EPISODE #27: The Personal Side of Radical Political Organizing

 

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G challenges O to think less about the political theory of organizing for a moment and think more about the personal events in his life that brought him to identify with other oppressed people and organize to fight back against that oppression. G & O share stories from their experiences that helped radicalize them and the love and joy they experience in struggle.

Episode #26: FILM REVIEW: "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and August Wilson's Black Life

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The brothers review the film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe, written by Ruben Santiago-Hudson based on August Wilson's 1982 play, starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final (and arguably greatest) screen performance before his unfortunate death at the age of 43. The brothers meditate on August Wilson's body of work, which chronicles stories from working-class Black people and which the brothers definitely plan to come back to in future podcast episodes. They try to address the question Wilson once asked to one of his elders: How did you live to be 70 as a Black man in America? The brothers also relate some stories passed down from their own family histories, stories that some of the people in Wilson's stories might relate to, and consider how the isolation of young Black people from their elders is one way the antiblack structure works to sap the capacity of Black resistance.

Episode #25: FILM REVIEW: Black Fatherhood and the Movie "Fences"

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Today, for Father's Day, the brothers ask, how is Black fatherhood possible in an antiblack world? In other words, how do new and evolving forms of antiblackness and capitalist oppression change and strain the relationships between Black fathers and their children? And how, in this changing but still deadly context, can new forms of masculinity emerge? This review of the 2016 movie Fences, starring and directed by Denzel Washington, examines the web of relationships around Troy, a former Negro League baseball player in Black Pittsburgh of the 1950s. G & O talk about the relationships between Black parents and Black children. The brothers also explore the film's treatment of other themes, including the emotional labor of Black women, Black intergenerational trauma, and Black men's friendships. O reflects on a time he performed in a scene from this play.

Episode #24: Organizing to Survive Capitalism in the Time of Biden, Harris, and Trump

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How do we survive capitalism while organizing its end? Thinking about violent events like the Flint water crisis, the police murder of Breonna Taylor, or the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 have many Black radical activists asking: As we organize to bring down the oppressive capitalistic structure, are we preparing ways to amass the resources and capacities we as Black people will need to survive this genocidal structure in the meantime? In this episode, G & O begin to think through these sets of questions. The brothers recorded this episode shortly after the 2020 election was called. The celebrations of November, which would soon be followed with the horrors of January, led the brothers to reflect on that moment, even before white supremacist terrorists tried to violently overturn the election and murder government officials. What the brothers saw, and still see even after the January 6 attacks on the capitol, is a moment way bigger than the election. In this moment there is an opening, a need for big ideas in critical Black thought, including Black self-sufficiency and self-defense, Black conversations about the role of government, surviving within capitalism while working to destroy it, and the importance of radical leadership from the Black  poor and working class.

Episode #23: The Homelessness Crisis and Pandemic Capitalism

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In this episode, the brothers talk about homelessness and the looming lapse of the federal eviction moratorium. G talks about his experience being homeless with a family to take care of. The brothers originally recorded this episode before the Biden administration signed off on the one-time distribution of $1400 relief checks and extended the eviction moratorium by a few months. Most of it still applies because both of those acts of governmental largesse were temporary and did not come anywhere near solving the problem. And now, with a federal judge recently ruling the eviction moratorium unconstitutional, the problem is again being kicked down the road. But the fundamental problem is,  and has been, capitalism -- a genocidal system generated out of structural antiblackness and anti-Indigeneity. The brothers discuss alternatives to that genocidal system we live under.

Episode #22: Jailbreaking Black Thought from the Academy

 

Inspired by Karen Hunter and Greg Carr's YouTube conversations about jailbreaking knowledge from the academy, the brothers reflect on aspects of the academy that they can do without -- including classism and antiblackness. They think through how Black people might keep the irreplaceable functions of the academy (the production, conservation, and distribution of knowledge) while discarding the other bits. They discuss the kinds of knowledge Black people need in order to get free.

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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.