NEWSLETTER

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Do black people make the best barbecue?

Well, anybody can make good barbecue. When I was a judge at the National Rib Cookoff in 1988, I tasted barbecue from all over the world. Hawaii, Japan, you name it. And most of it has some good flavorful fact about it, you know? I met some guys from Texas one time, at the Rib Cookoff, they said “Hey, man, we here for the money, but you the one that can make the barbecue.” I said, “Why you say that?” He says, “Black people make the best barbecue.” This is some old white guy, explaining to me… I said, well, that’s your opinion. Anyone can make good barbecue.

I heard that some former Black Panthers are marketing hot sauce?

That’s David Hilliard. It’s called Burn Baby Burn Hot Sauce.

Are you involved with that?

No, I ain’t got nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing to do with it.

Have you tried it?

No.

How have you responded when people have said that you’re selling out by doing this barbecue stuff?

Revolutionaries eat, too. I was on national television about 15 years ago, when Spike Lee’s Malcom X film came out. They had a panel of eight people up there. So one little chubby, fat white guy, says, “That Bobby Seale, well, he just sold out.” I said, “Man, what the hell are you talking about?” “Yes, he sold out, because he wrote a barbecue book.” I says, “What about the jazz album I put out? I’m an architect, if I did a book of space-saving architectural designs, would that be ‘selling out’? Here’s my barbecue book.” And I held it up, and I said, “This is the only down-home, hickory-smoked, Southern-style barbecue book in America, and for your information, revolutionaries eat, too.” I shot him down, this silly idiot, I said, man, later for you. And I’ve had people say, “What’s he doing writing a cookbook?” What is that, not manly enough for you? Get out of my face. They don’t even know what manhood is. I have a big long philosophical argument with idiots who come up here with some mythical misrepresentations of what manhood is, or—the whole shit, what a revolutionary is, you know what I mean? You got guys that have a two-dimensional method of thinking or maybe a one-dimensional level of thinking. They’ve either got their penis in front of their ego or their ego in front of their penis, and one idea ain’t too much better than the other. If you gonna revolve things around some penis relationship… I remember Eldridge Cleaver in his book, talking about the gun was an extension of his penis. I mean, get outta here. I look back on that stuff and I say, man, this brother here, he tried to say he was justified in raping white females because of what the white race had done in the past. So I say, well, then he’s stooping to their level, you know what I mean? We were never racists. The FBI and COINTELPRO tried to put it out that the Black Panther Party was racist, but we weren’t. It was not about discriminating against people because of the color of their skin. We were about all power to all the people, as opposed to any power to the racists and the avaricious who work with the racists to exploit and oppress us. That’s what I stood for, and I don’t care what J. Edgar Hoover and anybody else tried to say I was about. They’re wrong. I know what I was about.

INTERVIEWED BY BEN WHITE
To order the revised edition of Barbeque’n With Bobby Seale, visit Bobbyqueseale.com.


TO BE CONTINUED:
LABOR DAY BOBBY-QUE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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