Large tech companies like Amazon are notorious for hiring new college graduates at crappy wages and pushing them to get places in gaggles. Describing how this leads to what he calls “unaffordable family formation,” Steve Sailer says in an Unz Review blog, “It helps them squeeze more out of workers: The firms like being in places too expensive to raise a family — families are distractions, at least in the short-run.”
https://themilitant.com/2019/02/16/capitalist-crisis-blocks-affordable-family-formation/
UNZ Review is a neo-Nazi website as I have pointed out on my blog. As for Sailer, he is a typical contributor to UNZ Review. From Wikipedia:
Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist, movie critic, and columnist. He is a former correspondent for UPI and a columnist for Taki’s Magazine and VDARE.com. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. As of 2014, Sailer stopped publishing his personal blog on his own website and shifted it to the Unz Review, an online publication by Ron Unz that described itself as an “alternative media selection”.[1]
VDARE.com has been associated with white supremacy,[2][3] white nationalism,[4][5][6] and the alt-right.[7][8][9] Sailer’s writing for VDARE has described black people as inherently lacking judgment,[10] and claimed that Jews control the media to demoralize and divide other groups.[11]
His writing for both VDARE and Unz Review have endorsed eugenics and scientific racism.[12] Sailer has been credited with coining the term “human biodiversity” in the 1990s, with the term later becoming popular among the alt-right as a euphemism for scientific racism.[13][14][15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
From a Sailer article on UNZ Review:
I suspect that lots of European elites think that It Can’t Happen Here because:
– They don’t really grasp that it ever happened in America. After all, it’s not a subject for respectable discourse in the American press.
– Unlike us, white Americans are racist, so they deserved whatever it was that happened to them.
– We’ll send the migrants to the boring suburbs instead, and keep the lovely downtowns for ourselves.
– We have gun control, so how bad can things get?
After having written over 1,500 film reviews for Rotten Tomatoes for the past twenty years or so, I am probably better qualified than most people to make sense of the one hour and forty-five minute video recording made by a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites cult that can be seen below:
The recording was about the same length of the average film I review but one that was even less interesting than the Hollywood junk I am forced to watch at year end in advance of the annual NYFCO awards meeting. Made by Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan on a smart phone, it had no close-up footage of the American Indian confrontation with the Covington Catholic schoolboys except for the native drummers advancing on them and then being swallowed up. Most importantly, you don’t see the smirking Nick Sandmann whose future as a student and professional will be constrained by his arrogance. No Ivies for him.
Like Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”, there are a number of versions of what happened on the plaza beneath the Lincoln Monument on late Friday afternoon four days ago. The right has predictably taken up Nick Sandmann’s cause while the left has indicted him as a racist thug. Given the kind of abuse American Indians have put up with for the past three hundred years, Sandmann ranks as a minor first-offender but an offender nonetheless. I will try to explain his and his classmates’ behavior later on but want to start off with a word or two on the Black Hebrew Israelites who created a climate that made such a confrontation possible. If they had not been haranguing people that day, the Covington students and the Indians would have never crossed paths.
The Hebrew Israelites will be familiar to most New Yorkers, where they are based. Many years ago they used to preach (for the lack of a better word) near the corner of West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue where I am embarrassed to say I used to preach socialism with my SWP comrades. It is difficult to say whether passers-by were puzzled more by them or us.
Thanks to the indispensable Wikipedia, I have a better idea of who they are. The belief that African-Americans are the true descendants of the Biblical Hebrews has been around since the late 1800s when Frank Cherry and William Saunders Crowdy formed the first such congregations, unconnected to each other. Wikipedia doesn’t have any information on Cherry but Crowdy is a notable figure. He was born into slavery in 1847 and escaped from his masters in 1863 after an argument. Wasting no time, he joined the Colored 19th Regiment of the Union Army as a cook that year. After the war, he became a Buffalo Soldier, the term for Black cavalry members used to break American Indian resistance to the white settlers.
