Gina Belafonte: Carrying forth the legacy of her father Harry Belafonte

Episode Summary

In this episode, things get heavy on The Tight Rope as Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose, with their special guest Gina Belafonte, navigate the balance that artists must keep to be accessible and also stand resolutely for social justice. Spotlighting the importance of lyrical vision and imagining, they uncover paths to hope and sustenance in today’s music and its role in social movements. In the context of her father Harry Belafonte’s legacy, Gina Belafonte deepens the conversation on the necessity of intergenerational connections, personal commitment, and the arts in every arena of our lives. Don’t miss the next steps to evolution in this episode of The Tight Rope. 

 

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. A prominent democratic intellectual, social critic, and political activist, West also serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. West has authored 20 books and edited 13. Most known for Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now. West has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films, including Examined Life, and is the creator of three spoken word albums including Never Forget. West brings his focus on the role of race, gender, and class in American society to The Tight Rope podcast. 

 

Tricia Rose

Professor Tricia Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Brown University (Ph.D), Rose authored Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy (2003), and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). She also sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc. Focusing on issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings, and now also on The Tight Rope podcast.  

 

Gina Belafonte

Daughter of Julie and Harry Belafonte, Gina Belafonte is an actress, director, award-winning producer, artivist, and cultural figure. She serves as the Executive Director of Sankofa.org, a social justice organization that educates, motivates, and activates artists and allies in service of grassroots movements and equitable change. A native New Yorker, Gina is Producer of internationally acclaimed documentary film Sing your Song (HBO), as well as The March (PBS) and Survivors Guide to Prison (Netflix). Also a member of Daughters of the Movement, she co-chaired the 2017 Women’s March Los Angeles and co-founded the non-profit organization, The Gathering For Justice, a multi-cultural, multi-generational organization that focuses on youth incarceration and the criminalization of poverty. Today, Gina lives in LA and New York and works with diverse artists, activists, and organizations worldwide to promote cultural and civic engagement in the 21st century. 

 

Insight from this episode:

• Personal reflections from Gina Belafonte on honoring family legacy and forging her own path in the fight for Black freedom. 
• Details on the life, struggles, and revelations of Harry Belafonte.
• Benefits of critical engagement within families.
• Strategies on overcoming fear and pressure in the face of radical decision making.
• Strategies on how progressive Black artists can move into a deeper imagining of our future and speak truth to power. 
• Reasons why evolution, not just revolution, is needed during this time. 

 

Quotes from the show:

