Racial Sins

Sources: Taken (dir. Pierre Morel), Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin, The Searchers (dir. John Ford), and many more

I got my wife Taken for Christmas. It was one of those "I'm buying this 'cause you like it but I also like it (maybe more) and so everybody wins" gifts. Not to worry, though, since I also got her an oversized bathrobe and a pearl necklace whose price means it was either stolen or a fake. I have no selfish interest in either of those things.

But back to Taken.

                                                                               photo from here

This movie bothers me, though I seem unable to stop watching it. It's action-packed, and it's fun (?) to watch a father go on a rampage unencumbered by moral compunction. But that's not what troubles me. In fact, the level of violence is comparable to what I would want to be able to inflict on bad guys who were trying to sell my daughter into sex slavery. What does bother me is the casting.


Taken employs a troubling method of casting which I'll call the sin sandwich. On the bottom layer, you have your thugs. On the middle layer (where all the good stuff necessary for a fulfilling bourgeois life is--money, family, glitz, glamor) you have the greedy middle-men who facilitate crime in return for staggering stipends. On the top you have the mega-bosses--animals who cause the criminal world's wheels to turn.

A reasonable cross-section of the underworld, you say? Perhaps. But I can't help but be bothered by the racial make-up of each class. Brown-skinned people (from the "bad parts" of Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) make up the top and bottom layers (the bread) while Western Europeans and Americans are in the middle. In other words, the Nordic-Teutonic-Anglo peoples are the meat that holds everything together and makes crime so darn tasty.

Now, perhaps this is simply a reflection of true life. Perhaps most greed-induced crime occurs under the pink-skinned guidance of WASP progeny. But I doubt it. More troubling than the unreality of this depiction, though, is what the sin sandwich paradigm says about Hollywood's (and therefore our) continued racialist notions. I don't want to spend too much time talking about the scum and the mega-bosses. I think white folks' projections of evil onto the brown-skinned others of the world is a subject that most people understand, and those who don't understand it at this point likely never will. But the white racial sin of greed, especially in its middle position on the sin sandwich, tells me a lot about how white people still see themselves as behaviorally distinct from others.

The tacit thesis I'm seeing in Taken is that white people have racial predisposition towards greed. Greed is our racial sin. White people love money so much that they will allow the evil brown people to come, take a few of our white virgins (a nod here to Dr. Slotkin), and maintain our way of life from the dirty money we receive in return. If that sounds just as bad as what the violent thugs or the inhuman mega-bosses are doing, think again. Because this racial sin of greed, while still despicable, is a character flaw--something one catches at boarding school because one never gets enough letters from home during the holidays--while the gritty violence of the thugs and the barbarian tastes of the mega-bosses are depicted as cultural, national, or even biological degeneracies. In other words, the audience of Taken is left with the impression that those few white men have done bad things while the Albanians, Arabs, and Africans are bad human beings.

There are many supporting factors that reinforce this message: a French middleman who loves his family, the white protagonist who eschews violence to be closer to his daughter, the white friend who dies from the drugs  before prostitution can ever begin. All these factors reinforce the complexity of the white race while contrasting that complexity with the monolithic badness of gun-toting Muslims.

Now, Taken is not the only film that reinforces such racialist ideas. I've noted The Searchers above in the Sources section, but that's not as clear or recent of an example (though for evidence's sake, here's the schema: Comanche braves as the thugs, greedy would-be assassins/facilitators as the middlemen, tribal chiefs intent on sucking the whiteness out of little girls as the mega-bosses). Numerous films, television shows, and even news reporting participate as well. And I'm not really sure what the next step is here except to say that assigning a sin (or any other characteristic) based on skin color risks reifying the latent racism that we've been working so hard for so long to remove. There's no reason to boycott or not watch a film like Taken, but let's make sure we think while we watch.

Whiney Limeys

This looks serious doesn't it?

The British Parliament is being invaded. Thousands of protesters pushing past police cordons to get to the House of Commons and teach those MPs a lesson.