Crowdy’s Church of God and Saints of Christ is a fairly conventional institution with a mixture of Christian and Jewish customs. Members believe that Jesus was neither God nor the son of God, but rather a strict adherent to Judaism and a prophet sent by God. Leaders of the Church call themselves Rabbis, and so on.
The outfit that Shar Yaqataz Banyamyan belongs to is a horse of another color. The best introduction to them is a Village Voice article from March 2011 titled “Black Hebrew Israelites: New York’s Most Obnoxious Prophets”. Author Steven Thrasher recounts their infamous street theater:
On this corner, in the shadow of the Empire State Building, you could just pull up a chair with a bowl of popcorn and watch a show more entertaining than anything you’d ever see in a comedy club. The House of Israel, shouting within earshot of the tens of thousands of people who pass through this intersection on any given evening, makes for a sticky web. The endless stream of “so-called black” New Yorkers, “so-called Jews,” bewildered Japanese tourists, and born-again Christian teens who pass by are their flies.
For the first 30 minutes of Banyamyan’s video, you see his four co-religionists at the bottom of the Lincoln Monument, about 40 feet from the stairs and with their back to Lincoln’s statue. Another 40 feet or so in front of them are about 150 American Indians who have come to Washington as part of an Indigenous People’s March and Rally. It is likely that the event has ended since nobody is giving a speech. Instead, they are in a circle dance with drummers keeping rhythm. Their mood is relaxed.
The unnamed street preacher of the Hebrew Israelites kept up a steady stream of invective against them the entire time. He denounced them for worshipping buffaloes and totem poles. A couple of Indians walked over to argue but they probably would have been better off just ignoring them, especially since that would rob the cult of a sense of accomplishment. Their goal is not so much winning supporters but antagonizing people.
Meanwhile, there were maybe a dozen or so Covington students on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial who were paying no attention to the war of words between the cult and the handful of Indians.
That began to change forty minutes into the video when the Covington’s numbers had increased, marked visually by the MAGA hats about half of them were wearing. When the cult spotted the MAGA hats, they turned their backs on the Indians and refocused their verbal abuse on the students who they called children of incest led by pedophile priests. They denounced Trump as a “faggot” since he was seen on the Internet hanging out with Rudolph Giuliani in drag from a charity event in 2000:
By fifty minutes, the Covington students had risen to the bait and surrounded the Hebrew Israelites who taunted them as being chicken-shits, too afraid to take on five Black men protected by angels. I suspect that the students were less interested in having a fight with the men and were simply mystified by street theater that never would be seen on a sidewalk in their lily-white town.
What they seemed to be more interested in was recreating the “team spirit” of their high school gym, seeing the group of five insane Black men as a rival basketball team. One youth stripped down to his shorts and began jumping up and down bare-chested like a cheerleader. For all I know, that’s what he was. It didn’t take much to get the Covington students revved up and they all began jumping up and down, yelling chants that are not possible to decipher from the video although I might have heard “block that pass” at some point. It is important to understand, however, that there was a good distance between them and the Hebrew Israelites at this point, likely a result of an older man (likely a chaperone) urging them to retreat.
At one hour and twelve minutes into the video, you see Nathan Phillips leading a small group of Indians headed toward the teens drum in hand. Still high on adrenaline, the students surrounded them and continuing jumping up and down in rhythm to the drum. I doubt that no more than the average contempt for Indians motivated them at this point. It is likely that they were like most teens, just acting like assholes—especially the smirking Nick Sandmann. I have seen articles that compare the Covington youth to the “Unite the Right” protestors in Charlottesville when they strike me as have never having heard of Richard Spencer. The closest analogy to them would be the football crowds who do the “tomahawk” at an Atlanta Braves baseball game. There have been references to a basketball game in the Covington gym where a couple of students have painted themselves black. It is likely that this was not minstrel-type racism but only a reference to the school colors (everybody else around them is dressed in black.) That being said, it was a slap in the face to Black players on the opposing team in the same vein as blocking Nathan Phillips. The affront was inspired more by watching NFL games where painted faces are prevalent rather than Tucker Carlson.
