The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
19 pages • 38-minute read
Gil Scott-HeronThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised
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Themes
Black Liberation
The premise of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is that there is a revolution that will liberate Black people from the damage of a racist American culture. The speaker creates urgency by condemning Black passivity and creating an explicit call to action.
The speaker calls the addressee “brother” (Line 1), an effort to include the addressee in a community of Black people committed to liberation. In the first stanza, the list of things the addressee will not be able to do are all related to activities that deaden the senses and disconnect the addressee from reality, including television, heroin (“skag” [Line 3]), and alcohol. The implication is that the addressee has managed to “skip out” (Line 4) on doing the work of revolution by failing to do the internal work, which requires a clear understanding of the Black self.
The poem is also a call to action. The first line—“You will not be able to stay home, brother” (Line 1)—associates home with passivity, a place where people are either by themselves or with a small group of people. Being an activist requires mass action rather than focus on the individual. When the poem closes, the speaker emphasizes that the moment for action is fleeting since there “will be no re-run” (Line 59) and since the “revolution will be live” (Line 60). The poem is a prod designed to get the audience to see revolution as something urgent that they would no more miss than their favorite program.
The Importance of Grass-Roots Activism
Scott-Heron also implies that Black liberation will be achieved through grass-roots work rather than top-down approaches with co-opted Black leaders at the top. Scott-Heron name-checks two significant Black leaders. There is “Whitney Young” (Line 31), head of the civil rights organization the Urban League, which focuses its work on economic empowerment and civic organizations. There is also “Roy Wilkins” (Line 33), who held leadership roles in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The speaker describes Young as a “dandy” more concerned about his “process” (Line 32)—chemical straightening of his hair to make it straighter—and Wilkins signaling his willingness to move away from the politically moderate efforts of the NAACP through the facile, surface-level action of wearing a “red, black, and green / Liberation jumpsuit” (Lines 34-35). The references to styling are meant to dismiss these leaders as mere window-dressing in the efforts of Black people to liberate themselves.
While the revolution will be “live” (Line 60), Young and Wilkins will be mere “pictures” (Line 31) and “slow motion or still life” (Line 33), respectively. The revolution will be too fast-moving, in other words, for people like Young and Wilkins to lead it. Scott-Heron underscores the speaker’s irreverent attitude toward these leaders by imagining a scenario in which people participating in the live revolution “run [Whitney] out of Harlem on a rail” (Line 32); the ejection of Whitney from a center of Black culture and revolution will not even be of note, given that the important action is taking place elsewhere. If would-be-revolutionaries want to avoid the fate of so many Black movements for change, they will even need to reject leaders from within their racial community.
Black Representation in the Media
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is rooted in a distrust of popular representation of Black people in mass media. Popular media trivializes things that are important to Black survival. Part of the reason the revolution will not be televised is that television is not the right medium for capturing revolution.
Scott-Heron includes many allusions in the poem, but those in the eighth stanza are particularly of note because they recall a time when popular television shows were sponsored by manufacturers of popular household brands. There is a mismatch between this funding model and the heavy work of liberation: “The revolution will not be right back / After a message about a white tornado”—Ajax cleaner—(Lines 50-51) because the juxtaposition between a cleaning product and a struggle for fundamental rights is unseemly.
The series of products that include taglines with the word “white” (Line 51) are all evidence of the erasure of anything that disturbs the representation of the American home as a place where traces of basic human functions and life can be smoothed away with cleaning supplies. Revolution on television would bring Black people into the homes of people who buy such products. Corporations and mainstream media thus avoid including Black revolution because it disrupts a sanitized vision of the United States.
When Black Americans do appear in the media, it is in the news, where Black people are presented as looters “[p]ushing that shopping cart down the block on a dead run” (Line 22) or when “pictures of pigs shooting down brothers” (Lines 27, 29) appear as entertainment. Using “pigs” (Lines 27, 29) as a term for law enforcement evokes the belief of Black nationalist groups that American institutions such as law enforcement or the media are central players in creating a racist system. The revolution won’t appear in mass media because television is all about selling a false image of who Americans, especially Black Americans, are.
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