Interview 26

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Interview 26
[00:00:00]
Interviewer: OK, great, so again, thank you so much for your time. The first question I ask
everyone is going back into your childhood, how would you describe your
household growing up?
James: Oh boy that is a really complicated question but I deal with these two different
stages. One was my mother and her father who were originally southerners
moved up to New York and he secured a home in Long Island where a lot of
black people from the same part of South Carolina all bought houses, coming to
work at as a part of the black migration, but my mother made a decision at one
point because my grandfather had passed and his widow who was biological
grandmother and my mother could not get along and my mother had seven kids
and two grown with one being the step-mother and the other being the
daughter whose father’s now dead I guess, we never found out why but my
mother made a final decision and she moved us to the projects in New York and
when she did that it pretty much destroyed our family and we never fully
recovered, and my mother still lives there in the projects where this all
happened. So economically it was a working class black family experience that
gave way to a single mother ghetto urban experience within the short period of
time of the death of the patriarch of the family.
Interviewer: And as you were growing up, was your mother working at the time?
James: Yeah, domestic, multiple jobs all the time, two and three jobs was normal, one
job was something I never knew her to have, she always had at least two jobs,
sometimes three and then in the circle of well-to-do white Long Island suburban
wives, wives of wealthy men, doctors, people who were white people of
influence, my mother was their domestic and she outlived all of them because
she’s still alive. [laughs]
Interviewer: Wow. [laughs]
James: So she won. [laughs]
Interviewer: Yeah, for real. [laughs]
James: They’re all gone except for their children, their children are still here, but she
outlived all the adults. So we went from that family background from a working
class black family around the era World War 2 industry to a black urban
ghettoized stereotype family background situation.
Interviewer: And were you born in New York or were you born?

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James: Yeah I was born in New York, my whole family, my brothers were born in New
York, all of them.
Interviewer: And so now as an adult, this is kind of a strange question but, what do you, how
did you characterize your role within your family?
James: I would say I’m the leader of the family, even though I’m 3000 miles away, I’m
the moral and I think most the leader of the family in terms of being very strong
for the next generation of young people in the family, my nephews and nieces,
I’m the one uncle who broke through the things we all inherited and tried to be
an example for all of them and say look, I came from the same circumstances
that you came from and we got the same blood in us and look at me and I
continue to support any of my nephews and nieces who go to college and try to
do something with themselves. I have a nephew right now in Long Island and I’m
helping fund his education right now. But if you aren’t, if you let the streets take
you or whatever, I still love you but I’m not going to support you financially so
we came out of that background.
Interviewer: But, you said being 3000 miles away how often do you see your siblings, your
mom?
James: Maybe twice a year but I talk to everyone regularly and they all recognize my,
how do I say this, my presence in the family, my large shadow in the family. Not
that I’m more important than anyone else just that like when my sister suddenly
died within days of a cancer diagnosis pulled the family together. I mean I have
other family members that are very strong but in terms of, the way my family
sees me or the way they tell me they see me especially the men in the family,
they see me as a kind of, someone to admire because he broke through, he got
away kind of thing.
[00:05:56]
Interviewer: Yeah that makes sense, that makes sense. Can you tell me anything you would
change about your family?
James: I wish my father had lived and was present and that’s about it that would be the
main thing. Because we had a happy childhood in spite of their not being a father
present and my mother as far as I know and my father had seven kids together
and we all had the same last name and we all grew up together and we all had
only been told that story that’s our family circumstances, my father died when I
was five years old and my youngest brother was about two or three, and so she
had no children before she turned 30 and then had seven kids after turned 30
years old, my mother, and now she’s supposed to turn 90 next month and has
amassed a family with that original seven that are multiplied by god almighty 50

