My own national book awards

The long list of National Book Award nominees for nonfiction for 2014 was released on September 17. It came to my attention when a friend on Facebook pointed out the limited diversity of the list--just one woman, and no people of color (more accurately, one, Anand Gopal).  But the lack of diversity is just one of the list's problems. If the major goal of non-fiction is to provide insight into important questions facing the larger society--certainly I think this is the goal--the list is almost a complete failure. Excluding Gopal's book, which sheds light on how Afghanis have experienced the American occupation of Afghanistan, I can't see how any of the books on the list (I admit I haven't read them) could qualify. Some of the list reads like a parody of current publishing cliches. There is neo-gilded age kitsch called "The Innovators." There is presidential hagiography, the main form of popular history in the US. Apparently we are moving on from Lincoln to FDR. If you pay any attention to these things, you will not be surprised that the words "at war" follow the president's name in the title. Another author has written a memoir apparently focused on her dysfunctional parents, not at all an overcrowded genre, and hailed as a breakthrough because it is in cartoon form ("the first cartoonist honored by the National Book Awards in the adult categories"). I would add, only a couple of decades after "Maus." A journalist travels around China in another title--I'm guessing he meets ambitious people who aren't too worried about the government, discovers there is a lot of corruption and pollution, and that inequality is growing. Three titles form a mini-treatise on the religious views of the nominating committee. "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" sounds like pushback against Tea Party nonsense that postulates the founding fathers as fundamentalist Christians. But then "The Heathen School: A story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic" sounds somewhat sympathetic to Christian efforts to educate a multicultural cast of "heathens", demonstrating that the nominating committee is not rigidly anti-religion. And then E.O. Wilson's "The Meaning of Human Existence" offers a scientist's reflections on deep philosophical questions, showing that these sorts of meditations are not the monopoly of the religious. Rounding out the list are titles on Tennessee Williams and Paris under the German occupation seemingly plucked at random from a list of respectable sounding books published this year. What a dismal, unexceptional list. Excluding Gopal, efforts to engage with the major problems of our time are practically absent,  unless you want to believe the culture war between the religious and secular still constitutes the major dynamic.And the sad thing is this has been a great year for non-fiction works. I therefore offer the following list of books that should have been honored. It is not especially counterintuitive. A number of these books have gotten a fair share of attention. Two hit the bestseller list. This only raises more questions about the official list.(disclaimer--I haven't read all of the books below. I don't claim to agree with everything any of these authors say)

1. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the 21st Century I wasn't able to find rules on the National Book Award's website. I certainly hope, for their sake, that the rules forbid authors based outside the US. How else to explain the absence of the unchallengeable non-fiction book of the year? Simultaneously a serious economic history, an endorsement of a populist prognosis that the rich seem to be getting almost continuously richer at the expense of everyone else, and a bestseller, Picketty played a key role in returning inequality to public debate, after it had receded with the demise of Occupy.

2. Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776 Horne's depiction of the American colonialists as simultaneously obsessed with expanding slave society and terrified of the prospect of slave revolt is not easily shaken. His narrative culminates with a fresh approach to the American revolution, as a rebellion against the prospect of abolition.

3. Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge Perlstein's history of the US in the seventies generated unfounded charges of plagiarism. His real crime--chipping away at the halo around Ronald Reagan, the signal historiographical achievement of the right wing in the last thirty years.

4. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything A very timely intervention putting both questions about the role of the state and the question of capitalism on the climate change agenda. 

5. Simon Head, Mindless:Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber Largely neglected, perhaps because of its unfortunate subtitle. A serious examination of the transformation of the labor process by computer business systems, that also highlights how these systems migrated out from the military. A worthy successor to Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capitalism."

6. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity A true story of slave rebellion that inspired fiction by Herman Melville provides a window into the relationship between slavery and capitalism.

7. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism  Now famous as a book The Economist declared was too hard on slaveholding whites, this also illuminates the relationship of slavery and capitalism. A big topic getting very belated attention is worth two nods on the list.

8. Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction That the Civil War presaged the total war of the twentieth century is a cliche; this book left me convinced that we should think of the wave of reactionary violence after the Civil War, ultimately successful in defeating the push for African American rights, as a precursor to the twentieth century reactionary terror in Spain, Indonesia, Chile, etc.

9. Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars Provides actual historical background that can be used to put the current attacks on teachers' unions and public schools in context.

10. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States Rather overdue telling of American history from the perspective of its victims. Hopefully this just released book will reopen a question that the American left has quietly abandoned.

11. Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City  Among other things, this ethnographer witnessed the police kill a man and falsify a report about it. Her subject--the relationship of young African American men to the justice system that torments rather than serves them--is crucial.


I could go on. There are many books being produced that develop insights into key historical and social questions of our time. These are books whose goal is not to score a few academic points, but to foster debate among a much broader public. Some of them have actually succeeded in doing so. I don't really understand the case for honoring the non-fiction on the long list of the National Book Awards as opposed to my list. Perhaps they have some other criteria. Maybe they have a more aestheticized understanding of non-fiction, in which what matters is the artfulness of the prose and the narrative structure. This sounds like a terrible idea to me. But even so, such a list probably wouldn't include celebrations of dot com entrepreneurs and presidents. Those books are not the next "In Cold Blood." Rather, the list seems to be saying "don't raise important questions. Keep producing grist for the NPR mill. We will honor you anyway." 

Gaza to Ferguson

One of the most heartening developments connected to the uprising in Ferguson has been connections made with the resistance in Gaza--connection made by people in Ferguson, in Gaza, and around the world. This connection reignites the internationalism of 2011--"Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall" but at a different level. Whereas the rebellion of the squares in 2011 was based on growing alarm among the highly educated that they no longer had a decent future (notwithstanding the huge differences between the political context in the Arab countries and the West), Ferguson/Gaza represents the revolt of those who have always been aware that they have no future.

The connection between Ferguson and Gaza has been made partly because of concrete manifestations, most notably the training of the police chief in Ferguson in Israel. Here I will describe three ways in which the two situations paralleled each other. First is the basic context. These are revolts of people who have basically been declared redundant, in the way of the prosperous people who believe they have every right to whatever they want. They are not first and foremost a proletariat in the marxist sense--unemployment is too high to use strikes as a primary weapon, nor do those who are employed occupy a particularly strategic place in production. This does not mean that they are not exploited--Ferguson is what it is partly because of the looting of the subprime era, and the conflict over Gaza is in part a conflict over control of resources. As well in Ferguson, part of the larger picture of policing is an effort by the city government to use motor vehicle fines to fund itself--in effect squeezing an impoverished population because more conventional revenue sources--taxes from property or business--are less and less viable. They are shunted to the margins, where the powerful hope they will remain quiescent. In return, they are offered virtually nothing. Whether one calls the places they are forced into occupied territories, slums, ghettos, refugee camps or prisons, at this point, there is little effort to dress them up in the bunting of consumerism or progress. Instead, the powerful basically believe they cannot make trouble, so there is hardly reason for the sort of elaborate work (and often dollars) needed to maintain hegemony. This situation, to be regarded as human trash, exploited sometimes, but often just pushed aside, is the first parallel between Gaza and Ferguson. And this helps clarify what just happened. In both places, this situation has been resisted. The invisible made themselves visible. And their foes were not able to put them back in their place.

This brings us to the second major parallel between Gaza and Ferguson. Basically, both Israel and the forces of order in Ferguson lost their respective battles. Israel visited horrific destruction on Gaza. Over 2,000 people were killed, thousands more maimed, tens of thousands left homeless. The economic infrastructure was destroyed. A high tech progrom was carried out, involving terrifying robo-calls to imminent victims of drones, and hateful messages scrawled on the walls of destroyed homes. But Hamas’ capacity to fire projectiles seems intact. The tunnels seem more menacing than they were perceived at the beginning of the conflict. Dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed, a small fraction of the Palestinian death toll, but too many for the Israeli public. And the effects on consciousness further afield--within Israel, in the West Bank, in the United States, and in the rest of the world--are largely opposite what the Israeli leadership hoped for, unless it has completely lost its mind (More about this below).

