THEANGEL&THEGAMBLER
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The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation | Jacobin
After decades of frustration with what Selmafilmmaker Ava DuVernay calls “white savior” narratives, antiracist progressives appear to have settled on an ideologically more appealing alternative — what we might call the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.
In 1969, after Brown had aligned himself politically with President Richard M. Nixon, he released the paean to black self-help, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).” In the nearly half-century since, especially during the last two decades of neoliberal hegemony, that self-help perspective has become the righteous antiracists’ standard for cultural criticism and political judgment.
The commentary around two very different 2012 films: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln provide a striking example. It concerned the relative merits of each movie’s characterization of the source of Emancipation. Django Unchainedwas a live-action cartoon in which the entirely fictional story of a rebellious slave is the prop of Tarantino’s homage to the spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas the Spielberg production aspires to historically faithful, or at least respectful, examination of Lincoln’s desperate effort to pass the Thirteenth Amendment — which abolished slavery — through Congress before the hostilities ended.
That so many critics and commentators nevertheless were inclined to compare these two films indicated that the question of how slavery’s abolition should be narrated had become disconnected from concern with the actual history and politics of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather, the controversy centered on the centrality of black people’s “agency” in the story of Emancipation. That is how juxtaposition of Tarantino’s cartoonish fantasy to a film with historical pretensions like Lincoln could ever seem reasonable.
Exploring the story of Emancipation — or the nature of slavery for that matter — was subordinate to an ideological program of racial recognition, validation of the depths and pandemic extent of white racism and celebration of black overcoming.
The controversy reduced to whether a film focusing on Lincoln’s role in pushing the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress objectionably overlooked — even denied — the contributions of black slaves to their own “self-emancipation.” In Spielberg’s film,according to the Nation’s Jon Wiener, “old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom.” To polish off the comparison, Wiener observes, “In Tarantino’s [film], a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.”
As Wiener’s bumper sticker analysis makes clear, this debate wasn’t really about how slavery ended in the United States. It was about how it would seem most gratifying now to want slavery to have ended. That very presentist concern underlies the repeated insistence ofLincoln’s critics that Lincoln didn’t free the slaves and that they instead “freed themselves.” But, putting to one side for a moment the issue of historical accuracy, that is a questionable view even by the standard of honoring black Americans’ agency and autonomous action.
In that light it is interesting to consider Edward Zwick’s 1989 filmGlory and how it throws this change into bold relief. Glory — which may be, from the standpoint of egalitarian sensibilities, the greatest film ever made on the “Civil War” — tells the story of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the all-black regiment that famously led an unsuccessful assault on South Carolina’s heavily entrenched Fort Wagner. It was this same fort that defended Charleston, the birthplace of the master class’s insurrection, from seaborne attack.
Although Glory depicts the regiment as made up largely of runaway slaves, the Fifty-Fourth was comprised only of free black volunteers and — by official stipulation — commanded by white officers. In addition to the story of the Fifty-Fourth in general, Glory also focuses on the story of Robert Gould Shaw, the young scion of a prominent family of Boston abolitionists who commanded the regiment and died in the attack on Fort Wagner.
In fact, Shaw’s character is the central thread running through the film, and Zwick — and Matthew Broderick in the role of Shaw — affectingly show the young officer’s ambivalences, limitations, and growth into an effective regimental commander and resolute advocate for his troops as well as in his convictions of the equal humanity of black people. As he writes in a letter to his mother: “We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written but which will presently be as enviable and as renowned as any.”
However, the story is not only — or even principally — about Shaw.Glory’s power as a film is that it captures that particular historical moment when the military action to suppress the slaveholders’ insurrection openly condensed as a war to destroy slavery and the crucially important role that black men played in creating that moment and seeing its promise through to fruition. Zwick also uses the war film’s convention of the brothers-in-the-foxhole narrative to good effect in giving the black soldiers individuality, depth, and breadth.
When Driving Miss Daisy came out, I was shocked, as I assumed there was only one thing a movie like that could be, but I found it a little difficult to imagine that that film could be so highly touted at the end of the 1980s. So I polled people I knew who had seen it — including several whose views I had trusted up until that point and several who had lived through the Jim Crow era as adults — concerning my skepticism, only to be reassured that it wasn’t that film at all.
So I went to see it in the theater, and within the first ten minutes I realized that of course it was that film. There was nothing else it possibly could have been. The master trope of Driving Miss Daisy is the development of a personal relationship between mistress and servant that screens out — though I’m sure the film’s director and advocates would prefer “transcends” — the mundane realities of class and racial hierarchy within which that intimacy was structured.
