“For me the question has always been [about] power,” says poet Nikki Giovanni, self-described “black militant,” to writer James Baldwin—nodding in accord—on a 1971 episode of Soul!—the variety show—both railing cigarette after cigarette. She continues: “I would sell my soul, ya know what I mean? Y’all can have Jesus. Give me the world. Give it to me, or I will take it.”
Giovanni’s take is not atypical of black liberation rhetoric, which, as she and Baldwin demonstrate, is as prone to hyperbole as any strain of political enterprise. “The bill is in,” Baldwin notes later in the conversation, speaking obliquely to his white countrymen. “We paid it. Now it’s your turn.” Ignore, for the moment, Baldwin’s assertion of only two years prior—made on The Dick Cavett Show—that any notion of the black revolution as vengeance is the product of the “guilty white imagination.” He was, decidedly, a proud prophet of the oppressed (in the black community, anyway), who, as philosopher Bertrand Russell wisely observed, “only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.” Consider the not-so-subtle intimations of a phrase like Black Is King, the title of Queen Bey’s forthcoming record.
Of Algerians in France—”with their turbans and their djellabas”—biographer Julian Jackson recalls Charles De Gaulle having said, “Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again.” Such is, arguably, the fate of most projects that attempt to subsume disparate peoples into one monolithic body politic, even those who share a mother tongue. Does that mean such efforts are without merit? The United States, with its founding documents and revolutionary origins promising radical liberties, has erected a legal and philosophical apparatus—perhaps the most just in existence—to perform such a task: the unification of human beings, whatever their origins, under an umbrella of universal ideals.
But humans are fallible. The papers proved more resolute than the flesh. Slavery undoubtedly violated that covenant. Jim Crow laws undoubtedly violated that covenant. Is atonement possible in a relationship defined as much by its transgressions as its potential for fraternity? Malcolm X called integration “only a trick.” And Baldwin bragged, “We cannot be accommodated.” The truth, of course, is much more convoluted. Humanity, again, is fallible—fallen, if you subscribe to one of the Abrahamic traditions. Guilty, in other words. Should we not be forgiven, none of us, ever?
“One cannot be responsible for what one has not produced,” says Giovanni, countering Baldwin’s quip that, with eight siblings to feed, he feared bringing a child of his own “into the world.” Its analogue on the larger scale of black-white relations is obvious—who is forgivable? Should the descendants of Germany’s Third Reich by liable for the inexcusable crimes of their grandparents? Should anyone of the name Habsburg be treated like filth for sharing a jawline with tyrants of the Holy Roman Empire? Should the residents of Jerusalem forever pay for the murder of Jesus Christ?
“In the place of justice,” warns Solomon in the Tanakh, “wickedness was there.” While one can find virtue and promise in a cause, one must also be permitted to object to the terms—or the behavior of its representatives, or both—without fear of reprisal. Debate, in other words, in the arena of ideas—not the street—is what distinguishes the progressive society from the primeval. For example, there is a distinction, indecipherable to fanatics, between the obvious—that, yes, black lives matter—and the obscure—that the thinly-veiled Marxist black liberation group, Black Lives Matter, is in fact in pursuit of black supremacy. But alas, conceding that is a bridge too far in the eyes of people who see only in chiaroscuro.
Reconciliation is a country arrived at via conversation between consenting parties. There is no road to it through retributive sport, which is the impassable mountain range into which Black Lives Matter has corralled racial justice discourse. As political theorist Gustave Le Bon observed in The Psychology of Crowds, “An individual can accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd, never.” For, he continues, “The ideas capable of influencing crowds are not rational ideas but feelings expressed in the form of ideas.” There is no good weather to report here, as you can see in the headlines and newsreels of late.
“This is going to be a difficult summer.” Baldwin predicated as much in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley in January of 1979. Exactly six months later, President Jimmy Carter would echo that sentiment in a speech of his own, acknowledging a “crisis of confidence” evident in the “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” He was not wrong. America was gripped by recession, by disenchantment in Vietnam, by racial enmity and malaise. But he discerned in the tumult a way forward, a “path of common purpose.” The alternative—one of “fragmentation and self-interest” and “constant conflict between narrow interests”—would almost certainly mire the nation in “paralysis and stagnation and drift.”
It is going to be a difficult summer.
