Episode #21: Film Review: “Don’t Quit until You Either Win or You Die”: "The Spook Who Sat By the Door"

Sometimes, you need a Black story that inspires you to struggle, but doesn't do so simply by accurately showing how fucked up things are but actually makes you feel like we can win, too -- and win not just in terms of small symbolic victories, which are important, but in actual asymmetric military conflict. That's why today, in honor of Malcolm X and Sam Greenlee, G & O talk about one of their favorite films of all time, The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973), directed by Ivan Dixon and based on the novel of the same name by Sam Greenlee. This film is a classic of Black underground cinema that is in some ways the benchmark of how film can inspire radical, ethical actions.

And we just learned that Paul Mooney, the writer-actor-comedian and important Black thinker, passed away in Oakland, Cal. As FRELIMO used to say, "a luta continua... the struggle continues..."

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BLACK THOUGHT: An Entry and an Exit: Continuing the Collective Black Freedom Struggle

According to his NY Times obituary, Sam Greenlee, author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, was defiant about his success: "If I never made another film, look at the film I made.”

On certain days, we have multiple reasons to think about our elders and ancestors in struggle, and we remember the examples and tools our ancestors left behind for how we, the living, can continue our struggle.

Today, May 19, was the date in 1925 when Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Neb. And of course, one way to honor the legacy of struggle of brother Malcolm is by discussing a film that is also part of that legacy of struggle: The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The 1973 film, directed by Ivan Dixon, was based on the novel of the same name written by Sam Greenlee. As it happens, May 19, 2014, is also the day that Sam Greenlee passed away in the city of his birth, Chicago.

Today we commemorate an entry and an exit. But in doing so, i think we should also remember to honor our ancestors in struggle while they are alive.

In an interview he gave late in his life, Greenlee said he was basically broke and living on food stamps and assistance. He said that even Black studies departments wouldn't hire him after Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist and politician, basically whitelisted him. Greenlee gave respect to Jackson for the risks he had taken in the long Black freedom struggle, while also critiquing the lasting negative impact Jackson had on his life, his family's life, and on the film Greenlee and Dixon made. As with many others who risked it all for our struggle while young, only to later sell out our freedom struggle, what Greenlee tells us about Jackson can serve as an invitation for us to consider the ethics of Black leadership and how and why so many Black leaders, especially bourgeois ones, readily succumb to forces that turn them against the more radical elements of our movements, especially those coming from Black working class and poor communities.

I also can't help but think about the fact that his novel is now being made into a mini-series by Lee Daniels, director of films like Precious and The Butler and of the TV shows Empire and Star -- one who has stood on the shoulders of previous Black filmmakers and had no shortage of financial success, and one who has made a career of risking little or nothing in telling stories of Black life. I hope all good things for Daniels' remounting of this film. But i already know that he has not paid a cost for making shows and films that help inspire radical Black struggle in anything like the way Greenlee and Dixon did with Spook. 

Indeed, Daniels' films have generally been negative toward Black traditions of radicalism. I doubt Daniels will be poor at the end of his life -- and there is no shame in that. But Greenlee was poor at the end of his life because he was being punished for the risks he took in making books and films like Spook. We should always believe in the possibility for people to change from what they have done previously, and so we should pay attention to see how Daniels handles this film and how he deals with the family of Sam Greenlee, who surely paid a significant cost to create what Daniels will now reap the rewards from.

But this is not to pick on Daniels and Jackson. There is also a larger point that the risks our elders and ancestors have taken required great daring. We do not take the same risks in simply recreating what they did. This does not mean that we are free of the constraints that bound previous generations. It means those constraints have shifted in how they are being applied. Spook was and is powerful because of its capacity to inspire struggle -- and its history of doing so -- in very concrete ways. This is not easy to do. It requires an intimate understanding of the shape of our oppression and the tools we can use for resisting that oppression right now. In doing justice to Spook and Greenlee's legacy, we have to find new ways to threaten the racist structure that are at least as effective today as Spook was in 1973. Since our movement is different today than it was in 1973 -- and so is our oppression -- we must keep learning and keep trying.

Finally, when we're considering the meaning of May 19 we can think about ancestors and elders in general and how they're constantly coming into and going out of the world -- sometimes known, sometimes unknown, sometimes on different days, sometimes on the very same day. We know only a fraction of those who have left the world, and we hope to learn of even more ancestors' stories because stories can inspire. But we also need to be attentive that new ancestors for our struggle are constantly being made. Who are they? We don't yet know. And so maybe the real lesson of May 19 is to live as though all Black youths, adults, and elders -- like a young man born today in 1925 or an old man who passed away today in 2014 -- might help lead and inspire our struggles.

