At first glance the prominent aggressive nature of Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” can be off-putting and considered offensive to many groups of people. After closely analyzing some lines in this poem, you can infer the different experiences Baraka has had with the people he writes about. “Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them deadwith tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.” This line stuck out to me after learning about the concept of institutional racism in Anthropology class. Institutional racism is when a certain group of people pass down jobs from generation to generation leaving little opportunity for individuals of different races to excel in certain fields. An example of this is the fact that 89% of New York firefighters and policemen are Americans with european backgrounds, coming from countries such as Italy and Ireland. Baraka most likely uses the phrase “sent to Ireland” to describe his disdain for the police force and the ethnicity of the cops he has dealt with.
Another line I found amusing was “Black poems to smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches whose brains are red jelly stuck between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes.” This line made me laugh because I feel like it still applies to society today. When I heard Amiri Baraka recite the poem I interpreted the line “whose brains are red jelly stuck between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes” as a way for Baraka to express the attention young women paid to public figures and celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor. Young people focus on the opinions of celebrities and don’t bother to form their own or to use their own “brains”, this idea is only getting worse in todays society with new social media.
While many people can agree that Baraka’s aggressive nature and blatant belittling of certain demographics of people can be cause for people to take offense, his writing expresses his ideas in a creative way that is admirable at any angle. Amiri Baraka believed poems were a way to release his opinions on the social inequality of his time, as expressed by the line ”Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts beating them down.” I have a lot of respect for Baraka for the courage he has to let his opinions and ideas run freely onto the paper without worrying about what other people will think and the passion he puts into reciting them.