In Ferguson, it was the appearance of militarized police that catapulted this story onto the front pages. But it was also striking that the heavy handed show of overwhelming force failed to repress the protests. The contrast with Occupy Wall Street was stark. Occupy gained its footing because of political fumbles that resulted in a failure to promptly confront it. By the time Bloomberg was ready to go ahead with a “park cleaning,” OWS had already gathered sufficient steam and liberal allies to force him to call it off. But when a militaristic police force showed up in the middle of the night, the park was easily cleared. It was a devastating blow from which the movement did not recover. More than a few OWS sympathizers concluded that consequential protest in the US would be met with overwhelming force and quashed. In Ferguson, not only did the militarized police fail to stop the protests. The arrival of the “good cop,” Ronald Johnson, also did not seem to slow the momentum. Nor did the mobilization of the National Guard. At this point the protests appear to be declining, not so much because they have been repressed but because these sorts of mobilizations don’t last forever. There are some promises from the Attorney General and the FBI to look into the killing of Michael Brown. I suspect many people in the immediate area and quite far afield are concluding that this sort of protest is effective and possible.  And, as with Gaza, we must consider the opinions of actors further afield. Here too, the protestors won big.

Lets look first at the larger battle for hearts and minds around the Isreal/Palestine conflict. Israel itself has been sliding towards a vicious, intolerant, racist madness depicted by Max Blumenthal in his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Israel’s foundation is racist, but the polity has long had quite a bit of space for dissenters and, not so long ago, there was a substantial, even if lightweight, peace movement. During the first weeks of the assault on Gaza, demonstrations were small, didn’t have many Jewish participants, and were met by terrifying mobs out for blood. By the end, there was a modest revival of the old peace movement, and larger demonstrations. Israel has a ways to go before getting back to the inadequate normal of the nineties, but these cracks haven’t appeared for a while. Still, it is hard to be too optimistic about developments within Israel. But then there is the situation in the West Bank. Lately the West Bank has epitomized acquiescence to the status quo, as Gaza has epitomized resistance. Abbas has followed a cautious strategy (if that is the right word for it), trying not to offend the US or Europe much. And this strategy has not been effectively challenged from below. But a couple of weeks after the onslaught on Gaza began, the largest demonstrations in years were held in the West Bank. Now we read that the West Bank may be on the verge of a social explosion. Further afield, in places like London and South Africa, some of the largest demonstrations  ever in solidarity with Palestine were held.