We turned on CNN this morning to these scenes. There were even cavalry charges at the protesters. Very thrilling. Emblazoned across the bottom of the screen was the headline "Students protest parliament vote to triple tuition!" Incredible, we thought! Can you image NYU's tuition being tripled? No one without a trust fund could attend. It would be criminal to restrict education to that elite few!

The CNN anchor seemed to be having similar thoughts. Hoping to wow her viewers with astronomical tuition numbers, she asked the correspondent on-scene (who was simultaneously trying to keep his cameraman from being trampled by men and beasts) how much triple tuition would be.

His response?

"Parliament will be voting to place a cap of 9000 pounds on tuition...that's about $15,000."

$15,000? I almost peed my pants with jealousy. Oxford, Cambridge...Leeds. For $15,000 a year? And British students are injuring police officers and shooting fireworks at police horses over this? Give me a break. Take one fewer holiday to the Mediterranean and get a summer job at Tesco, for crying out loud.

Why WikiLeaks May Kill Us All

Sources: World War Z by Max Brooks, The Walking Dead on AMC, and the Wikileaks news coverage, especially this NY Times article

Ever since I started watching The Walking Dead on AMC (so, since Halloween), I've been a little bit jumpy. You assume zombies will always warn you with a barely stifled moan of undead craving, but that never seems to be the case. Instead, zombies have a terrifying penchant for silent stalking and surprise snacking.

My jumpiness only increased with my recent devouring of Max Brooks' World War Z. I remember picking this one up off a Barnes and Nobles bookshelf about a year ago and getting completely absorbed in a random woman's story. Fast-forward a year later, and you'll find me feverishly needing more zombie (how's that for a role reversal?) after another oh-so-short 45-minute episode of The Walking Dead comes to an end. I found Brooks' book at the library and, in between Thanksgiving naps, had my first experience with the genre of zombie literature. Actually, I'm not sure if there is a genre, or more than this book about zombies, but I'm hooked. Now if only my two guilty pleasures, spy thrillers and zombie war history, could somehow be combined...

Anyway, that's just a long way of saying World War Z made a zombie invasion so realistic that for the past week I've been extra vigilant during my dark walks home. I walk through the darker corners of BYU campus ready to drop my satchel at a moment's notice and head for the nearest grocery/firearms store. Or the nearest LONG blunt object. Yesterday, though, I made it all the way home without once sniffing the air for any hint of rotten flesh. And while I can't help but think this threat-level detente is exactly what a zombie overlord would want to happen, it's human nature to relax once a threat overload has passed.

Which brings me to my beef with WikiLeaks, a beef informed almost exclusively by my poker skills. WikiLeaks can't bluff for anything. The threat of a "vast network of untapped resources" (not really a quote) and unleaked material they're using in a desperate attempt to leverage themselves out from everyone's bad side has about as much credibility as Mark Sanchez saying he's got something up his sleeve for the next time he plays the Patriots.

WikiLeaks went all in before anyone else knew there was a game going on. No one raised, no one matched, and half of the countries didn't even look at their cards. You can probably think of several other metaphors for what's happened in the past weeks, so let your imagination run wild.

That being said, I love the idea of what Assange and his cronies tried to do. While I understand the appropriateness of some secrets in diplomacy, I love the idea of leaders having to act as if anything they said or did could be leaked the next day for the world to see. But that's a huge amount of power. That's on par with the jealous Lord of Hosts (or the all-seeing eye of Sauron). And where the Lord of Hosts is still working, and Sauron lasted an epoch or two, WikiLeaks lasted a few weeks.

If they had leaked key cables with precision and delicacy, states would have stood up, taken notice, and followed the same pattern of aggressive damage-control that they're following now. The difference, however, would be that instead of placing their salvation on the threat of publishing a very non-threatening "mass of State Dept. cables" that probably say something like "Secretary Clinton registered a complaint about the lack of pumpernickel rolls at Foggy Bottom," they would have concrete tools with which they could continue fighting.

