This story is extremely unfortunate if true, and I am sorry if JB is starting to lose it, but (a) she's not really to be faulted if her audience doesn't include black people these days, particularly in view of the fact that it did when it counted and when it was brave and actually dangerous for her to sing We Shall Overcome, and (b) for those of you who care about ethnic identity credentials, although it was (to say the least) dumb and insensitive for Baez for do this Ebonics rap, it should be remembered that she is actually a Mexican-American and therefore a genuine member of an oppressed minority.
That doesn't, as I say, excuse bad judgment and poor taste with the blackface act. But she is not another white latte liberal -- in fact she is neither a liberal in the sense intended at all but a radical and always has been -- and she is not white either but a Mexican-American. I suppose it makes a difference of some sort.
jks
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [thanks to Michael Pug - good links at orig]
>
> <http://www.lastsuperpower.net/newsitems/Baez>
>
> Joan Baez and Me
>
> Once Joan finished her minstrelsy riff, the
> audience, in which I did
> not see a single black person, went wild with
> applause and hoots and
> hollers. I have never felt so embarrassed for a
> bunch of "liberals"
> in my life. I wonder where Baez got her notions of
> how poor black
> country folk talk-she couldn't be stereotyping,
> could she?
>
> Ronald Bailey
>
> She gwine tell de folks how dat ol' missuh prez'dent
> be a debbil!
>
> Charlottesville, VA-America's "culture war" was on
> full display last
> night at the Joan Baez concert. Tickets to the
> concert were a present
> to my mother-in-law for her 69th birthday. My
> mother-in-law certainly
> fit the demographic of the audience, or as she
> described it, "All the
> old hippies are out tonight." Let's just say that by
> attending, my
> wife and I dropped the average age of the audience
> by several months.
>
> Sixty-three year old Baez came out on stage and
> asked how the
> audience felt about the election? Of course the
> audience groaned and
> moaned-after all, this IS a Joan Baez concert. For
> her part, Joan
> said that she felt like she had been run over by a
> truck. One
> audience member yelled, "You give us hope." Now I
> like a good
> rendition of "Joe Hill" or "Diamonds and Rust," as
> well as the next
> person and I do recognize her talent as a singer.
> And Baez has a
> perfect right to dedicate a song, as she did, to
> that insufferable,
> lying self-promoter Michael Moore, whom she praised
> for doing his
> best to save the country. Later Baez announced that
> she was going to
> sing a song that she sang only in countries that
> were undergoing
> extreme political strife. In fact, she hadn't sung
> it in the United
> States in the last 20 years. The song? "We Shall
> Overcome."
>
> However, the most remarkable and disturbing episode
> occurred halfway
> through the concert when Joan stopped singing and
> announced that she
> had "multiple personalities." One of her multiple
> personalities is
> that of a fifteen year old poor black girl named
> Alice from Turkey
> Scratch, Arkansas. Baez decided to share with us
> Alice's views on the
> election. Amazed and horrified I watched a rich,
> famous, extremely
> white folksinger perform what can only be described
> as bit of
> minstrelsy-only the painted on blackface was
> missing. Alice, the
> black teenager from Arkansas Baez was pretending to
> be, spoke in a
> dialect so broad and thick that it would put Uncle
> Remus and Amos and
> Andy to shame. Baez' monologue was filled with
> phrases like, "I'se
> g'win ta" to do this that or the other and dropping
> all final "g's."
> Baez as Alice made statements like, "de prezident,
> he be a racist,"
> and "de prezident, he got a bug fer killin'."
> Finally, since Bush won
> the election with 58.7 million votes to Kerry's 55.1
> million, Alice
> observed, "Seems lak haf' de country be plumb
> crazy." Since Baez was
> reading Alice's notes, it is evident that she thinks
> that Arkansas'
> public schools don't teach black children to write
> standard English.
>
> Once Joan finished her minstrelsy riff, the
> audience, in which I did
> not see a single black person, went wild with
> applause and hoots and
> hollers. I have never felt so embarrassed for a
> bunch of "liberals"
> in my life. I wonder where Baez got her notions of
> how poor black
> country folk talk-she couldn't be
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