And then there is the situation in the United States. Notwithstanding the unanimity of the Senate in affirming its support for Israel, notwithstanding all the ridiculous lies and twisted arguments promoted in the media, the space for dissent around US support for Israel, already increasing in the last ten years, widened substantially. Two developments were particularly noteworthy. One was the direct action to “block the boat,” and prevent a ship carrying Israeli goods from unloading in the Bay Area. It represented a heightened level of confrontation and confidence for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The other was action taken by Jewish Voices for Peace to protest at Jewish Federation offices in several cities. This literally marks the arrival of activism and controversy about support for Israel within the formal organizations of American Jewry. This is a very significant development. The unanimous support for Israel by these organizations has been a huge obstacle to change in the US. The left extreme of American rabbis (apart from an eccentric Hassidic group) has typically been to use wiggle words, wring hands, and say “we hope there can be peace.” The emergence of J Street, a pro-Israel group which took a little distance from the traditional Israel Lobby, AIPAC, was a welcome development, but it was too limited in its dissent to make much of a difference. In theory, a coalition to end military aid to Israel and transform the US relation to it could be built around the Jewish community; in practice, liberal groups (labor unions, African American leaders, liberal churches, etc) have been fearful of undermining their relationship with Jews. The sooner the unanimity is broken, then, the better. Two signs of the time--an article in an Israeli newspaper warns that “Israeli Apartheid Week” held on many college campuses the last few years is likely to turn into “Israeli Apartheid Year” this coming school year, as BDS activism picks up. And the New York Times just published an anti-zionist Op Ed piece that could appear on Electronic Intifada or MondoWeiss. For those familiar with the perspective of those three publications, and notwithstanding the Times editorial page’s formal commitment to offering diverse perspectives that its editors do not endorse, this is a “hell freezes over” moment. At the very least real wariness about the motives and actions of Israel is becoming dominant among liberal public opinion, and I think organizations are likely to become more confident about expressing some need for US policy to change. Progressive politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Bill de Blasio, who have back-burnered this issue when not expressing outright support for Israel, are likely to find themselves under fire. Few in the US will say this out loud, but the increasing space for criticism of Israel can be traced back to the resistance posed by Hamas. If not for that resistance, and Israel’s monstrous and ineffectual response, Palestine would remain mired at too low a spot on the progressive radar to fight the steep obstacles facing those who want change.

Ferguson is triggering similar changes in public opinion and the space for activism. The image of the criminal or radical African American male has been a weapon in the reactionary arsenal for decades (actually centuries). I well remember the reaction to the looting during the New York blackout of 1977 (in retrospect, an indirect response to the austerity imposed in response to the fiscal crisis of the early 70s) occuring in the midst of a decade when the "Black mugger" was very prominent in the popular imagination. “Those people are on welfare, but it is still not enough for them, and they defy the logic of a civilized society by looting." Soon the US elected a president endorsed by the KKK, as well as his successor, whose defining campaign ad was also the vilification of the African American male as criminal, in this case Willie Horton. The momentum of this stereotype was devastating to the African American community, which was incarcerated at ruinous rates. It was also destructive to any hopes for a broad coalition to challenge the power and concentrated wealth of what Occupy memorably tagged “the 1%.”

For its part, as it revived class-based populism, Occupy basically evaded race. In fairness, Occupy showed solidarity with Troy Davis and others like him. But it can’t be said that it attempted to take on the question of police persecution of communities of color very directly, except somewhat at the end as it was looking for allies to challenge police repression. The power of the stereotype of the black criminal was not simply in its ability to mobilize those on the right; it also coursed through liberal circles, where, again going back to the seventies, resentment among White liberals that Blacks did not appreciate White liberal leadership or were impinging on White public patronage networks was rife. And, not least, it helped paralyze African American politics. I remember once hearing Bill Fletcher on Democracy Now!, discussing the aftermath of the acquittal of police officers who had killed Sean Bell. The New York Times had noted (a little giddily, I thought), that there were no riots or unruly demonstrations. Fletcher said that to understand the muted response, one had to understand the fear of crime within the Black community.

Clearly, something has changed. If we look at the chain of Troy Davis-Trayvon Martin-Michael Brown we see ascending public anger within the African American community, but also more widely, as most solidarity rallies in these cases have been mixed race. Although the old tactics of vilifying Michael Brown’s character, denouncing “violent” protesters, and even unironically invoking “outside agitators” were all pulled out, none seemed to stick much. This is not to underestimate continuing resistance to confronting racism, even in its most violent manifestations at the hands of the police; only to note that the terrain seems more open for challenge than it has in some time. Particularly notable was the migration of the term “the militarization of the police” from the margins to mainstream publications. Although many people on the left justifiably worry that the "militarization" question will obscure ongoing racism at the hands of police with ordinary weapons, "militarization of the police" has disrupted the high esteem of the police among the American public, politicians, and media more than any time I can remember.

