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Tee
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tee
Post Number: 100
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 01, 2004 - 07:11 pm: | 
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FYI...
Source: Essence
http://www.essence.com/essence/lifestyle/voices/0,16109,725819,00.html#
-Tee
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Kerry Talks With Essence
The Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry sat down writer ZZ Packer for an exclusive interview at the NAACP Convention this summer. Here is a transcript of her interview with Kerry.
PACKER: So you’re here at the 95th NAACP convention and Bush is not. How did you react when you found out that Bush was opting out of the convention?
SEN. KERRY: I was surprised. I think the President of the United States should take advantage of the chance to talk to Americans and bring people together.
PACKER: You were also at the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and unveiled your new slogan, “Let America Be America Again,” which was the title from a poem of the same name by a Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes. I just wanted to know how you came to pick that as your campaign slogan?
SEN. KERRY: I read the poem. It’s a powerful poem. There’s a lot of it that one could quote that would say something about the struggle of people today. But it seemed to me to be a plea that was appropriate to the time.
PACKER: And actually the refrain “America never was America to me” alludes to how America for blacks and the underprivileged is more an unrealized ideal than a place of the nostalgia that this title seems to imply. So how would John Kerry as President fulfill the ideals of the America which has yet to deliver its promise to all Americans?
SEN. KERRY: Well, we’re an ongoing story and we make progress because we fight for it. It takes leadership to help make that progress. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill there was a sea change. When he signed the Voting Rights Act in ’65, it was a change. You know, we have to fight for the progress that we make. We’ve been going backwards in the last years with this leadership.
So what I’m going to do is put it back on the forward course. We’re going to have healthcare for Americans. We’re going to end America’s separate and unequal school structure by funding education properly for rural and urban communities. We’re going to provide college loan and job opportunities to minority and disadvantaged communities which struggle today with access to higher education and jobs. The dropout rate is way too high in the inner cities and rural communities. We can do something about that.
We just have to not abandon children, that’s what we have to do.
PACKER: So speaking of children, let’s move on to education… you’ve talked about education quite a bit in your campaign memoir, A Call for Service, and specifically you stress the point of reforming the public school system from within. And yet it seems that all the presidential candidates promise to revitalize the educational system.
SEN. KERRY: But I have a record of voting for it. Bush talked about it and didn’t fund it. I vote for it. Every opportunity I’ve been given to raise the money, I voted for it. So I take my political stake, I put it in the ground. George Bush is just words. And there’s a big difference. I’ve shown precisely how I’m going to fund it, and how I’m going to pay for it. Now, whether people believe me – they’re going to have to look at my character over thirty-five years. I have always pursued and followed through and fought for these things.
PACKER: How, specifically, would you then fund it?
SEN. KERRY: By rolling back George Bush’s tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and investing that money in education and healthcare. That is specifically how I’d pay for it. And by closing loopholes in the tax code.
PACKER: You mentioned unemployment when you were giving your speech (earlier at the NAACP convention) and you mention some of the same statistics I’ve read: that the rate of unemployment is twice (as high) for African-Americans than it is for whites: 10.9 percent. And it even outstrips the unemployment rate for Latinos and Asians. But what special measures would you take that would not just merely address the overall American unemployment and under-employment, but specifically the two-to-one ratio, this disparity.
SEN. KERRY: By targeted efforts that the (current) administration is not properly funding. Minority business ownership, minority business lending. Minority hiring within certain kinds of projects, the funding of those projects themselves in the inner cities, elsewhere, schools, construction, roads, sewers, all kind of construction opportunities. Ongoing education – adult education -- is a huge component of providing help for people, technical assistance, technology transfer. There are many ways to put people to work. You can do it from an immediate infusion of investment in public projects to longer term efforts for education and training.
PACKER: Why do you think George Bush hasn’t done that yet?
SEN. KERRY: Because his priority—his top priority—is a big tax cut for wealthy Americans. Very simple. He doesn’t believe in those things. They’ve cut them, in fact. They’ve cut those programs. They’ve cut the lending of the SDA, they’ve cut the lending of access to credit.
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Steve_s
Newbie Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 16
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 02, 2004 - 07:48 pm: |
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Thanks for posting this. I hope that Kerry gets the chance to try to enact some of these changes, particularly in the area of education and health care.
Kerry's slogan has changed over the course of the campaign from "Bring it on," to "Help is on the way," to (my favorite) "I've got your back," but I missed "Let America Be America Again," so I was surprised when about a month ago I noticed the slim blue volume of Hughes poetry (with a foreword by Senator John Kerry) at the check out counter at the mega bookstore. I haven't seen it since, but I read the title poem in the store and loved it. Yes, I thought it might be a political gesture to African American voters, but to all Democrats as well. Here it is:
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1473
Later I did an internet search and found this mad Slate column by Timothy Noah:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2101575/
A few years ago I read Vol. 1 of Arnold Rampersad's The Life Of Langston Hughes and was not disappointed. It's a really interesting biography. I've forgotten most of the details, so this is mosly from memory (except that a month ago I checked some facts at the library in one of Arthur Koestler's autobiographies).
Langston Hughes was among a group of African Americans who travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932 to appear as actors in "Black and White," a film critical of U.S. race relations. Plans for the film were scuttled when the US recognition of the USSR seemed imminent. FDR recognized the Stalin government in 1933.
One of the coolest parts of the bio is when LH, on a group tour of Central Asia before returning to the US, leaves his colleagues and decides to go it alone. He gets off the train in Turkmenistan with his phonograph and his Bessie Smith and Sophie Tucker records. Then by coincidence he meets Arthur Koestler. It's true that they attended a show trial together, but this was 1932, they were out in Central Asia, and it was one of the first show trials. It was the 1936-1938 Moscow purges or show trials that started filtering back to the NY intelligentsia, many of whom were Marxists, but Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. It seems unusual that LH supported Stalin so late, but I'm sure Rampersad deals with it honestly, it's just that I've forgotten.
But in Turkmenistan (I think that's where it was), Koestler spoke the language and understood what was going on in the courtroom, all Hughes did was jokingly say, "The guy looks guilty to me, Arthur." It's misrepresentation for Noah to say that "he had witnessed, with approval, one of the show trials." In his autobiography Koestler even says that Hughes was bored and went out and sat in the square. What's Noah's problem? He's a liberal.
There may be other misrepresentations too. He says twice that the poem was published in 1938, but it was written in 1935. It's a Whitmanesque poem about the Great Depression and American inequality but I don't see anything Stalinist about it. If you read the alternate lyrics to Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" they decries private property. Does it matter?
Langston Hughes was born in the former abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence Kansas. His maternal grandmother who raised him was previously married to Lewis Langston who had died in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. As an infant he was wrapped in the man's shawl. I got the feeling of someone born with a heightened sense of purpose.
I just voted on one of those voting machines made by Bush's Diebold buddies. Good luck to Kerry, but if Bush gets another term, my consolation is that he'll probably have to hide out with Kitty Kelly in a bunker in an "undisclosed location." |
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