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and she’s the matriarch of a large family of people who live across this country
now.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s special.
James: So you know that and I kind of helped support the family financially that’s an
important role I tend to play, if they’re trying to do something productive with
their lives I’mlike yeah and I never say no, I always say yes, and I’m talking about
an ongoing basis, I’ve probably carried about three of the next generation of my
family in addition to my own family here.
Interviewer: That was going to be my next question I was going to ask, do you regularly
provide any of your family members with financial assistance, and it sounds like
you do. What motivates you to support them in that way?
James: None of the brothers and sisters ever but the nephews and nieces, the next
generation I help them if they need it, if they are trying to do something
productive with themselves and if they’re desperate enough. You know like I
have a couple of nieces that aren’t doing much with themselves but if they called
I would probably do what I could given that they called me for help. I have a
niece back in New York who has suddenly become a single mother in her early
thirties and she needs financial assistance including paying for new tires for her
car, paying for separate rent and that sort.
Interviewer: And what is the difference, you said not for siblings but for your nieces and
nephews, what’s the difference there?
James: At some point you have to be strong enough on your own to be self-reliant and
to carry your own weight and I don’t have pity for adult people who should have
learned like everybody else what it takes to provide a circumstance for your life
that you feel good about and so I’m not inclined to help my brothers or sisters
but I definitely would help my nephew who’s in college right now because I’ve
been through that experience and I know what it’s like to have no financial
support and no moral support and emotional support at all, when you’re going
from the projects to getting a Ph.D. largely as an outsider most of the time that
was pretty much the reality for me. Being from New York, coming to California
with no real connections to anybody here I just kind of forced my way through
from undergraduate experience at Pepperdine to grad school university to
completing my doctorate and establishing a career at this point, I’m at the top of
the game.
[00:10:42]

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Interviewer: Yes, you are, at Berkeley. [laughs] So you talked about that nephew that you’re
now able to provide both financial and I’m sure moral support for, so how do
you feel to share financially with him and others?
James: I feel wonderful, and I have this relationship with my son who’s nine and my son
who’s seven, I feel like I’m able to on a multi-dimensional level fulfill both
whatever unresolved childhood concerns or feelings I had about my own father
not being present by the way I parent my own children. In other words I am the
father to my son that I wanted my father to be for me and so that’s the
relationship my sons are getting and they’re getting, I think they will tell you,
they love it and my daughter as well. So on that end of the equation, that’s
where I am. Now could you repeat your question because I think I lost the
second part of it?
Interviewer: I just asked, how do you feel when you share that with them.
James: OK yeah, it feels great, it feels like you’re able to do for yourself through others,
you want it done to you. Looking backward and saying, I’m thankful that I’m in a
position to do for those behind what I wish somebody ahead of me was able to
do for me and the road that I towed was unnecessary if somebody before me,
my father or whomever, had set it up that. If I died today, my kids are set, they’ll
miss their father but they won’t miss a meal for their whole generation, what
they do with that is up to them so they have to take what I’m giving them as a
start and run with it because it’s a great start. I got my start was largely with a
strong mother, I don’t want to discount her and her, like I said working multiple
jobs, but you definitely operate from a deficit beginning point when you don’t
have no father and I’m not a sexist but I know as a boy it’s just devastating to
start off that way. So to be able to provide for my nephews and nieces, to
encourage them along the way and to help them to pay for their books because I
know what books cost, to counsel them about staying motivated and not giving
up. You know I don’t get into my nephew’s personal business, what’s he’s doing,
but he reports to me, his first semester in college I guess he felt like he owed it
to me I guess because I’m sending him $200 and $300 a month just to help him
out, to keep money in his pocket and he doesn’t have a car yet so, so you know
just to have money in his pocket because my brother his father I don’t know if he
helps him and if he does I don’t think he helps him much. So I try to give him
something to make sure he has something in case no one else does because I
went through the experience of being the child of the family in college with the
same family members, we were all much younger, but I still got no family
support and I could imagine the attitudes aren’t very different today in my family
in general about education than they were for me growing up so I’m sort of

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being the motivator in the family about education because no one else is even to
this day.
[00:14:54]
Interviewer: I see, yeah. So my next question is more about your personal mobility story, it
sounds like you did really value education and didn’t really have a lot of
encourage in that way so I’m just trying to get at, how did that happen? You had
this great trajectory where now the call for interviews ask for people to classify
themselves as middle class and that kind of broad, ambiguous term, so what do
you attribute to your own mobility?
James: Honestly I think it was a real seer of, in the sense that when my mother moved
up to the projects it was ripe with heroin and everything was everywhere, it was
Long Island and people don’t treat Long Island in terms of New York City, the
Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, but there is a portal of black communities all over Long
Island like Hampstead, some of the roughest places in New York are in Long
Island like Hampstead or Roosevelt or Winedance or Central Iceland, these are
some rough patches of black communities and when crack hit it was right there
and it devastated our community. We were singing Good Times and Ain’t No
Stoppin’ Us Now in ’79 and then early ‘80s and the next thing you know hip hop
hit and next thing you know crack hit and our people have not recovered since.
And it had a holocaustic impact in my view and I’m actually making that point in
a current book project I’m developing right now.
Interviewer: So you feel like it was a personal kind of failure.
James: Yeah because I would see guys leave and go off to the army or to other places
and come back and I always thought, oh my god they all were sailing because I
felt if you’re coming back to the projects after you got out it’s like you went to
prison and came back, you got out and I didn’t know I was going to get out, we
didn’t know, who knew, you don’t know what the future holds you’re in the
middle of it and you’re just living and lucky for me some things happened that
changed my trajectory as you said but certainly the beginning point was the
definite deficit and very negative and even to the point of crime and that sort,
crime and drugs and things of that sort because it was everywhere, it was all
around us so. For me it was more about personal ability, I would say my main
motivation was largely a deep devotion to my mother, almost a religious
devotion to my mother, I would say it was deeper than religious devotion, I
would say my devotion to my mother superseded my devotion to any particular
religion and when I became religious it was also in relationship to my mother and
my devotion to my mother. So I felt like I owed her so much because she carried
this family of seven people which became ten real quick once my oldest sister