In thinking about this opening, it is worth noting the diversity of approaches on display in Ferguson. While the response to the Rodney King verdict was a five day riot, from the start in Ferguson there have been large conventional demonstrations. These demonstrations produced the memorable slogan “hands up/don’t shoot” (reportedly Michael Brown’s last words) and the image of collectively raising hands above heads. But there was also the more militant practice of pushing back against the police, looting, etc. It was probably the latter that intensified the overreaction by the police that consolidated Ferguson as an international story. Ferguson is actually only the latest in a series of unruly community responses to police shootings (a number of whose victims were Latino or white) in the last few years in places including Anaheim, Durham, Albuquerque, and East Flatbush. It was only a matter of time before one of these situations broke through. To explain Ferguson, some observers have pointed to the mismatch between the demographics of the police force (almost entirely white) and the population, while others have noted the novelty of trying to repress riotous behavior in suburbs. Regardless, it should be apparent that it resonated in places quite different--places with more diverse police forces or "traditional" urban neighborhoods.

And now that it has broken through... It is clear the case has generated intense reflection within the African American community, particularly among younger people. To some degree, Ferguson seemed to mark the end of an era of leadership epitomized by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, neither of whom was able to capture the spirit of the uprising and point a way forward. Ferguson has generated a huge response on traditionally African American campuses, even though it is the middle of the summer. It has also spread to additional campuses for the Monday August 25 Hands Up Walk Out action. There have also been protests, some peaceful, others a little unruly, although none rising (or sinking, depending on ones perspective) to the status of “riot” in numerous cities. Pictures I’ve seen suggest multiracial crowds.

Waves of protest matter, but one of the more poorly understood ways they matter is to baptize people, through direct action, into enduring political commitment. This only occurs with a small portion of the protesters, but they become the core that pushes additional movements forward. Looking around, they may find that there are already budding movements in the African American community around foreclosures, education, low wage workers as well as a number of criminal justice issues. Indeed, it was apparently a core of activists in these movements in Ferguson who organized many of the demonstrations about Michael Brown. Although questions of police, and trying to focus an agenda into a couple of demands that might make a difference is likely to be the highest priority, it does not require an advance degree in Marxism to recognize that the crisis in Ferguson and other places like it is much broader than questions of criminal justice. Perhaps the experiment with solidarity economics in Jackson Mississippi that was spearheaded by the election of Chockwe Lumumba and then tragically cut short by his death will be seen as a touchstone in the creation of a broader project. Need it be said that while one can reference all of these struggles within the African American community, they are simultaneously class based struggles of importance to people of all races in the United States?

There is no reason to be excessively optimistic about either Gaza or Ferguson. Even fairly minimal demands--fully lifting the siege of Gaza, or national legislation curtailing police abuse--is likely to prove elusive without struggle, and these sorts of steps are really only the beginning of a much larger struggle to actually achieve justice. Nor would I want the above to be read as minimizing the ongoing human tragedies in both places. But as we mourn the losses, we should also be cognizant of what has opened up. Israel’s mighty military and America’s militarized police proved ineffectual at subduing and repressing poorly armed or unarmed opponents. The movement of repression and resistance has opened up cracks in ideological structures that can and must be widened. It is a moment fraught with possibility.

Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement

We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja is as provocative as it sounds. Tracing a tradition of armed self defense of the African American community before, during and after the visible heyday of the Civil Rights Movement in the early sixties, the text suggests  a new way of understanding the relationship of that movement to the use of force. And it is not only a matter of self defense--at times violence was used to further the goals of the movement. The book unsettles a narrative, widespread in the media and influential on the left, that the movement achieved its goal of desegregating the South by taking the moral high road and through the use of non-violent civil disobedience discredited its opponents, whose cruelty was exposed. In turn, the federal government was impelled to act, passing crucial legislation, i.e. the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. These in turn promptly led to the dismantling of Jim Crow structures. In the context of the failure of the Democratic Party to embrace the movement by seating the Mississippi Freedom Party rather than the Jim Crow delegates at the 1964 and the turn towards more intractable economic issues and Black Power, the question of violence was opened, and growing numbers in the movement embraced it. Depending on ones outlook, this was either a tragic error that invited government repression or a step towards revolution, aborted by forces outside the movement's control.