A policeman, dispatched to protect his community, is shot and killed. Black Lives Matter. It is written on their t-shirts, banners and splashed across the private property they commandeer and deface. A business owner, her hands pleading for restraint and understanding, is beaten with a 2×4, her store ransacked and robbed. Black Lives Matter. The Stars and Stripes, flying in celebration of our nation’s birthday, is confiscated and mutilated and set ablaze. Black Lives Matter. For days and nights on end the violence is allowed to continue (largely) unimpeded—in some instances it is tacitly endorsed. Black Lives Matter.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) definition of terrorism is: “The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
Read it again.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) definition of terrorism is: “The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
That’s right: intimidation and coercion “in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Now that the “Shock and Awe” phase of The Revolution has “set the tone,” striking fear into the hearts of ordinary citizens—”You wouldn’t want us to have to burn down your homes next time, would you?”—the campaign has shifted back to the more delicate realm of cultural infiltration and regulatory reform. Yes, back—the disruption of public institutions, universities, media, private companies, nonprofit organizations and individual sovereignty is a phenomenon that has been ongoing, in earnest, for a century, even before the likes of Alger Hiss, the Ware Group and the Rosenbergs. Call it soft terrorism. Sensing an opportunity (and craving legitimacy), however, what was once an underground operation has now surfaced—the mask, as they say, is off. And the true face of Marxism—pimpled, jowly, incensed—is as ugly as ever.
But unlike the communist subversives of the twentieth century who worked remotely and sub rosa, today’s communist seeks to change the minds of her neighbors and colleagues with, first, subtle social pressure—to “butter them up,” so to speak—and then by militant duress. She knows the American disposition is benevolent and charitable, which she exploits with cunning and perseverance. It is a pageant of naked—and despicable—espionage.
“The revolution—and indeed in the interest of Socialism—demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of those who direct the labour process.” Communist mastermind Vladimir Lenin’s accusatorial and threatening The Soviets at Work speech of 1918 provides a template for the coercive aims of Black Lives Matter. There is no room for dissent; they know in order to wield and exercise power you must be a slave to their demands, at home and—crucially—at work, where the stigmatizing of pesky nonconformists is particularly effective. The goal, admits political theorist Herbert Marcuse in Counterrevolution and Revolt, is the “radical reconstruction of society” through the birthing of “a new consciousness: the breaking of the hold of the Establishment over the work and leisure of the people.”
Whatever the pigmentation of his skin, the black liberation communist—in the evangelical fashion of the Christian, his ideological opposite—seeks to convert, yes. But the comparison stalls out there—he also wants subservience, in every action and every thought. Speaking of leftist organizers in The New York Times Sunday edition, law professor Amna A. Akbar instructs that, “whatever you think of their demands, you have to be in awe of how they inaugurate a new political moment.” You have to be in awe. The tyrannical psychology of the communist, yesterday and today, even demands that you feel what they feel—in contemporary parlance, then, you must “be an ally” and listen.
My local symphony, a once-esteemed outfit, understands this, for their business model is heavily invested in your ears and the expectation that your ears, being tangentially connected to your legs, will walk through their turnstiles every other Saturday evening or so. It is, arguably, inevitable, then, that its administration would make a public declaration in support of Black Lives Matter despite no signal whatsoever from the radical organization that classical music is of any interest to revolutionaries or that it requires reevaluation and “decolonization.” But—I should give them the benefit of the doubt—the symphony directors are not idiots; they know the long arm of social justice reaches well into the arts, and that they will be held accountable—sooner or later—for the “whiteness” of their staff, players and material. Rue the day these supposed stewards of civilization discover the objectives of today’s revolution differ little from those of the original, and that capitulation to their dictates only accelerates it towards its fulfillment. As we learn in Adam B. Ulam’s The Bolsheviks from a resentful proponent of cubism, futurism, all the isms that rendered the art of the Enlightenment obsolete: subversives mean what they say. “In the name of our Tomorrow we shall burn Raphael, demolish museums, melt down the masterpieces of art.” Strike up the band!
In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch argued wrongly that the object of the “culture wars” was not to impose a new moral code of a minority onto the “incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic” majority, but to instead build “parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions” from which to initiate systemic social disruption. Indeed, in America’s corporate boardrooms, on her copydesks, mastheads and assembly lines the demands of Black Lives Matter have been adopted wholesale and with little protest. Why make another world? “The point,” Karl Marx vehemently argued, “is to change [this one].”