• On the “upside” of COVID-19 lockdown: “People are listening in groups. Families are listening together and sharing things together in ways they might not have been as easily able to do before we were on collective social lockdown” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On Harry Belafonte and his music: “A crucial part of this longer tradition that goes back hundreds of years, and it’s the expression of deep humanity and creativity of a hated and haunted people still dishing out love and justice” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “[Gina Belafonte] comes from political and artistic royalty both in the Black tradition but also the American and really the human tradition. But she chose to be an artist and an actress who rendered her services to freedom and truth. She chose to be connected to organic organizations on the ground… she’s there because these are choices… Families provide the exposure, but the children have to follow through and decide for themselves which way they want to go –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “What breaks the back of being intimidated? It’s love, it’s compassion, it’s being tied to something bigger than you.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “As you grow and mature, lo and behold, you start to have relationships with the dad you never knew. You fall in love with Frederick Douglass, you fall in love with Harriet Tubman, you fall in love with Sojourner Truth.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “Fear does not often show up as fear... When you’re afraid to be devalued, to be marginalized, to be laughed at, to be shamed, to be accused of being irrelevant, then that shows up in very indirect ways in terms of a fear, but necessarily a fear that you recognize. It’s so important to remind young people that that fear shows up in so many different ways. And so does the courage we need.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “I’m not going to allow white supremist authorities, capitalist authorities, imperial authorities, patriarchic, homophobic, transphobic authorities to make me so fearful that I consent to their domination. So in that sense, the courage is something that never eliminates the fear. It allows us to work through the fear.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “All they can do is kill you though. That’s all they can do! ...The question is how are you going to use your death to the service of something bigger than you?”  –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “The best of our tradition reminds us that there are virtues higher than survival.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On Harry Belafonte’s rendition of “Oh Freedom”: “That song is so deep into the core of my marrow and really exemplifies so much of the struggle and the resiliency and proclamation that we make when we enter into social justice activism… It straightens my back up, and I feel like I’m ready to move forward and get busy.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “The systems of our country, in particular our capitalist system, have really suppressed and put a tight control over the airwaves and what we’re able to hear and find as our cultural heartbeat. Right now, it’s a very interesting time how many musical artists in particular, who are looking to the legacy of my father and others like him, are using their platforms as a megaphone for social justice activism. And yet, I still am seeing a sort of trepidation in their lyrics. I’m not seeing them really full on saying “Let’s Get It On”... and having a deeper imagining of what our future should and could and will be and look like.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “I find a lot of what we’re telling is our history, which we need to. We need to reclaim those stories for sure. But where are some of the inspirational love stories of Black people that are true and really ancient? ...showing love and celebration and resilience and how not only the way in which that world is but also how it could be.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “You can describe what is and not get into much trouble. But if you start making claims about what that circumstance means and what you want instead of that circumstance, now you really do stand a chance of losing lots and lots of people.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “If all we do is provide some fascinating descriptions and don’t have enough courage to really radically project something different, then white supremacy still remains a point of reference even when we are resisting.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On reformist versus revolutionary imagination: “People talk about revolution and they get all nervous… Revolution is going to make you insecure because it is something that is an alternative to a present that is unknown. So you have to re-equip and re-prepare yourself. It’s not going to be a matter of just trying to incrementally patch up a status quo that has shown to be so unjust and cruel. –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “What we need is not only a revolution, but we need an evolution.  An evolution of our human existence, an evolution of our humanity, our moral values, an evolution of how we consider and view the opposition opposites of right and wrong.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On Jay Richard Kennedy, an FBI informant and Harry Belafonte’s business manager: “For the rest of [my father’s] life, there was an underlying sense of paranoia, balancing who do I bring into the fold that I can trust, and how do I maintain my artistry and my cultural contribution?” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On Harry Belafonte: “He never really wavered from his desire to elevate voices and the consciousness of his fans, he would never compromise his artistry for the status quo or the bottom line.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “As Paul Robeson said, or as my father put into the mouth of Paul Robeson...  artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are the civilization’s radical voice. We have the opportunity and the poetry through dance, through music, through theater, through film, to transform perspective, to transmute ideas, to bring not only the past but the future together in one.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “So art plays a huge role, which is why it’s always defunded first. This world would be so different if it was art-centric.” –Gina Belafonte The Tight Rope Episode #4

• “Artists are the vanguard of the species. Artists are the moral and spiritual antenna of the species. So we have to look to them because they’re the ones that tend to have the vision. Where there is no vision, the people perish… So artists in this sense become essential workers, in the most fundamental sense of who we are, not just as Americans, but as human beings.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On Harry Belafonte’s legacy: “It’s the concrete loving and shaping he’s had on so many young brothers and sisters of all colors, including myself.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

• On their friendship: “I could not walk out more fortified. What I got from Harry Belafonte fortified me for two or three lifetimes.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #4

 

Stay Connected:
Cornel West

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Tricia Rose

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Twitter: @ProfTriciaRose

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Gina Belafonte

Website: Sankofa Biography

Twitter: @GinaBelafonte

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Instagram: @peacegina

LinkedIn: Gina Belafonte 

IMDb: Gina Belafonte

 

Sankofa

Website: Sankofa.org

Twitter: @Sankofa

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Instagram: @sankofadotorg

 

The Tight Rope

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This episode was produced and managed by Spkerbox Media in collaboration with Podcast Laundry.