08 January 2017

Our Permanent Radical Interests Vs Transient White Radical Friends

My head would spin off my shoulders, like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" busying myself with white peoples' demons of the day and compromises of the moment. What did Mandela respond to the US journalist who challenged his friendships with Fidel, Arafat, and Qadaffi?

As if on cue I am supposed to turn on their announced enemies - e.g., Fidel, Qadaffi, Angela Davis, Robert Mugabe, Kwame Ture, the Communist Party, and many more to mention, as if I were white people's archetype of an antebellum slave, who cannot distinguish his master's pain from his own, and who himself has no pain but his master's. I am supposed to assume myself a white man, left or right politically, and view the world from there and from there only.

There are too many white radicals who keep doing this. In 2017.

One white socialist replied of Angela Davis: "she still cant justify her support for Hillary Clinton." To which I let him know whatever the nature of that support, which is debatable, Davis has absolutely not a fucking thing to justify to him.

At the deep, rotten heart of this matter is white exceptionalism. Whatever their politics, they set the standard and stand on the pinnacle. The thought that their history of conquests and socio-political organization has driven the world to a precipice, not a pinnacle, and that the global South might save humanity is negated by their liberal white racism.

Many radical whites who act like their latest brand of radicalism is like the new iPhone will dismiss movements they themselves have no use for, but take care: this does not mean these movements don't serve you.

They love to disparage the Communist Party as being "Democrats." Ok, here I can kind of see their point, but their analysis is lazy, kind of like confusing and conflating Egypt's Mubarak's, the House of Saud's, the Assad family's, and the Hashemite kingdom's Euro-centric view of the Middle East with that of the Arab people of those countries.

This frequent analysis redacts a nearly 100-tear history of the Communist Party in the US, a history that Black people should know.

Black people, in particular Black people in the US, would be wise to look at all the things white society want us to not look at. The Communist Party, for example, was a critical force in what was to become the "civil rights movement," period. I think I can say "what was to become" because this was not the light at the end of the tunnel aspired to by those communists and fellow-travelers, but this is another discussion. The Democratic and Republican Parties were not present.

Official history has handed us Franklin D Roosevelt, as hero of the working class, man of the people, the answer to the Depression: words and redactions provided by white historians who inflated the establishment's role and erased the radical tactics of the communists altogether.

Yes, admittedly even some of those whites in the CP were slow to make bolder moves, but then Stalin pushed them to be bolder and into forming fully integrated trades-unions, like the CIO (which later merged with the non-integrated AFL). So maybe your grandparents should have hung a picture of Joseph Stalin, who pressed for Black liberation, next to FDR, who did nothing to stop lynching and passed a New Deal largely for the white poor and not Blacks. Just saying.

Someone disparaged Kwame Ture for his "friendship with Idi Amin." That came out of nowhere. When then-Stokley Carmichael headed SNCC, he divorced its work from all whites [pretty much for the same reason I'm writing this piece]. I'd have been prepared for someone criticizing that rupture, which I would have defended. Not his association with another African leader. A life of radical, socialist, pan-Africanist struggle reduced to one relationship? More laziness. I don't think the critic here even knows what pan-Africanism is or its history.

Meanwhile, the same whites who make a fetish out of such posturing will, in the same breath, accuse me of immaturity for not being more nuanced in my analyses of a Jill Stein, who supports Israel, or a Bernie Sanders, who also supports Israel and dropping drones on people without due process. These are the white's compromises. They ran to Barack Obama in 2008, to Bill Clinton in 1992, and to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Their reading lists are confined to Europeans, which they excavate again and again as if it were a crime scene, but I notice no Black or brown radical voices ever seem to make their citations. Radical Black voices do not exist.

Yet they expect me to take on their views of the world and accept their criticism when I do not?

This is a "keep your eyes on the prize" public service announcement for 2017. White radicalism often has its limits, so beware. It will go only so far but wants to preserve white civilization at the same time, which is often their first master and a yoke around our necks. White allies set their expectations for you today and, if you rise in stature, will submit you to litmus tests tomorrow - to publicly condemn this person or that movement.

Beware of Black and Brown radicals who are no better than slaves, who have no pain of their own except what white people tell them to have: they can be expected to mimic the script you just heard from the white man. Did you chuckle with me when, in the wake of Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," Democratic Party flunkies and politicians, like Donna Brazille, seemed to discover the word "revolution" in their interviews? Well, laugh no more: no sooner had Bernie disappeared back to his role as DNC cheerleader did these slaves drop the word from their vocabulary.

Rejecting our real heroes, class warriors, and radical movements is exactly the docile position white civilization want us, its Black and Brown underlings. Inoculate yourselves: find the most radical voice you can and do not diverge until one more radical comes along, and do the same. This is how revolutions are imagined. The planning will come naturally.

Don't let the defenders of capitalism and white civilization turn your gaze to their expediency and reject your North Star.

"One of the mistakes political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies. That we can't and we will never do. We have our own struggle, which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting that struggle. But nevertheless we are an independent organization with its own policy. Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country towards our struggle ... " - Nelson Mandela