I wonder if someone was listening to Charles Mingus when they came up with the title for the new film organized around the betrayal of Fred Hampton by William O’Neal entitled Judas and the Black Messiah. Of course I’m thinking of Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Here we have two holy subjects, the Messiah and The Black Saint paired with two miscreants, Judas and the Sinner Lady. If we examine the two titles, we find that these pairs are not formally in opposition to one another, but held together by the conjunction “and.” If we dig further into the meta-titles on Black Saint we come to a curious image: “Saint and Sinner Join in Merriment on Battle Front.” Why would these two figures which seem to stand diametrically opposed to one another, saint and sinner, join together in merriment in the very place they are supposed to be battling? And this is the beauty of the titles on this album, because the anonymity and generality of these images work against our desires to think about such images as a saint and a sinner in a binary, fixed, and definite manner: one good, one evil. It opens us up to the possibility that the distinction between the sacred and the profane is wrought with contradictions. The title of the film offers us no such freedom. There’s too many binding and static references; the title is forcing and indeed constricting our minds to place the figures of Fred Hampton and William O’Neal into roles where they cannot move. Did one expect anything less out of a Hollywood film?
William O’Neal is not a Judas figure, because Fred Hampton was not a Messiah. For one, Messiah’s work alone– well, they might have some help along the way, but in the end they are the ones who save us all. One of Chairman Fred’s recurring phrases for God’s sake was “Power anywhere where there’s people!” The man was informed by Marx, Mao to name just two, in the use of terms like “the masses” meaning the proletariat, meaning ultimately proletarian struggle. No one man can self abolish the proletarian class position not only for himself but everyone, as well as overthrow the ruling class. Hampton understood and lived that to the very end. It’s very tempting to compare the Messiah with the revolution for some it seems. They are both teleological in their basic sense, but Messiah’s deliver the believers to the promised land, while revolution, if I stand to think about it more critically, leaves a number of contradictions to be worked out in its asunder of the previous system (capitalism in this case). (This is of course one of my problems with revolution, namely, we never stop struggling). If we are taking the line that O’Neal is Judas, with the devil or evil being the ‘state’, this doesn’t work either. Because the state and the violence it produces is not evil. It’s not evil because evil can only exist in a world where there is ‘good’ on its opposite side. That gets us into binary thinking that goes nowhere. Hampton and O’Neal lived in, to follow David Theo Goldberg, a racial state. Amerika. A racial state he writes, “are states that historically become engaged in the constitution, maintenance, and management of whiteness, whether in the form of European domination, colonialism, segregation, white supremacy, herrenvolk democracy, Aryanism, or ultimately colorblindness or racelessness.” This management of whiteness is about superiority and power over all aspects of life be they economic, social, political, cultural etc. Evil is too unspecific and tame a word for how the state used O’Neal to assassinate Hampton. There is no formless form, no omniscient being under our feet responsible for all of the fucked up shit that happens to black people and black revolutionaries. It’s the organization of this country which keeps things flowing, which keeps multinational corporations on top and us at the bottom.
Hampton understood the forces that stand on top, and how they must fall:
We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense on what you call the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society working with people that we may never have a chance to work with. Maybe we could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn’t have to be hidin’ when we go to speak places like this. Maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people and your problems are right here in the valley.
We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding, went into the valley knowing that the people are in the valley, knowing that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing that our enemies are on the mountain, to our friends are in the valley, and even though its nice to be on the mountaintop, we’re going back to the valley. Because we understand that there’s work to be done in the valley, and when we get through with this work in the valley, then we got to go to the mountaintop. We’re going to the mountaintop because there’s a motherfucker on the mountaintop that’s playing King, and he’s been bullshitting us. And we’ve got to go up on the mountain top not for the purpose of living his life style and living like he lives. We’ve got to go up on the mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, that we are coming from the valley!
Fred Hampton, (SPEECH DELIVERED AT OLIVET CHURCH, 1969)
There’s no need for good and evil in Hampton’s eloquent image here of knocking the fake King off the mountaintop. Hampton understood that we need kick everybody off the mountaintop for good, and don’t nobody need to stand there, be they revolutionaries of capitalist exploiters. Yeah, we’re coming for them, but not to take their spot, rather, so the grass can grow again on the tops of the hills.