committed to finding out the truth about Assata Skakur. Justin (Charles Everett) is a documentary film maker who we first meet filming an outdoor jazz concert on a New York street. (As the director of acclaimed jazz films featuring John Coltrane, Stan Getz and others, Baker must have a strong identification with this character.) During filming, Justin runs into Asha (Erika Vaughn), a pretty college student who falls in love with him in a rather old-fashioned way. After a few visits to his apartment, she discovers a bookshelf full of material on Assata Shakur. This leads to a showdown with Justin to see how involved he is with her story. It turns out that he is very involved. The remainder of the film is structured around his recounting of Assata’s arrest and flight to freedom to Asha.

In a way, his passion for finding out the truth reminds me of the young African-American film-maker Keith A. Beauchamp’s dedication to Emmett Till. The martyrs and heroes of the Black Community have a way of inspiring succeeding generations of truth-tellers.

As somebody who had only very limited exposure to her case in the 1970s, I found Fred Baker’s film most instructive. Like many “old leftists” (Trotskyist, to be specific), I found much of the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army activities that Assata Shakur was involved with to be an ultraleft diversion from more pressing tasks in the mass movement. My political differences might have even led me to assume the worst about her, a mistake that the movie very effectively corrects.

Despite her reputation as a “terrorist,” there is no evidence that she actually shot a New Jersey State Trooper on January 23, 1973. Doctors testified that she was shot when her hands were up, while one of the arresting officer’s testimonies was riddled with contradictions. In one of the more dramatic scenes of the film, we see a recreation of the confrontation on the New Jersey highway that led to her arrest. It has the same kind of chilling effect as Earl Morris’s recreation of a similar incident in “The Thin Blue Line,” in which the police testimony is revealed to be full of holes. If there is anything that can be learned from cases such as Mumia’s or Assata Shakur’s, it is to take the word of the cops with a wheelbarrow full of salt.

In the early 70s, Assata Shakur became a kind of symbol of evil in the minds of white racist America that Nat Turner was in an earlier age. The police were anxious to hold her practically responsible for every crime that the Black Liberation movement was accused of around that time to the point that it became ridiculous.

Assata was never forgiven for her flight to freedom. Last May she was identified as a “domestic terrorist” and a one million dollar bounty was put on her head. Such is the state of the American justice system that she is still being hounded, while mass murderer Luis Posada Carriles is released on bond from a Texas jail. For news and information on Assata Shakur, check the website: http://www.assatashakur.org/

Fred Baker

In the Q&A last night, Fred Baker mentioned that his movie would eventually have a website. When it does, I will post a link to it. Considering the state of racial relations in the USA, with Don Imus’s “joke” about the Rutgers women basketball players and a white cop firing 31 bullets at an unarmed and unresisting Sean Bell, such a film is more urgent than ever.

UPDATE:

“Assata” Website

 

 

Don Imus forced to apologize

For the first time in his nearly 40 year career in radio, Don Imus has been forced to apologize for his racist “jokes”. This morning I listened to him apologize profusely to the women’s basketball team at Rutgers and to Black Americans in general for calling them “nappy headed ho’s” [ho's means whores] last Wednesday.

Black political leaders have not been mollified by his apology. This afternoon Imus is scheduled to appear on Al Sharpton’s radio show at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. Fortunately, this can be heard online at: http://www.sharptontalk.net/. Sharpton is a very sharp critic of racism in the media and in society generally, so this should make for a very dramatic exchange.

Today’s NY Times summed up the controversy in the business section.

“Imus in the Morning” is scheduled to start this morning like any other, with Don Imus and his crew cracking wise about the weekend’s events, riffing off the news and chatting with Evan Thomas, one of Newsweek’s top guns. Later Tom Oliphant, Washington author and former op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, will check in for some political talk.