6
had her children, the oldest now is 40 and he was like a little brother to us and
so that was just a lot and I felt I owed it to her to try and not get in trouble with
the law, to try to do well in school, I always had a bright smile, and a vivacious, if
you can say that for a boy, a vivacious personality and it always worked with the
white people where we grew up because even though we were in Long Island we
were in the projects and we were in the white schools, these white suburban
schools but they weren’t abusive and violent and openly racist to ways that I
remember. Most of my teachers were Irish white women and Jewish white
women and occasional men but I don’t remember them being particularly
prejudiced to us but back to the point for me it was a sense, when I realized I
was her strength it was like I owe it to this women to be as successful as I can be,
so that was the true motivation for me from the projects to being who I am and
whatever I am right now, the main motivation was a son’s love for his mother,
it’s the truth of it. Even though she never really respected my education and
doesn’t to this day. I think she thought it cost her a son like it took me away from
her in New York.
[00:22:21]
Interviewer: Oh OK, I see.
James: And she lost me because of it but we both know I could not have survived, if I
stayed there I’d be dead or in prison for sure, it was escaping New York that
helped me get on a different path.
Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. So, let me switch gears really quickly. We talked about
giving money to family and you mentioned earlier that your siblings you felt like
at a certain point they need to figure it out for themselves in a way that you
wouldn’t hold your nieces or nephews as they’re growing up for that, does that
mean that at some point you were helping your siblings when you all were
younger or has there always been a difference for them?
James: I think it’s always been sort of a difference, sort of like I always see us as a den of
lions and lionesses in my family and the male lions had to leave the den as soon
as they could to not be a burden on the pride and leave and become self-
sufficient and that’s what I did and that’s what some of the people in my family
did and there’s some of us that didn’t. There’s some of us that were motivated
by poverty never to go back and others were where they became stronger. No I
wasn’t helping any of them over time so it’s never sort of been the case, maybe
way back, I’m talking like 1980’s you know not since then, there’s been no calls
but I have nephews and nieces where I’ve given thousands and thousands of
dollars. Like I said the niece is 32 years old and just had her first child and my
brother who was her father died when she was four so she grew up without her

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father and now she has a child and she’s a single mother and the father’s not
reliable and I know if my brother was alive he would help his daughter and take
care of his daughter so I try to help his daughter.
Interviewer: That’s great. So thinking about both your siblings and your nieces and nephews,
how do you think your financial position has affected your relationship with
them?
James: How my financial position has affected my relationship?
Interviewer: Right, with your family.
James: I would say it has not, largely because, I mean we share a joint account but I
have my own and my wife has her own, so we sort of operate that way. We sort
of allow for family emergencies out of our own needs to give it to them out of
whatever accounts we have and I don’t ask her when and how often she helps
her mother who lives here and she helps her mother often but I don’t ask her
how much and how often because it’s never been an issue and same thing with
me, I’m inclined to send any amount to my family based on what the situation
may be. My brother got in some trouble with the law a few months ago and they
needed to raise bail money right away and I sent them $500 in a few minutes
and never even told my spouse because it was like I’ll recover this with work and
I didn’t take it out of our household account.
Interviewer: So my next question is, in that instance where you have to help your brother
with the bail money, where could that money have gone otherwise? That $500?
James: Probably stayed in my accounts and not going anywhere else, I’m kind of cheap.
[laughs]
Interviewer: So it’s going into savings and just had been there.
James: Exactly it wouldn’t be used I know that much probably to peg down any debt or
credit I’m big on that.
[00:27:15]
Interviewer: OK, OK. So we’ve talked a lot about your siblings but haven’t talked too much
about any cousins that you have and I’m wondering what your relationship’s like
to aunt’s, uncle’s, if they’re a big part of your family.
James: My mother was an only child.
Interviewer: Oh OK.
James: Her brother, whose name was my name. My grandfather, her father, this is
almost like a Tony Morrison book but he lost his only son in an accident when my