Instead, WikiLeaks has cried "Wolf!" It's a big wolf, and it was there, but after a week, we're going to feel safe again. We're not going to lose sleep because someone said nasty things about someone else or because a Saudi informant or Iranian professor was exposed and summarily executed. That's too far away. We're too callous. So the next time WikiLeaks unloads a huge package of sensitive memos, we're going to think, "Meh. I've already felt those feelings. I'm going to watch more Jersey Shore." And if in that box of sensitive memos there's a special cable delineating a possible zombie outbreak in central China, and if we ignore it because WikiLeaks jaded us too soon, I'm going to be royally pissed.

 

from AMC's The Walking Dead site.

The End (or Temporary Pause) of Empathy

Sources: The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin and the World Cup

In Jeremy Rifkin's latest book, he makes a case for a more flexible understanding of human nature. In brief, humans have developed in accordance with their opportunities for empathic development (putting themselves in other people's shoes or lack thereof). The more opportunities, via improved roads, availability of foodstuffs, or the internet, the more empathic the civilization becomes, and the greater opportunity for healthy civilization. Admittedly, this is only part of Rifkin's thesis, and perhaps not even the most groundbreaking, but for me it was the most important. For about 24 hours after finishing the book, I was convinced.

Then I started watching the World Cup.

I'll save the bulk of my World Cup reflections until next week, but I've become decidedly less empathic as the tournament has progressed. I've had problems like this before. Brief but impassioned moments of hatred for South Korea accompanied the short track competitions in this year's Olympics. But that's nothing in comparison with the merry-go-round of nationalism/irrational hatred/Machiavellian politics that churn inside me during each soccer match.

The list of countries I've hated with belligerence in the past month:

Uruguay (because they flopped against South Africa, handballed against Ghana, and provided a safe haven for Nazi war criminals)
Mexico (because they beat South Africa and I covet Dos Santos' hair)
France (residual anger from Zidane's headbutt four years ago and Henry's handball against the Irish in qualifying)
Argentina (residual anger from the mano de Dios incident I didn't (couldn't) even witness in person)
the U.S. (shoddy play and early goals allowed)
England (Revolutionary War bitterness...well, more the War of 1812. Plus, I don't like Rooney's look.)
Slovenia (well, really Mali, but I grouped the ref and "his" team together)
Portugal (Ronaldo, bleh)
North Korea (torpedoes)
Germany, Australia, Serbia, Ghana, Netherlands, Paraguay, New Zealand, Italy, Slovakia, and Brazil.

It's as if all my real world worries, imaginary slights, and competitive anguish meshed together into a ball of ugliness that raised my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. Add to that the number of meals I ended up eating out because I was "busy" following the tournament, and the World Cup may have taken a few good years off my life.

Strike Three

I know some folks have requested that I find a new line of blogging (i.e. talk about something besides race problems in Arizona), but this story really should be broadcast. The Huffington Post reports that a mural depicting children (actual students who attend the school) of different ethnicities is going to be repainted (under direct orders from the school authorities) because of constant community drive-by slurs, often while the children themselves were helping professional artists with the mural. And by repainted, I mean painted white. Here's the story.

So let me recap. Because members of the community shouted "nigger" and "spic" as they drove by, the rational decision by the school is to whiten the black and chicano students' faces. Brilliant. That's the exact right decison...for a sniveling coward living in fear of a resurgent racist movement akin to the KKK.

Once again, I fear we forget our history. How long did we, as a nation, help Jim Crow persist because we deluded ourselves into thinking that patience with racial slurs and racist actions would help it go away? "I'm sure the police will wake up soon and treat people decently." Wrong. Caving to pressure like this, deciding to whiten the faces of students of color, will only prolong racist sentiment.

