courtesy photo
Two hours before he will play to a sold-out crowd at Omaha’s Waiting Room Lounge, Brother Ali is reading a children’s book.
Once our interview starts, the hip-hop artist (probably still best known for the controversial 2007 protest song “Uncle Sam Goddamn”) will tell me that he is “furious,” indeed “fucking angry” about the state of racial affairs in America. But at this moment, there is no tension in his voice as he reads the story of Sammy the Seal to his manager’s young daughter.
The little girl — maybe 4 years old — is perched on Ali’s knee and is turning the pages as he coos the story of a seal whose sense of adventure leads him out of the zoo and on a series of urban field trips with school children.
To take any artistic gratification in finding a new or literary way to describe Ali’s legal blindness and albinism would be blasphemy in the context of meeting the man. Telling other people’s stories, he says — particular those traditionally not in control of their own narrative — is a kind of colonialism.
Sammy the Seal reaches its short-awaited resolution, at which point Sammy learns to “be himself and go home.” Going home for Sammy is flopping back into a concrete swimming pool, content with the sameness of his fellow seals and the uniformity of finding his proper place in the world.
When the book is finished, Ali is in a middle space: halfway between devoted child’s reading partner and the cultural critic who has harshly censured inequality and the power structures that implant and nourish them since his debut album in 2000.
“Books like this are interesting,” he says still in his dulcet reading voice, but not to the girl who is still nestled in the sofa next to him. He flips backward through the chalky pages and checks the original print date — 1959.
The mid-20th century origins of Syd Hoff’s book could trigger a litany of criticism from Ali about the thinly veiled metaphor for accepting life in a cage or being “home” only around identical life forms.
But what appears most resonant in our conversation to follow is the book’s crime of oversimplification, a homogenization of message Ali says even his own fans interpreted in his early work.
The Minneapolis rapper tags his 2012 album Mourning In America and Dreaming In Color with a truer expression of his soul and convictions than ever before. If albums such as 2007’s The Undisputed Truth called out war, greed and American exceptionalism by brandishing a sledgehammer, Mourning in America does it with a laser pointer. The culprit is white privilege.
“Letter to My Countrymen,” the opening track of Mourning In America, immediately identifies the socially constructed phenomenon Ali says has duped white people and terrorized people of color out of their humanity for centuries:
“I think the struggle to be free is our inheritance / and if we say it how it really is / we know our lily skin still gives us privilege / advantage is given to the few / that are built into the roots of our biggest institutions.”
Of the album and of his clarified mission, Ali says:
“This album was about me saying … ‘OK, I know a whole lot of you guys are ignoring why this music exists. You’re hearing some of it, but you’re ignoring why I do it.’ That album is about me renegotiating the contract. You’re not going to be able to ignore why I do this.”
Ali is quick to name his many white fans. Ignoring this new contract, by Ali’s definition, would epitomize white privilege, choosing whether or not to confront the inequality of race in America. African Americans — who Ali eternally credits with reaching out to him as a marginalized youth — have no such option.
“I am who I am because black people made me who I am. (Without them), I would have killed myself by now.”
White privilege constitutes nearly half of our 40-minute backstage conversation at this Omaha stop of Ali’s War and Peace Tour with Immortal Technique. When we finish, he asks me, please, not to take out the part about white privilege. I don’t really see how I could.
“I’ve had the white privilege conversation a lot and most people leave it out. It’s gotten to the point where I ask people to leave it in.”
He says he suspects that there is no broader conspiracy to silence his views on the part of interviewers, just that people (particularly white interviewers) don’t understand the concept behind the intensity that causes Ali at one point to level a finger at me and say: “You will hit a point of rage where you start realizing you’re programmed not be human. You’re the guy on the horse on the slave plantation with the whip, but you’re never going to own the house.”
Days later and hundreds of miles away from the rapper who’s made it part of his life’s work to call out white privilege around every corner, those journalists may choose whether or not to pretend the conversation didn’t happen.
Listen to Hear Nebraska’s intimate interview with Brother Ali here:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. Everyone really ought to read this book. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.