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mother and her baby brother whose name was James was killed when a kettle of
hot water in the old south, I think my mother might have been four and he was
three if I’m not mistaken and somehow fire collapsed and it missed my mother
and it hit her brother and it scalded him and he died within a few days and my
grandparents both became fierce alcoholics and separate and their lives are
destroyed and my grandmother, my mother’s mother becomes a woman of the
streets in South Carolina, basically a woman running up and down the bars an
alcoholic publicly because she was broken by that, and my mother says my
grandfather also said that destroyed, that broke him, and you see where that
event sort of poisons the next several generations of our family through
alcoholismbecause it definitely passes on.
Interviewer: Wow.
James: But my mother was an alcoholic for us growing up.
Interviewer: And then on your dad’s side of the family did you always keep in touch?
James: We had no relationship with my father’s side of the family, they’d be 15 minutes
away but they were light-skinned black people and some of them passed and
they just didn’t have a relationship with us. They were the Burkharts. Think
about that name Burkharts, our name was his name and their name is Tampa
but one of the married well to do married someone named Burkhart and they
were black bourgeoisie and light-skinned black bourgeoisie and they had no
relationship to us, we were known as those kids in the projects in Glen Cove and
they were the black, and my father’s mother’s house, the family house that part
of the family grew up is still there in Hampstead perfectly beautiful and intact
and a family member lives there but they don’t come out for strange reason
when we come there to talk to them they won’t open the door. This is my
father’s niece the last one that’s living out of that group, I would’ve said they
have a complexional issue where they are very light-skinned and I think it drove
them race crazy on that tip being mulatto so-called or whatever you want to call
it, being very like black people I think they just experienced the same sort of
psychological issues that a lot of people who struggle with those issues have to
struggle with and how they belong and wherever they belong and they never
really associated with us that was the other damage and right down the street
there was another side of the family story that we never were able to get
because my father died when we were young and his family had nothing to do
with us.
Interviewer: Into some of your other relationships, how would you, is there a difference
between what you would do for family in terms of giving money or loaning
money and what you would do for your friends?

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James: I’d say so, I help a friend or two here and there but not like I help my nephews
and nieces I think because there’s this whole thing with my nephews and nieces
like I said I’m fathering them in a way but I wish my father was around to be a
father for me, I’m also the uncle that I wish I had so my nephews and nieces
when I was going through what they’re going through now in terms of my own
struggle to get to this point so I’m trying to, so there’s certain kind of Freudian
kind of self, I’m sort of paying it back or looking back to myself in the future I
don’t know what it is I just know that I’m always fulfilling some kind of
psychological circle by doing this in that for me it was always a struggle and it
was always incomplete and I was always anxious about my struggle and
education in trying to make it out here in California without no family support
and now to be able to be in the position now to help several family members
who are trying to do that it’s about breaking the family cycle is what I’ve always
wanted to do for myself after my nephews and nieces and so whoever else
wanted to come out of the cycle come on out but I have nephews and nieces in
prison like I told you, I had two brothers with felonies who can’t vote, two
brothers that have no word. My mother still lives in the projects, like I said, I kind
of got away so where I come from, it’s not like that anymore because the black
community has been all displaced and removed and now it’s all Dominican and
Venezuelan even the Puerto Ricans have been driven out but in the ‘70s and ‘80s
these projects were the ghetto projects of New York where we were from but
now my mother’s still there but a lot of the old blacks, the only blacks that are
still there are the elderly that couldn’t leave. But they’ve been displaced by these
other immigrant population so the community’s not even the community when
you go back home now.
[00:34:07]
Interviewer: Right, that’s interesting. So some people in these interviews have talked about in
the way that you give support family financially some people have told me that is
unique about black families in relation to other racial groups, and other people
don’t think that there are any differences. What do you think of that idea?
James: I mean, I have a really good friend, he won’t admit it, if he’s not a black
Republican he might as well be one but he’s definitely a millionaire he drives
around in Porsche, his wife drives around in a Mercedes, they own a $2.5 million
home here in Oakland, he’s all about money and things of that sort, that’s all he
does for a living and he has an opinion and it just reflects what I’ve just described
to you, he says those of us who have been able to reach any so-called middle
class which is a job with income for most of us, we are more often paying, how
did he put it, we’re paying forward rather than reaping backward. In essence
we’re taking care of our elderly and we’re taking care of our young in our