Given that Mr. Imus spent part of last week describing the student athletes at Rutgers as “nappy-headed ho’s,” you might think he’d have trouble booking anyone, let alone A-list establishment names. But Mr. Imus, who has been given a pass for this sort of comment in the past, also generously provides airtime to those parts of the news media and political apparatus that would generally be expected to bring him to account.

Mr. Imus’s comment about the Rutgers team last week was not just, as they say, over the line — you can’t even see the line from where he landed. It was not a gaffe, a slip of the tongue, a joke in poor taste. (Nor was the on-air comment to Mr. Imus by the show’s longtime producer, Bernard McGuirk, calling the women’s final the “Jigaboos vs. the Wannabees,” in a bad attempt to borrow a phrase from a Spike Lee movie.) Mr. Imus’s slur was the kind of unalloyed racial insult that might not have passed muster on a low-watt AM station in the Jim Crow South.

The article goes on to mention that its own African-American reporters have been the butt of Imus’s racist jokes. When Gwenn Ifill, now a host of a PBS talk show, was working at the Times, Imus referred to her as a “cleaning lady” and to sports writer William C. Rhoden as a “quota hire.” Evidently this has not persuaded NY Times columnists Tom Friedman, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd from making regular appearances on his show over the years.

Imus’s ability to attract powerful political and media figures over the years has earned him inclusion on Time Magazine’s list of the most powerful 25 Americans in 1997. It said:

But what he really plays is people. “Imus is the best political interviewer,” says New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “He’s read everything, and he gets to the heart of everything.” The host claims that all he wants from guests is to “goad them into saying something that ruins their life.” Spoken like a 29-year veteran of shock-jocking. But Imus does more: probing and prodding like a national inquisitor, he translates stodgy politics into vital popular culture.

Like many people, I listen to the radio in the morning from the minute I wake up to the minute I walk out the door. About 10 years ago, I switched from Howard Stern to Imus because there somewhat fewer commercials. I also found conversations with Frank Rich somewhat more interesting than those with porn stars, if only marginally so. Back in the 1980s, my radio was always tuned into WBAI in the morning. As the station began to enforce a “preaching to the choir” litmus test, I began to look elsewhere. I tried NPR briefly but the smarmy, suburban, New Yorker magazine, centrist politics made me scream. I backed the WBAI rebellion in the late 1990s if for no other reason that one NPR seemed sufficient.

Some of the best reporting on Imus’s racism comes from Philip Nobile, who has been trying–mostly unsuccessfully–to shame his guests from appearing on the show. This item appeared on the webzine MobyLives:

I once sought to write about Spike Lee’s fake conversion to Islam for the New Yorker. Charles Michener, the commissioning editor, gave me one piece of advice. Regarding the magazine’s style circa Tina Brown, he said, strive for “ironic distance.”

The title of this article was fashioned with the New Yorker’s standard in mind. It is meant to gently signal the reader to the ridiculous position that David Remnick finds himself in as Don Imus’s buttboy.

“I love David Remnick, I just have to tell you that,” Imus said on Friday, September 27, setting up his treasured guest.

Imus tends to fawn over the celebrity journalists who perfume his anti–gay, anti–black, anti–Asian, anti–Semitic, and sometimes anti–handicapped ridicule. Remnick is especially dear. In 1998, the flattery took the unusual, some might say tasteless, form of a $50,000 payoff––via a one–time Imus Book Award for “King of the World.” From that moment on, Remnick has kept his Gentlemen’s Agreement, pretending that Imus’s merde is meringue.

At any rate, it is a sign of some progress that Imus is finally on the defensive. The fact that Black America can raise the stakes in such a struggle to the point where powerful media companies can see the necessity to restrain its pit bull marks a degree of progress. Listening to Imus’s apology this morning gave me a sense of satisfaction, but I think that the real payback will be listening to Sharpton rake him over the coals. The show comes on in about 40 minutes and should be archived as well. Check it out.

