Sister Souljah The Race Issue w/ Phil Donahue

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http://www.motheroftheuniverse.biz/ A Griot, A Messenger, A Teacher, A True Queen

Sister Souljah The Race Issue w/ Phil DonahueAll
of the education that I had,College public and other wise nobody every
told me that I was an African woman' nobody ever told me what the
history of Africa were.nobody ever told me that America was business and
with out business and without business you will nothing and be
nothing!...And nobody every told how to organize business so that I will
be able to develop institutions in my own community.'

So now the
sincerity ,the sincerity of all the programs,and all of the education
has to be question,indicted and convicted,because the bottom line is
that America is not,it has never tried to produce African adults who are
functional self sufficient who understand their politics,their
economics, and their relationship to the world politics.'I
think that the dice are loaded and that's what's left out of Mr.Browns
piece' see there was a period of time in this country after
reconstruction where African people owned a lot of land' owned a lot of
businesses ,and did a lot of things but what happen was' the American
government,the KKK,and other organizations organized in smashing that
afford!...

So its not that we haven't owned land and have not organized
business ,Its that,If you are African in America' or in latin America'
or in the Caribbean ' or in the continent' you will be hostage !...

NO
MATTER WHAT YOU DO! because they do not want us to survive and become
self sufficient.' And you can say no' but you haven't lived this life'
you haven't lived this life!..(Phil Donahue)quotes Senator Bradley' We can't get there unless we go together'I have a terrible feeling that behind me are some people who do not agree.'Sister
Souljah : Senator Bradley of the all white United states senate' said
we can't get there unless we are go there together' 'sorry' none of us
are where he is!... that's number 1. number 2. you're making a moral
appeal to a country that does not have a moral conscious!...

The
question becomes: THAT WHEN WHITE PEOPLE FEEL SERIOUS AND ANGRY AND
UPSET ABOUT ABORTION' THEY COME OUT IN THE THOUSANDS ' UP TO THE
MILLIONS TO SAY THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE ABOUT ABORTION!..WHERE
IS THE WHITE OUT CRY AGAINST WHITE RACISM' THAT MURDERED AFRICAN PEOPLE
ALL AROUND THIS ENTIRE GLOBE? ITS DOESN'T EXIST!...SO WHO ARE THESE
WHITE GOOD PEOPLE?... I WANT TO MEET THEM!...I WANT TO SEE THEM!...

Cornell West: I know but sista I know,but that might be all we can get'

Sister
Souljah: and guess what,I don't work with all I can get!...what I work
with is what I have,listen' You have to have some confidence in the
power of African people amongst ourselves: To establish a foundation


(Cornell West) We have'

Sister Souljah:No!... we have utter chaos in our cities and you got to say that!..

Cornell West) there's no black institutions?Sister Souljah: you may have a programCornell West: black church?

Sister
Souljah: we've built a lot of institutions and those institutions and
those institution have not be effective!... the majority of millions of
African youth in this country are dying mentally dying spiritually,dying
emotionally ,dying academically,and you may have a program,Mr.brown may
have a program,but what we got to talk about is a American government
that trapped millions of African people who don't go to your
program,don't go to Browns,program!..

Millions of African people not
only here but all around the world' and if we're not honest enough to
say: WHO ARE OUR FRIENDS!... WHO ARE OUT ENEMIES!.. TO KNOW WHAT A
FRIEND IS,TO KNOW WHAT A ENEMY IS!...WE WILL CONSTANTLY BE TRYING TO GET
INTO PEOPLES PARTIES TO SHAKE OUR BUTTS WITH THEM! TO GET THEM TO LIKE
US!.. AND THAT'S NOT THE QUESTION' THE QUESTION IS WHAT CAN WE BUILD
AMONST OURSELVES TO SECURE OURSELVES AMONST OURSELVES SO THAT WE WILL BE
ABLE TO SURVIVE INTO THE FUTURE.

I love to know that if I walk out
in Washington DC tonight' some black kid in Washington DC is blowing off
another black kids head for a pair of sneakers because the institutions
that we're talking about' not the things that we hold up and say this
is one example!...

The institution that we're talking about: ARE NOT
SAVING THE MIND OF THOSE AFRICAN CHILDREN!..YOU HER NONE OF THESE NEGROS
SAVED ME!...NONE OF THESE NEGROS SAVED ME!.