10
families, we’re not inheriting the kitty or the trust fund that our white or Asian or
maybe other counterparts might be able to inherit or a pre-existing family
business let’s say an Indian immigrant person might be able to pass on to his or
his family for example. So you have those sort of challenges. We are typically
paying and taking care of the next generation and the previous generation which
is itself inherited all of those inequities and imbalances that Ta-Nehisi Coates
documents in his article about reparations in terms of what Jim Crow did to our
families, what Jim Crow did to my mother who was born in 1925, my mother was
born in 1925, the same year Malcolm X was born, that generation of black
people who were the black migration and they just settled in Harlem and they
then worked from Harlem while some of them started having children they left
Harlem and moved out to Long Island because she wanted better schools for her
kids. So that’s the thing I think is, one of the things I say at the very end of my
book on black nationalism is that very reality there’s a wealth gap between black
and white people in general in terms of home ownership that places blacks
about 1600 years behind whites and we’re not even talking about outlying cases
or exceptional blacks or outstanding whites we’re just talking about middling
blacks and middling whites, just regular people. In terms of home ownership
alone, there’s a group that studies Martin Luther King’s dream every year and
they give a report kind of like the urban league report every year gives a state of
the black family, this report gives a state of the dream I think it’s called and they
have these measures of what the dream might look like in terms of real, tangible
social categories, income, education, integration within residences, geographical
resident integration, cultural integration, you know the dream being realized and
they argue in about ’04 that we were about 1664 years behind and then you
think about what happened in ’08 with the economic crisis that
disproportionately affected African-Americans and Latino homeowners across
the state of California and D.C. just wiped out black peoples futures and so that’s
the depressing reality and I think that reflects similar other kinds of inequality
where I read and seen some data that talk about whites having I think 20 times
the per capital wealth that black people have and what that’s doing in terms of
retarding future generations and their full development.
[00:39:35]
Interviewer: Yeah, so in light of all that, as you described, black people are in the unique
position where we both have to sit forward and backward, I really liked the way
you articulated that, and kind of in light of the wealth gap all these things you’re
talking about, from your perspective, what do you think black people really
need?

11
James: I think African-American people need to develop a new consciousness about
themselves as a people that isn’t so much racialized in the way black power was
but it has to have a degree of that because that truly is the glue that no matter
what other formations and multiple identities and intersectionalities we may all
possess and I don’t want to trivialize those because they are important but they
were always present even if they were muscled or muted and I think that
inappropriate and wrong and I think we’re all mature enough now to include
those voices and places without having to be James Baldwin or Countee Cullen
you know and not be public about your sexuality if you want to be but can’t be.
As a people and as a country I assume western civilization is now at that point.
Now I’ve lost my train of thought.
Interviewer: I asked you what, in light of our financial position what do you think black people
need to form a new form of consciousness?
James: You know I was telling my wife earlier today I think we have to think about
looking at other large minority populations in this country who are also
physically outstanding people who cannot hide their identity like Chinese
populations and this is something I’ve exposed my students here at Berkeley on
my class on black nationalismis, what if we adopted an approach, like Booker
Washington’s best students were the Chinese, you know they understand the
social space and economic space the market and the community and they’ve
retained community in every city in America and they aren’t necessarily a recent
minority population they used to be in the Bay Area goes back to the 1800s, the
Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 they go back further than that with the
development of course to the intercontinental rail systemso they have an
ancient history in this country and they show a model of existence in every city
in Oakland, in San Francisco, in New York City, in Dallas, in San Antonio,
wherever there is a major city there is a major gathering of Chinese community
in public marketplaces and yet they withdraw themselves as do Jews every
Friday night and every weekend back into their enclaves and their community. I
think that’s the way forward even though African-Americans are advanced in
certain ways than the Chinese population is in this country politically. Nobody is
advanced as the black group is, I think maybe white people might be, the elderly
white voters might be but African-Americans are a politicized population and
they have always been a politicized population because they had no choice but
to politicize their race because it was being erased, our genocide, so I think that
bodes well for African-Americans in terms of the future of black politics I do
think there is reason to be optimistic in the long run because the numbers show
the population size that the African-American population is about to explode
over the next forty years. And the whole country’s population is about to
explode to about 400 million Americans and 75 million of those people are

