Amiri Baraka

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1934 age 0

   Born

2. 1998 age 64

   CreditBulworth

3. 2014 age 79

   Died

• OPOliver Platt2 titles
• DTDean Tavoularis1 title
• CPCCH Pounder1 title
• LMLaurie Metcalf1 title
• CBChristine Baranski1 title
• JDJen Drohan1 title
• HKHarvey Keitel1 title
• ASArnold Schwarzenegger1 title
• BIBill Irwin1 title
• SASean Astin1 title

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  Photo:Swing333CC BY-SA 4.0
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  Photo:David Sasaki from San Diego, USACC BY 2.0

• One of the most persistent traits of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies. The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners.

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself, in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering, and if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness, and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil.

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Art in an abstract setting is one thing, but art where you’re actually telling people to do things becomes dangerous…

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0

• You cannot stop struggling just because you’ve got a black guy walking around saying some stuff. Just because his skin is your color don’t mean his brain is the same as yours; if you’re going to bomb Libya you’re nuts. So it’s a continual struggle to raise the level of social consciousness in the country. Not only for black people but for everybody who needs that change.

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0

• When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher, but when I was saying, 'Black and white, unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly get to be unreasonable.

  Amiri Baraka, CC BY-SA 4.0