Please check out The Spook Who Sat by the Door HERE.

Podcast Episode #20: The 1776 Commission Is Part of an Ongoing Attack on Black Studies

Remember the so-called "1776 Commission"? Started in September 2020, during the final throes of trump's ill-fated re-election campaign, it was a group of largely Black conservative writers who convened to counter the 1619 Project, a series of articles put together by new york times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. In this episode, the brothers discuss the foolishness and the ongoing danger of the 1776 Commission. They point out that the Black intellectuals selected by trump to make up the 1776 Commission exemplify a kind of bourgeois Black misleadership that has long sought to serve the antiblack structure by suppressing Black resistance and trying to lead Black people to obey the slaveholding empire of amerikkka.

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BLACK THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Not Enough for Freedom: The 1619 Project Helps Liberals, the 1776 Commission Serves Fascists, and Black Folk Still Ain't Free

In 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones curated a powerful series of articles and school curriculum called the 1619 Project. The main argument of the series was that, from the first moment when enslaved Africans were imported to the u.s. colony of Virginia in 1619, "No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed." In other words, the u.s. is built on a foundation of slavery that continues to influence everything about the u.s.a. to this very day.

Taken together, these writings counter the standard story that amerikkka was built by Great white Men who, regardless of their faults, are to be held up as heroes because they put forward the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Some of the titles of the essays from the 1619 Project can give you a sense of how different this counter-narrative is from the way most schools teach u.s. history:

• "Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true."
• "For centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. No wonder everybody’s always stealing it."
• "Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system."
• "A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America"

The 1619 Project, earned Jones a Pulitzer prize and a lot of followers, particularly in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the still-unpunished police murder of Breonna Taylor. 

Overall, the 1619 Project is pointing in a helpful direction. As we Black folks fight to even imagine a world in which Black lives matter and cannot be taken wantonly without severe repercussions, it is imperative that we build from an acknowledgement of this basic fact: The u.s. as we know it would not exist without the enslavement of Black people. The more conscious among us know that this isn't just a thing of the past: The u.s. continues to find alternate ways of enslaving Black people in order to keep itself going. This is the most basic of facts. And our work as Black activists isn't just based on wanting to help people who just randomly happen to be in need and happen to be Black, but specifically on the fact that the condition of us Black people is a direct result of historic and ongoing injustice. In serving our Black communities, we fight against that injustice because it was wrong to us and our ancestors from the very beginning. We love each other, and we hate our oppression.

So, while the 1619 Project is to be praised for getting this counter-narrative out there, it does so at a certain cost to Black freedom struggle. That's because it frames this basic counter-narrative in particular ways that get even moderate liberals to agree with Black radicals that the united states was founded on slavery. And that's just not enough.

One shortcoming of the 1619 Project's narrative is that it should have started earlier, at least in 1492, even if it was talking only about slavery, but especially if it was also acknowledging the constant companion of racial slavery: genocide. The genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the americas is connected to the enslavement of Black people in a whole lot of ways: 

1. Indigenous americans were genocided for embracing us when we escaped plantations and resisting oppression with  us, 
2. Black americans were recruited to the military and paramilitaries that stole land from Indigenous americans, 
3. The decline in enslavement of Indigenous americans was accompanied by the rise in enslavement of Black americans, 
4. Indigenous Africans stolen from the continent became Black americans and many Indigenous Africans were genocided on the continent in the process of capturing us for the slave trade, and 
5. The forces of enslavement and genocide at the heart of the 1619 Project's narrative were all at work long before 1619, even in what we today call the united states.

In other words, enslaved and genocided have a common interest in resisting amerikkka, and the 1619 Project missed an opportunity to emphasize that fact.

Another thing is, of course, the 1619 Project's narrative is not even a new narrative. The idea that amerikkka is founded on genocide and slavery comes straight out of Black thought, at least as old as David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Black thought is the collective understanding that Black people have developed based on our radically marginalized experiences over the last 500 years. It is the constantly evolving body of knowledge that we've had to gain just in order to survive, and it is how we teach our children and grandchildren to survive and resist being duped, re-enslaved, genocided, and crushed in an antiblack world. And one of the basic facts it grows from is what Frantz Fanon would have called "the fact of blackness." The reality of our lived experience as Black people teaches anyone who isn't in denial a common set of facts that we acknowledge, or die from not acknowledging -- and we often die whether we acknowledge it or not.