What's worse though, the more patience we have with racism, the more opportunity it has to poison the national consciousness as a whole. Slaveowners in the antebellum South had to create an entire narrative that allowed them to deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in a situation where Christians "masters" abused other human beings to make money. The resulting narrative? Black people are inferior. It helped massa sleep at night. This disgusting idea was allowed to persist in the South, and the result was a poisoning, not only of the minds of each subsequent southern generation, but of generations throughout the United States. 150 years after the abolition of slavery, that idea persists. This is the longevity of racist thought left unchecked. It will NOT go away quietly. Official silence will NOT give racists an opportunity to cool down. And most importantly, giving into to racists demands will NOT bring peace to the community. Quite the opposite. Ask Neville Chamberlain.

Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that either 1. This is a problem only in Arizona or 2. All Arizonans are racists. But as bloggers throughout the sphere have commented, it appears as though President Obama's elections has unleashed the darkest tide of racial violence (psychological, verbal, and physical) in years. To paraphrase the Bible, Jesus Christ once overheard some less-than-upstanding folks discussing their ancestors. They said, "If we were alive when the ancient prophets taught, we would not have stoned them like our ancestors did." We know how that worked out, and Christ certainly called their bluff. Likewise, how many of us have thought: "If I lived in the 60s, I wouldn't have been racist. I would have helped in the civil rights movement. I would have been at the March in Washington."? I know I have. My friends, we now have an opportunity to prove we're not the kind of hypocrites we so easily excoriate in biblical contexts. Speak out. Speak out everywhere, but especially where you are. Make racial epithets and actions unacceptable in your presence. Fight to make sure racially-motivated laws are not passed or enforced in your community. If you do nothing, you're just like the Arizonan authorities who, through their action (or lack thereof) said loud and clear: "It's ok to call our children niggers."

Arizona Strikes Again

Article...from Fox News!

I'm wondering if we've all been victims of a cloak-and-dagger maneuver. Just when you thought Arizona wanted to create racial boundaries, they really want to erase them. Will, that is, as long as everyone starts embracing whiteness. You can read the article for yourselves, but here's the low-down.

The Arizona law, if signed by the governor, would prohibit:
1) any course that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government. I think this is understandable, but could be twisted to mean students shouldn't learn about economic systems besides capitalism and political systems besides "representative" democracy.
2) any course that would promote resentment of a particular race or class of people. I don't think they're worried about poor black people. Read "white" for particular race and "rich" for particular class.
3) any course that promotes ethnic solidarity or is "designed" (I can't fathom what that means) for a particular ethnic group. That stated object here is to promote individualism rather than ethnic solidarity.

I can't help but be snarky here. Did Arizona not get the memo that the melting pot has never really existed? That it subsumes cultures to "Americanize" them into automatons of  Western values and aesthetics? If Arizona schools have to ban any course designed for a particular ethnic group, then history, English, etc. is out. Even mathematics seems a little skewed towards Greeks. Take it away. The good news is that all those students who no longer have to go to school all day (maybe they'll still have music classes) will have plenty of job opportunities in the fields, kitchens, and homes of the state now that hispanics will be harassed away through immigration reform.

Here's a quote from the state school superintendent, Tom Horne: "Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals, and not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds," Horne said. "This is consistent with the fundamental American value that we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into. Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism."

What tradition does Mr. Horne come from? Is he talking about the segregated schools of Jim Crow or the barring of Asian American students from any schools? Is he talking about the multicultural experience of the Native American students forced to leave home and be imprisoned in Catholic convents?On of the passages that has stuck with me most from Huey P. Newton's Revolutionary Suicide involves his time in school. He recognized that none of the material was relevant to his life, and neither he nor his teacher made any effort to change that. This lack relevance continues today for numberless students.

Mr. Horne and the government of Arizona have once again failed to understand their own assumptions. They assume that everyone is white or wants to be white. They assume that "white" is not an ethnicity. And they assume that any ethnic solidarity that is not white is dangerous. Have we already forgotten the lessons of the past 50 years? Arizona is leading this country along a dangerous path, and it is our duty and honoro to resist their crusade against difference.

