Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider

Author:Asad Haider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

I am inside someone

who hates me. I look

out from his eyes.9

But any ambitions to whiteness sat uneasily with his emerging political consciousness. Starting with his 1960 trip to post-revolutionary Cuba, through his arrest at a UN protest over the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and finally bursting forth with the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones grew more and more unsatisfied with an apolitical art.

As the black political struggle grew in intensity, Jones could no longer maintain his divided self. He came to embrace black separatism and attacked white people in his politics and poetry. In one particularly infamous instance, at an event in the Village after the 1964 Harlem riots, Jones was asked by an earnest audience member if there was a way for white people to help. He replied, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer.” When another questioner brought up two white civil rights activists who had recently been murdered by the Klan in Mississippi, Jones dismissed them, declaring, “Those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences.”10

Baraka would later acknowledge in his autobiography that such remarks were fundamentally hypocritical, since these white activists “were out there on the front lines doing more than I was!” Troubled even then by his political hesitancy, Jones made a decisive break with white bohemia, moving uptown to Harlem in search of a black aesthetic and the black revolution. This search would ultimately lead to a return to a native land—the New Ark, as his hometown would be designated by the nationalist movement he joined there. Reflecting a growing rage against the white hipster New York culture that had absorbed him, the introduction to Home foreshadows his move back to Newark: “By the time this book appears, I will be even blacker.”11

The “blackness” he had begun to pursue in the mid-sixties was not in itself a purely political category; it was just as much a disavowal of LeRoi Jones’s whiteness. But it also represented his turn toward a specific political practice: nationalist self-organization. Baraka’s beating, arrest, and imprisonment during Newark’s 1967 riots, sparked by the police beating of a black cab driver, turned him into a symbol of black militancy. It also caused him to turn radically toward cultural nationalism. In American Pastoral, the retired glove manufacturer Lou Levov tries to convince his son to move his factory out of Newark, complaining, “A whole business is going down the drain because that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones, that Peek-A-Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat.”12

The urban rebellions, in Newark and beyond, were a political turning point on a national scale. They underscored the persistence of the oppression of black people after the legislative victories of the civil rights movement, as well as their exclusion from postwar affluence. They were an explosive indication that such conditions would not be accepted peacefully.

In this context the nationalist call for racial self-organization appeared to be a viable alternative to the disappointments of integration. Komozi Woodard proposes Baraka

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