12
projected by the U.S. Census 40 years from this year, this in your lifetime and
definitely in your children’s lifetime. Not just your grandkids lifetime that’s very
soon is my point and some people that are alive right now will still be here to see
this explosion and the question is, what does the black group do? And I think
they have to begin to think about different ways on the local level of organizing
in communal ways that are not anti-anybody and are not alienating but part of
the problem in organizing the black community is I’m sort of put off so much
dogmatism coming up in New York in the days of afrocentrism everyone was so
dogmatic about everything, you know I’m James Taylor I’m not changing my
name to this or that, my heart is black, I believe black, I only think black, I write
black, I’m still black, I’m gonna die black, I don’t believe I’m American I believe
I’m black, my religion is not Christian or Muslim my religion is black that’s all I am
is black and I’m not ashamed of that, I take pride in that because I know what
that means in terms of our history. You know when I went to Mount
Lenoncoringus Church the first time a friend of mine invited me when I was living
in L.A. and I was going to graduate school I never felt like more of a black sellout
all my life than when I walked out of this church I was like, oh damn. I don’t walk
around saying abadi Ghana, I ain’t got no afro, I don’t got no daicheki but I was
as black conscious as anybody I knew in fact anybody who knew me knew that
James Taylor was the one if you wanted to know about Malcolm X. For example,
when I was at Pepperdine, I was a graduate student of USC Kim Fields the actress
was a student at Pepperdine and she had a on-campus talk show and Ron
Johnson, I can’t remember his correct name but he was Dwayne Wayne’s
sidekick on Different World, the light-skinned brother.
[00:46:11]
Interviewer: Oh yeah, I know who you’re talking about.
James: He and Kim Fields had a show on campus that was projected locally on local L.A.
cable TV and Pepperdine faculty was making the movie Malcolm X, Pepperdine
approached Kim Fields because she was a student and wanted to hire her to
interview Attalla Shabazz, Malcolm X’s oldest daughter. Attalla, how do I say this,
apparently there was some discussion with Kim Fields and the gossip was they
wanted $5000 for Kim for the interview and Pepperdine said no and so they
came to me and said will you do it for 500 and I said, oh hell yeah, you mean you
want me to sit down and talk to Malcolm X’s daughter who I’ve been looking at
my whole life since I was a child, looking at her face, at the horror of her father’s
death and the pain of that child, absolutely, and it happened that when Spike
Lee’s movie was made, I’m sure she spoke at 100 universities around the country
but when she came down to Pepperdine down there in L.A. and it was all in the
local L.A. Times and Long Beach Times, she and I sat down and had a one-on-one

13
in front of the whole university community because the university knew that I
knew as much as Malcolm X and was as serious a student about Malcolm X as
anybody they knew, and they were like, let’s just go to James Taylor and that
was it and it happened. And I have it on video to this day of me and Attalla
Shabazz for two hours, for two hours sitting in front of the university and local
L.A. community having this conversation about the movie, about Malcolm, about
contradictions in her father’s book, I would get out of her the detail that
Malcolm’s autobiography making the claimthat he hated every bit of the white
racist blood in his veins, that his grandmother was raped, Attalla admitted at this
event that his grandmother had four children with this so-called rapist and
Malcolm simply used that as a rhetorical device, that it wasn’t true.
Interviewer: Wow.
James: Yeah and that’s one of the most inflammatory things Malcolm says in the
opening of the chapter Nightmare where that book opens up with the horror of
the Ku Klux Klan burning down the family’s house. And that’s something we were
able to get out of her.
Interviewer: That’s crazy, that’s super interesting on two levels, one because it’s just
incredible what you did there but two I did undergrad at UCLA so it’s crazy to
hear that there were that many black people at Pepperdine for this woman.
[laughs]
James: Right, it was like all ten of us that weren’t on the basketball team but they were
all celebrities or celebrities’ kids, it was either the very poor of us who were so
broke that financial aid couldn’t carry us or those who were independent with
their financial-if I sat here and told you the who’s who of the black people that I
went to school with Pepperdine, that I taught at Pepperdine because I taught at
Pepperdine for years too, I taught there for like six or seven years before I came
out to the Bay Area. It was a little bit like I’d be name dropping ridiculous black
Hollywood.
[00:49:42]
Interviewer: That’s cool though, I never knew that. My last question is, in terms of finances,
career, family life, where would you like to be in ten years?
James: Well, still totally engaged in my teaching career, toward the end of it but
definitely still engaged in it, still writing and researching. I’ve said, because I had
my children in my early forties that I’m going to go out with two feet first
because I need my professor faculty fringe benefits for education for my
children, getting them through college because at that point they’re not going to
take up my retirement money paying for their tuition. Daddy will teach until he’s