The bigger critique of the 1619 Project, however, concerns how it opens the Black thought narrative to those who would affirm amerikkka. In the hands of liberal-progressives like Jones and the new york times, this central narrative gets watered down into a quasi-patriotic narrative that says, in so many words, "america is basically a good idea but has a long way to go to fulfill its ideals." Through the 1619 Project's narrative, liberals are shortchanging the Black thought narrative of the danger it poses to oppressors, enslavers, and genociders. There is, after all, a danger in just allowing Black thought to speak freely, because if it were ever truly listened to, it would tell a narrative of amerikkka that might result in a fundamental transformation not merely of the united states or the amerikkkas but the entire world system we have come to know over the last 500 years. 

Liberal-progressives have basically co-opted this central element of Black thought and contorted it to serve a u.s. patriotic narrative that positions the Black oppressed of amerikkka as the long-suffering saviors of amerikkka. A narrative that should cut across the borders of nation-states set up by european enslavers and unite oppressed people instead becomes a U.S.-centric narrative that says that slavery is "at the heart" of u.s. history and must in some way be atoned for like an "original sin" of this nation. 

In 1975, u.s. historian Edmund Morgan helped nudge this version of the narrative into the mainstream of u.s. historians when he referred to "the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom." In his book American Slavery, American Freedom, he argued that the founders of the United States fought for their own freedom from european colonial powers AND for their right to enslave and genocide Black and Indigenous peoples. In other words, they wrote "all men are created equal" while raping and torturing enslaved people. And if they felt any sense of contradicting themselves -- well, eventually, somebody could just write an HBO drama or a Broadway musical to meditate on how these "founding fathers" were basically good people but were just so vexed that they couldn't see their way to not raping us, not torturing and enslaving us, and not murdering us.

Of course, Morgan's narrative was an advance over the mainstream white narratives of the u.s.a. that preceded it, but its shortcoming is also that of the 1619 Project: the u.s.a. professes freedom but relies on slavery because, at a deep psychic level, the white people comprising its ruling class simply don't recognize the people they enslave as human beings. 

As Raoul Peck's recent documentary film series Exterminate All the Brutes reports, this is the case everywhere in the world that european settler-colonizers have stolen land and bodies over the last 500 years. The playbook of enslavers and genociders is remarkably similar the world over. And everywhere it is antiblack. 

Moreover, at some level, genociders aren't even conscious of how similar they are. To some extent, they just do and say the same shit because they have a similar relationship to Black bodies wherever and whenever they are in the world. For instance, both white South Afrikan colonizers of the 17th century and white amerikkkan gentrifiers of the 21st century say shit like "Nobody was here when we arrived" and "Black and Indigenous people haven't contributed much to our culture" (see u.s. politician Rick Santorum's comments for a recent example of this). Using military, paramilitary, and police force, white people reserve a place for themselves in which they can keep up the illusion that they haven't done anything massively, murderously wrong in order to have all that they enjoy.

If Jones and Morgan used the psychoanalytic tools of Black thought, they could go further to gain clarity on why you cannot love Black freedom and love amerikkka. They refer to a so-called "paradox" of a supposedly "free" society based on Black slavery. But, to white people, it's not as a paradox or a contradiction that needs to be fixed at all. It is precisely all they ever wanted it to be. whiteness, everywhere in the world. is grounded in a kind of unaccountable psychic structure -- known  in psychoanalytic discourse as a perverse sadistic structure -- that allows those positioned as white to physically harm and terrorize those positioned as Black and Indigenous without ever themselves being available to being harmed and terrorized. That's what happens when you have all these guns. The vast asymmetries of power between european genocider-slaveholders and the Indigenous and Black populations of the amerikkkas are what allow this space for genocider-slaverholders to imagine themselves as basically good people. This space, propped up by raw force and terror, is known as whiteness, and the white people who have embraced it flourish within this contradiction, within this massive sadistic psychic structure. And it has bound together europeans of vastly different cultures and worldviews for the better part of the last millennium -- and counting.

That's a long time. This suggests that the liberal effort of things like the 1619 Project to change amerikkka by telling white people that they are hypocrites will always face the most severe and violently antiblack backlash. Creating a world in which Black lives matter won't come about by merely acknowledging this contradiction as though people will see the error of their ways and allow us to change what they have built their family legacies and senses of self on. Fundamental change will require something that breaks through the walls built to protect the perverse sadistic psychic structure that is whiteness. Decisively resolving that contradiction identified by the 1619 Project and Morgan requires acknowledging amerikkka itself as the greatest enemy of freedom in the world. Hence, trying to make amerikkka "live up to its ideals" won't get us free because amerikkka's ideal IS freedom for white people, enslavement for Black people.

However excellent and exceptional Jones' 1619 Project and Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom are, neither will go all the way there. They will almost, but not quite say, what any ethical student of Black thought knows: Resolving this "american paradox" will require ending that which we recognize as amerikkka.