These are racist jerks but no more so than probably 90 percent of Americans that Leon Trotsky once described in the following terms. Substitute the word “Indians” for “Negroes” and you’ll get the idea: “99.9 per cent of the American workers are chauvinists, in relation to the Negroes they are hangmen and they are so also toward the Chinese. It is necessary to teach the American beasts.”
In terms of their political views overall, they are like probably 90 percent of the white students in Catholic schools–pro-Trump and anti-abortion. That is why they came to Washington. They were at an anti-abortion rally and picked up MAGA hats from street vendors. That’s normal for the USA even if for the rest of the planet it is aberrant behavior. Everything is relative. What’s normal for the USA would strike a Swede as fascist (at least up until the point when Swedish fascists become the majority.)
After the Indians are surrounded by the Covington students and disappear from the camera’s view, there is of little interest in the video except one key element. All of this takes place a good distance from the Hebrew Israelites who chat among each other about the bad behavior of the students, something that has a hollow ring given the hour or so they spent stoking them up. With all due respect to Nathan Phillips, there is little evidence that his small and plucky group was acting to defuse the situation since the distance between the youth and the cult was considerable. My guess is that he was asserting their right to climb to the top of the stairs, which certainly was their right. The callow youth of this Catholic School saw their right in turn to block them as if they were a visiting high school basketball team. They will pay for their arrogance in years to come.
Miguel Salazar, hired gun for the New Republic
On December 20th, Miguel Salazar wrote an article for New Republic titled “Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?” that was clearly intended to scandalize the DSA. While the magazine is by no means as disgusting as it was under Martin Peretz’s neoconservative editorial control, it certainly reflects the dominant position of the Clinton/Biden/Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party. If you want to get a handle on Salazar’s politics, you should read the Nation interview he did with Jon Lee Anderson, the author of a hostile biography of Che Guevara. Check out this question: “Recently, in the US, there has been a push for a more revisionist approach in looking back at historical figures such as Robert E. Lee or Andrew Jackson. In an interview with BBC Mundo, you say that we can’t compare figures from the past using the morals of today. Where do we draw the line on figures like Che?” Imagine that. Making an amalgam between the slavocracy and a physician who gave up a promising career to risk his life fighting for the liberation of Cuba’s campesinos.
It appears that an African-American politician named Cat Brooks was urged to come to a Bay Area DSA by some of her supporters who were at a meeting in progress. They summoned her because there was sentiment against endorsing her candidacy for mayor of Oakland. A DSAer named Jeremy Gong was likely leading the opposition to her based on an article he wrote in September titled “East Bay DSA Should Not Endorse Cat Brooks”. To start with, Gong argues that her support for charter schools should preclude an endorsement. But additionally Gong hearkens back to a hoary debate on the left going on for a century at least. He writes: “in her statements to and about DSA, Brooks has revealed that she holds a political perspective which understands race to be the fundamental dividing line in society instead of class — and this undermines our project of building a multiracial working-class movement.”
For Salazar, the emphasis on class betrays the DSA’s supposedly old-school Marxism:
But unlike other progressive groups, DSA has to contend with internal factions that are very seriously wedded to a certain strain of socialist ideology—one that emphasizes, as Karl Marx did, a churning class war that governs the history of humankind. For these socialists, an anti-capitalist movement must be anti-racist, since capitalism has been instrumental in the subjugation of minorities. But they are also weary of liberal politicians who, they say, exploit race to pander to minority groups, all while skirting the deeper class conflict at work. In the past year, these hard-liners have clashed on numerous occasions with other socialists, often minorities themselves, who contend that righting America’s unique wrongs requires an approach distinct from the universal precepts of historical materialism—one that emphasizes racism’s special impact on inequality, supra-class.