14
70 if they let him so you guys can get through, after that and they gotta go to
wherever I’m teaching because where I teach now, other than Berkeley, is the
University of San Francisco and the relationship I have there allows my children
to go to any of 26 Jesuit universities around the country that they apply to other
than Georgetown which is the most prestigious Jesuit school in America but
there’s others. You’re located where, in Sanford?
Interviewer: Yeah, I’m in Sanford.
James: Yeah so, up here it would be USF, Santa Clara, Marymount, those schools all,
there’s 26 of them, so my kids and my wife could actually go to school at any of
those places, and many of colleagues do take advantage of that right now, so
that would have to be a major factor but you know the older I get the more I’m
watching my money in ways that I wasn’t watching it in my early 30s, I definitely
plotting out and trying to be more conscious in how my money’s invested and
where it is for long-term steady growth and as far as I know I’m in a good
position because I just reached the top of the profession as full professor status
and I intend to teach another 20 years and so that income multiplied over 20
times should be OK.
Interviewer: Pretty nice. So as a quick follow-up to this, seeing that as the picture for ten
years from now, what do you imagine the relationship to your family talking
again about your immediate family, your nieces and nephews, what do you think
your relationship will be like once you get to that place?
James: Well hopefully everybody’s still alive and that’d be nice and if so, you know I
think it will continue to be what it is because it’s always been this way most of
my nephews and nieces look up to me and they still marvel at me as having
broken through and I don’t want to sound like one of these well-to-do, I’ve made
it so can you kind of thing even though I do believe in that, I do believe in that I
don’t want to sound like that. My relationship with them I hope will be one
where they are at long last financially strong and able and knowing that I helped
raise them as a career sailor in the Navy and made a career out of it, he’s raising
four children by himself, he’s raising his own two children who are abandoned by
their mother who he was married to and his sister’s two sons all of them I think
the oldest is ten and they’re all like eight and maybe seven and seven like that
and he’s a man that’s 40 years old raising them by himself alone because my
niece is in prison, his sister, and I raised him, I raised that young man, and so
that’s about the whole idea of breaking the cycle as I said. I told him today, I
almost came to tears telling him because I’m like, do you realize the odds you
beat as a black man from New York, from the projects, with a mother who was a
public alcoholic.

15
[00:54:50]
Interviewer: Right.
James: In my projects it was my sister was the public alcoholic and that’s how my whole
family had to deal with that growing up, it was like her being the beloved sister
because she was the oldest child and whatever happened to her in her life our
family lived with the ongoing horror every day for decades of her alcoholism and
it was fierce and violent all the time and her son was strong enough to succumb
but her daughter is the one in prison, her daughter was weaker and the son we
think was able to overcome it because my mother was younger when he was
born, he’s a few years older than his sister and my mother was younger,
everybody was younger, we were still together and so he got a little more of that
strong family grounding than she did and she ran off and as I said she’s in a cell
right now as we speak. So that nephew to me is the linchpin for the next
generation, he’s the oldest grandchild of all and he’s the one they all do look up
to and they all do respect and I’m sort of like, you know we’re talking about the
flow chart I’m the one right above him under my mother, you know, then it’s
him and all of those nephews and nieces you know lateral with him and there’s a
bunch of the next generation and then there’s even great grandchildren now, my
mother has about, I think, I don’t want to take a wild guess but my mother must
have about 50 grandchildren and great grandchildren now, coming out of a
single woman, you know as an only child after that, talking about her beginnings
basically with no relatives, kind of get back on the point of view about cousins.
No real relatives around most of our lives just people in the projects that we
knew that we became family with you know surrogate family people like that.
Interviewer: Right.
James: So, here you go through that experience, if my mother is really close to the
community or what’s left of it, they still respect her for the days when she raised
her family in the projects at that critical era. So I hope my nephews and nieces
continue to look to me and admire me as being an extension of their pride in
their family because part of my motivation was that my mother would be able to
walk the streets of New York where we were from and go to the grocery market
and not just have to ashamed of the reports that would come out locally about
my brothers and sisters being in prison or being incarcerated or being drunk or
being in fights or being pregnant or all of the negative stuff that happens to any
black family happened to us. Just trying to be like Michael in Good Times, I was
that more black-conscious black child, right? I mean that’s who I identified with
in Good Times was Michael, I’m like yeah, hell yeah, black power you know and
that was my thinking and that was my orientation probably because I watched a
lot of Michael on Good Times you know that and Roots is a key moment. Say my

