![]() ![]() ![]() He did so as a social commentator, using his talents to speak to the realities of race in America and class within Black America. Pryor re-emerged in 1971 from a self-imposed period of isolation hanging out in Berkeley, reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, listening to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and reflecting on his youth in Peoria. ![]() When Pryor put "little Cosby" to rest in the late 1960s - dramatically walking off stage muttering "what am I doing here?" - he did so because of those memories of the black underground in Peoria. Miles Davis is the most visible example of this.īut what Pryor understood perhaps better than anyone as the Civil Right Movement waned, was that the "unreconstructed" Black was as much an insincere performance of Blackness as the "ready for integration players" (to turn a phrase from that other Black trickster from the era). While such "unreconstructed-ness" is largely a myth - we all capitulate at one time or another to the so-called "White gaze" in one form of another to gain access to institutions we deem important to our well being - it helped create mythic icons, which became synonymous with not dancing the dance of racial ingratiation. But for all of those Black performers who sought to make themselves palatable to whites, there were other examples of folk, who poet and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe describes as "unreconstructed" folk who never sought to remix Blackness for White comfort or consumption. ![]()
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