Amazing Grace

Scheduled for nation-wide release this week, “Amazing Grace” is a hagiographic treatment of the life and career of William Wilberforce, the parliamentary opponent of the slave trade in Great Britain. (The film’s title is derived from the hymn written by John Newton, a retired sea-captain and reformed slave-trader who became a minister and who is played by Albert Finney.) In the press notes, director Michael Apted states:

This is a great moment in British history, and I wanted to portray it as a generational battle–the young men taking on the older generation–like Kennedys and their Camelot court were to America in the early sixties.

Ironically, this was exactly the political role of William Wilberforce. Using the language and gestures of reform, his gradualism helped to maintain a cruel racist system that forces to his left were far more interested in abolishing.

In an article on JFK that I wrote for Revolution Magazine in New Zealand a couple of years ago, I took note of the following:

Not only were the Kennedys hostile to the Civil Rights Commission; they appointed 5 segregationist judges to the federal bench, including Harold Cox, who had referred to blacks as “niggers” and “chimpanzees.” Robert F. Kennedy preferred Cox to Thurgood Marshall whom he described as “basically second-rate.” Kennedy frequently turned to Mississippi Senator James Eastland for advice on appointments. According to long-time activist Virginia Durr, Eastland would “invite people over for the weekend and tell them to ‘pick out a nigger girl and a horse!’ That was his way of showing hospitality.”

The film was meant to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the passing of the bill that banned the slave trade in the British Empire, an event that constitutes the climactic scene.

What it does not make clear is that the bill did not abolish slavery itself, which would persist in Jamaica and other British colonies for another 30 years. When younger and more militant abolitionists pressed Wilberforce to enter legislation to that effect, he replied that because of the effect “which long continuance of abject slavery produces on the human mind…I look to the improvement of their minds, and to the diffusion among them of those domestic charities which will render them more fit, than I fear they now are, to bear emancipation.” In other words, the slaves were not ready for their freedom. In the 1960s, the call was for “Freedom Now”, something the Kennedy brothers shrank from just as did William Wilberforce.

The above quote and those that follow demonstrate William Wilberforce’s true attitudes toward slaves, something entirely missing from Apted’s sanitized biopic. They originate in Jack Gratus’s 1973 Monthly Review book “The Great White Lie: Slavery, Emancipation and Changing Racial Attitudes,” a necessary corrective to the one-sided portrait drawn by Apted.

In 1823, 16 years after the slave trade was abolished, Wilberforce felt compelled to address the persistence of the institution in his “Appeal in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies”. Always the religious moralist (he was an evangelical), Wilberforce looked at the slaves in a most paternalistic fashion as if they were sinners while at the same time showing ample generosity toward the planters who whipped and exploited them (”we should treat with candour and tenderness the characters of the West India proprietors.“)

While slavery was certainly evil, this was not in his eyes the worst aspect of the system. Instead, it was “the almost universal destitution of religious and moral instruction among the slaves” that constituted “the most serious of all the vices in the West Indian system.” He realized that it was hard for the Europeans to feel anything but contempt, “even disgust and aversion” for the personal peculiarities of the Africans, “but raise these poor creatures from their depressed condition, and if they are not yet fit for the enjoyment of British freedom, elevate them at least from the level of the brute creation into that of rational nature…Taught by Christianity they will sustain with patience the sufferings of their actual lot, while the same instructors will rapidly prepare them for a better; and instead of being objects of contempt, and another of terror…they will be soon regarded as a grateful peasantry.”

In Apted’s film, Wilberforce is played by Ioan Gruffudd as a kind of ascetic wraith. Suffering from colitis that he treats with laudanum, he is always rising from his sick-bed to dash off to parliament to make some stirring speech. Every other abolitionist figure is subordinate to him, which is of course detrimental to the film since they are far more interesting than this bible-thumping prig.