It would be useful if Salazar identified who “these hard-liners” were but I wouldn’t expect an article designed to scandalize the DSA to name names. My first inclination would have been to check what such a “hard-liner” had written to judge for myself, if only Salazar had bothered to provide a source. But then again I am used to reading Marxist polemics where clarity is all-important. When you write for the New Republic and The Nation, clarity gets short shrift.
Further evidence of racism might have been uncovered in Philadelphia as well. There was a proposal in DSA to set up a reading group based on Asad Haider’s new book “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”. After the political education committee declared that it was not starting any new reading groups, the DSA members went ahead with it anyway. When the Philly DSA leaders found out, they told them to either cease and desist or resign. Considering the loose-knit nature of the DSA, this struck me as an organizational solution to a political problem, namely how to resolve the class/race contradiction or decide whether one even exists. The two camps went back and forth for a couple of weeks with temperatures rising, I supposed.
Finally, the fight boiled over into the pages of Jacobin when Melissa Naschek, a co-chair of the Philly chapter, wrote an attack on Haider’s book because it viewed the Black Power movement of the 1960s positively. For her, Black civil rights figures such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin are much more in line with DSA perspectives because they “insisted that the way forward was through an interracial working-class coalition.” By creating separate Black organizations such as SNCC, the Panthers, and dozens of other less well-known groups in the sixties, the Black Power movement was “was still based on a liberal belief that economic inequality could be dealt with by segregating the working class into racially distinguished units”, even if the rhetoric of an H. Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael was “militant”.
Since Naschek and Haider only know the sixties by reading secondary material, I am not surprised that they find inspiration in either A. Philip Randolph or H. Rap Brown. Unfortunately, the Black struggle in the 1960s was held back by reformism on one side and ultraleftism on the other. As should be understood, they function as two sides of the same coin. As Peter Camejo once put it, the failure to win reforms, especially through electoral politics, can make impatient youth take part in adventurist actions that are designed to persuade politicians to change—an act tantamount to a tot having a tantrum.
Sometimes a liberal becomes frustrated not getting the ear of the ruling class, and he concludes that he has been using the wrong tactics. So he adopts a lot of radical rhetoric. He says this ruling class is apparently so thickheaded that what we’ve got to do is really let loose a temper tantrum to get its attention. The politicians won’t listen to peaceful things, but if we go out and break windows then Kennedy will say, “Oh, I guess there is a problem in this society. I didn’t realize it when they were just demonstrating peacefully. I thought everything was OK because they were in the system, but now they’re going outside the system, they’re breaking windows, so we’ve got to hold back.”
These liberal-ultraleftists think that’s what moves the ruling class. Actually they come close to a correct theory when they say that if people start leaving the system the ruling class will respond. But they don’t believe that the masses can be won. They think it is enough for them to leave the system themselves, small groups of people carrying out direct confrontations.
Does Melissa Naschek have any idea that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin refused to speak out against the Vietnam War for fear that it would undermine Democratic Party programs to help Black people? You’d think that to help her make her case against Black Power she would have at least held up Martin Luther King Jr. who did tie race and class together in the course of pointing out why Blacks should oppose the war. Maybe she decided to sweep him under the rug because too many people, especially old farts like me, knew that he was beginning to adopt some of the themes that the Black Power movement had articulated. This includes his 1967 statement that “The majority of [Black] political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support … most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of [Blacks] nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader.” H. Rap Brown might have used coarser language but it amounted to the same thing.
Haider wrote a lengthy reply to Naschek on the Verso website that I cannot begin to summarize because of its length but suffice it to say that he finds Randolph and Rustin lacking. Somewhat surprisingly, he does not mention their silence on the Vietnam War.
My biggest problem with his response is his tendency to express himself through abstractions. For example, he writes: “To argue for improvements in the living conditions of Americans alone is not universal. But any struggle can become universal if it challenges the whole structure of domination and brings about a collective subject with the possibility of self-governance.” I guess this is the occupational hazard of being a dissertation student. You read stuff like this all the time and it seeps into your own writing. That being said, I am probably much more in sympathy with his ideas since I was passionate about Black nationalism from the time I heard Malcolm X speak at a Militant Labor Forum in 1965.
