Category: Civil Rights

Same tricks, different decade.

Used in section this week: J. Edgar Hoover hones his later anti-civil-rights strategy as the FBI goes after Marcus Garvey. (In fact, the first black FBI agent was hired by Hoover to infiltrate Garvey‘s UNIA…what a victory for progress.) Speaking of which, if you haven’t been reading Caught in Between lately, CiB’s been collecting superlative black history links all month long, including items on Reconstruction, the Middle Passage, Juneteenth, Lynching, Harlem, and the Dred Scott Decision, among others. All worth a look, in February as in any other month.

xXx and Elizabeth.

I can already see the sparks fly. Garth of Dark Horizons reports on the movie pairing you’ve all been waiting for: Vin Diesel and Dame Judi Dench. I know the Pitch Black sequels are set in space, but hopefully they can squeeze in a scene of the two of them simultaneously screaming from out the front windsheld of a car. In other Dark Horizons news, along the lines of K-19, director Kathryn Bigelow is now working on a historical film about the Scottsboro case, which could be quite interesting.

Truth and Consequences.

Misread misanthrope or principled truthteller? Louis Menand and Leon Wieseltier battle over the legacy of George Orwell. Only recently in my readings (in Menand’s Metaphysical Club and James Livingston’s Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy) have I encountered this notion that the pragmatism of the Progressives (such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey) eventually leads to the same moral relativist conclusions as post-structuralism (in fact, Livingston argues that much of the postmodern devotion to figures like Foucault and Derrida is mainly a reflection of the European indifference to, if not ignorance of, American scholarship – James and Dewey came to the same philosophic conclusions decades earlier.) And, indeed, Herbert Croly’s 1909 The Promise of American Life, considered the bible of the Progressive moment, attacks abolitionism for much the same reasons as Louis Menand – that it was dangerous and destructive in its reliance upon absolute moral certainty. (Sadly, to say the progressives had a moral blind spot when it came to America’s racial dilemma is an understatement.) But, then again, the “prophetic pragmatism” of Cornel West is cleary infused with a moral sense that is based on certain underlying truths. (“Like Foucault, prophetic pragmatists criticize and resist forms of subjection, as well as types of economic exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination. But these critiques and resistances, unlike his, are unashamedly guided by moral ideals of creative democracy and individuality.”) So, I’d say that, while I fall somewhere between Menand and Wieseltier on the subject of Orwell, and while I usually find Wieseltier to be a pompous ass (his own attack on Cornel West comes to mind), in the end I side with those who say keep the aspidistra flying. To paraphrase Orwell, all truths may in fact be equal, but some truths are more equal than others. It may involve some intellectual doublethink, but one can recognize that a truth may have some basis in subjectivity and still hold it – and fight for it – with conviction.

Treading Lightly Amid the Palmettos.

John Edwards and the rest of the Democratic field try to figure out how to manage the NAACP boycott of South Carolina. Sigh…between Bob Jones University and the Stars ‘n Bars, it’s always a bit embarrassing to hail from South Carolina in an election year. Hopefully a day will someday come when the post-Strom Palmetto State will finally get its act together.

Gangs of Helms Deep.

Also from Follow Me Here, Salman Rushdie compares gang violence in Two Towers and Gangs of New York to developments in Iraq. Interesting points, but did we see the same Scorsese film? In both the initial and final gangland scenes, there’s hardly any sense of moral ambiguity. To the contrary, as I noted in this post, the Irish (Neeson/DeCaprio) forces are portrayed exclusively as maligned, freedom-loving immigrants, while the Nativist (Day Lewis) gang are portrayed as racist brutes. You’d never get the sense in Scorsese’s film that it was the former group that actually unleashed virulent hatred upon the city’s African-American population in July of 1863. I suspect this reading of Gangs has more to do with the close friendship between Rushdie and “The Band that Built America.” Or perhaps Rushdie saw the longer Scorsese cut of the film, which is rumored to be more nuanced.

Mississippi Burning.

On the other side of the aisle, the GOP starts thinking harder about dumping their own embarrassing baggage, despite Trent Lott’s BET plea. If only Lott had taken a page from his idol and merely pretended to be remorseful from the get-go. Update: With Dubya on the sidelines, pundits are putting it in the fridge: Lott will be removed from the Senate leadership. Who will replace him is still up in the air.

The Good Old Days.

After a flurry of Internet criticism, GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott is forced to apologize for his paean to segregation at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, a paean which echoed his prior support for such racialist organizations as the Council of Conservative Citizens. So, were Lott’s remarks really a “poor choice of words” or a brief glimpse of something more sinister in the Majority Leader’s character? You be the judge.