LISTEN: YOU KNOW WHO SAVED
ME? A MAN NAME JOHN DESANE,IN ENGLEWOOD NJ WHO TOLD ME WHO I WAS,WHO
SHOWED ME MY HISTORY,WHO TOLD ME WHO MY ENEMIES WERE,WHO LET ME KNOW
THAT THIS WAS NOT A EASY WORLD,WHO LET ME KNOW THAT THIS WAS A COLD
ENVIRONMENT,HE'S NOT A PART OF WITH DILLY DALLY' WITH THE MINDS OF
AFRICAN CHILDREN AND LETTING THEM KNOW WHAT THE REAL SITUATION IS IN
AMERICA!...

rap musician; activist; writerPersonal InformationBorn
Lisa Williamson in 1964 in the Bronx, NY; daughter of a truck driver
and a homemaker; married, 1994; children: a son.Education: Attended
Rutgers University.CareerAnti-apartheid activist, early 1980s;
co-founded and administered African Youth Survival Camp, Enfield, NC;
performed and recorded with rap group Public Enemy, c. 1990-91; signed
with Epic Records and released album 360 Degrees of Power, 1992;
published book No Disrespect, 1995.

Life's Work'I'm inclined
to remind people of the things they'd most like to forget,' writes
Sister Souljah in her 1995 memoir No Disrespect. The uncompromising
views of this young 'raptivist' began to make mainstream news when she
was publicly criticized by then-candidate Bill Clinton during his 1992
presidential bid.

Though she complained that the remarks Clinton
attacked were taken out of context, Souljah has also underscored
repeatedly that she has little concern for the views of white
politicians or the mainstream media. And while she has been portrayed as
a loose cannon and a demagogue, her considerable education and
articulate manner have won her more sympathetic listeners than her
critics might have imagined possible.Sister Souljah was born
Lisa Williamson in 1964 and raised along with her siblings in the Bronx,
New York, by her mother.

Her father's epilepsy had brought about the
end of his job as a truck driver. 'My mother and father were divorced
real early,' she explained in an extensive Playboy interview with Robert
Scheer. 'So I ended up in the projects with my mother. I've lived in a
lot of places. The only thing that stays the same thematically
in all the places I've lived is that I was always either a welfare
recipient or lived in [federally subsidized] housing.

I was always
connected to government programs.' As she points out in her book, this
connection was fraught with indignity; she claims that such 'services
were designed to make us feel inferior.'No Disrespect describes
the projects as 'an endless maze in which a wrong turn could result in a
little bleeding, a `casual rape,' a critical beatdown, or even death.'
Living in this 'war zone,' surrounded by 'tall brown buildings,
unofficial garbage dumps, no parks, roaches, rats, and mice,' she and
other members of her community were forced to learn survival skills. A
detour to Englewood, New Jersey, with a beau of her mother's exposed her
to a cleaner environment that was nonetheless still poisoned by
segregation and black self-hatred. Even so, young Lisa remained
religious and focused, learning to cook, looking after her siblings, and
doing her schoolwork. 'I was articulate and prepared in math,
science, reading, sport, and play,' she writes.

'After all, this is what
I had promised God I would do.'Despite her studiousness, she notes
that 'what we were taught was ridiculous' insofar as it ignored the
history and achievements of black people since antiquity.

'No
teacher gave black children any reason to take pride in their color, in
their origins, in their past,' she points out. Redressing this wrong has
been a major preoccupation of Lisa Williamson, both before and after
she became Sister Souljah.

'I try to tell young people not to look
for leaders but to try to identify the qualities in themselves--to
develop the talents and skills that they have--so they don't become
dependent on somebody else's talents and skills,' she declared to
Playboy's Scheer. At the same time, she praised the work of numerous
black leaders, particularly activist Malcolm X, politician Adam Clayton
Powell, Jr., and especially nineteenth-century anti-slavery firebrand
Harriet Tubman, whom she deemed 'the strongest person in the history of
African people in this country.'

Souljah also said of Tubman, 'She was
an activist. She took action. She was a soldier. She was a warrior.' Tubman's unyielding efforts to free her people have clearly influenced Souljah's own self-conception.During
high school Williamson attended Cornell University's summer advanced
placement program; she later traveled to Spain for a stint at the
University of Salamanca.

She pursued history and African studies at
Rutgers University, forging her fierce rhetorical style in editorial
pieces for the school's student newspaper and in speeches at political
rallies. In particular, she lent her voice to the struggle against the
racist apartheid system in South Africa. The acts of civil disobedience
in which she participated led to periodic arrests. Yet such activism
only brought home the necessity of addressing the obstacles faced by
blacks in America.