Umoja's narrative is quite different. Armed self defense was a long standing tradition in the South, due to constant threat of white supremacist violence. Some Blacks would keep firearms in their homes and return fire from night riders and other white supremacist vigilantes. When Civil Rights activism started to accelerate, it was a necessity, due to the intensity of the violent response, the collusion of local law enforcement with white supremacists, and the failure of the federal government to consistently protect movement activists. Early on, there was interest in the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and their parallels to the struggles of African Americans. These anti-colonial struggles were all typically violent. In this context, strict codes of non-violence appear as an importation that always had limited support. And when non-violent groups were most active in the state, they often adopted to grim realities of Mississippi life by accepting offers for self-defense. The Deacons of Defense, an armed group in Louisiana, inspired imitators in Mississippi.

Although the Black Panthers didn't have much of a presence in Mississippi (but see below), Black nationalism does register in We Will Shoot Back. It's particular form is the Republic of New Africa (RNA), an effort to assert a nation composed of Black Belt regions in the South. Participants adopted armed self defense, which the author claims may have saved lives when the police confronted them over a dispute over land. In contrast to the other struggles described in We Will Shoot Back, the Republic of New Africa seems arbitrary and imposed from above. Although it never came close to its goal of a new country and pulling the United Nations in as arbitrar of the status of African Americans, it nevertheless raises similar questions as other efforts to create homelands for people, namely, how many African Americans would actually want to move to such a place, and what would happen to the indigeneous population already present?

During and after the RNA, civil rights struggles, backed by self defense, continued in Mississippi. Although there is a tendency to declare Jim Crow dead following passage of the Civil Rights Act, struggles continued into the late seventies around fairly basic demands such as having African Americans on the police force. These struggles were often powered by the emergence of the United League, a more militant alternative to the NAACP, which developed effective strategies involving boycotts in small cities backed by enforcement squads which would intimidate those within the African American community unwilling to support the boycotts (it might be noted here that many labor struggles in the US have used similar amounts of violent intimidation to enforce compliance).

Of the many stories of self defense recounted in We Will Shoot Back, three in particular stood out for me. In 1961, in Tylertown Mississippi, SNCC workers were told that several months before their arrival, the town had been terrorized by nightriders. Warnings that the terrorism must cease were ignored. African Americans apparently connected to a fraternal order captured one of the nightriders. His head was severed from his body and placed on a bridge as a warning to whites. The terrorism stopped.

The second incident occurred during a boycott in Aberdeen Mississippi in 1970. The context for the boycott was the suspension of two African American police officers for refusing to wear confederate symbols. Organizer Rudy Shields had a friend bring a contingent of Black males from another town to Aberdeen. Amidst rumors that the Black Panthers had arrived, the young men marched through town, striking fear among both white business owners who hoped to break the boycott and Black consumers who were not yet on board. The fear of militant, armed members of a revolutionary organization was more potent than the reality, and helped to strengthen the boycott.

The third incident happened amidst the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 70s. In Tupelo in 1978, the aforementioned United League led a boycott of White owned businesses around demands relating both to racism of the police and failures to expand economic opportunities for Blacks. Tensions rose as the Klan joined the battle to break the boycott. The city council tried to appear above the fray, equating the struggle for social justice with Klan terrorism and trying to stop the protests of both. In this fraught environment, the United League brought arms to demonstrations, and had scouts on rooftops searching for snipers and other dangers. Things came to a head on June 10, when the United League held a demonstration in downtown Tupelo, and the Klan held a counterdemonstration.  The UL's demonstration was more than twice as large. No violence occurred, but "local Blacks were emboldened by the greater numbers of UL protesters and took the opportunity of the Klan counterprotest to unleash verbal assaults at White supremacists for years of racial intimidation and terror." Sixty four year old Jack Clark told reporters "We used to have get off the sidewalks for White folks.. and them Klansmen, wooie boy, you didn't go messin' with them. But now I tell them, "go to hell.""  Umoja attributes the new attitude not only to the size of the United League demonstration, but to the presence of armed Blacks. The release from fear of the Klan provides a stark contrast with the more famous incident in Greensboro North Carolina, where Klansmen assassinated five members of the Communist Workers Party in 1979 at a "death to the Klan" rally.

