Politics & Power Quote by Amiri Baraka

That line lands like a heckle from the back of the room: not a debate point, a pressure test. Baraka stages a “rich man” as the mouthpiece of grievance, reducing “liberal” to a nag with pockets you can’t touch. The wit is in how cleanly it captures an old American reflex: if politics threatens wealth, call it meddling; if politics protects wealth, call it freedom. Baraka isn’t endorsing the definition so much as pinning it to the wall and asking you to notice what’s missing.

The subtext is class theater. The rich man’s complaint pretends to be about autonomy, but it’s really about ownership as moral authority. “Other people” smuggles in a hierarchy: the liberal is cast as an outsider, illegitimate, someone who hasn’t earned the right to speak. Money becomes the one sacred language, and redistribution, regulation, even taxation become personal affronts rather than democratic choices. Baraka’s sentence is short because the ideology it mocks thrives on short sentences.

Context matters: Baraka came out of Black Arts radicalism, suspicious of moderate liberalism’s promises and allergic to capitalism’s self-justifying stories. His work often treats “liberal” as a brand of polite governance that can celebrate civil rights in public while leaving structural extraction untouched. By quoting the rich man “recently,” Baraka also marks the line as contemporary, evergreen, a reminder that the richest people frequently frame their interests as common sense and their resistance as principled restraint. The joke is that it works.