During an anti-apartheid march through Newark,
New Jersey, Souljah told Rolling Stone, she had an epiphany: 'I'm
marching through with hundreds of other kids,' she recalled, 'and we're
going: `Free South Africa! Free South Africa!' And it felt like about
5000 bricks dropped on my head.

I said: `Oh, shit. These people can't free South Africa--they haven't even freed themselves!''


She left Rutgers before graduating, partly due to her increasing
involvement in the administration of a North Carolina camp for homeless
kids she'd helped establish with funds earned from rap benefit shows.It
was as a lecturer that she captured the attention of rapper Chuck D.,
of the groundbreaking rap group Public Enemy.

In 1991 Williamson
appeared on a Public Enemy album, at which time she adopted her stage
name, a combination of 'soul' and the word for God in both Hebrew and
Rastafarianism. Sounded out, it suggests 'soldier.' Souljah's own album,
360 Degrees of Power, was released in 1992. 'Rap music is powerful
because it puts people in leadership who would not ordinarily be allowed
to speak, rap, rhyme, sing or say anything,' she insisted to Scheer in
Playboy.

'It puts an array of stories and experiences on the
market--some funny and some painful.' She added that the music
had enraptured her since childhood: 'It was going on at house parties
and on street corners when I was a kid. Back then you had [hip-hop
pioneers] the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Furious Five-- and
we controlled it.'Most of the commentary in mainstream
periodicals about 360 Degrees addressed it not as music but as a
showcase of Souljah's viewpoint. 'The album--a call for black unity and
empowerment, stressing education and economic self-sufficiency--has its
fair share of positive messages,' opined Rolling Stone's Kim Neely. 'But
[Souljah's] seeming inability to see whites as individuals and her
tendency toward sweeping generalizations--the most patently ridiculous
of these, found on a track called 'Brainteasers and Doubtbusters,'
being that white feminists are lesbians--is a major chink in her
generally on-the-mark commentary.'

Scheer, who expressed admiration for
his subject's straightforwardness, admitted that he 'found her album
loud, intimidating and not completely comprehensible.' Newsweek,
meanwhile, attacked Souljah's 'messianic rhetoric.'Of course, the
reason such publications noticed Sister Souljah at all had less to do
with curiosity about rap or black politics than with the fact that her
words had been criticized by Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party's
nominee for president. It was largely believed that Clinton--perhaps
opportunistically--took issue with a remark made by Souljah at a meeting
of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in order to appeal to
white voters. Clinton complained that Souljah, a guest of the
Coalition's Leadership Summit, had advocated violence against whites.

'She
told the Washington Post ... `If black people kill black people every
day, why not take a week and kill white people?'' Clinton proclaimed in a
speech excerpted in Newsweek. 'If you took the words `white' and
`black' and reversed them, you might think [former Ku Klux Klan member
and ultraconservative Louisiana political hopeful] David Duke made that
speech.'

If Clinton thought Souljah would be an easy target, however, he
would soon find otherwise. 'I do not advocate the murdering of
anybody,' Souljah told the Los Angeles Times. 'Not white people. Not
black people.

That charge is absolutely ridiculous. Mr. Clinton
took my comments completely out of context. In the quote he referred to I
was speaking in the mindset of a gang member.

'When pressed about
his attack on her, Clinton insisted, as Newsweek reported, that he was
simply calling 'for an end to division.' Ultimately, however, the mixed
signals of an electoral season ensured that this bitter exchange would
never be transformed into any kind of fruitful dialogue. Souljah went on
to label Clinton--in keeping with the innuendo put forth by his
Republican opposition-- 'a hypocritical, draft-dodging, pot-smoking
womanizer,' as the Los Angeles Times reported. She furthermore
charged him with 'using me as a political football, the Democratic
version of Willie Horton,' referring to Republican ads during the 1988
campaign that used a furloughed black felon as a symbol for liberal
leniency.

During this blitz of publicity, Souljah was asked
variations on the same question: did she hate whites? It was her refusal
to let whites off the hook and espouse the 'common ground' themes
beloved by Jackson that allowed the mainstream press to paint her as a
racist demagogue. Yet it was only in a few interviews--notably the one
with Scheer--that she was allowed to express her opinions in any detail.
'I don't think any white person who is not constructively fighting
against injustice should sleep easy on any given night,' she insisted.
'You should have fear and guilt and remorse about creating a world
that's so destructive to people of color.

