Kevin Powell on Community Building and Congressional Aspirations
Most recently you’ve focused your efforts on assisting the people in the Gulf Coast who are affected by the oil spill. Obviously, efforts in the past few years with Haiti and the Gulf have shared the spotlight in terms of getting the nation’s attention with the economy. How would you use your role in national government to get people to continue to care?
The oil spill opened up a new dialogue because the people disproportionately affected by the BP oil spill are people of color. It brings that whole Gulf Coast situation back to the national conversation unfortunately. It’s tragic that this happened, but we have such selective amnesia in this country and such a short attention span. And it’s not our fault. It’s the mass media culture because when you are bombarded with 300 TV channels and people’s lives are dictated or controlled by a blackberry and people aren’t allowed to be human anymore, Facebook and Twitter become more important than human interaction and we forget about things.
It’s been five years since Katrina. Sometimes it feels like the work you do is a drop in the bucket because it is such monumental stuff that we have to deal with in our community and for a second I’m speaking about black people and really about poor people. They’re already dealing with a myriad of issues and you throw on top of that the Katrina disaster. On top of that, the BP oil spill exacerbates all of the problems that already exist. And that’s why I feel we’ve got to get ahead of this curve and have a pro-active agenda for our country in terms of working class people of color. Otherwise, it will be reaction after reaction. And that’s just not good enough anymore. We saw the series of reactions with Haiti. Now you hardly find any articles about Haiti in the newspapers or on the radio or on TV. It becomes like reality TV shows – people are titillated for a little while and then they move on to the next thing.
Bono from U2 said it best, we as human beings have got to understand the difference between charity and justice. Charity is when you just give some money because you feel bad about some situation. Justice, as he said, becomes a part of your value system, a part of your soul.
Who has been the most influential person in your life? Who keeps you centered?
I would not be here if it wasn’t for my mother. She is all over my work, because she is the first leader I ever met. She is the first teacher and educator I ever met. This was a woman who came from South Carolina with nothing as a 19, 20 year old and basically had a grade school education. She packed everything into a little suitcase and came here looking for a better life. She met my father. And unfortunately my father was not a good man. There are some good men in this country but he certainly wasn’t one of them. He was a player. He pimped my mother, got her pregnant, then didn’t bother to be around.
My mother could have crumbled under the weight of all that. I was raised on welfare, food stamps, government cheese – the kind of poverty I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I think about where I am now; I’ve published ten books, I’ve traveled to 46 of the 50 states in this country, I’ve traveled overseas many times, I’ve been on television and have done some things I could not have imagined growing up as a boy in Jersey City, New Jersey. It’s all because of my mother.
She told me when I was three years old, when I was four years old, when I was five years old, ‘you’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re going to go to college’. And even though I didn’t become a doctor or a lawyer, what she was doing in spite of her lack of a formal education, was planting the seeds in me of learning, of appreciating education, falling in love with reading. She took me to the library as a child every Saturday. My mother never read or took out a single book herself. We both had library cards, but she got it to show me that I should have one. I realized I wanted to be a writer as a boy, because she exposed me to that world.
That’s one reason why in Brooklyn, every single morning, when I see groups of young people going to school, I go up to them and I start making conversation and I say repeat after me ‘I am a genius.’ Some of them laugh and chuckle but it’s important to tell children early on that they can do anything they want with their lives. That’s what my mother did. To this day, I always turn back to God, my mother and education by way of always reading something, whether it’s Shakespeare, Bell Hooks, or Gloria Steinem.
The Democratic primary is Tuesday, September 14th. Go to KevinPowell.net for more information.
