Month: February 2021

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The saddest thing about reading Soledad Brother is how George Jackson recognizes that his father, Lester, is incapable of escaping the (both forced and accepted) downtrodden position of the black man, aspirations of a petit-bourgeois life, and his reification into the roles of provider and concurrent assimilation within Amerikan empire; but the way that this gets articulated and expressed is through the violent oppression of the black women in his life. While we don’t have access to the letters that his mother, Georgia Jackson wrote, only his responses to her, we can clearly see that she pushes back against his misogyny many times, and at certain times her analysis seems so full of clarity that George Jackson has to pause and acknowledge the places that she is right. But still he falls on trying to relate to his father for whom it is too late to reach, and this is the saddest thing of all. And why does he want to relate to his father so badly? Because he is a black man, like himself, and they have an opportunity to break with the positions that seem inescapable and passed down through the generations of black men in their family so that someone like his brother, Jonathan Jackson, could have a clear understanding of what it is to be a black man. But of course, this emphasis on the plight of the black man is near sighted and it is reflected in many of the errors of black revolutionary groups in the United States.

The ways that patriarchy swallows up the voices of those who have the views and clarity that could lead black people away from the Amerikan nuclear family, patriarchy, and so many of our ills is trying. And how those ideas of family get represented in who the so-called revolutionary leaders were of that time. All men, and if not men, then lightskin black women who fall into the same reactionary views as the men. What is even more fucked up to me though, is that in his correspondence with Fay Stender, a Jewish white woman who is his lawyer, Jackson seems to convey to and with her more respect on an intellectual level than with the closest black women in his life. He tells her such tender things, but more importantly, she seems to fill the a certain role left absent by his father, and that black women could never even have the possibility to fill. His letters to Stender lay out his most explicitly political views. We don’t see him, in the text, get as deep with anyone as he does with Stender (perhaps Angela Davis is a distant second). He creates a position of alienation with his family members early in the letters, referring to them as “you people” often, and calling his father a friend. The tenderness and confidence he has in his political clarity becomes expressed mainly through a white woman in this text. It’s sad to me.

Jackson then reveals the limits of the so called “black man’s revolution.”It’s time to surface the voices of black men. We have too many reactionary views that we refuse to try and break down, and which are clearly visible if you actually read the works of Jackson, Huey Newton, Frantz Fanon, Bobby Seale– every revolutionary black man. It’s everywhere in their works, and we have to learn from them or we will forever be lost. If what it means to be a black man is to get ours first, to speak over black non men: count me out.

*note: this is only based off the text of Soledad Brother. that is not the entirety of Jackson’s political being and words.

I’m currently reading George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and by way of coincidental study, a friend sent me this talk with Joy James: https://youtu.be/z9rvRsWKDx0. Joy James delivers some truth on the relationship between Jackson and the radical academic Angela Davis during that time. How the death of George Jackson really marked the end of that pursuit of revolutionary struggle and everything got commodified into reform and other sinister movements. Now, that on its own is extremely interesting to me obviously. But what was also interesting was her mention of Fay Stender, the radical Jewish Berkeley born lawyer who defended Huey Newton and George Jackson.

James asserts that Stender heavily edited the letters included in Jackson’s Soledad Brother, which, really pisses me off because these are already letters which underwent surveillance, destruction, editing, censorship through the state. But as James notes, Stender edited these letters to sanitize the words and images of Jackson so that white liberals (of which she would later be revealed to move into) could more easily digest him and all of his black rage.

So I did some light searching on Stender and found this extremely anti-black article on Stender and the night that a former black convict, and alleged member of Jackson’s Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) Edward Brooks entered Stender’s house, put a gun to her head and forced her to admit that she had betrayed Jackson, and then shot her six times. Stender pressed charges obviously (or maybe not obviously for a former radical lawyer whose focus was the black radical incarcerated) and Brooks went back to prison where he was murdered many years later. Stender, paralyzed from the waist down, had a breakdown, moved to Hong Kong, further left behind the prison analysis in favor of other political lines, and took her own life a year later.

Now, this story to me rang many, many ironies. How is it that a white radical lawyer who turned her back on specifically black incarcerated people could have been all that surprised that black anger came knocking on her door? The same black anger that she sanitized in Soledad Brother came knocking with a gun in an attempt to take her life. The fact that she worked so hard to see this black man locked away in prison without ever probably thinking about why he was motivated TO take her life (the anti-black article asserts, erroneously, that the BGF had no politics, but they were allegedly targeting movement lawyers), might be the greatest irony of all and a clear representation of so-called white radicals. White radicals are able to divest and give up on slaves when they are burnt out, while the slave continues to die in prison. So that when Jackson requests of Stender to smuggle weapons into the prison for his survival, she can refuse and keep it moving. White radicals are able to change their political lines. For the slave there is but one political line. And it is hardly line, but a force weighing down on us at every breath.

Stender served an important purpose, necessary at that time: to be a lawyer for these high profile black revolutionaries. But what does it say about the white radical’s desire to take up that position?  I feel like reading Assata really demonstrates the limits and uselessness of lawyers in many cases. Stender simply performed a job to the best of her abilities, and that was it. Or so she thought.

