the politics of ridicule
It’s been recognized that the most important achievement of twentieth century black intellectual activists was to “create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality.”
While the liberal-left’s response to the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani has taken on diverse forms — from questioning its legality to questioning its wisdom to questioning the legitimacy of war in general — black people, a nation within a nation, deployed the distinct response of ridicule. Memes about being ineffective tools for U.S. empire, dodging military service in various ways, and making light of what they’ll tell their grandkids about how they survived this era have been circulating all day.
It is, in fact, an absurd experience to, after watching your fellow countrymen and elected representatives equivocate about the dangerousness of a president who has routinely belittled and brutalized his own citizens for the past 3 years, observe them suddenly realize that the commander-in-chief isn’t just reckless and immoral, but destructive and suicidal. It is absurd, still, to watch them scramble to convince the rest of the country that such a deliberate act of military escalation, coincidentally executed at the top of an election year, probably won’t lead to World War III although it will certainly lead to more loss of human life, particularly for Iranians.
Today, watching the Black Twitter response to the airstrikes, I found myself thinking about the Double V campaign. Double V (“Victory at home and victory abroad”) — a slogan used by African-Americans during World War II to promote the fight against facism and militarism overseas and for democracy at home — connected domestic policy to foreign policy. Even as African-Americans were living under Jim Crow, the U.S. championed itself as among those countries “fighting for victory over aggression, slavery, and tyranny.” It was ironic that their government would claim to be in opposition to white supremacy in the global context when white supremacy structured almost every aspect of their civic lives. So, the strategy was to use the U.S.’s hypocrisy against it. It didn’t really work. By the time of Vietnam, the oppositional consciousness of some of the black movement’s leaders had gained prominence (although not majority support). There was not only a dissolution of the consensus to support the U.S. during war time, but an embrace of a vigorous critique of U.S. foreign policy:
Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what’s going on in this country. I maintain, as we have in SNCC, that the war in Vietnam is an illegal and immoral war. And the question is, what can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of our country, are killing babies, women, and children? What can we do to stop that? And I maintain that we do not have the power in our hands to change that institution, to begin to recreate it, so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone, and that the only power we have is the power to say, “Hell no!” to the draft. We have to say. We have to say to ourselves that there is a higher law than the law of a racist named McNamara. There is a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk. And there’s a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. It’s the law of each of us. It is the law… It is the law of each of us saying that we will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will stand pat. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we’re going to decide who we gonna kill. And this country will only be able to stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, “Hell, no, we ain’t going.”
[...]
We are raising questions about this country. I do not want to be a part of the American pie! The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money! I don’t want it, don’t want to be part of that system. And the question is, how do we raise those questions? How do we begin to raise them?
(Kwame Ture fka Stokley Carmichael, “Black Power,” 1966)
Sounds like what a lot of black folks are saying right now. So, I’m left with a question rather than an answer — is derision politically useless or is it a legitimate precursor to substantive engagement and international solidarity?
