by Hooks, Bell
bh: Well, one of the threads that runs through all your albums has been representing black men as both the architects and the representations of evil. Who’s the primary predator now? Are we preying on each other?
IC: Of course, yeah, that’s the case, but that’s not the focus of my records.
bh: Well, talk a little bit more about who the predator is and how you see the concept of “predator.”
IC: Well, I think black people have been the victim of everything. I think we’ve been on the defensive on everything. And a predator is definitely on the offensive, you know. And I think that’s what we need to do, start not sitting back and letting things happen to us, but start creating better things for ourselves. We can do that through a mental revolution which I think needs to take place before anything positive really happens. If we don’t have a mental revolution, if we ever get involved in a physical revolution, we’d get blown out of the water. Because there’d be too many people tryin’ to lead, and too many people goin’ in their own direction. It just won’t be on and it won’t be clickin’. The mental revolution is gonna take time, but it’s happenin’ as we speak.
bh: Well, what do you think about people like Shelby Steele, and the black voices that are saying our problem is that we focus too much on victimization, that we gotta get off this victim kick?
IC: I don’t know … You gotta definitely remember the past.
bh: I think that we can’t get stuck in victimization, but we gotta know who the enemy is, what the enemy has done to us, and we have to name that.
IC: We can’t sidestep that. And that’s what black people been tryin’ to do. But that ain’t the case. That ain’t the case because the same thing is happenin’, just in different ways. The enemy has got more wicked and more wise, and we haven’t.
bh: The way that white people continue their power is, in part through their control of our images and our representation.
IC: Oh, Yeah. I think Dr. Frances Cress-Welsing’s philosophy on racism, I think that’s the whole root of the problem, about the genetic annihilation, and that we all become one big melting pot. In some years in the future, white people won’t even exist. So to make sure that they do exist, they got to put walls around themselves, and they really have to block everybody out. To block everybody out they feel they should murder ’em. I think we need to recognize that they’re attackin’ us, and we’re tryin’ to sidestep. But now we’re on the offensive, we know how to go around this, this bullshit. But if you in denial of the problem, you’re never gonna solve it.
bh: I write a lot about white supremacy, and then people say to me, she doesn’t like white people. And I keep tryin’ to get people to see it’s a difference between attacking the institutionalized structures of white supremacy and individual white people.
IC: Yeah, I mean, I don’t dislike white people. I just understand ’em. And since I understand ’em, I should read what they tryin’ to do. I mean, this is what they have to do to survive, to exist as a white race, ’cause if not, genetically they can be just taken off the planet.
bh: I have more problems than you do with Cress-Welsing, ’cause I feel like that sidesteps the issue of power. I feel like even if white people knew they were going to be on the planet forever, they wouldn’t want to give up the power and control of the planet. Because it’s not just about whiteness, it’s about the world’s resources, oil …
IC: It’s definitely about that, but I think all that goes hand in hand. I think since they got the power, of course now they wouldn’t give it up. But when they went to countries and raped the women and come back and the babies are the color of the women they raped, you know, they like, wait a minute, and then came up with a plan. So consciously that’s what he holds onto when you’re talking about racism. And I think by him using his methods to exist, he gained power and said wait a minute—I like this, too. I ain’t gonna let go of this no matter what. So I think it all goes hand in hand.
bh: Do you think the average dude out there is thinkin’ the way you think about racism and white supremacy?
IC: No. Because I think the average dudes haven’t been exposed to as many people. The average dude really ain’t been nowhere outside their neighborhood. So they ain’t really that concerned. They worried about how to get food on the table. They don’t care who’s the president and who’s mayor. They still gotta get money. And that becomes their drive—money. And nothin’ else.
bh: There’s so much emphasis on black men and violence. What about black male pain and grief? What do you do with your pain and your grief?
IC: Well, I really just try to suck it up. I don’t let it become routine because pain and grief never supposed to be routine to nobody. Killin’ has become a way of life. Very little talkin’, a lot of shootin’. And, I mean, that really has a big effect on us, you know. Television, you look at the violence before television and the violence after television. Now they can show an actual murder on TV, you know what I’m sayin’? A couple of days ago, an actual murder.
bh: I know, it was too much.
IC: And it’s like, it wasn’t even shocking. It’s a thin line between reality and the fake movie stuff. But the reality, it didn’t look as gory as the movie shit does. I think subconsciously some people say, damn, that was real, and they shocked and they don’t like that. But I think violence has become a way of life, and I think black people have always carried guns to protect ourselves from white men. And I think white men themselves can’t integrate, but they’re really gonna pump this self-hate so that the guns will never be pointed up, but will always point inward toward each other. And that’s what we’re stuck in. We got to put somebody to blame for this, because somebody is. You screw somebody out of their culture and their know-how and make them dependent on you, then you got to point that out. You got to show them that this black face that you’re about to shoot is not the enemy. On my records I refuse to say I shot a nigger for this, I shot a nigger for that. On my past records when I didn’t have no knowledge … I wouldn’t say some of the things now that I would in ’89, ’87, ’88, because, I mean, I’ve grown as a person. I need to grow as an artist, so I would never say, yo, I’m lookin’ for a nigger to shoot. I’d rather say, I got my gun pointed at the cracker, because the black man and the black woman is not my enemy. Although we do things within our community that need to be checked.
bh: Do you think white supremacy oppresses black women?