• Chick Corea died recently. He’s not someone who sang to me, so I won’t remember him there, but his playing alongside Keith Jarrett in Miles’ early ’70s electric groups is still killer with him on the electric piano and Jarrett on the organ. His science is Morton Subotnick, Henry Cowell shit. RIP.
• This is the last time I’ll mention this film, but yea it was pretty disheartening to Eddie Gale, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, The Watts Prophets all used in JATBM. I think criticisms of jazz snobbery or gatekeeping in this instance are unfounded. Because when those of us try to share this music online, it’s usually crickets. And when we try to share the history of Eddie Gale coming up through the legend Kenny Dorham and his following space chords and the teachings of the master Sun Ra in his Arkestra, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s circular breathing, and the invisible whip, and the tone connecting us to the ancestors, no one wants to listen to that. But now their sounds are used as backdrop to a film which used revolution as representation. And for those of us who on Youtube (yes some of us still do), we will have to be saturated with that genesis of discovery.
• Starting a listening project where I’m going through the entirety of the Strata-East discography. I’m so excited. If anyone reading this wants to join, let me know.
• I do think it’s interesting how people who claim to be marxists have no interest in actually examining their material conditions dialectically. But this is especially the case when it comes to non-black latinx types, mainly chicanos. They refuse to recognize that the material conditions have changed and that it’s no longer a matter of ‘chicano/indigenous or you’ve let the colonizer win.’ It was never a matter of that in my view, but I wasn’t around in the ’60s so perhaps that myth had a stronger foothold then. More people are recognizing the ways that the racialization of the Mexican identity is fraught with antagonistic contradictions, and is imploding upon itself in its supposed difference/sameness from whiteness/white supremacy/colonization.

Sing Mccoy Tyner, logs weighting heavy in the marsh/ Sing Kamau Brathwaite, volcano mesh its carbon thrust into oxygen/ Sing Giuseppi Logan, bird on benches applause in the downtrodden twilight/ Sing Toots Hibbert, brake of the automobile congregation in the ghettos/ Sing Milford Graves/ deep skin of the drum stretch/ Sing Eddie Gale, spaceship hovering over the brownstone/ Sing Bill Withers, butter dissolve in the grits grey/ Sing Manu Dibango, purple hibiscus rise high in the flower fields/ Sing Metal Faced Villain, eternal internal astral rhyming/Sing Cándido Camero, fingers traced in the water’s ripple/ Sing Stanley Cowell, one note holds all the notes …..

Reading many texts of some of the more prominent New Afrikan, Black Nationalist, Black Internationalist, Intercommunalist Black/Pan-African revolutionaries of the 20th century, I am thankful for the wisdom that they have left us. But one of the things that Black people are realizing more and more today it would seem is that nonblacks on the whole, but especially nonblack Mexicans do not belong to that romantic project of the Third World which has been steadily eroding for many years along the lines of faux solidarity. Just as Black Amerikans had to realize the myths of Amerika, they are today realizing the myths of Latin Amerika.

The errors of those black revolutionaries (thinking with Kuwasi Balagoon, George Jackson, Assata Shakur) was that they fell into the thinking that Frantz Fanon writes on in his chapter “On National Culture.” For Fanon in this text, Black culture was nothing but mystification. Two cultures such as Black Amerikans and Black South Africans should not come together on the basis of a shared Black culture (he says that two cultures can never be completely identical, which, like, okay Fanon we don’t want them to be), but on the basis of being oppressed by the same/similar enemy of Amerikan/European empire. Black culture for Fanon was based on the struggle of the masses. It makes sense in the time he was writing, of course. Through the movement of Negritude and the instrumentalization of Black culture and Blackness through the project of neo-colonialism after so called independence, one could see how Fanon, heavily invested in the Algerian liberation struggle (not a struggle for independence), would come to these conclusions. But we must stack this up against the failures of nationhood in the 20th century struggles.

I don’t purport to be a revolutionary, but Kuwasi Balagoon wrote that as revolutionaries we have to support the will of the masses. Well, in my estimation, the Black masses are moving towards a rejection of this line bound up in the idea that national culture is materially and dialectically more prescient than a Black culture. Now of course, Black culture is always already commodified, it means nothing on its own as some sort of floating signifier. We have to constantly come up against infiltrators and grifters, scalpers and bodysnatchers especially in the Latin Amerikan psyche. Those “brown” people who are trying to reclaim a Black lineage or bloodline (whatever that means) that was stolen from them because of colonization and racial caste. I think we have to focus our energy elsewhere when it comes to these people. Too much of our energy is being spent fighting these people who everyone knows are leeches instead of trying to connect with our people.

I believe that a major error in Black Amerikan organizing especially in California/Texas has been to not make a priority of seeking out the sharing of experiences, struggles, and voices of Black people in Latin Amerika. But this goes back to the myths of Latin Amerika which have been sold to us under the false pretenses of solidarity, unity, and the Third World. This goes back to the myths of nationalism. Bolivia or Venezuela may lessen the grip that US Imperialism has on them, and approaching it from a national standpoint, the Left has every reason to applaud and support that. But does this Left seek out the experiences and stories of Black people living in those countries? Or are we merely to be satisfied with these pushbacks against Amerikan Empire, and chalk up the rest to contradictions still being worked out?

As Black people still colonized in the so-called belly of the beast, we need to do more to connect with Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and all Black people living in Latin Amerika. For one, to break the stranglehold of the myths of these countries as unequivocal beacons of oppression to be saved and flattened along through bullshit PSL protests and statements of unity. Nah. Black people need to come together and destroy that shit. And the infiltrators and the brown people will get left the fuck behind. And we can come together as Black people not in some tired Pan-African way which flattens the differences we have, but we can work out our struggles and contradictions together so that we can live one day in a world where we don’t have to struggle.