George C. Wolfe

I meant to read this before I saw the performance at Wayne State's Hilberry, but the cast and direction were so good that reading it several weeks after the show, I'm all the more impressed. This is a work that contains some references that are a bit dated, yet as a whole it is exceedingly timely. He's not a man without opinion nor one without a valid point.

In 1995, bell hooks interviewed Wolfe for Bomb magazine. In the interview he said, "When The Colored Museum happened, all these mediocre Negroes who regard themselves as the guardians of black culture attacked me because they thought I was attacking black culture, that I was doing things in front of white people that shouldn’t be done. They didn’t understand my arrogance, my belief that the culture I come from is so strong it can withstand public scrutiny. I don’t view black culture as a fragile thing. There are unquestionably economic realities and, without a doubt, racism and the machinery of power and the crap that gets done to men and the crap that gets done to women—all of that stuff is very real. It affects us. But if Michael Jackson can mutilate his body—and still create, make sounds that come out of him which are ancient, vocally—some part of his spirit remains intact, has not been violated. It doesn’t matter that he’s singing, 'It don’t matter if you’re black or white.' Even as psychological and intellectual mutilations take place, as long as there’s still a cultural base, anything that anybody writes or says or does is strong enough to withstand these violations."… (more)