First among them is Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), a member of the anti-slavery group that Wilberforce had joined and on whose behalf he spoke for in parliament. From the press notes, we learn that Clarkson was a “fiery radical and a magnificent organizer” who took testimonies from sailors and captains involved in the slave trade. William Wordsworth, an abolitionist himself, wrote a sonnet to Clarkson on the occasion of the 1807 bill abolishing the slave-trade:

Clarkson! it was an obstinate Hill to climb;
How toilsome, nay how dire it was, by Thee
Is known,–by none, perhaps, so feelingly;
But Thou, who, starting in thy fervent prime,
Didst first lead forth this pilgrimage sublime,
Hast heard the constant Voice its charge repeat,
Which, out of thy young heart’s oracular seat,
First roused thee.–O true yoke-fellow of Time
With unabating effort, see, the palm
Is won, and by all Nations shall be worn!
The bloody Writing is for ever torn,
And Thou henceforth shalt have a good Man’s calm,
A great Man’s happiness; thy zeal shall find
Repose at length, firm Friend of human kind!

Even more interesting than Clarkson was Oulidah Equiano, a freed slave from Nigeria who served with Clarkson on the abolitionist’s committee and who wrote a best-selling memoir. He is played by famed Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. A website in his honor reports:

Kidnapped and sold into slavery in childhood, he was taken as a slave to the New World. As a slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, he eventually earned the price of his own freedom by careful trading and saving. As a seaman, he travelled the world, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Arctic, the latter in an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole

Throughout the film, Clarkson and Equiano play second fiddle to Wilberforce and do not emerge as interesting characters. Furthermore, the film seldom strays outside the parliament or from Wilberforce’s country estate (he was fabulously wealthy.) Inside the parliament, we hear speeches for and against slavery. Around Wilberforce’s dining table, we hear him and his abolitionist guests trying to figure out what to do next to achieve their goals. Entirely missing is the ferment of the mass movement that existed all through Great Britain in this period. Ordinary working people, who were bitterly opposed to slavery, simply have no existence. This is very much a struggle between rival elites. In the conclusion of the film, there is a reference to their existence as Wilberforce unrolls a petition with more than 300,000 names on the parliament floor. It would have made for a more interesting and more historically accurate film if we saw how ordinary British citizens decided to take action against such an unspeakable evil

This is not to speak of the slaves themselves who were moving to abolish slavery themselves through insurrection. The film makes clear that the Haitian revolution and the French Revolution (that Clarkson supported and Wilberforce opposed) caused a backlash against the abolitionists. It is too bad that Michael Apted’s screenwriter Steven Knight found the parliament floor and Wilberforce’s dining room more compelling arenas than the sugar fields of Haiti. I myself would have preferred to see a slave revolt than one more speech from Wilberforce.

Although my complaints might be written off as what might be expected from a chronically disgruntled Marxist, there is clear evidence that even his contemporaries found Wilberforce lacking. Thomas Clarkson wrote the poet Coleridge (like Wordsworth, an abolitionist) that Wilberforce “cared nothing about the slaves, nor if they were all damned provided he saved his own soul.”

Essayist William Hazlitt, a colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge who some regard as a proto-socialist, was scathing in his portrait of Wilberforce in “The Spirit of the Age”:

He goes hand and heart along with Government in all their notions of legitimacy and political aggrandizement, in the hope that they will leave him a sort of no-man’s ground of humanity in the Great Desert, where his reputation for benevolence and public spirit may spring up and flourish, till its head touches the clouds, and it stretches out its branches to the farthest part of the earth. He has no mercy on those who claim a property in negro-slaves as so much live-stock on their estates; the country rings with the applause of his wit, his eloquence, and his indignant appeals to common sense and humanity on this subject. But not a word has he to say, not a whisper does he breathe, against the claim set up by the Despots of the Earth over their Continental subjects, but does everything in his power to confirm and sanction it! He must give no offence. Mr. Wilberforce’s humanity will go all lengths that it can with safety and discretion; but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious. He is anxious to do all the good he can without hurting himself or his fair fame.

Apparently, Michael Apted was not the only one to commemorate the British abolitionists. Adam Hochschild, the author of the very fine “King Leopold’s Ghost”, wrote “Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” in 2005–a work that has received plaudits wide and far.