The Black thought narrative is a critique that cuts to the roots of what amerikkka is and means. In other words, the narrative as Black thought articulates it is radical -- meaning, it literally goes to the root. (Remember, the word "radical" comes from the Latin word "radix" meaning "root.")

That is why, in this moment, liberal-progressives like Jones are called up from the bullpen to helm a narrative that would otherwise be a radical narrative, and would otherwise radicalize those who have nothing to lose. Liberal-progressives, many of them from the non-profit industrial complex, are NOT using co-opted narratives like the 1619 Project to steer the oppressed toward a revolution led by the Black poor from below that could end the world we have come to know over the last 500 years. Liberal-progressives gain the trust of radicals by articulating a similar-sounding narrative, and then they quickly adjust the narrative just enough with ideas about making amerikkka "live up to its ideals" to keep the Black thought narrative from taking over. In such ways, street radicals are converted into people who seek to make amerikkka "better." Problem is, genocide cannot be made "better." It has to be ended.

Look, it's great to acknowledge how the 1619 Project is more helpful than the dominant narrative of the u.s.a., but we should be very careful about it. The case of the 1619 Project shows that, before our very eyes, Black thought in the hands of liberal-progressives can quickly go from being a radical threat to the ongoing genocide that amerikkka is to a helpmate to the lofty amerikkkan ideals of freedom for "all" -- even as the genocide of Black, Indigenous, and poor people continues.

There are many good things about the 1619 Project's narrative, but overall, it signifies a repackaging and watering down of Black thought as old as the first maroons who revolted against their enslavement and fought alongside Indigenous people. The present historical moment has forced many people who have previously ignored or rejected Black thought to answer to it. And in such a moment, a narrative like the 1619 Project's narrative provides something that progressives like Jones can line up promote. To not get in on the Black thought narrative of amerikkka would be to risk irrelevance. That's the kind of political moment we are in right now. Make no mistake, however. The 1619 Project's narrative still seeks to preserve amerikkka as an ideal that just hasn't gone far enough. The idea that we should really be fighting to carry amerikkkan ideals further should make Black people and those who love our freedom struggle very uneasy.

But even the 1619 Project does some labor toward centering the perspectives of the least powerful instead of the genociders and enslavers whose narratives are almost always taught in schools. That is better than what we have, and it is certainly better than the 1776 Report.

Some might dismiss the creation of the 1776 Commission as Trump's (failed) last-ditch effort to win re-election. But the report didn't fall flat just because Trump lost re-election. It landed safely in a power structure that has long attempted to bludgeon Black people into silence in order to maintain control over how the amerikkkan story is told. Trump and his fascist and conservative allies sought to empower right-wing Black intellectuals -- like John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, who are largely marginal and irrelevant in Black conversations -- in their ongoing project to tell us that we need to speak nicer about a society that dehumanizes us in just about every way that it can. These servile intellectuals have been given a mission to commandeer Black history in service of a "patriotic education" that serves white supremacy. In other words, in trump's effort to save the white supremacist narrative of u.s. history, he had to make an intervention in Black studies, a field which, like Black cities and Black countries, he ordinarily looks down his nose at. That's why he needed Black intellectual proxies to be his handmaids.

It should go without saying that trump cannot make such an intervention through publication of well-researched texts. (He barely reads.) The only way he can intervene in Black thought is by using force to batter down the contradictions, or at least those who would expose those contradictions. And even without Trump in office, the foot soldiers and shock troops of the antiblack structure have already received their marching orders and are still very much at the work of silencing Black and Indigenous voices -- trying to de-fund Black studies and ethnic studies and attack those who study and apply it. It all goes to prove, once again, that whiteness, and the right wing tendency that forms its vanguard, has long seen Black thought as so great a threat to amerikkka that they are not above recruiting Black helpers to shut down Black thought.

In this episode, recorded shortly after Trump announced the 1776 Commission, the brothers discuss the larger effort to suppress Black knowledge and Black thought and how the 1776 Report fits into that effort. Even though the commission became largely irrelevant once Trump lost the presidency, the 1776 Report is still floating around down there as an archived presidential commission report, ready to be revived by thirsty white supremacists who don't mind sadistically forcing a "patriotic history" on Black and Indigenous people in order to silence our righteous resistance to genocide and slavery. The Black intellectuals on the 1776 Commission represent an ongoing problem internal to our communities: the problem of Black intellectual misleadership appointed by white people and white interests to force Black people to conform our understanding of our own history to that which will allow our enslavers and genociders to keep doing what they want.

