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21 " The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. "
― Amiri Baraka
22 " can't be rockefeller ... must be the devil "
23 " The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject. "
24 " The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. "
25 " This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned. "
26 " Children of the Cosmos never say goodbye, only minor interruptions appear like small forevers. Only time when we must communicate with the vibrations of desperate souls, and then it’s morning again, and the sun steps out from hiding, and our world glistens. Spectrums flash and fade, streaks of purple and orange shot with soulasphere. Our voices ripple and prance, our bodies glow like stars and melt; transformed and reformed into compressed constellations that will continue to continue. Yet we are only children of the Cosmos. "
― Amiri Baraka , Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
27 " Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. "
28 " Hunting is not those heads on the wall "
― Amiri Baraka , The Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka
29 " I am a mean hungry sorehead.Do I have the capacity for grace??To arise one smoking spring& find one's youth has taken off for greener parts. "
30 " but this also is part of my charm. A maudlin nostalgia that comes on like terrible thoughts about death. "
31 " All the lovely things I've known have disappeared. I have all my pubic hair & am lonely. There is probably no such place as Battle Creek, Michigan! "
32 " [O]ne of the most persistent traits of of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies. The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners. "
― Amiri Baraka , Blues People: Negro Music in White America
33 " Christianity, as it was first given to the slaves [...] was to be used strictly as a code of conduct which would enable its devotees to participate in an afterlife; it was from its very inception among the black slaves, a slave ethic. [...] One of the very reasons Christianity proved so popular was that it was the religion, according to older Biblical tradition, of an oppressed people. The struggles of the Jews and their long-sought "Promised Land" proved a strong analogy for the black slaves. "
34 " In the early days of slavery, Christianity's sole purpose was to propose a metaphysical resolution for the slave's natural yearnings for freedom, and as such, it literally made life easier for him. The secret African chants and songs were about Africa, and expressed the African slave's desire to return to the land of his birth. The Christian Negro's music became an an expression of his desire to "cross Jordan" and "see his Lord. "
35 " [O]ne can see, perhaps, how "perfect" Christianity was in that sense. It took the slave's mind off Africa, or material freedom, and proposed that if the black man wished to escape the filthy paternalism and cruelty of slavery, he wait, at least, until he died, when he could be transported peacefully and majestically to the Promised Land. "