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Assimilating Black Protest Leaders
Another really interesting bit from that Eldridge Cleaver interview. This time, he is talking about how the black social movements got deconstructed or subverted when their leaders became politicized. Another very interesting look at how the opposition gets sucked up and assimilated (See this post for more):
[…] but we have a problem which is a political problem because when the laws were passed to open up the political arena for black people the most visible leaders and the ones who were able to get those jobs were our protest leaders so what they did, they took our protest machinery and transformed it into their personal political machinery to get them reelected which stripped the black community of any kind of organizational machinery and consequently it left us floundering and treading water in a miserable state.
It still shocks me that there is so much history over the last fourty years which has been effectively washed from our collective memory (see also this post). People like Cleaver, who admittedly have some negative parts of their history, but who had really interesting and intelligent things to say about culture and power have been all but forgotten. But the things they struggled with are still the things we struggle with today, some with different names and faces, and some with even greater continuity. It’s up to us to not let what they did and thought simply vanish into the ether.
May 29th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
This is something I come back to a lot as well. It’s pretty much as though the point of the edutainment system is to make us forget. I have to wonder to what extent the loss of living memory arose systemattically, to what extent is was intentional–like Carnegie’s idea about education–and to what extent it the system was intentionally manipulated to produce that result, and by whom and what.
May 30th, 2006 at 1:51 am
just wait. aldous huxley`s distopia is coming along nicely. cleaver was a deeply disturbed individual. his psychopathological tendancies were perfect for the extremist gang he was part of and manipulated by. the sixties were full of “iconoclasts” with similar traits and creative ways of expressing themselves. betty friedan, for instance. or the beat poet, allan ginsberg (interesting poetical subject matter.).
hitler had some interesting things to say and was quite brilliant in his creative problem solving too. but we aren`t celevrating him in retrospect though.
i wonder why the counter-culture of the sixties produced so many fuck-heads that are revered in the media to this day?
May 30th, 2006 at 9:55 am
“i wonder why the counter-culture of the sixties produced so many fuck-heads that are revered in the media to this day?”
alistair, your question can be asked another way and will become current commentary on the problems with revisionist histories:
I wonder why so many fuck-heads produced by the counter-culture of the sixties are revered in the media to this day?
I don’t think the counter-culture intentionally produced the fuck-heads to be later revered. But memories look brighter from further away. And it’s quite easy to lift quotes or isolated moments of clarity and intelligence to misshape a particular fuck-head into a genius whose star was extinguished by prejudice and ignorance.
May 30th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Eldridge Cleaver is “revered in the media to this day”???
Think not. He may have some reverential historical draw enabling him to
“get his message out” in alternative and or internet publications, but hardly revered.
The Black Panthers as an organization were and are worthy of historical note, and people are somewhat interested in seeing where the people they can identify in “history”, especially as radicals, are doing today.
Ginsberg’s name is well recognized perhaps, but mostly in the way you mentioned him - some beat poet barely anyone has reador even knows what the hell he is famous for, other than being one of those beret wearing / bongo slinging types.
JFK/MLK/X and surroundings of course do have media reverence going on - (u know in white america mostly JFK) but were they fuck-head products of the 60’s?
Nixon also is “revered” in the media, and he was a (def) fuck-head product of the 1900’s or something like that.
May 30th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Recent Newsweek article talks about the growing protest conciousness in music these days. Maybe the Dixie Chicks started something … it just took (a long) awhile for others to catch on.
Man, doesn’t 9/11 seem almost like a dream? All the American flag decals are faded off the bumpers … Osamawho? Now we’re missing “That 70’s show” which taught such valuble, post-flower power coming of age lessons … “Lost” anyone?
May 30th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
hey tim have you read “soul on ice” yet?
May 30th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
speaking of forgotten history, don’t forget that another reaction to the politicization of black leaders was to be murdered by the state, like fred hampton.
May 30th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Or maybe phrased like:
I wonder why so many fuck-heads in the media revere the counter culture of the sixties to this day
May 30th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Much better, SubstanceM. Thanks.
May 30th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
No, but I want to. Is it any good?
Whoever made a comment about “That 70’s Show” - good call. That’s what we have in place of history now and its a poor substitute.
In any event, my point was not to glorify Cleaver. He’s a human like everybody else. But he’s a human who had a huge impact some years ago and who has been all but erased nowadays.
May 30th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
read it years ago, yeah it was pretty good, prison memoirs as i recall
reminds me o’ the wise words of bill lee
May 30th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
Baudrillard would say that the 60s are a 3rd order simulation i think - an evil representation which disguises the fact that the original has been murdered or somehow taken out of commission - like celebrating the memory of a man publicly to assuage the guilt that you feel over having privately ratted him out to the secret police so that you could get a promotion.
Why do americans still celebrate the 4th? If the founding fathers were alive today they’d be on all fours being sodomized with glow sticks by military contractors in a dog cage in Cuba somewhere while cornfed non-commisioned officers laugh, drink beer, and take turns fighting over a sony playstation in the next room.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
the reviving of the militant tone of the sixties counter-culture makes a market for bruce stinkbean, the dixie chicks and the already dead neil young (lynard skynard killed him years ago. he just refuses to hop in the box.)
we live in a culture of consumerism. unless we subscribe the lights will eventually fail to come on at the flick of a switch. then the feces will come into contact with the air-recirculation implement.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
The other thing worth mentioning here is that Cleaver himself had been all but assimilated:
http://reason.com/8602/fe.ls.cleaver.shtml
June 1st, 2006 at 6:26 am
wow, that`s quite a circle to travel. my girlfriend`s parents live in cuba six months of the year. her dad has a picture of che guevara in his living room. her dad`s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he defends castro as the hardest working person he knows, working 16 hours a day for the people. i think he has imprinted his own morals and work ethic onto one of the worst political criminals of the new century. i could see how cleaver could become disillusioned with the pig culture of cuba and choose the lesser pig culture here.
June 1st, 2006 at 12:32 pm
I hope I’m misunderstanding here, or did you (Alistair) just call Fidel Castro “one of the worst political criminals of the new century”? If so, that’s just plain ridiculous.