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Episode #19: REVIEW: "Judas and the Black Messiah" and the Education of Black Leadership

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The brothers recorded this review of Shaka King's 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah a few months before Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield were up for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (which Kaluuya won, but Stanfield should also have gotten an award). The brothers briefly discuss the actors' performances, casting, and writing, but mostly they focus on the film's contribution to Hollywood's long history of depicting Black love and Black radicalism, as well as the Black Panthers' historical role in politically organizing Black street organizations, the force of Black resistance to police murder, and the police infiltration of and war on the Black liberation movement. The brothers also talk about the building of Black leadership capacity through political education and the importance of preparing for self-defense, intelligence, and counter-intelligence capacities in Black movements.

NOTE: The brothers urge people to read Native American Studies scholar Ward Churchill and writer Jim Vander Wall's book Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement and check out episode #12 of this podcast, in which the brothers discussed that book.

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Episode #18: REVIEW: "Exterminate All the Brutes" and the Language of Genocide [PART 2 of 2]

In the last episode, G & O began discussion of Exterminate All the Brutes, Raoul Peck’s 2021 film now streaming on HBO Max. The brothers focused on the repeated symbol of white people’s “heart of darkness” echoed from the book that title is taken from: Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, written about Belgium’s rape and genocide of Africans in Congo. The brothers also brought in some of the tools of psychoanalysis. They paid close attention to language and images to read the unconscious intentions that drive and direct an action, even if people are unaware of those drives. Seen in this way, this film’s topic is the genocidal drive at the core of whiteness, and it is articulated so that whiteness can be understood and ended. 

In this episode, the brothers continue their discussion of Exterminate All the Brutes, by homing in on the film’s connection between images that shape how we think about genocide, such as John Wayne movies, monuments, and histories of genocide, and the structural conditions of modern u.s. society which are designed to result in genocidal effects on Indigenous and Black people. In the present moment, whiteness is engaging in a collective refusal to see itself in the mirror image of other sadistic figures, like Jeffrey Dahmer. The psychic structure of whiteness, stretching across many generations and geographies, is sadistic — meaning, it gets juiced from harming those it sees as “others” — even if that harm is concealed while it occurs and is later denied completely. The brothers analyze the tech industry term “artisanal miner,” for example, which sounds pretty but conceals the slave-like conditions under which Black people in Congo today are forced to produce coltan, a mineral that makes our smartphones work. The brothers conclude with their score of the revolutionizing potential of Exterminate All the Brutes. 

NOTE: The brothers apologize for the moments of crosstalk, which are really bad in this episode. This is an ongoing problem with the Anchor software, which the brothers have brought to Anchor’s attention. They will work on fixing it in future episodes and might end up moving to a different recording system and platform.

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LISTEN TO PART ONE OF THIS CONVERSATION HERE

Episode #17: REVIEW: "Exterminate All the Brutes" Exposes the white Heart of Darkness [PART 1 of 2]

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The brothers are back with part 1 of a 2-part discussion of Raoul Peck's new HBO documentary, "Exterminate All the Brutes" (2021). The first thing G & O examine is how the film explodes the standard story that documentary tells about America. Documentary, O says, is related to ethnographic writing, a form of media innovated by the very same genocidal colonizers this film depicts. This film will guide you through a Frantz Fanon-style reading of the murder whiteness carries in its heart. it excavates the murderous events of the last 500 years so you can glimpse the sadistic drive in the collective unconscious of global whiteness. Be ready to go there. This film is made to take you there.

Episode #16: "Two AKs Up!" Can Django Unchained & 12 Years a Slave Inspire Struggle? [Part 3 of 3]

Today, the brothers conclude their 3-part discussion of Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave with a conversation about class, gender, and the definition of the term “to fetishize.” Does Django’s tendency to fetishize the violence of slavery detract from its ability to spark excitement in modern-day slave rebellions? If 12 Years a Slave shows how systemic the violence of slavery was, does it also dampen the sense that we can and should fight slavery as we encounter it today? And can we critique films we see as harmful without shaming the people who found enjoyment in them? These are some of the questions the brothers consider as they rate the potential of each film to help inspire revolution — but instead of “two thumbs up,” the brothers prefer "two AK-47s up!"

