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A. In no way did I compare 2 Live Crew to Shakespeare! When I was asked if there were instances of lewd language in Western literature, I cited a few obvious examples: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce. This observation shows that lewd language isn't ipso facto proof of obscenity. But that's all it shows.
Q. You also said their lyrics were an example of parody.
A. My interpretation could be totally wrongheaded, but it's what I honestly believe. And I have taken an incredible amount of flak for it. Nothing I've ever done has attracted as much hate mail as my testimony for 2 Live Crew.
Much of the album is obscene and misogynistic. To me Luther Campbell's performance made black macho seem silly, made it seem unattractive. It's never an easy question to distinguish between parody and the thing that's being parodied. Like Archie Bunker. Did Archie Bunker critique racism or did he reinforce racism? It's an open question.
Q. Andrew Dice Clay, a white, is probably just as offensive as 2 Live Crew, but he wasn't put on trial. Why is that?
A. I'm convinced that 2 Live Crew's album was seen as peculiarly inflammatory because black people are seen as peculiarly inflammable. The image is that young black men are like dry tinder waiting for an idle spark to set them off. And if they get that idle spark, they'll go wilding. I'm sure that if the same lyrics had come out of virile-looking young white boys, they would never have been prosecuted in the same way.
Q. You have spent most of your adult life in the North and moved South only a year ago. Now that you are about to return North to teach at Harvard, do you have any observations about the difference in race relations between the two regions?
A. Relations are worse in the South because the bottom-line historical experience was slavery. In the North it was abolition. A black person is not at the same place societally in the North and in the South for that very reason.
Here I was the first black person to live in my immediate neighborhood. I came home one day and a brick mason, who was black, was redoing the walk. And I said hello. And he said, "Can I help you?" with a bit of hostility in his voice. And I said, "You are helping me. You're fixing my walk." And he looked dumbfounded and said, "Is this your house?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Do the white people know that you bought this house?" I said, "Of course!" And he said, "Of course. I bet they know all about you." And we both busted out laughing, like I'd been checked out. On the whole I'd rather live in the North than in the South.
Q. Only 3% of the nation's college faculty members are black. What can be done to get more into the pipeline?
A. A wonderful thing happens when you encounter images of your cultural self in a book at an early age. That happened to me at 14 when an Episcopal priest gave me James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. I felt like Baldwin was naming me in a way that I didn't even know I needed to be named. It changed my life. That's where I first got the inkling that I might want to be a scholar, to serve my people through print. How could anybody deny -- left, right or center -- the importance of that experience in shaping a young intellect? What we have to do is change the curriculum so that that experience of identification can occur for people who are not Anglo-Saxon.