In a February 14, 2007 Nation Magazine review of Hochschild’s book, the always astute Daniel Lazare was quite positive but did raise some points worth considering. Lazare takes note of Hochschild’s comparison of the abolitionist committee that looked to Wilberforce for leadership and the humanitarian, middle-class movements of today. In his introduction to “Bury the Chains,” Hochschild writes:

Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers.

Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn.

Lazare asks whether the 12 members of the committee were responsible for abolition of the slave trade (a hollow victory in itself) or were there broader social forces at work. By concentrating on personalities like Wilberforce, Equiano and Clarkson, Hochschild implies that it is the former that were responsible. In contrast, Lazare stakes out a position much closer to Jack Gratus’s:

Although they [Wilberforce et al] made a big splash at first, they were quickly overwhelmed by momentous historical events that were constantly erupting offstage. They exercised about as much control as a twig does over the flood bearing it downstream.

Morally, moreover, their legacy was more ambiguous than we might like to think. Not only were abolitionists silent about new forms of slavery that were springing up in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, most notably child labor in coal mines and factories, but, in a particularly ironic twist, the movement they created segued all too smoothly into the movement to colonize Africa directly. In 1839 a leading abolitionist, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, established a new organization whose title said it all: the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa. The more Europeans inserted themselves into African affairs, the more Africa became a playground for their imperial ambitions. Shutting the door to one form of hypocrisy meant opening it to another.

Lazare also has a pointed observation on Hochschild’s apparent willingness to segment the struggles of the early 19^th century–something that a radical like Clarkson never considered doing himself:

Hochschild concludes his study with a swipe at unnamed critics who complain, he says, that “all this fuss about the slaves in the West Indies helped distract the public from the oppression of labor at home.” The statement is not footnoted, and it’s hard to imagine whom Hochschild has in mind, since it has long been a tenet of the left that the struggle against wage slavery and the struggle against chattel slavery are inseparable. As Marx put it, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Still, there’s no doubt that British humanitarianism was selective in terms of whom to feel sorry for and whom not to. Abolition did not succeed in Britain until it transcended the narrow middle-class moralism that Hochschild celebrates. If reformers are so ineffectual in Bush’s America, perhaps it is because they have not transcended it either.

Although I am obviously very disappointed in “Amazing Grace,” I would still urge you to see it when it opens since it is the very first film to my knowledge that deals with an obviously key historical moment. I hope that it will inspire others to delve into historical material that is more accurate and more meaningful, starting with Jack Gratus’s excellent “The Great White Lie”.

 

An update on “Amazing Grace”:

I just discovered that the production company behind the film, Bristol Bay Productions, has launched something called the “Amazing Change Campaign” that intends to fund and promote Christian missionary work in troubled areas in Africa (Uganda, etc.) in the spirit of William Wilberforce.

When I discovered the Christian connection, I did a little more investigation and learned that Bristol Bay is owned by Philip Anschutz, who also owns Walden Media, the production company responsible for the Christian film “The Chronicles of Narnia”.

Philip Anschutz, rightwing billionaire responsible for “Amazing Grace”

Philip Anschutz is an evangelical Christian billionaire who has funded organizations that oppose abortion and gay rights. Last year Anschutz got into a bit of a scandal trying to launch a gambling casino [perfect--just perfect] in London’s Millennium Dome, which inspired this report in the July 7, 2006 Independent:

The Christian tycoon who wants to ban gay marriage; Deputy PM Under Fire

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

John Prescott’s genial host in Colorado is a billionaire conservative who has used his vast wealth and influence to promote his Christian viewpoint, to rally against gay marriage and fund an organisation that questions the theory of evolution. He has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates.

The Deputy Prime Minister claims he spent only two-and-half hours with Philip Anschutz over the entire July weekend he spent at his 35,000-acre ranch, Eagle’s Nest, an hour from Denver. Mr Prescott said he went to satisfy an ambition to see a working cattle ranch - stirred by watching Westerns as a boy - and to talk with sugar-beet farmers about the state of their industry.