An Open Letter to Arizonans

Most Reviled State of the Union,

It must be hard being the last state of the contiguous 48. So much pressure. Do you get tired of the hand-me-downs from older states? Does civil rights legislation not fit right? Would you like to try on something else, something more fashionable and in? The civil war, the end of slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans--these all occurred before you were born. Your decision to create a police state in response to immigration is great idea. It's always overrated to learn from others' mistakes.

I write you this letter, knowing that you don't want to hear what I have to say. After all, you're an Arizonan! It's your state. You own the land and make the laws. It helps that 19th-century wars allowed you to usurp power over the inhabitants of the land, both Native American and Mexican. And that power sure did help you enslave them, play them off of each other and work them to death before you found another gardener.

We both know all that scheming paid off. For a while there, your economy was booming. Middle Americans went to work everyday in the freezing North, dreaming of a retirement home in Mesa, and they got it. Lots of good, honest folks moved in, started companies, and took advantage of that founding ideal of America--opportunity. There was only one problem. Other "people" moved in, or at least started showing up in schools and neighborhoods. They thought they deserved opportunity too. Hmph! They didn't even speak English like our families with our Scandinavian and German last names did.

Sure, they work hard. But, like so many of you have said, they "stand around on corners" all the time. It's so un-american. After all their time in your homes, they should know that Americans loiter around television sets, not out in the open. Crowds outside are dangerous. They might talk, laugh, dance, or learn something!

In the end, it's all for the best. All of your unemployed MBAs need jobs, and the sooner you kick out or harass away anyone with brown skin, the sooner your baby boy with so much potential, your pride and joy who sleeps, just for now, in your basement, will be able to buy his first pair of work gloves.

Horrifiedly yours,
Dave Fife

Historical Truthiness

Sources: Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps and the news coverage of the Texas school board

I went to school for many years in Richmond, Virginia. 2nd through half of 8th grade, plus high school. That comes to about ten years of public school instruction and ten years of instruction in history, both local, national, and world.

Why in the world did I have to come to a Mormon university (with a great library) in order to stumble upon the story of Gabriel Prosser and the almost-destruction of Richmond? Did they think the story would scare little white kids? Did they think they should censor history to preserve some vestige of southern respectability? I have not been entirely silent about the conservative state school board in Texas making "cosmetic" changes to their history texts. I find it despicable and overtly political. That board is making a concerted attempt to delete any white heroes whose pure reputations they may have trouble defending. Thomas Jefferson was fairly radical, encouraged equality of man, but also had intimate relations with his slaves? Too controversial, too hypocritical, he is now stricken from Texas' record of national history.

But, in the vein of Stokely Carmichael, I now find that my own backyard is not quite in order. Virginia (and other states, for sure) has been involved in the same political games. Why give a month to black history if (mostly) white and (all) middle-class folks decide what that history entails? Why don't children learn about Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panthers? For the simple reason, as I've stated in other posts, that the conflict of the 60s and 70s (and the 1800s) has not been resolved. The root causes still exist. And teaching children about revolutionaries might re-ignite the revolution against corruption, inequality, and privilege.

I don't mean to act as if I didn't know history is and has always been shaped by politics. Maybe I should even applaud the Texas school board for being so frank about it. At least, with it out in the open, interested parties can seek out alternative information more easily. However, the major quality of all this politicking is our continued skewed vision of "America." I know the History channel is starting a six-part program called "America: The Story of Us" on Sunday, and I'll be interested to see what they show. But six hours of television will never trump 12 years of educational instruction during a child's most formative period. I'm almost looking forward to the extra "homework" I'll be assigning to my children when they get to school. Is that too revotionary?

