Weekly Items of Note (2/25)
David Shasha
“Black Panther” Zionist Eschatology is All the Rage in The New York Times and The New Yorker
Last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine published the following article on the “Black Panther” movie that confirms all that I have been saying about the New Black Separatism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/Dyddm-NlV_k
Carvell Wallace calls the Poptrash Superhero Black Separatist movie a “Defining Moment” for Black America:
“Black Panther” is a Hollywood movie, and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations. We have for centuries sought to either find or create a promised land where we would be untroubled by the criminal horrors of our American existence. From Paul Cuffee’s attempts in 1811 to repatriate blacks to Sierra Leone and Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa Black Star shipping line to the Afrocentric movements of the ’60s and ’70s, black people have populated the Africa of our imagination with our most yearning attempts at self-realization. In my earliest memories, the Africa of my family was a warm fever dream, seen on the record covers I stared at alone, the sun setting over glowing, haloed Afros, the smell of incense and oils at the homes of my father’s friends — a beauty so pure as to make the world outside, one of car commercials and blond sitcom families, feel empty and perverse in comparison. As I grew into adolescence, I began to see these romantic visions as just another irrelevant habit of the older folks, like a folk remedy or a warning to wear a jacket on a breezy day. But by then my generation was building its own African dreamscape, populated by KRS-One, Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers; we were indoctrinating ourselves into a prideful militancy about our worth. By the end of the century, “Black Star” was not just the name of Garvey’s shipping line but also one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.
On Monday we read Jelani Cobb’s review of the movie in The New Yorker which struck many of these same themes:
The hatred for America and for Civil Rights idealism is palpable:
There is a fundamental dissonance in the term “African-American,” two feuding ancestries conjoined by a hyphen. That dissonance—a hyphen standing in for the brutal history that intervened between Africa and America—is the subject of “Black Panther,” Ryan Coogler’s brilliant first installment of the story of Marvel Comics’ landmark black character. “I have a lot of pain inside me,” Coogler told an audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on Wednesday night. “We were taught that we lost the things that made us African. We lost our culture, and now we have to make do with scraps.” Black America is constituted overwhelmingly by the descendants of people who were not only brought to the country against their will but were later inducted into an ambivalent form of citizenship without their input. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all those born here, supposedly resolved the question of the status of ex-slaves, though those four million individuals were not consulted in its ratification. The unspoken yield of this history is the possibility that the words “African” and “American” should not be joined by a hyphen but separated by an ellipsis.
And once again, we see the New Black Separatism linked to Zionism and to the thinking of Marcus Garvey:
Coogler’s commentary on the literal tribalism of the African diaspora, his devotion to a glorious vision of Africa, and, most provocatively, his visceral telling of the pain of existing as an orphan of history—as seen in the story of Killmonger, whose separation from Africa is not simply historical but also paternal—is striking but not unique. The narrative of Africa as a tragic tabula rasa in world history exists in dialogue with another version, equally imaginary, but idealized, and authored by descendants of those Africans who passed through the Maison des Esclaves and the other structures like it. In 1896, after Ethiopian forces defeated an invading Italian army in the Battle of Adwa, black people across the globe celebrated the country as the last preserve on the continent free from the yoke of colonialism, and a sign of hope for the black world—the Wakanda of its day. In the nineteen-thirties, after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Depression-era black Americans and West Indians scraped together pennies to send to a country they had never visited to fund the resistance. In the late nineteenth century, the West Indian educator and diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden envisioned and promoted a kind of black Zionism, in which people of African descent in the West would return to work on behalf of African redemption. What Blyden, and what Marcus Garvey—a Jamaican who, in the nineteen-twenties, organized a global pan-Africanist effort to end European colonialism—and what the organizer Audley Moore and the scholar John Henrik Clarke, and what the entire lineage of that pan-African tradition insisted on was a kind of democracy of the imagination. If the subordination of Africa had begun in the minds of white people, its reclamation, they reasoned, would begin in the minds of black ones.
The Garvey link that I have consistently attributed to Ta-Nehisi Coates is prominent in these articles, front and center. The disdain for the Civil Rights Movement is palpable. The connection to Zionism is fundamental.
It is Anti-American through and through, acting as if those who fought the Civil Rights struggle were dupes, and that Marcus Garvey was the real hero!
Screw MLK and other Civil Rights pioneers!
What we are seeing is a repudiation of a multi-cultural American identity, and a forced resumption of racial apartheid – all under the rubric of Marvel Comics Corporatism.
We are also seeing that African-American and African-themed scholarship from distinguished academics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Christopher Miller, and Paul Gilroy – scholarship that deals with the culture and history of Black Identity in a philosophically sophisticated manner – is being roundly ignored in favor of a cartoon invented by a White man.
The Harlem Boys and Girls Club Get a Generous 42k Subsidy to See “Black Panther”!
In a related story, I was watching the PBS news program MetroFocus which featured a segment on the following “Black Panther” story:
https://www.vibe.com/2018/01/ellen-degeneres-black-panther-screening-boys-girls-club-harlem/
The talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres helped to promote an initiative which raised over $42,000 to bus a group from the Harlem Boys and Girls Club to see the movie gratis.
It is really hard to process how a Corporate Hollywood movie can be processed as if it has Revolutionary capabilities.
Indeed, all it shows is that Black people can now own a piece of the Capitalist Franchise that is Marvel Comics, and that they can be proud of their own piece of Poptrash garbage – just like White people.
Is Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz Confused?
In the previous WION I made note of Leibovitz’s praise for Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, an individual who continues to blur the lines between Church and State in America:
Here is my article on Soloveichik’s program at The Hoover Institute with Utah Senator Mike Lee:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/JVae6I3QlmM
Last Monday, Tablet posted the following Leibovitz piece arguing for the very thing that Soloveichik and Lee have been arguing against:
It is unclear what side of the Religious/Secular divide he is on, perhaps he should be paying closer attention to what his hero Soloveichik has been doing and respond accordingly.
David Shasha