![]() And so I’d always believed that if I was going to be part of what Moses was concerned about, which was deliverance and liberation, that I had to have a profound critique not just of Pharaoh, but the system that held Pharaoh in place. But there is this notion of “chesed.” The highest form of being human is to spread loving kindness and steadfast love to the orphan, the widow, the fatherless, the motherless, the oppressed. I do believe that there’s a lot of heterogeneous elements in the Hebrew Bible of genocide and patriarchy that we have to hold at arm’s length. I have a good time in the life of the mind, but I always try to use it as a form of weaponry for empowerment and ennoblement of vulnerable people, no matter who they are. James and Du Bois and Nkrumah and others, and Nandy and Ambedkar in India, Sister Roy from India. But it allowed me to become part of a larger conversation.Ĭ. I always remained a kind of Jesus-loving free black man, concerned about poor and working people. These were towering figures who just opened up intellectual life and shattered a lot of my parochialism. ![]() I was within the academy, so I was studying with John Rawls and Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum and Martin Kilson and Preston Williams, and then off to Princeton with Richard Rorty and Sheldon Wolin. It would be Marx, it would be William Morris, it would be William Hazlitt, it would be Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams, and then Edward Said. I fell in love with so many of the towering intellectual figures. So we remained very close, but I couldn’t join.īy the time I went to college, I was exposed to this magnificent wave of ideas and the life of the mind. But I had my own understanding of God and Jesus and struggle and revolution. They had strong critiques of the church, I can understand that. I could never join the party because I was a Christian and they were deeply secular. ![]() I was teaching in the prison, Norfolk Prison, where Malcolm X was. So I already had a critique of capitalism, and a critique of empire, and a critique of homophobia and patriarchy, because that’s what we talked about in the Black Panther headquarters. ![]() My great uncle had been lynched, and they wrapped him in the flag, so I associated that flag with something very ugly and vicious.īut when I came into intellectual growth, it was both rooted in the church - I’ve always viewed myself as a revolutionary Christian, in the legacy of Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer - and I worked closely with the Black Panther Party. I got kicked out of school for beating some kid up for refusing to salute the flag. She and dad really provided so much love and support it freed me up, because I was very much a gangster growing up. My mother’s still alive, eighty-eight years young, with the elementary school named after her. I’ll never be the human being my father was, he died twenty-six years ago. The highest honor I’ve ever had is being the second son of Irene and Clifton. So we’re really between a rock and a hard place, which is usually where the Left is in the last fifty years. We don’t want to follow any illusion, simply because we’re confronted with such an ugly fascist Frankenstein figure like Trump. ![]() That’s very important - but his neoliberal rule is still going to be tied to Wall Street, tied to capital, tied to militarism, tied to Africom, to deeply reactionary policies in the Middle East with Netanyahu and so forth. Now, I think with Biden what you have is someone who can stop the quick move toward American fascism. He is crushing workers, marginalizing women, scapegoating Mexicans, and Muslims, and Jews, and Black, brown, and indigenous people. He is pushing the country toward genuine fascism: wholesale disregard of the law, the rule of big military, the rule of big money, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. And, how we do that is to hold onto our intellectual integrity, and our political courage: telling the truth about Donald Trump, the neofascist, the gangster, his collaborators and facilitators. We’ve got to be consistent in our critique of empire, of capitalism, of patriarchy, of homophobia, transphobia, and male supremacy, and white supremacy. ![]()
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