Dream Job

Sources: The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust  and The Way the Wind Blew by Ron Jacobs

I've decided that my absolute dream job would be working for a think tank, especially for the government. Nobody else seems to think like I do. I have a strange (dare I say delightful?) way of looking at the world, and people rarely completely agree with me. Though they may agree with my conclusions, they won't agree with my philosophical underpinnings or argumentative assumptions, and vice versa.

If any think tank recruiters are reading, let me give you a little taste of what I can bring to the table. I've been learning about the violence of the 60s and 70s (a period that I think needs to be studied much more thoroughly--it was not all about flower power and Dick Nixon), and I've been stuck with the impression that the domestic violence so widespread in this period was not a singular flare-up. Governments maneuvered quite skillfully to extinguish the fire, but the fixes were only temporary. The changes on higher levels produced the impression that there was more equality, but failed to really correct the underlying issues of disparity and conspicuous consumption. As we've seen with government bail-outs, even that invisible hand of the market won't be allowed to slap America awake to its destructive liason with consuming (as opposed to producing).

I've started to feel that much of my research in the next coming years will be to understand intimately groups like the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, the RAF, etc., in order to see what embers are still lit or still flammable. I'd like to be in a position to change government policy in a way that corrects the underlying issues before we have another international flashpoint. For me, the end of violence is the ultimate goal, and while its abolition must occur on both the local level (i.e. the family) and the world level, it needs to happen from both ends simultaneously. How's that for a taste, Mr. Think Tank recruiter?

Glasnost

Dear World,

Having seen the mess you're in, I'd like to suggest a few changes. I realize, of course, that 6 billion other people will scream "idealist!" in a variety of languages, but I'm used to it. Just block it out, it works wonders. Goethe once said, "If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he could be and ought to be, he will become what he ought to be." Yes, I'm assuming it takes a somewhat different form in the original German, and no, I don't actually have a primary source for the quote. But the sentiment fits with my world-view exactly.

Let us transition. Let us transition to Gandhi, so I can quickly make my point and dish up some delicious chicken taco soup from my crockpot. Gandhi treated men and women, especially the British occupation, as rational human beings. He expected them to realize that if hundreds of thinking, unhysterical people were passionately, though passively, resisting their rule, then maybe those people had a point. The British left. There were problems, snafus (literally), and bad spots, but the direction was always the same.

The relationship to American foreign policy is not too far of a jump. The sooner we start treating the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the entire Arab world as human beings capable and partial to compassion, we'll have a much more peaceful world. What that means, in other words, is letting them operate outside of our dour military shadow. The longer our soldiers, who don't speak Pashtu or any other dialect, communicate with grunts and rifles, the longer the United States will be perceived as an imperialist power looking to forge a united Afghanistatn for the sake of a natural gas pipeline. The longer we sequester ourselves in the Baghdad green zone, the longer we will be that group of strangers that rides into town every so often in humvee.

All people are capable of compassion. All people have the ability to listen, even the predisposition to do so. So let's leave. Let's tell them our side of the story without air support. Let's give them information and trust them to make good use of it.

Impossible, you say? The insurgents and the Taliban and the bad guys would poison their minds against the West? Maybe so. But this world is shrinking. I watched the Kyrgyz government fail the other day, and I watched it on my laptop. How many of us can locate Kyrgyzstan on a map? How many of us saw the videos and pictures of a smokey Bishkek? There's a great disparity between those numbers, and in that disparity lies the hope for a new century of peace.

If we leave our occupational endeavors now, will we (Americans) lose a degree of safety? In all likelihood, yes. There may even be another September 11, where innocent lives will be lost at the hands of fanatics. But what if, instead of invading sovereign nation states, we simply invested in Middle East fiber optic cable networks? What if we made sure that every village in the world could access and contribute to youtube? Could see what their neighbors had done to another neighbor? Where would the fanatics' power be then? Who would join their training camps?