So, the symphony postures, proposes “actions” and makes “pledges.” The “whole Symphony organization” will be audited to ensure each individual is sufficiently right-minded, culturally and racially. Ravel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Gershwin, Bernstein—one can assume the works of these giants of composition will be newly scrutinized, and with gusto, as part of the promise to collaborate “with diverse groups on programming.” We may never hear “Boléro” again. And why should we? One can assume its creator, a white man, was nothing but a vicious bigot, yes? This is how The Revolution, producing no art of its own (it is, of course and above all, a destructive endeavor), infects even the opera house—it is welcomed in with curtsies.
Nonplussed, I wrote them a letter:
I understand you must, under threat of public disgrace, profess your alignment with a political movement that openly plots to meet any critic with intimidation, humiliation and, if necessary, violence. You wouldn’t want its supporters painting the web—or, God forbid, the front page of the newspaper—with accusations of unforgivable racism in the ranks of your organization.
I understand you must bow to the demands of a movement that has normalized domestic terrorism and swear your allegiance to them for fear of your reputations and social standing in a community that values, über alles, the appearance of perfect tolerance. You must put food on the table.
“Music must be a place free of division,” you insist, as if before the racial convulsions of this spring and summer the consensus was that music is inherently inequitable. As if melody and sound—the very movement of it through air—is unjust and discriminating. Music! You’ve christened it “a place” of division with your rhetoric endorsing the experience of one—and only one—skin color.
Music is prismatic and beautifully elusive—attempts to define, classify, own, partition or control it are laughably futile. I can’t think of any creative medium more amenable to the standards of universal fellowship. And yet, with your call for “racism training” to repair “deep wounds that hold us apart,” you’re suggesting music (and its makers) was, heretofore, somehow deficient, somehow partisan. How insulting.
Of what benefit are your performative pledges—besides inspiring resentment—to the large majority of people in your organization and community who already believe (and participate) wholeheartedly in the American project of building an ever more perfect, colorblind Union?
Your deliberate politicization of perhaps the final refuge of the nonpolitical is, I think, a losing strategy. I used to relish the hours spent bathing, eyes closed, in the sounds your orchestra conjured. No longer.
I suppose I shouldn’t expect an invitation to the next New Year’s Eve gala. I will miss paying $10 for two fingers of cheap white wine in a plastic Solo cup.
Is it bigotry to find diversity-by-fiat detestable and unbecoming of a free citizenry? Is it bigotry to defend the very systems and institutions—capitalism, the presumption of innocence, private property—that our founders devised and heroes improved to promote liberty and equality of opportunity in pursuit of a just meritocracy? Is it bigotry to loath any crusade that promises to destroy reputations and livelihoods if its pronouncements of superiority are resisted? No, no and no.
“What is civilization?” Kenneth Clark asks at the outset of his beloved television show. “I don’t know,” he admits, nonetheless surmising that it deserves credit for shaping Man into “an intelligent, creative, orderly and compassionate animal.” Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris looms behind him. He also ponders if civilization is worth preserving. After all, it’s 1969 and much of the West is deep in the throes of social upheaval and civil unrest, not unlike today. It seems exhausted and unwilling, if not unable, to assert a raison d’être. Its children cannot name their fathers and, instead of creation, aspire to brigandage. “The honkies,” wrote Giovanni in a poem published in 1968, “are getting confused.”
Is it worth preserving? Is Brahms worth defending? Perhaps, as a parting gesture to its patrons, my symphony could bow-out with his famous “Wiegenlied,” or “Lullaby,” as the mezzanine is doused with gasoline and set ablaze. A towering mural of a clenched fist would unfurl from the loge in one discomfiting swoop, and those in attendance would clap and whistle in approval. And as the music faltered behind the crackle of timbered pilasters bursting aflame a chant, unintelligible at first, would build and crescendo into a booming and perfervid declaration some fifteen-hundred voices strong:
“Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.”
Image: Lam, Stephen. “A protest in Oakland, California following the grand jury decision in the shooting of Michael Brown, 25.” The Guardian. Reuters, November 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/black-lives-matter-birth-of-a-movement.
Impolitic 