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.