PART 1 OF THE CONVERSATION IS HERE
PART 2 OF THE CONVERSATION IS HERE

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Trump and Biden Are Both My Enemies, but Only One of Them Is Openly Providing Leadership to Nazis

The last time i voted in a u.s. presidential general election, it was 2008. I saw past Barack Obama's obvious intelligence and through his vague rhetorical promises. I prided myself in seeing who Obama was talking to ("the middle class") and how friendly he was to the same Wall Street interests who had just turned the economy into their own ATM. I noted his preference for Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care plan over the single-payer health care policies that I knew would save my Mom and Dad, both of whom would die within the next five years. Instead, I voted for a candidate who excited me -- whose very memory from the 2000 election year still causes many liberals to shudder with revulsion -- one who had begun his political labors decades before as a fresh-out-of-law-school outsider, going head-to-head with the corporate manufacturers of automotive death traps, organizing groups nationwide that were aimed toward holding power accountable, and who at least spoke about poverty, corporate oligarchs, and single-payer health care. I knew my preferred candidate would not win the general election, but I lived in the solidly blue state of California that the Repugnacan presidential candidate wouldn't even come close to winning, and i hoped to boost a third party to the level of support needed to obtain matching federal funds. Rather than simply adding my vote to a guaranteed blowout that would not have earned the blue candidate any more electoral college votes, I believed that voting for a third party would create an opening for genuine debate about things that matter.

By 2012, I had seen Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant. Those young brothers' murders had opened my eyes. And I had come to see electoral politics as a trap. I had seen that the Obama campaign and then administration had co-opted people and energies away from the radical movements I had come to see as the only hope for Black people's survival. I had seen motherfuckers like George Zimmerman just walking around freely after having gotten his ass whooped by a child he was stalking and murdering that child, and motherfuckers like Johannes Mehserle getting off for having shot an unarmed young Black father in the back on the floor of a public transit platform. Covering the Democratic National Convention for The Feminist Wire that year, I wrote

We Black people must come to see that when one of us has a post with the most powerful job description in the world and still is not free to protect something as basic as our biological existence, then we are not free either. Not just Obama’s hands, but all of our hands are tied. And if electoral democracy holds out no better promise than this, then there are few options that remain aside from those that Assata Shakur and George Jackson recommended.

By 2016, I argued that this same suspicion of electoral politics should be extended into a conclusive reason to reject electoral politics as a terrain of struggle altogether. Still in California, I knew that Clinton would safely win my state's electoral college votes. Angered not only by Hillary Clinton's support for "superpredator" crime and prison policies against Black people but also by her role in the assassinations of Berta Cáceres of Honduras and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, I felt free to not vote at all, even in down-ballot races. By that time, I had become involved in radical movements protesting the unpunished police murders of Black people. I was helping in small ways to organize Black spaces and Black networks of knowledge production and distribution outside of the academy. Those activities, and surviving gentrification while helping my partner and her children, left me no time to be involved in electoral politics, and that was fine by me. I thought that building capacity in myself and my community was more essential to our struggle than voting ever could be.

But in my total rejection of voting, I can now see, I helped encourage other Black folks around me to reject it. We encouraged each other in something that made us less prepared for the present moment. The radical analysis of the racist, capitalist paradigm we live in was correct; my strategic application of it was not. And now, knowing what we have learned over the last four years, I do not believe we, as politically engaged Black people on the left, can totally abandon the electoral theater of struggle. If we do, as we are seeing, that will be precisely the "path of least resistance" through which the enemies of Black freedom drive their tanks like so many Nazi panzer divisions. Decades of "lesser-evil" electoral strategy left Black people almost as vulnerable to white supremacist fascist violence as we were after union troops abandoned us at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Hence, we, as radical folks who help shape the thinking and actions of our families and communities, have to at least pay attention to what is at stake, even if we choose to sit out voting, and even if we are also preparing to defend ourselves in other ways. 

Even if we know the electoral arena has been bought off by the corporate oligarchs that are killing us, neglecting that terrain of struggle is inviting our enemies to attack us on that terrain. And we have too much riding on our movements to let them be smashed by fascists who just stroll right in without so much as camouflage. This doesn't mean we go volunteer for Demo-rat campaigns or whatever, because the risk of electoral politics is always that it saps our movement energies without giving us anything but empty promises. It is essential that we keep building our own movements outside that arena. That is the best place to put our energies. But while we're doing that, we must also keep an eye on the many ways the antiblack structure tries to shut down our movements. And electoral politics is one of those ways.

