It is telling that in the build-up to Public Enemy’s 1989 smash, “Fight the Power,” Chuck D. states that the “March in 1963 is a bit of nonsense, we ain’t rolling like that no more.” True to Public Enemy’s spirit and messaging, Chuck is signaling a more confrontational approach to gaining rights and equality. Telling is that before Chuck’s salvo, the video opens with scenes and a narration of marchers peacefully moving toward voting rights. It is a scene that W.E.B. Du Bois would have felt a surge of pride for.
Du Bois’s 1900 essay, “To the Nations of the World,” opens with a signaling of his own. In referring to “the metropolis of the modern world,” Du Bois is citing America’s colonial antecessor, England–from where he is writing–and its global leadership position. The English were, after all, the first to abolish slavery in its colonial outposts throughout the Caribbean. From there, Du Bois moves to the assembling of a “congress of men and women of African blood” who are not only demanding to know how much longer will race be “the basis of denying…half of the world the right of sharing” in the ability to make the most of themselves, but also cites the world’s responsibility—their complicity in that denial—as well. Chuck, however, is less interested in the rest of the world’s responsibility, he is intent on confronting the specificity of America’s failures.
Chuck’s asserting that he’s “black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped, plus I’m amped/most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” is a declaration that the moment of arrival is at hand; the marching towards is over: he, and the black bodies demanding equality alongside him, are now present. His rail against America, while as clear as Du Bois’s, is more forceful and less conciliatory: “sample a look back, you look and find nothing but rednecks for four hundred years if you check.” It is four hundred years of denial and negation, oppression and withholding and, like Du Bois, Chuck wants change.
To ‘fight the power,’ is to challenge hierarchies of oppression and denial and their upholders. These titans don’t clash—they simply mark their challenges differently:
“As the rhythm’s designed to bounce/what counts is that the rhyme’s designed to fill your mind/Now that you’ve realize the pride’s arrived, we got to pump the stuff that makes us tough/From the start, it’s a work of art to revolutionize/make a change…”
Word.