IC: Hell, yeah. I think white supremacy sometimes uses the black woman to get to the black man. You know, we’ll hire her, but we won’t hire you.
bh: But don’t you think it also uses black men? Like to me, Clarence Thomas is a case of the black man being used.
IC: Oh, yeah, it uses everybody. It takes a person like Clarence Thomas and it feels like a lot of black people would be proud, and it puts him on TV and rips him apart. A lot of people—I’m not one of them—but a lot of people look, oh yeah, we got a black man, we got Thurgood Marshall, and now we got Clarence Thomas, that’s cool.
bh: There’s a big difference between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and they don’t see that.
IC: No, it’s a black face, it’s a pacifier. It’s kind of like, every inner city has a Martin Luther King Boulevard, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s to pacify us. Y’all say we’re racist? Y’all got Martin Luther King Boulevard. Y’all got the Cosby Show. And if you look at talk shows, white people say y’all got this. They throw out a pacifier. “What about Colin Powell?” They always use the pacifier as a scapegoat to show that they’ve been fair and lovin’ and understandin’, they bend over backwards for black people.
bh: One of the main things a lot of people said to me is “Why you want to talk to Ice Cube? ’cause he don’t even like black women.” I wanted you to talk some about whether you believe black men and women must work together to challenge dominations.
IC: Yeah, on the business level, I think a black woman is the best thing to have, because black women are focused
. My manager, a black woman, when it comes to business, she is sharp. [He laughs.]
bh: So you think we need to have a vision of partnership?
IC: Yeah, I think black women have always been the backbone of the community, and it’s up to the black man to support the backbone, to show strength. I think black women have been the glue. Black women is trying to hold it together and it’s up to the black man to lock it in. In some cases we jump at the occasion, and in some cases we fail. But I think the black women have been the most consistent.
bh: Do you think we can be leaders together, side by side?
IC: Yeah, definitely.
bh: I gave a talk at Harvard recently, and a black woman stood up—I was on a panel with some black men—and she said, “I’m black and I’m poor and I want to know why black men don’t like us.” I’m not talking about you, I’m asking you about black men in general. Do you think black men, in general, like black women?
IC: I think self-hate plays a lot in everything. They make the white woman look so glamorous, and you have to be this, and you have to be skinny, and this color, and I think it takes its toll on the black man. So black man end up over-stepping the guilt and looking for white women, or someone who appears to be white, or close to white. And black men for some reason—I know the reason—they feel that they can show themselves to be a man sexually. So they’ll get the woman pregnant, but won’t be her man. And she’s stuck with a baby, and she’s holding that weight. And nobody wants to stop and take the responsibility. And now she has two or three kids and a man don’t want to get with her, and the cycle just continues and continues and continues.
bh: How do you think we can change it? I’ve been thinking a lot about this myself: How can I give my insight, my resources, back to black folks so that we can begin to change some of this? So many people said, “bell, why would you want to talk to him?” I feel like part of the magic of us talking is a lot more people have to see you differently. You’re not just saying, “I don’t want to talk to bell hooks, I mean, she’s into this feminist thinking.” And I’m not saying, “I don’t want to talk to Ice Cube, he’s a sexist, he doesn’t like black women.”
IC: If people really follow Ice Cube and know what Ice Cube about, they have to look at Yo-Yo. You know what I mean? Ice Cube put that thing together as far as her comin’ out. I think the kids need a balance of each dose. Me being a male, a male has a certain ego, you can’t get away. I think that of males all over the world. And that comes out in the music. And I think women need to really show, “Yo, we can do this and we can educate. We can be the same way.” And then what’s gonna happen is everything is gonna melt together and hopefully turn out cool.
bh: On Predator there’s a number of different female voices. The rough song, of course, for a black woman to listen to is “Don’t Trust It,” which kinda dogs us out and says bitches got a brand new game. Bitches all over with some new improved shit. But you have other moments on the album where women are speaking very differently. There’s the voice-over interview. Do you think that people register those other images of black womanhood? Or do they only focus on the bitches one?
IC: Well, people always focus on the most controversial thing. Because the evil of America outweighs the good, so people tend to hunger for the bad thing. They want to see the car wrecks. They want to see the sex scandals. They don’t want to see the straight-A student. Since we live in the society that we live in, people are gonna tend to identify with the “Don’t Trust It” record because they identify with the controversies more than they identify with the lady on “I’m Scared,” saying, “Yo, you know, we do this, we do that, we live in Harlem.” But I think it’s startin’ to be more and more socially correct to start identifyin’ with that lady that’s sayin’, you know, this and that.
bh: What do you think black men and women can do to come closer to one another?