Different Times, Different Tactics

In struggle, many things are important; few things are essential. There are no essential differences between Biden's neoliberalism and Trump's right-wing fascism. Both are genocidal bourgeois settler-slaveholder ideologies, and, in fact, the fascism of Trump couldn't have emerged without the neoliberalism of both Demo-rats and the Repugnacans who have held office in recent decades and created the conditions that make amerikkka's settler-colonizers fertile for fascism. Trump and Biden are both essentially hetero-patriarchal imperialist neoliberal fascists. But the important distinction is between how they're going to kill Black, Indigenous, brown, and poor people:

1) Biden was never elected by having active klan-nazi elements as his base. Someone said, "I don't know if Trump is a white supremacist but i know the white supremacists think he's a white supremacist." Trump openly sends love messages to the right-wing white supremacist militias, including his recent "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!" Biden, for all his buddying up with segregationists in congress, still has had to work closely with Black, Indigenous, brown, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants, just by virtue of being a Demo-rat from the northeast of the u.s. imperial homeland. Trump feels no need to even pretend NOT to be a white supremacist, and even actively brings klan-nazi elements into policy-crafting governmental roles (like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, to name a few) and amplifies their messages within his base. Trump empowers, emboldens, and inspires the same motherfuckers i might have to fight LITERALLY TOMORROW to defend myself and my loved ones.

2) Additionally, while Biden advocated for more policing of Black communities and the 1994 crime bill that has incarcerated many Black men (including my loved ones), Trump not only supported so-called "tough-on-crime" policies from the sidelines -- but he also took out several full-page ads calling for the death penalty against the Exonerated Five from the 1989 Central Park incident. He has never apologized to these Black men for that and even doubled down on it after their innocence had been proven. And they could easily have been me and my loved ones.

3) Now with Trump's proto-genocidal "let-em-die" COVID-19 policy decimating Black and brown communities (whose stability has already been sapped by previous neoliberal policies), his rejection of scientific evidence of the need for humans (and especially amerikkkans) to slash our carbon emissions, and the fascists Trump defends who kill protesters at Black Lives Matter rallies, we clearly see how little Trump gives a damn about Black people's lives. (Well, i can't speak for everyone. Most of us do.) This is not to romanticize Biden. He will probably handle Black domestic concerns the way Obama handled things like Flint, Michigan: assuring everyone that the people saying "the water is poison" are just being dramatic. Biden will also likely handle police reform the way Obama did: forming task forces to research the problems while fundamentally leaving the police in power and without any accountability to the communities they harm. But the "let-em-die" COVID policy of Trumpism -- not just from Trump himself but also from other state officials like governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Ron DeSantis of Florida -- entails rejecting things like scientific knowledge and the coordination of resources between the different branches of government that i do not expect from a Biden administration.

4) Some major laws and legal rulings make up the modern u.s. administrative state and are now under threat from the new Trumpist right-wing court, including Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut (right to privacy), the National Labor Relations Act (legalized the formation of labor unions), Grutter/Gratz v. Bollinger (affirmative action), and countless environmental, food/drug safety, labor, and health laws and regulatory agencies. There is never a way to know for sure, but Biden appointees would be highly unlikely to dismantle this whole network of laws, at least in the short term.

This is not even an exhaustive list. But if these differences are important to you -- and in this moment they're definitely important to me -- then take a moment and at least try to vote. No telling if they'll count the vote, but if it costs little to do it, it's a good idea to shape the field on which we must struggle.

The performative aspects of the presidency -- like the dignity of the office or the "notches on the belt" of legislative initiative -- are less of my concern because i don't think that the u.s.a. has an ethical right to exist in the first place. This is to say that the u.s.a. is unique as a hub of global empire -- the anchor tenant of an unethical world system that consists of capitalism and antiblackness. It is unethical from its inception. There's no "dignified" way to force Indigenous people off their land, poison Black-majority cities, and dispatch police death squads. And "legislative achievements" like tax cuts and welfare reform don't count as achievements to me because all i can think of is the schools and children those tax cuts and "reforms" starve. So Biden might very well, like Obama, steer the slave ship more ably than trump, enabling a few more of us to die just a little more slowly. But that will never mean that the ship is heading in an ethical direction. It's still taking us to the slave market, to the slaughter. Obama took us to the slaughter, and Biden will do the same if he wins.

However, be all that as it may, Trump is tossing us overboard right now. And let's not delude ourselves: That's a more immediate threat, even if both Biden and trump are long-term threats to our existence. Yes, fascism emerges from neoliberalism, but that doesn't make them the same or both equally threatening to Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor folks in this moment. Trump's fascism is a vanguard movement of white supremacists, paving the way for future white supremacist fascists who will make trump look tame and "establishment" by comparison.

"Ruthless Killers"

Look, let me be honest: As of today, on the eve of election day, i don't even believe Biden will be president. Sure, Biden will likely win the nationwide popular vote. (Every poll i see summarized in the news predicts that.) But that would only matter if the u.s.a. were a democratic republic. (The u.s.a. is fundamentally a genocide, and that's what it returns to in moments when actual democratic processes threaten to interrupt or undermine that genocide.) Because of the electoral college, the popular vote is not what decides u.s. presidential elections, and Trump has been showing the world that he is going to take advantage of that fact by any means he can, both legal and illegal.