Driving Miss Daisy left such a lingering bad taste in my mouth that I took what was for me the unusual step of going back to the theater within a week or so to see Glory, hoping that the vicarious experience of black men taking up arms against slavery would cleanse my palate. It did that and much more.
The punch line of this personal account is not simply that I appreciated Glory as an antidote to Driving Miss Daisy. More than that, it’s something of a cautionary tale about perspectives that reduce political concerns to whether or not the oppressed or the “marginalized” are able to express their agency. Driving Miss Daisy is all about the agency of the two central characters. And that agency is enacted up close and personal, in a world in which there are only personal transactions between individuals and their mutual regard.
But we can envisage such a world only to the extent that concern with individual action and relationships blocks from view or overrides the structures of inequality rooted in political economy — whether expressed through racial hierarchies or not — that constrain the sphere of personal interaction. We have no sense whatsoever of driver Hoke’s life outside of his employment in Miss Daisy’s service or of what would have to have been the stark differences in their material circumstances.[/QUOTE]
In The Help the maids live where they live and are poor as a matter of fact. The arc of the narrative bends toward their empowering themselves by finding their individual voices, not improving their material conditions. And at no point does the white ingénue Skeeter — as she forms bonds of friendship, learns the maids’ perspectives and advocates for their voices — ever connect their poverty with her own class’s wealth and power.
Thus the film’s happy ending resolves to an equivalence posited between Skeeter’s departing Jackson for New York and the uncertain challenge of seeking her fortune in the publishing industry and the maid Aibileen’s walking off equally cheerfully toward the exciting challenges of an uncertain future given to her by the opportunity of unemployment.
The Help is thus an expression of its historical moment. It is no longer necessary to obscure the asymmetries of social and economic power that separate masters and servants, like what was done in Driving Miss Daisy, in order to have a feel-good story. A multiculturalist lameness trivializes recognition of class hierarchy as respect for “difference,” yet another way in which fetishizing agency is at bottom a Thatcherite project.
The psychobabbling bromides that elevate recognition and celebration of black agency rest on an ideological perspective that in practical terms rejects effective black political action in favor of expressive display. It is the worldview of an element of the contemporary black professional stratum anchored in the academy, blogosphere, and the world of mass media chat whose standing in public life is bound up with establishing a professional authority inspeaking for the race. This is the occupational niche of the so-called black public intellectuals.
The torrent of faddish chattering-class blather and trivial debate sparked by Michael Eric Dyson’s recent attack on Cornel West in theNew Republic illustrates the utter fatuity of this domain, as if there were any reason to care about a squabble between two freelance Racial Voices with no constituency or links to radical institutions between them.
In an illustration of what this game is all about, the Nation, sensing space for competing brands, projected some Alternative Black Voices into this circus of spurious racial representation in a piece entitled “6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics.’ ”
Twenty years practically to the week before publication of Dyson’s essay, I took stock of what was then the newly confected category of the Black Public Intellectual and noted that the notion’s definitive irony was that its avatars were quite specifically not organically rooted in any dynamic political activity and in fact emerged only after opportunities for real connection to political movements had disappeared. Nor were the “public intellectuals” connected to any particular strain of scholarship or criticism.
Rather, their status was no more than a posture and a brand. By the early 2000s, it was possible to see young people entering doctoral programs with their sights on the academy as a venue for pursuing careers as public intellectuals — i.e. among the free-floating racial commentariat. And that was before the explosion of the blogosphere and Twitterverse, which have exponentially increased both avenues for realizing such aspirations and the numbers of people pursuing them.
But the politics enacted in those venues is by and large an ersatz politics, and the controversies that sustain them are by and large ephemeral, vacant bullshyt — the “feud” between Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks, whether black people were dissed because Selmawasn’t nominated for/didn’t win enough Oscars, and so on.
In the context of this sort of non-stop idiotic bread and circuses — and this may be an apt moment to remind that the blogosphere is open to any fool with a computer and Internet access — it is good to reflect on one of the crucial moments in American history when the linking of social and political forces presented a clear choice between egalitarian and inegalitarian interests, and masses of black people joined with others to strike a consequential blow for social justice and to wipe the scourge of slavery from the United States.
No, it wasn’t a final victory over inequality — it didn’t usher in a utopian order, and the greatest promises opened by the triumph were unfulfilled or largely undone. But it was one of the most important victories that egalitarian forces have won, along with those of the twentieth-century labor, civil rights, and women’s movements, and it is worth reflecting on it and the ways it changed the country for the better.
That struggle against the slaveholders’ insurrection, along with those latter movements, also underscores the fact that the path to winning the kind of just world to which a left should aspire requires building a politics that seeks, as the old saying goes, to unite the many to defeat the few. Any other focus is either unserious or retrograde.