Black Gold video discussion

[sheryl]

Whatcha think?

ask dave

[sayeeda]

Ok, I posted my opinion earlier on this, but not specifically on that piece of lyric. If I had to stretch...meaning guess (hopefully) intelligently...Dave might be referring to the large numbers of African Americans that volunteered for the armed forces (in order to either pay for college or get a career) during peacetime only to find themselves embroiled in a conflict that involved (IMO) securing America's foreign oil supply more than human rights.

Is this what Dave meant? I dunno. I just like the song. Please make sure that you put your head in the right decade (or conflict) when analyzing. The Gulf War was 1990-1991, right? Many people felt that we were there not to rescue Kuwait as much as to rescue our oil interests.

Whatcha think?

Agreed. Piggybacking on what has been said so far, I would add that this line refers to these black soldiers feeling themselves embroiled in a conflict that wasn't theirs. They saw this conflict as the white' man's war, the white men, including Senior Bush, who were trying to "secure American's foreign oil sypply for their own wealth." I am, of course, taking into account, as mentioned above, that Dave said this song was about George Bush.

It's a really powerful line with a lot of subtext. The pieces are there...it's just a matter of reading into it, knowing what was really going on, and then, making the connection.

[Homesick]

I was actually going to post to this thread earlier about that very line, but I didn't want to risk starting something controversial. Being that I don't have the kind of insight into the debate on war as well as ethnicity that goes on in the U.S., I thought it best to refrain from guessing. (In addition, political discussions on message boards have a tendency to spiral out of control.) Since people have already expressed sentiments along the same line as mine, though, I might as well go ahead and add a little thing or two.

In my opinion, the line is an echo from the days of the Vietnam War that is still relevant: the thought that—like Carol and Sayeeda have already pointed out—both wars were started by white people in power to protect the economic and political interests of white people, with black people (and people of any other ethnicity) having little say in the way of things.

There's a short sequence in the movie Hair where an agitator says something like, "The black people are fighting the yellow people to protect land that the white people stole from the red people," which I think says pretty much the same thing.