Months ago, he had his fundraiser-turned-postmaster Louis DeJoy disrupting the u.s. postal service mail processing capabilities, indicating impressive levels of foresight (not to mention the years-long efforts to force Ukraine to attack Biden's presidential prospects, the basis of trump's impeachment). More than a week before the death of u.s. supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, trump was already floating names of people he might appoint to his third supreme court slot, the crowning achievement of his first-term judicial appointments, of which there have been hundreds, thanks to the Repugnacan senate. He has been regularly feeding racist red meat to his base and encouraging anti-masking protests in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And, of course, his let-em-die COVID response disproportionately victimizes those of us, including Black folks, who have traditionally voted against Repugnacans, something that, along with drastically reduced numbers of polling locations, seems calculated to further depress the turnout of voters who must stand in hours-long lines at the polls.

Of course, unlike his response to COVID, his plan to steal the election seems quite comprehensive, efficient, and well planned. So even though electoral turnout is actually shattering early voting records across the country (and, in some areas, early voting has already exceeded overall 2016 voting) in spite of the COVID risk, trump knows that he still has options to throw out thousands of ballots -- and the Demo-rats and his Repugnacan enablers won't stop him. It's economical for him to cheat because there are only about 20 counties in so-called battleground states that are going to make the decisive difference in this election. Twenty. 

Even if we suppose that voters get past all the long lines and voter IDs and other voter suppression laws and methods right-wingers have weaponized against us for at least the last decade, and even if the armies of lawyers trump is dispatching to those jurisdictions fail to convince the disproportionately conservative federal courts, including the u.s. supreme court on which conservative appointees now hold a super-majority -- there are definitely more than 20 groups who are energized to ram Biden campaign vehicles when Don Trump, Jr, says things like "have some fun." So, for people as morally vacuous as these motherfuckers, sending out 20 groups with guns to key polling locations in 20 swing states? -- shit, that's a juicy opportunity when another four years is on the line. And, of course, when there are police who are willing to do things like pepper-spray elders in wheelchairs on a nonviolent march to the polls to vote, police who are caught preparing to do even worse by training each other in military doctrines ("be a ruthless killer") that quote Robert E. Lee and Adolf Hitler -- we are going to have to struggle on our own, because the Repugnacans and Demo-rats will condemn our defense of our right to vote, just like Biden and trump condemned our responses to police violence against us, including the recent Philadelphia police murder of Walter Wallace.

In Defense of Our Movements

I'm prepared to be very wrong about my election prediction, but I don't think that matters anymore. My point is, vote, if you're going to, but please don't think that will be enough. Trump forces our hands. Sooner rather than later, we have to act.

First, if we are voting, we have to check a box on a ballot that might help us defend ourselves against the existential threat Trump poses to us. (If you're lucky enough to live in a state trump can't possibly win, there are several left third parties that can use your support.)

Next, and most essentially, we have to use whatever means are necessary to defend ourselves against whatever shit goes down after that. Be prepared for something to go down. There are many signs that it will. These motherfuckers are coming for us.

Finally, please, let us organize our freedom movements for long-term struggle with renewed purpose. I can't offer suggestions on groups, but if you attend a local protest against police terrorism, you might find that a good place to meet like-minded folks you can build with. We need to work with the many groups on the left that are organizing grassroots independent (i.e., NOT corporate-funded) parties that empower Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor people in the long term. Remember, not all parties are bound to electoral political parties, and ours cannot afford to have their energies sapped by electoralism. The fact that we must sometimes rely on a candidate like Biden in the short term to fend off the threat of trump is not an invitation to adopt a "lesser-evil" politics strategy. It's an indication that trump is so bad that even non-voting folks like me are saying, "We gotta get this motherfucker outta here before he kills us!" We must survive pending revolution.

But creating the kinds of politics that will address our unmet needs cannot start in the electoral arena, which repeatedly shows us that it is too compromised with corporate capitalism and antiblackness to ever be about our freedom. We gotta start our own groups at the local level. And, as political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz advised in his seminal essay "Black Fighting Formations," it is essential that, from the beginning, we give serious consideration to what aspects of our movements must be underground and what aspects need to be aboveground.

We are still trapped behind the barbed wire, and "lesser-evil" electoral politics helped get us here. Please don't just vote; organize to defend our communities against the genocidal right-wing fusion of police and paramilitary. Organize to build the community networks of care and education and resources that our movements need. Nothing besides us will save us. While we mark the ballot with one hand we can grip the pistol with the other. If nazis are rolling through our hoods, only one of those tools might save us.