Blog10.4.2019


Blog10.4.2019



My appetite for thought-provoking, dangerous books is growing swiftly of late. We need relief, particularly in the Age of Trump insanity, from re-fried discourses which pretend to be sources of enlightenment.  Yes, we should continue to read and study the rhetorical moves which characterize works from traditional conservative and liberal thinkers, if only to confirm how rich and robust  is American commerce in deception, delusion, and rigorous disinformation.  It is prudent to do so.  Nevertheless,  I admit that my distrust of verbal games (print and non-print) which reify the murky interests of the state (USA) is a bit over the top.  Being over the top, however, precludes my being crushed, tamed, made wretched and silent at the bottom.  Better to be paranoid than to consent to "enslavements" as usual in one's native land. Better to think outside-the-box with alacrity  than to suffer with patriotic glee inside the container, mind and body drained of agency.



 One example of a book I deem worthy of attention is As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018) by Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson.  It is a "sleeper," a noteworthy book that will not get critiques and commendations from the gatekeepers of American ideological productions.  It is written in lucid prose.  It is truly, as its authors propose, an echoing of "the practices of anarcha-indigenism  that differentiate inclusive models of indigenous nationhood based on inclusivity, horizontality, and interrelatedness from nation-states based on borders, exclusivity, domination, and control" (xviii).  The proposal is solid, because it buttresses the claim  that As Black As Resistance is "a book of revolutionary hope that pierces the despair and fear of our current political moment" (xviii). Revolutionary hope is like the revolutionary love about which Kalamu ya Salaam expounded many years ago.  Hope and love must ultimately push back against the limits of epistemology and ontology.  Hope isn't to be swallowed without serious, common sense reckoning of what one might be consuming.  As B. B. King sang long ago ---"No one loves you but your mother, and she might b lying too."  Slavery isn't as gone with the hurricane as many Americans wish to think!



Under the terms of engagement I have forged for myself ,  I champion much that Samudzi and Williams  take pains to argue.  Their writing is nuanced in ways that evidence respect for time-born local knowledge, the knowledge that challenges the nonsense manufactured to promote bogus  white supremacy. Their insights about the complexity of implacable violence, colonialism, racism, and anti-black capitalism are solid and worthy of inspection.



Admit, dear readers, that we Americans of all colors are  SNAFU.  Our lives and those of our children pivot greatly on how successful we can be in murdering  SNAFU-ness and white supremacy in whatever guise it assumes, in our effecting the advent of positive alternatives that are more than cheap dreams that we fool ourselves into thinking make daily life tolerable.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 4, 2019




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