Above I've summarized just a small amount of the content of We Will Shoot Back. I strongly recommend reading the entire book. I suspect most readers will find their understanding of the civil rights movement transformed. The image painted of Black activists willing to use force if necessary to protect themselves and advance their movement is quite different from the way the civil rights movement is usually portrayed. It is not that images of disciplined non-violent activists not being provoked by beatings, or communities singing in churches are wrong. Rather, these practices should be seen as part of the same movement that at times provided armed guards to movement activists and shot back at nightriders. Attempts to disentangle an early,  good, noble, non-violent movement from a later bad, nationalist, violent movement are a lot harder to do after reading this book. Apart from the chapter on the RNA, one of the most striking things is how consistently the protests described, protests which involved armed self-defense, were advancing demands that involved rudimentary reforms necessary to abolish segregation--firing the most racist police, attaining a minimal level of respect from city governments, ending the refusal of white businesses to hire African Americans. The RNA is something of an outlier, but for the most part, armed resistance was advancing basic goals of the civil rights movement. It is also important to note that movement activity of this sort persisted long after the civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-nineteen sixties. Jim Crow was not simply abolished by legislative fiat in Washington, but through a multitude of hard fought struggles in small cities all over the South.

Lou Reed, Israel, and Backlash Politics

Some people on the left will always find something to complain about, and, in the case of Lou Reed, the recently deceased founder of the Velvet Underground, it is the support for Israel expressed in the song "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim." The specific lyrics are "Jesse you say common ground/ Does that include the P.L.O?/ What about people right here, right now/ Who fought for you not so long ago?" Jesse refers to Jesse Jackson, who had run for president in the Democratic primaries in 1984 and 1988, just before "New York," the album including "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim" was released (in other words, the song was not very timely, as the Democratic primaries had already run their course, and Jackson would never again play as prominent a role in American life). "the people.. who fought for you not so long ago" refers to Jews who participated in the civil rights movement, as Reed goes on to sing "remember those civil rights workers buried in the ground." The song ends on an even more condescending note: "And Jesse you're inside my thoughts/As the rhythmic words subside/My common ground invites you in/Or do you prefer to wait outside?"  It's a terrible song, and mostly reveals that Lou Reed should have stayed away from politics, which he did nearly his entire career. No point celebrating his engagement with a typical bunch of causes appealing to liberal artists, or his anti-American misanthropy (another standard liberal trope), as John Nichols does. 

Reed was distinguished by writing about the demimonde he encountered in New York in a decidely private, apolitical manner. Based on their lyrical content, you would be hard pressed to realize that the four great Velvet Underground records were produced during the largest upsurge of protest in the US since the thirties (although there is that reference to "all you protest kids" in "Sweet Jane"). I remember reading somewhere that the Velvets played once with that other great proto-punk band, the MC5, universally regarded as far more political, and were horrified when the MC5's lead singer encouraged the crowd to rip the club up in the spirit of "tear the system down." Reed apparently got out on stage and said he appreciated the club and its owner for letting them play. This story reflects well on Reed, in my opinion.