IC: I think we have to really identify our problems. I think self-love, that’s the key to all our problems.
bh: Do you feel like your wife is a conscious person like yourself? How do you guys deal with a conflict? What if she thinks your shit is raggedy? How does she tell you? Do you talk?
IC: Yeah, she sit there and tell me. And, I mean, I take heed to it. But I been doin’ this a lot longer than I’ve known her and on some things I say, “Damn, baby you right.” And on some things I have a strong passion to say it and I’ll say, “Yo, you know, I’ve got to follow my own judgment on this.” We’re one but we’re still individuals and we disagree. But we handle it civilized. And I listen to what my wife has to say because we’re in disagreement, and a woman is really lookin’ for security. And if she think I’m goin’ way out, she’s like, “Wait a minute you might disrupt my security.”
bh: My black male partner, I know he’s really been struggling in terms of the job market and stuff. And I feel like that’s part of our difficulty as black people, that many of us are insecure. We’ve been emotionally abandoned or wounded or we haven’t been materially taken care of the way we desire. It’s important for us to recognize that each of us needs that.
IC: Yeah, definitely.
bh: I know that when you was talkin’ to Greg Tate a while back in his interview “Man-Child at Large,” he was askin’ you about women and you said the whole damn world is hostile to women. But do you think you help intensify the hostility?
IC: Well, it matters in the way you look at it. Definitely, I mean it’s just like lookin’ at a glass half-full or half-empty. If you look at it in the way that I hope to present it in showing a way of life that’s not acceptable or an action or, you know, having a woman to be the bait so the man can come in and kidnap the guy. That’s unacceptable and we want to point this out and we want to make this look as unattractive as we can.
bh: Or even like having women seduce men to get them into crack.
IC: Yeah, or whatever is the thing that’s the unacceptable action. How do you deal with that? Do you say, “Well, because we can’t say nothin’ bad about each other don’t even speak on that topic?” Or do you attack the thing, hold it and say, “Look, here’s what’s goin’ on. Watch yourself women, be cool.” And I tell men the same thing on records. But see, people focus on the women thing.
bh: You seem to think that it’s really important for the family for both men and women to be there.
IC: Yeah. You know, my father never left home. He’s still at home. And I think that’s the reason that I’m the way I am. Because, you know, a woman can raise a boy to be respectable. But, a woman can’t raise a boy to be a man. You need a man there. Like, if I had a daughter and no wife, it’s just two different people. We don’t have the same problems.
bh: The only thing I don’t agree with is that mostly I feel like every child needs to be loved. Sometimes you got a man and woman together, but you don’t have any love. I don’t think that child is gonna be any better off than the child who’s just with one parent, but is being loved.
IC: Yeah, but I’m sayin’, like there’s some things a boy wants that’s with his father.
bh: Or with a man. I don’t think it has to be his father.
IC: Yeah, with any man that he looks up to or he thinks is givin’ him the right information or the right advice. Some things my friends wouldn’t even tell their mother. Some things I wouldn’t tell my mother, but I sit down and talk to my father and the problem gets handled. I think when that doesn’t exist, the kid tends to turn to friends and that’s just like the blind leading the blind. And their friends become— especially older people in the neighborhoods, you know like older dudes that gangbang or whatever—the people they look up to. It’s like being led by the wrong people. And all this stuff that’s happenin’ to the community is happenin’ because of that.
bh: I really want to respect the black women single parents who have raised their kids through the hardships of poverty in this country and aloneness, and although I believe that every child needs men and women in their life, we can’t focus too
much on saying we need “the” father because a lot of kids are never gonna have contact with “the” father. I have a sister who’s on welfare who doesn’t have a husband, but her child has a really deep and loving relationship with my dad. I feel like, in lots of ways she has a more positive idea of black men than she would have if my sister just grabbed any ol’ nigger to marry just to have a daddy. Because a daddy that’s not loving, that’s not gonna help you.
IC: Nah, not at all. You’re definitely right on that tip because, like I said, I want to see my stepson with a better understanding of the world goin’ into school than I had. I didn’t know what the powers that be was and I didn’t know what time it was on this and what time it was on that. And to give him that understanding at six years old on “Here’s the situation, here’s what’s goin’ on, here’s what you’re gonna be up against.” When the teacher tells him that George Washington was the founding father of our country, he can raise his hand and say, “Wait a minute,” and really drop the real deal. And to be able to do that, I think that we’re startin’ to reverse the process that’s been goin’ on since we’ve been here and I think this is the generation to do it.
bh: That was really an important point to make. I really appreciate you talkin’ about yourself some, ’cause I think also that we need to know that we can love children that come into our life. They don’t have to be our children, like your blood child. I think there’s been a lot of negativity around people feelin’ like if it’s not your child, like men sometime feel like, “If it’s not my child, you know, if it didn’t come from my seed, then I don’t want to have a relationship to it.” And I think that kind of thinkin’ is out.
IC: That’s way off line.
bh: Tell me somethin’ about what you hope for your children, and for yourself, in the years to come.