Violent radicalism can only be nurtured in an environment devoid of the perceived enemy. Pogroms started in courts and bars where no Jews dared to come. Violence ensued.  A system of segregation enforced racial stereotypes and blanket judgments. Violence ensued. Homophobia flourishes in communities where "gay" is a dirty word. Violence ensues. While these horrible memories occurred (and occur) in various forms of isolation (time, custom, etc.) that resist any effective tinkering right now, there is one kind of isolation we can correct. The sooner we connect the world with silly things, the sooner the world will connect on more important issues. If a fraction of the war budget had been spent on extending the reach of the internet, we would live in a different world. If we had a fraction of the kind of courage that brings peace, thousands fewer people would be dead. So stand up world, or rather sit down. Take some losses. Make the fanatics look stupid for once. Stop prosecuting people for thought crimes and "threats." Try people in an open court. Abolish the idea of military justice. As we open up the world, we're going to see some ugly things. But stay strong and sit tight. A better world will grow from that ugliness.

Cleaver's Redemption

Sources: Soul on Ice and Soul on Fire, plus multiple writings and interviews from Eldridge Cleaver, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

I'm going to do it. My thesis, I mean. It's hard to pin down my fascination with violence to any crucial young event, and I always operate under the suspicion that I've blocked things out (I think I'm kidding, but how can you be sure?). Maybe it starts with small things, like my few brushes with school violence (the hitting, not the shooting kind), by utter distaste for blood (I wouldn't eat ketchup for years following a particularly grisly nature program about the Africa savanna), or my years-long fascination with world wars. I don't even know how I feel about violence now, except to say that I loath it and look to it in principle. I'm a conflicted young man.
I say all this to put into context the ethereal nature of my academic interest. The very fact that violence pervades human society means that I've bounced around at warp speed from inner-city drug narratives to cowboy/Indian binaries to depictions of anarchy in Russian film. I know. A thesis, especially as my university envisions it, will not fit all those planks. I had to decide on ONE thing. Torture.
This past summer, I read Soul on Ice for the first time. I was both disgusted and intrigued (a combination which never recedes for long) by Eldridge Cleaver. He seemed to both eschew violence and live for it. More precisely, his notions of just violence evolve as his essays and letters go on, leaving me wanting more after I finished. So, where does one go to keep the information ball rolling? Wikipedia, of course! That entry search, while informative, didn't quite satisfy me (it was sort of like an episode of Lost, raising more questions than it answered), but the lack of readily available sources turned me off for a time. Rereading Soul on Ice for a class this semester gave me the chance to open things up. I was disappointed by Soul on Fire, troubled by Cleaver's speeches, and turned on to other writings of his contemporaries and former comrades, like Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. I'm just starting, but I think I've found my literary period.
Two worries as I begin this journey, and then I'll clue you in to my preliminary claim. First, I find it hard to not get caught up in the headiness of revolutionary ideas. Anyone who knows me tends to laugh at my self-styled political edge, but what will happen to me after days in the library immersed in radical Marxism, anarchism, and left-wing terrorism. Probably nothing :)
My other worry involves my discipline. When I tell folks I'm studying English, I imagine they're picturing To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet, not the Black Panther Party newspaper and born-again Christian autobiographies. I don't really have any anchors here, so I worry (probably too much) about ricocheting off into interdisciplinary vacuum land. I'll risk it.
Basically, my ideas about Cleaver involve his position within the larger revolutionary scene. First, his threatened mobilization of the white youth connects pretty smoothly with Fanon's ideas on mobilization of the country districts within a colonial country. Second, for the Black Panther Party to succeed within the structure of American politics, they couldn't be the most radical voice. Cleaver, by splitting with the Panthers, was sacrificed for the "greater good," though that good never could materialize (angry fist shakes at J. Edgar). To sum up: no Berkely, Peace and Freedom candidacy, exile, and alienation, no breakfast programs for Oakland kids and no canonization of Newton and Seale. I know, this gets a little fuzzy as I go on, and it probably has to do with how far I get away from texts, but I'll hammer it down. I'm just glad I have a topic.