16
generation, people like me that was a formidable I think even for Michelle
Obama that was a formidable event was Roots when we saw Roots televised
that brought slavery to you in a way that developed for me a political
consciousness and I tried to put that out to my nephews and nieces, most of
them respect me for it, it’s my thing not theirs but they respect me because they
know where I come from and even if they admire what I’ve done in general
they’re less impressed with my academic background, the specifics of what I’ve
published, what I’ve written. I’ve given them all a copy of my book, they know
what I’m doing now but it’s not critical to their lives. So I think they admire my
hustle or my determination to keep on pushing because they remember the
projects, they remember the wheelchairs, they know where I come from, they’re
my best witnesses so whatever this academic thing takes my career more power
to it that’s what I told my nephew today I’m like, you already won if you die
tomorrow you bet the odds you won you’re 40 years old you beat all the odds
for your generation because you’s supposed to be dead or in prison statistical.
With your family origin, with a father that is a career criminal and a mother, my
sister, who is a public alcoholic but never criminal, never went to prison or jail
not once, but she was a public alcoholic, and his father was a career prisoner, I
mean he spent probably 25, 30 years of my nephew’s 40 years in prison and I’d
say for the last 10 years he stayed out of prison largely because once my sister
died, the grandkids, his children and their children really need him to step and be
whatever he can be, a patriarch to them even though he’s an old school New
York Harlem dope addict, you know heroin, poppin’, old school dope addict I’m
talking about before crack dope addict kind of OG like that, he’s probably
approaching 70 years old but he was one of those brothers that when Mickey
Bonds you know all that, he was one of the boys who would go out and buy the
dope from Mickey Bonds.
[01:00:41]
Interviewer: Wow.
James: That’s how I learned about Mickey Bonds as a child in New York, everybody
knew about Mickey Bonds and we knew about Mickey Bonds in our projects
because of my brother-in-law, the guy that I’m telling you about there, my
nephew’s niece’s father who’s a career criminal because he was one of those
heroin addicts, never a dealer, just an addict. And so Tony Morrison you’d be
talking about these points of origin like my grandfather’s horror of losing his
baby, a boy, and what that did to the whole family and these legacies that are
passed on that’s why I go back to the theme of cycles, trying to break the cycles
with the next generation, nephews and nieces, I don’t want them to be black, I
have to check myself recently so that I’m not sort of getting to this point where

17
they are only acceptable to me if they have a black bourgeoisie life, black middle
class, I had to check myself to realize it ain’t for everybody and it’s definitely for
the majority of my family. I actually just be content at this point with my
brothers and sisters not being in prison and my nephews and nieces, I guess I’m
saying having to set a low bar for what I feel is standard of success and progress
for us as a people, for my family as a people, from our slave plantation ancestry
in a little town in South Carolina I could name to our last ancestors which I could
name two of them to where we are now is the typical black American from the
plantation to the projects single mother black migration where we are today in
the 21st century story, that’s my story, it’s a typical black urban migration story,
it’s not in any way unique from all of the black people you can find in New York
or Baltimore, I would say more like Boston rather, you know anywhere where
black folks migrated from the south and are still there a generation or three later
and having gone through all those majors epics from migration to urbanization
to deindustrialization to crack epic to mass incarceration we all went through
that horror. So as much as you could code my responses specifically, I’ma
microcosm of the whole generational reality, I would say two or three
generations from my mother being World War 2 generation to us being
technically the older of us babyboomers, the youngest of us being generation
X’ers, my youngest brother and me, to the next generation of nephews and
nieces, the oldest generation X’ers, I’ve got a niece that’s about I think two or
three years old from my brother believe or not and I’ve had other nephews and
nieces who’ve had children in the last three or four months, so we’ve had about
four new babies across our family born, another generation from my mother, I
think it’s the fifth generation from my mother that’s now been born.
Interviewer: Wow.
James: And she was taking care of the grandchildren until she couldn’t walk anymore
now she’s going to be 90 next month and can’t walk anymore but she was raising
a boy who is now 11, the two children that are now living with their uncle, the
boy I raised down in the CT area, the sailor, the two boys that are living with
their uncle, the brother who’s 40 raising the four kids by himself, my mother was
raising them and it came to a point where she just could not do it anymore
because she couldn’t look behind them, but here you have a woman almost 90
years old taking care of the fourth generation of her children because the
mother of those children is too weak and caught in drugs and things of that sort.
So that’s pretty much all my family’s business and you’ve got it on record so you
can do with it what you want. Obviously, I’m not very reserved.
Interviewer: I really, really appreciate how candid you were, let me turn off the recorder.

18
James: I’m pretty down for anything that helps black people so if it helps black people, I
tell me business if it’s going to help advance you.
Interviewer: Let me turn this off.
[01:05:16]

Interview 26

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