But if the MP for Hull East had time to dig a little he might have asked Mr Anschutz about Amendment 2, an ultimately failed ballot initiative he funded to overturn state laws that protected gay rights. The measure was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1996.

He might also have asked Mr Anschutz about the Discovery Institute, a “think-tank” he funds in Seattle that criticises Darwin’s theory of evolution and argues for the involvement of a “supernatural” actor in the development of living things.

Critics accuse it of offering little more than a new spin on creationism and the institute was recently caught up in a notorious lawsuit about the teaching of creationism in schools. And over dinner at the ranch, complete with its own golf-course and formerly owned by the beer magnate Peter Coors, Mr Prescott could have raised the topic of the Media Research Council, a Washington-based group that attacks the liberal media and which, in 2003, was responsible for half of the complaints received by the Federal Communications Commission about alleged indecency on television.

The wealth of Mr Anschutz, 67, is huge and his interests are vast. Born in Kansas, he inherited his father’s land and oil businesses before expanding them.

His empire includes sports teams - he owns the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, a cinema chain, a film production company that has produced such films as Ray and The Chronicles of Narnia, oil, railroads, telecommunications and newspapers.

Forbes lists him as the 28th richest person in the US with a net worth of $7.2bn (pounds 4bn) but, in 2002, Fortune called him the “greediest executive”.

Another Update: Excellent review of “Amazing Grace” by historian Peter Linebaugh 

 

Danny Hoch

At first blush, Danny Hoch–a New York Jew–seems to be the American Ali G. In the 1999 feature film “Whiteboyz”, which he co-wrote with Marc Levin, he plays a rural Iowan who dreams of being a gangsta rapper. A year later, “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop” appeared. Based on past Hoch performances on stage and television, he once again portrays a Black rapper wannabe as well as a number of other characters drawn from the streets of New York and rural poverty-stricken areas like the one depicted in “Whiteboyz”.

However, Hoch is no clown. His main interest is not in making people laugh (although he can be very funny), but in making them think about race and class, the fault-lines of American society exposed by Hurricane Katrina. He is in the performance art tradition of Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo, two other New Yorkers who have portrayed down-and-out characters on stage. And like these two, he is constantly being tempted by Hollywood to go mainstream. And unlike them, he has had the inner resources to resist such temptations.

A scene from “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop” illustrates this struggle to maintain his integrity as well as reflecting his sensitivity to racial oppression. On view at youtube.com and other venues, it shows how Hoch decided to challenge racism on the Seinfeld show, even if it jeopardized his chances of “making it.” After the Michael Richards outburst, the clip began to draw a lot of attention on the Internet. I first became aware of it after Doug Henwood–always alert to the vicissitudes of our age–forwarded a link to his LBO mailing list subscribers.

On the strength of his HBO appearances, Hoch was flown out to Hollywood to appear on a Seinfeld episode as “Ramon”, a Latino locker-room attendant who becomes obsessed with Seinfeld and keeps trying to hang out with him. After Hoch challenges the racist premises of the plot once too often, Seinfeld and his producers send him packing.

In another clash with entertainment industry big-shots, Hoch portrays M.C. Enuff, a Black rapper who is a guest on a fictionalized version of the Letterman show. Demonstrating both an affinity with hardcore’s frequent anti-establishment ethos and simultaneously his disgust with its misogyny and materialism, the Enuff character is played by Hoch as a bundle of contradictions. He simultaneously wants to kiss and bite the hand that feeds him.