Turning back to Salazar, he blames the Momentum caucus in DSA for the old-school Marxism that led to the rejection of Cat Brooks:
These ideological clashes, usually pitting DSA leadership against rank-and-file membership, have been largely limited to East Bay and Philadelphia, the only two major chapters in the country run by the Momentum caucus, a subgroup described in a 2017 Nation profile as the “most explicitly Marxist” within the organization, with a heavy focus on the campaign for Medicare-for-All.
You’d think that “the most explicitly Marxist” faction in DSA would be all about raising transitional demands and breaking with the Democratic Party. But in this strange skewed perspective of the New Republic and The Nation, a heavy focus on Medicare-for-All is virtually equivalent to Che and Fidel going into the Sierra Maestra mountains to start a guerrilla war. If you go to the Momentum website, you’ll discover that despite their dim view of the Democratic Party, they also view attempts to build a new left party as futile. Momentum leader Jeremy Gong co-wrote an article with Eric Blanc on Jacobin making the case that the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and Medicare-for-All illustrate “How Class Should Be Central”, as the title puts it. If that’s what “most explicitly Marxist” represents in such circles, I guess I am no Marxist.
Finally, a few words about Adolph Reed who intervened in this debate in a Common Dreams article titled “Which Side Are You On?”. Reed, who was a Trotskyist in the sixties just like me, has evolved into a class fundamentalist of the sort that the Debs SP and the CPUSA of the 1930s typified. Apparently, it is also the orientation that Miguel Salazar and Melissa Naschek favor.
Debs, bless his soul, just didn’t understand what his contemporary W.E.B. DuBois was trying to say:
I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question—the working class struggle. Our position as Socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other side.
Reed sounds like he has plagiarized Mark Lilla, the Columbia professor who blamed Trump’s victory in 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s identity politics:
This politics is open to the worst forms of opportunism, and it promises to be a major front on which neoliberal Democrats will attack the left, directly and indirectly, and these lines of attack stand out in combining red-baiting and race-baiting into a new, ostensibly progressive form of invective. Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2016 campaign swipe at Sanders that his call for breaking up big banks wouldn’t end racism was only one harbinger of things to come. Indeed, we should recall that it was followed hard upon by even more blunt attacks from prominent members of the black political class.
It has been and will be all too easy for the occasion to elect “the first” black/Native American/woman/lesbian to substitute for the need to advance an agenda that can appeal broadly to working people of all races, genders and sexual orientations. Our side’s failure to struggle for that sort of agenda is one reason Trump is in the White House. We can’t afford to repeat the mistakes that helped bring about that result.
It’s worth mentioning that Reed’s hostility to Black people organizing on behalf of their own demands has led to some truly reactionary positions. In an article on Nonsite.org, he takes up the question of Black Lives Matter focusing on killer cops. He writes:
This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. [emphasis added]
As for this “glaring fact”, it skirts the real issue, namely whether a white cop would have shot a 12-year old boy like Tamir Rice running around with a toy pistol in a playground if he had been white. When someone in a position to speak for the Black left ends up spouting the kind of garbage you can hear on Tucker Carlson, you really have to wonder what went wrong.
Boys Behind Barbed Wire (Norito Takamoto, Albert Masaichi, and Hisashi Sansui), 1944, Manzanar concentration camp
COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 27, 2018
Not long ago, I had lunch with Arn Kawano, a friend and Marxmail subscriber whose parents had been interred during WWII for no other reason than being Japanese-Americans living in California. I was anxious to discuss a film with him that I had reviewed recently titled “Resistance at Tule Lake”, which described how Japanese-Americans stood up for their rights as citizens against FDR’s fascist-like Executive Order 9066 that gave the green light to the camps.
