Black Studies Vinyl, CD & Tape 2 Items

Release Text:

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

"My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born—white!"

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

Limited Edition LP.

Release Text:

So that moving from the middle passage forward (and backward), as Jacques Roumaine said, from that “railroad of human bones . . . at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,” one traced the very path and life and development, tragedy, and triumph of Black people. How they had been “removed” from Africa and had been transformed by this hideous “trip,” and by the context of their lives in the actual “West,” into a Western people. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Du Bois points out, the majority of us were “Americans.” (Here, a pause, for “canned” studio laughter!)

At each juncture, twist and turn, as Black people were transformed, so was their characteristic music. It became emphatically clear to me that by analyzing the music, you could see with some accuracy what and why that change had been. To reflect that “newer” them, which I later termed, in the book Black Music, “The Changing Same.” In the continuously contrasting contexts of their actual lives. My deep concentration on the continuing evidence of surviving “Africanisms” and parallels between African customs and philosophies, mores, etc., and the philosophies and their Afro-American continuum were to teach myself, and whoever, that Black people did not drop out of the sky, although, “fo’ sho’,” they continue to be, despite the wildest of ironies, the most American of Americans.

But for all the syncretic re-presentation and continuation of African mores and beliefs, even under the hideous wrap of chattel slavery (“many have suffered as much as Black people ... but none of them was real estate” –– Du Bois), there is one thing that I have learned, since the original writing of Blues People, that I feel must be a critical new emphasis not understood completely by me in the earlier text. That is, that the Africanisms are not limited to Black people, but indeed American Culture, itself, is shaped by and includes a great many Africanisms. So that American culture, in the real world, is a composite of African, European, and Native or Akwesasne cultures, history, and people. [...]

Actually, Blues People is a beginning text. There is much work yet to be done to properly bring the music into the open light of international understanding and collective social development and use –– despite the massive commercial exploitation...*

— Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)

*excerpt from the introduction of the 1999 First Quill edition by Amiri Baraka