Hoch plays Flip in “Whiteboyz,” a film that is based on an expanded version of a character he played in “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop.” He lives in a fantasy world of drug-dealing, shootings and rapping that is totally at odds with the native culture of his white, Corn Belt town. Khalid, his one Black friend is bemused by his fantasies, especially since he is far wealthier and college bound. The plot revolves around Flip’s abortive attempts to turn his fantasies into reality, culminating in a trip to a Chicago ghetto to buy a load of cocaine from a vicious dealer. The film is obviously an attempt to exploit Hoch’s HBO reputation, but like most products coming out of Hollywood loses something in the process. It is still worth watching.

While the Hoch white rapper conveys images of Ali G and Eminem, I believe that the cultural roots lie deeper. In a very real sense, Hoch’s obsession with Black culture is a throwback to the 1950s when the beat generation was looking for any kind of escape from mainstream corporate America, even if it was in the culture of the most oppressed sector of the population. It is obvious that Hoch’s engagement with this identity has a sharper edge than those reflected in earlier forays into Blackness since it is also a critique of the lust for fame and material success found almost universally among aspiring rappers. It is a ploy basically to utilize the status of Outsider to gain access to the Inside. As M.C. Enuff puts it to Letterman, once you have spent a vacation on a Caribbean island, who wants to go back to the hood.

In “On the Road,” as Sal Paradise (a central character based on author Jack Kerouac) walks through a Black neighborhood, he finds himself “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough. . . . I wished I were . . . anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.” Later on, he says “All my life I’d had white ambitions,” and finds himself “wishing I could exchange worlds with the . . . Negroes of America.”

In 1957, Norman Mailer wrote an article titled “The White Negro” for Dissent Magazine, a journal edited by Irving Howe, a former Trotskyist. Mailer himself had demonstrated some familiarity with Trotskyist politics based on the evidence of “Deer Park,” a novel that like much of Mailer I find unreadable. His nonfiction I have always found more compelling, even when I am not convinced by his ideas. I do remember reading “The White Negro” in 1960, just around the same time I read Kerouac’s “On the Road.” While I never found myself wanting to imitate Blacks, I agreed with Kerouac and Mailer that their world appeared more authentic.

Perhaps the fascination Black culture, especially rap music, has for white youths is not that different than what I saw in the early 1960s: an escape from alienation, phoniness and conformity.

NY Times, October 10, 1999

Straining to Live Black

By Danny Hoch

I WAS born in 1970, and was lucky enough to be growing up in New York City during hip-hop’s childhood. Although I was reared in a nominally Jewish single-parent household in Queens, I grew up writing graffiti on trains, b-boying (breakdancing) and rapping.

I say this not to prove how ”down” I am, but to point out that in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, before white mainstream America discovered that hip-hop was interesting (marketable), everyone in my neighborhood from grade school to high school was consumed with hip-hop culture, no matter what color they were or which language they spoke at home.

But when New York City police officers caught us writing graffiti or doing drugs, they arrested my black and Latino friends and told me and the young Indian and Russian thugs who were my friends to go home. Eventually, I was arrested, too. And while calling my mother from the station house, the arresting officer, who was Latino, asked me and my Italian-American friend why we didn’t leave this stuff to the blacks and Latinos — using more colorful language, of course. A 13-year-old in New York City, I found the distinctions he was making incomprehensible.

One might perceive this cross-cultural confusion as New York-specific, but now it can easily be found everywhere. In the film ”Whiteboys,” which opened on Friday, I play an Iowa teen-ager named Flip, who, like most of the world, gets all his images of African-Americans from television. Flip, who calls himself ”Flip-Dogg,” is unhappy because he’s white and lives in the rural Midwest rather than in the ”exciting” ghettos he sees on MTV.

Flip, whose family is on food stamps, looks at his favorite rap videos and sees black teen-agers in $1,000 suits living what seems to be the good life: reveling in the projects alongside their Mercedes-Benzes, surrounded by bikini-clad women, drinking champagne and toting briefcases full of cash. He sees material power in the hands of a population that wields virtually no political, corporate or media power at all in America. When he looks at white people on television, they all seem to be ruling-class, status-quo bores.

Then he looks in the mirror and wonders, ”Where do I fit?”

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