Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: belief

Transcript context

…Two thinkers I want to bring up who share some biographical commonalities with you but came out with very different points. Amiri Baraka, originally LeRoi Jones, he converted to Islam, was an intellectual, a great poet, extremely talented. Like you, very much a polymath. But he stayed very radically left. He had a black nationalist period, he had a communist period, went through a lot of transformations, but no one would really describe him as any kind of conservative. You, like Baraka, converted to Islam but have a very different point of view. What accounts for that difference in the two of you? I believe you knew him, even. I did know Amiri. I think the difference is I believe in what happened in Europe during what they call the Enlightenment. That needs to happen to black Americans, absolutely a type of enlightenment where they get a grasp of what is afflicting them and what the cures are. I think that the American model is the best in the world but in order to get everybody involved in it we have to have it open to everyone. That hasn’t always been the case. Open to far less segregation and very different attitudes.…

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