When the Personal Is Political: Telling and Selling Our Stories
By Julianne Malveaux
Anthony Samad is a Los Angeles-based political scientist, economic developer and political activist. He has written a weekly column in California for more than a decade, focusing on social, political and race issues affecting African Americans. For all of his accomplishments, the greater contribution he has made is in his recent autobiographical discourse, Souls for Sale: The Diary of an Ex-Colored Man (Los Angeles: Kabili Press: 2002). Somewhat cumbersomely subtitled “Conflict and Compromise of Second Generation Advocacy in the Post Civil Rights Era,” the book is a blessing and a lesson to those who would participate in volunteer advocacy. Samad’s story is complicated enough to fill up more than 600 pages of insights, infights and personal revelations. In some ways, this is one man’s story. In other ways, it belongs to us all.
This is a case where, as Gloria Steinem so often says, the personal is political. This is a story of a Black man who wanted to do nothing more than serve, but got caught up in ego-tripping, turf fights and a generational conflict. He emerged as a stronger person, but there were major setbacks along the way. The personal is political because too often there are folks who want to serve but find they can’t because others won’t let them. What does it say about the next stage of the struggle that those who are willing, eager and able become cannon fodder for the venal?
