Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race

Abstract

Houston A. Baker, Jr. has rightly observed that "the radical chic denizens of Bohemia [and] the casual liberals of the academy" have never recognize, LeRoi Jones 's/Amiri Baraka's achievement as a playwright and a poet because his "brilliantly projected conception of black as country — a separatl and progressive nation with values antithetical to those of white America — stands in marked contrast to the ideas set forth by Baldwin, Wright, Ellison and others in the fifties." That is, according to the integrationist politics that continue to dominate discussions of race in the United States, what we might in the 1990s call the "African-American problem" is indeed seen as the, African-American's problem to examine and solve, not the white's. Baraka's Black Power political agenda, which perceives the United States as a society at least as black as it is white, a country built on "oppression and destruction," stands in marked contrast to the general integrationist bent of American racial politics. The call to revolutionary action inscribed into his drama demands a rethinking of both the American social system and the ways that it is typically examined in the generally liberal critical discourses of the predominantly white academy.