Life & Wisdom Quote by Amiri Baraka

A line like this doesn’t mourn God so much as it mocks what took His job. Baraka yokes “respectability” to “air conditioning” with a streetwise punch: one is a social code, the other a consumer convenience, and together they become the new gospel of the West. It’s funny in the way a slap is funny. The joke lands because it’s concrete. You can feel air conditioning; you can see respectability perform itself in clothing, diction, neighborhoods, job interviews. Baraka’s point is that modern devotion isn’t necessarily atheism - it’s submission to comfort and approval.

The subtext is political: “respectability” reads like a pressure campaign, especially against Black artists and radicals, to trade truth for palatability. The old moral authority (God, church, metaphysics) doesn’t disappear; it’s rebranded into middle-class norms and the quiet policing of taste. “As he has all over the West” widens the indictment beyond any one community, naming a civilization that has learned to translate spiritual hunger into thermostats, mortgages, and manners.

Context matters: Baraka emerged from the Beat scene, then broke hard into Black Arts and revolutionary organizing. He distrusted American liberalism’s promise that dignity can be purchased through assimilation. Here, “air conditioning” isn’t just comfort; it’s insulation - from heat, from streets, from other people, from the messy conditions that make solidarity necessary. In Baraka’s frame, the West doesn’t lose faith. It finds a faith more useful to power: stay cool, stay acceptable, don’t make trouble.