Media Killers :
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AA: Why the silence? |
| In my most hopeful state, I would have to say I really believe in my theory of beauty coming after silence, I would have to say that there is incredible silence, we don't know how long it's goint to last, but we must listen to the first voices we begin to hear after it, and we mustn't tell them to shut up, which is our tendency. | ADS: That's the question. It's a very interesting one.
In my most hopeful state, I would have to say I really believe in my theory
of beauty coming after silence, I would have to say that there is incredible
silence, we don't know how long it's going to last, but we must listen
to the first voices we begin to hear after it, and we mustn't tell them
to shut up, which is our tendency. We mustn't, we must listen. Because
there might be something, you know, a kind of desert flower. 
AA: You know, I love Oprah and I watch the show all the time; I get a lot of good information from Oprah, and she had a show about the riots, and white people spoke about the riots. ADS: Oh, crime and stuff, too, right? AA: Yes, but also there were people that were saying things about why must people destroy their own communities, why are they doing this, in anger and frustration, and why do they act that way. And maybe it's not politically correct or politically feasible for those voices to be heard louder. ADS: They should be. You know, it's not just something—this is why I'm bringing the media into it—it's not just the people's silence, and it's what the media wants to hear, and I think the media should want to hear more from white people. We can only guess at why—are they afraid of what people will say? Why don't we hear more of that? Because people are talking, people were talking, of course. And it wasn't all about going to the Beverly Hills Hotel; there were all kinds of things that people were saying. I think the most interesting answer I got to this idea of why people were destroying their neighborhoods came from Angelica Huston, who I didn't actually do in the show, but she sort of talked about how—not meaning to answer that question, but just talking about other things; actually we were talking about her role in The Grifters as this character Lily, who was trapped in a cage, and how a fox will begin to eat its own hand when it's trapped in a cage. And she starts to talk about desperate people. I wanted to try to figure out a way to include that as a kind of a very interesting answer to this. I don't think it's easy for most of us to imagine, because everybody, the people in Beverly Hills, were sure they were going to get hit, and they didn't. |
| KLF: And what would have happened if the riots had spread
to Rodeo Drive? The cops would break out their guns at that point because,
well, you know they would.
ADS: It really would have been a bloodbath. And maybe the
people didn't go there because they knew that would be a real suicide.
Maybe that's why they didn't. But that's the question, that's why this
one person who I talked to from El Salvador doesn't call it an uprising;
she says it was a social explosion, because an upri AA: An uprising is usually a middle-class phenomenon. It's planned by the middle class, and other people join in, and that's when things change. ADS: Right. Exactly. And this lacked that. There was a degree to which it is anarchical and chaotic. Even in the civil rights movement, I think people were able to rally more around the cities burning, and to use it. I have a feeling civic leaders didn't quite know what to do with this, even if emotionally they may have been glad for it, they wouldn't even know how to make anything of it, what to do with it. That's troublesome. I think it's also because I read this op-ed, and probably you did, too, in the New York Times on Friday, about Martin Luther King and the older generation that we need to hear from; this is an incredible generation in terms of who's empowered to speak. KLF: Somehow the response, of not wanting to test the issue, seems to be very consistent with my experience in Cambridge [Harvard]. During and after the riots white people in general were incredibly nice to me, holding doors open and whatnot. I think people were afraid to touch the issue for fear of igniting another fire. ADS: You know what I think it is? The truth of it is, I think politicians know they don't know what this is. They really know that they don't know it. KLF: Especially when you hear what was being espoused at the Republican National Convention. They don't have a clue, so it's time to dig up Beaver Cleaver and Elvis and the crew. ADS: But see, I don't even think black people, black leaders,
know about black men in the black community and black women. This is the
other thing that I'm so excited about: when I was in Crown Heights,
I couldn't get anybody to introduce me to a girl. "Who was out in the streets?
Hmm, I don't know." I don't think there were any girls. It is clear that
young women are as much a part, are more and more a part, of this violence,
isn't it? And this concern always that the black male is the AA: And I don't know if that statement is true—I mean, I read it all the time: Newsweek this past week is about the black male and the lack of fatherhood and all of that, and they come to the conclusion that the black male is the most vulnerable. But I don't know, I'm not certain that that's the case. ADS: I think it might be just because it's less likely that people in Cambridge would be opening doors for us as they were for Kevin. He does have to carry this whole history of what his physical presence means, and people are more ambivalent about what mine means and what yours means.
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Anna Deavere Smith