As I was saying, if you're white and angry, it's just politics as usual; or maybe it's even a new wave in politics to which attention must be paid.
If you are black and angry, you're a danger to the status quo. A case in point.
John Carlos says what he did was not a "black power salute." But try to find a reference to it in Google without those words. He says that's a label applied by the "right wing media." It's certainly a label; and it certainly wasn't supplied by him.
And 48 years later, it's still controversial. George Wallace's claims about segregation are relegated to the dust bin of the nation's history. We are even surprised when anyone connects his racism to modern day racism, and no one wants to directly connect Wallace to Donald Trump; well, no one respectable, anyway.
But this simple gesture still shocks us; still stirs controversy; and is still connected to an assertion of "black power." Which is still what disturbs us most of all.
I've been reading James Cone who has a lot to say about exactly the "black power" movement and that afterward and what it really meant. At its center, at its best and at its most ideal, it IS an affirmation of the lives and minds of black people, not hatred of white poeple. Of course, like any intellectual movement, it hasn't always existed in its best form but it was not anything like the pop version of that which was a hatred of white people. Cone points out that if black people were not very good at loving even their enemies the hatred that white people have earned over the centuries would have consumed us all.
ReplyDeleteThe cynical use of these issues has benefited, mostly, the worst of white politics and ideology, it plays on a mixture of paranoia, guilt, and phony, trumped up resentments among white people who were sold a line of lies by those who practiced the worst of politics. It is no mere coincidence that the worst of that was promoted by the great media corporations anymore than it was that much of the best of it was expressed through Black Liberation Theology and the churches. I've become convinced that, at their best, the churches are the real location of the alternative, counter-culture.
I've been reading James Cone who has a lot to say about exactly the "black power" movement and that afterward and what it really meant. At its center, at its best and at its most ideal, it IS an affirmation of the lives and minds of black people, not hatred of white poeple. Of course, like any intellectual movement, it hasn't always existed in its best form but it was not anything like the pop version of that which was a hatred of white people. Cone points out that if black people were not very good at loving even their enemies the hatred that white people have earned over the centuries would have consumed us all.
ReplyDeleteThe cynical use of these issues has benefited, mostly, the worst of white politics and ideology, it plays on a mixture of paranoia, guilt, and phony, trumped up resentments among white people who were sold a line of lies by those who practiced the worst of politics. It is no mere coincidence that the worst of that was promoted by the great media corporations anymore than it was that much of the best of it was expressed through Black Liberation Theology and the churches. I've become convinced that, at their best, the churches are the real location of the alternative, counter-culture.