Notwithstanding that "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim" is something of an outlier in Reed's career, I find it strangely fascinating. It does capture something about the mood among Jewish liberals following the sixties. It is not only a question of supporting Israel. At least as important is that Israel provides the context for Reed to disdain Jesse Jackson, as does Louis Farrakhan, elsewhere in the song. The moral structure of the song is an unintentional travesty of the guilt tripping often ascribed to Jewish parents--after all I've done for you ("remember those civil rights workers..."), you go and do this (talk to Arafat). He seems puzzled and angry that Jesse won't follow HIS lead: "My common ground invites you in.."  There is another Reed song that references similar themes. In "I Wanna be Black," a parody of white hipster's racial aspirations, he declares that one of the things he could do if his race were different is "fuck up the Jews." Here again, African American perceptions of Jews are imagined as alienating and divisive (I suspect the reference here is to tensions epitomized by the antisemitic poem read on the radio during the Brownsville Ocean Hill teachers' strike).

The outlook Reed delineates here was shared by a generation of liberal Jews. Those who gravitated to the far left did not share it, but they were a small minority.  The bigger picture is something like this. In the fifties and sixties, Israel was seen as a good liberal cause among American Jews (and even many others on the left). It was not that a big a deal for wider American politics. Jewish life in Israel had socialist overtones--think of the Kibbutz. There was no significant challenge to this perspective within the United States. Jews then, as now, were heavily represented in the liberal professions (teachers, social workers, social scientists) and the worldview fostered fit well with the expansion of New Deal/Great Society programs.Liberal Jews also supported the civil rights movement. Jews know what is it like to be an oppressed minority. Jews simply wanted all the doors of American society to be open to everybody, so talent could thrive (the Jews most directly involved in the civil rights movement may have seen things differently, since they often had a far left background). Then, in 1967, Israel triumphed militarily over its neighbors. This heightened a nationalist identification with Israel among American Jews. Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, the world left turned decisively against Israel, and support for the cause of Palestine self determination became increasingly prominent. This alone was baffling for many American Jewish liberals, who had no idea why people might have problems with Israel. The explanation was to mash Yassir Arafat, Adolf Hitler, the Arab public, Third World leftists into a sort of ur Anti-Semitism that is continually reinvented (hence, Kurt Waldheim's inclusion in the song). Add to this the equation of the Soviet Union with anti-semitism, and we can begin to see how US power would be embraced as the last best hope for Jews in the world.  Domestically, liberalism was also in crisis. The aforementioned teachers' strike epitomized liberal Jews declining ability to play a role as a senior partner to African Americans. Riots were sometimes perceived as targeting Jewish businesses in African American neighborhoods. The growing crisis of urban America was often portrayed as one in which African Americans had betrayed their alliance with liberal Jews, although, really, liberal Jews didn't show as much sympathy for concerns more oriented towards self determination, political power and economic struggles that characterized the late sixties and seventies.

This is a forgotten element of the backlash politics of the seventies and eighties. It is far more widely discussed that corporate America organized itself to destroy union and government regulatory power, that whites in the South moved into the Republican column, that working class whites in the North feared competition from African Americans or school integration, and that evangelical christianity reawakened as a political force allied with right wing Republicans. But the crisis of liberalism--and Jews then (to some extent, still) were a disproportionate, even leading element of American liberals--is often forgotten. 

Today, these politics mostly seem like ancient history. The torch at Dissent has passed from the likes of Michael Walzer, who would probably agree with "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim," to a younger generation, that, at a minimum, would be highly critical of Israel. It's been over ten years since Stephen Malkmus, an heir to Reed if ever there was one, sang "my Palestinian nephew got his face blown off in a dusty craft." As third world radicalism and Black nationalism have receded, so has paranoia over them. Given the greater prominence of Arab Americans, it's gotten a lot harder for college educated Americans, Jewish or not, to never learn how others see Israel.The turn to neoconservatism by some after 9-11 was less profound and intense than the earlier shift described above. The Nation still prints the rants of Eric Alterman, but they lack the heft of similar stuff written by Paul Berman in the 1980s. On the downside, neoliberal/neoconservative principles are now so entrenched in the US that it is not clear they require a living ideology to reproduce themselves.