And if you don't it means you
don't value the lives of people who have not emerged from your culture.' She also expressed pessimism about the possibility of peaceful co-existence and positive political change.

As
her critics gleefully pointed out, Souljah's album dropped off the
charts despite the rush of publicity from the Clinton affair. Indeed,
the album failed to ignite the imagination of the record- buying public,
no doubt partly due to its unflinching political content. 'I'm
an attractive young woman,' Souljah mused to Scheer.

'If I wanted to
make money, I could just put on a miniskirt and a tube top, shake my
ass, put out a video, and I'm straight. It's so easy to make money in
America off sex, drugs, and violence.' Noting that she 'had these
options,' she declared, 'My goal was to distribute a message that I
thought was essential for African people--a message that would tell them
what was going on, why it was going on and how they could, as
individuals, form a powerful collective.

That was my objective. Clearly,
I'm satisfied.' She further suggested that her record company was only
lukewarm in its support.Sister Souljah ultimately faded from the
national spotlight; Clinton was elected president, and the march of
hardcore 'gansta' rap continued apace, despite heavy criticism from
politicians. Yet Souljah was far from idle, continuing to travel and
speak to youngsters. She married and had a child before writing her
book; these experiences had a powerful effect on her worldview. 'It has
me more dedicated,' she told Jet. 'I already had a value for life and
now I have an even deeper value for life. I think once a woman carries
life in her womb she starts to really understand how precious the life
of each person is.' At the same time, she became even more critical of
her own upbringing and of ghetto parenting in general.

'Parents had a
habit of trying to raise their children off of slogans, like `do the
right thing' or `be a good boy,'' she asserted, insisting that 'young
girls need womanhood training and young men need manhood training.'No
Disrespect met with decidedly mixed reviews.

Many critics attacked what
they saw as Souljah's constant sermonizing, and indeed, the book
contains numerous episodes in which what seem like political manifestos
spring fully formed from Souljah's lips. Considering that many of her
quotes in interviews sound the same way, these may be accurate
representations. Be that as it may, those reviewers who disliked the
book found its protagonist strident and took exception to many of her
views. Karu P. Daniels of the Source, however, may have spoken for much
of the hip hop community when he lauded Souljah's 'candid and
provocative new memoir' for its honesty and clarity.

'She's speaking the language of the ghetto, and with that, no one can walk away from this read feeling isolated and alienated.'It
was apparently to combat feelings of isolation, in fact, that Souljah
undertook her work, and her productivity as both an author and a mother
seem to have dovetailed:

'Mothers, to me, are the narrators of
your life,' she noted in Jet. 'They either tell you a good story or a
bad story or a balanced story.' Telling the story of her
experiences--regardless of anyone else's idea of balance-- has certainly
been a consistent theme in her life. 'Remember,' she urges at the
conclusion of her book, 'No one will save us but ourselves. Neither God
nor white people will do so.' The key, as she told Jet, is self-respect:
'You just have to see yourself as a very powerful person, a very
important human being.'No disrespect'In fact, if you
asked any of the black people in the projects or the suburbs if they
loved themselves, they would automatically say 'Of course! Yeah! That's
right! Hell yeah!' But people who love themselves do not allow
themselves to be abused by others. I discovered, at a very young age,
that neither black people in the projects nor in the suburbs truly loved
themselves, because in varying degrees they were all cooperative
victims of abuse.

I decided early on that I would not ever cooperate or
suffer silently while being abused. Never would I allow anyone or group
of people to dominate and trounce my spirit and soul. This attitude and
determination would follow me forever.''Racism is a disease. It
affects whites as well as blacks. It may even be a kind of mental
illness. But the effect on black people is greater because we are the
victims of it. The effect on whites is severe because it deforms their
thinking and gives them a distorted picture of the world. But because
the economics of racism is inarguably in their favor, most whites learn
to live with it, even to deny it.But we cannot do so. Racism
has turned our communities into war zones where we are dying every day.
It is black-on-black hate, created by racism and white supremacy, that
is killing us. Black people killing black people. Can African
male-female relationships survive in America? Not if black-on-black
love is dead. Not if we are still too scared to admit there is a
problem while our families fall apart. Not if our young men continue to
refer to young women as 'bitches,' or our young women refer to young
men as 'motherfuckers,' or all of us refer to each other as 'niggas.'
It is a sad measure of our profound contempt for each other and of our
thoroughgoing self-loathing that we continue to persist in this ugly
practice.'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIpOe9MqAfI

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