Anna Deavere Smith - Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Excerpt from A Bloodstained Banner - Cornel West) lyrics

Cornel West Scholar (He is in a three-piece navy-blue suit with a pocket watch and he has on cuff links. Eyegla**es. Books everywhere, papers on the desk. It is as if the desk, which is two-sided, is a fortress. The answering machine clicks and there are two beeps.) You sell at the most profitable price and it's inescapable, it's ubiquitous, you're selling things, you're selling things at the most profitable price and you're trying to gain access to power and property and pleasure by any means you cayan, you see, and thal [sic] are two different things. On the one hand there's like duh frontier myth in America, right (barely audible on the word "right") That we (hard to hear that "we") gain some moral and plitical [sic] regeneration and expansion by means of conquest and dispossession of duh people's land. So I mean a, uh Richard Slotkin talks about dis in terms of being a gunfighterr (grabbing the "r") nation. If in fact our major myth is that of the fronteer, the way in which you expand the fronteer (He is leaning forward, with his head down close to the desk, his gla**es seeming to sit on top of his ears, and screwing up his face, as he literally puts his body into the idea) is by being a gunfighter. So many heroes, these cowboys wit dere gu-uns Now, you can imagine on one level dat's done because you wanna expand possibilities for the market, extract resources from the land, even as you subordinate the peoples who are on that land. Well, on another level it's a deep machismo ethic, which is gangsterous, eh? (almost as if he's saying "okay?" or "right?") That to be a mayan who engages in this means ta put othuhs down, ta be tough, ta be cold and meanspirited, and so forth. To be like Rambo, as this brother Stallone made big money in the last decade, right? Uh, and this kinda gangsterous orientation, which as we know, ya know, has a long history in black and white, uh, and in rap music these days-- you know, gangster rap, which is deeply resistant of, uh, against racism and so forth but so centered on machismo identity because you tough like a soldier, you like a, uh, military mayan, you, you can best, you're better thayan, uh, these other military men that you're fightin', against, you can outpolice the police, you can outbrutalize the police brutality, the police who are being brutal and so forth and so on. So you're playing exactly the same game, as it were, and racial reasoning, I think, oftentimes has been construed as an attempt of black people all coming together in order to both protect each other but usually the men who will serve as the policing agents, therefore the interests of black women are subordinated and the black men become the machismo heroes, because they're the ones who defy and women can't do that. Why, because, you know, these folks who you're defying themselves are machismo, so you need a machismo person to respond to the machismo. So you get dis encounter between two machismo heroes, you see, and it takes courage. I don't wanna downplay these machismo heroes but it's still within a patriarchal mode, it's still very much within a patriarchal mode, and it reproduces and recycles the same kinda conception of what it is to engage in struggle and what it is to attempt to gain some progress, as it were, and hence what I think we end up with is a certain kind of turf policing.