Arn, who has a law degree, told me that despite liberal obsessions with constitutional rights, there is very little to protect such citizens when a government acts in the name of a national emergency. If anything, FDR’s willingness to shred the constitution should alert those invoking the New Deal as some kind of golden era for democracy and human rights to look more closely and objectively at American history. To give you an idea of the inability of American liberals to comprehend the depravity of FDR’s internment camps, Herbert Wechsler, an attorney who was part of the Nuremberg prosecution team, was also the government’s lawyer in a case defending the legality of Executive Order 9066. Later on, when Wechsler was teaching at the Columbia University law school, a student named Arn Kawano asked him if he had to do it all over again, would he have defended 9066? When he answered yes, Arn gathered up his books and walked out of the classroom.
Greg Robinson:
In contrast, the President lent credence to the wildest and most unsubstantiated anti-Japanese rumors. A few weeks after Executive Order 9066 was signed, for example, Roosevelt told his Cabinet that “friends of his” who had explored the lower California region of Mexico some time previously had uncovered numerous secret Japanese air bases, which could be mobilized for work in concert with Japanese aircraft carriers on bombing raids into southern California.’ Thus, if the President believed unsubstantiated reports of fifth column activity by Japanese Americans, it was not simply because he lacked hard information but also because he was prepared to believe the worst, and expected the worst, from them.
Roosevelt’s view that the character of different ethnic and racial groups was biologically inherited, and the influence of such ideas on his policy decisions, expanded during the war years, even though such Social Darwinist racial theories had begun to be discredited by the anthropological writings of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and others. In mid-1942 the President commissioned Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Isiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Henry Field of the Field Museum of Natural History to direct a massive secret series of anthropological studies by experts on postwar migration and resettlement of Jews and other groups, with an emphasis on “problems arising out of racial admixtures and . . . the scientific principles involved in the process of miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called racialism.”
The President stated that he wanted the scientists to determine the optimum racial mixture of postwar refugee populations: “The President wishes to be advised what will happen when various kinds of Europeans—Scandinavian, Germanic, French-Belgian, North Italian, etc.—are mixed with the South American base stock. The President specifically asked the [research] committee to consider such questions as the following: Is the South Italian stock—say, Sicilian—as good as the North Italian stock—say, Milanese—if given equal social and economic opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offered settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italians?”‘ Similarly, Roosevelt commented at different times about the possibility of imposing eugenicist policies against troublesome groups. He joked in 1945 that Puerto Rico’s high birthrate could be curbed through mass sterilization, using “the methods which Hitler used effectively.” Similarly, in August 1944 the President discussed with his Cabinet “the advisability of sterilizing about 50,000 Junkers and officers of the German Army. [FDR] said that science had done wonderful things and that sterilization could now be accomplished by the use of rays which were practically painless.” Although these remarks may also have been facetious, at least in part, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau a few days earlier, “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” Other administration officials, notably Navy Secretary Knox, discussed sterilizing Germans in earnest.”
Throughout the period of evacuation, Roosevelt’s ideas about people of Japanese ancestry remained dominated by his belief in innate biological character. In spring 1942 FDR maintained a correspondence with Hrdlicka on the source of the nefarious and warlike Japanese character, which Hrdlicka attributed to the less developed skulls of the Japanese.” Roosevelt’s view of the Japanese as inherently savage was likewise reflected in his private conversations. He stated in 1935 that aggression “was in the blood” of Japanese leaders. In January 1942 he told Quentin Reynolds that the Japanese were “treacherous people,” and hissed through his teeth while quoting Japanese leaders in imitation of stereotypical Japanese speech patterns.” FDR’s assistant, William Hassett, recounted in August 1942 that “the President related an old Chinese myth about the origin of the Japanese. A wayward daughter of an ancient Chinese emperor left her native land in a sampan and finally reached Japan, then inhabited by baboons. The inevitable happened and in due course the Japanese made their appearance.
Roosevelt’s words and actions both before and after Pearl Harbor, when taken in their entirety, point to his acceptance of the idea that Japanese Americans, whether citizens or longtime resident aliens, were still Japanese at the core. He regarded them as presumptively dangerous and disloyal on racial grounds. There might well be some loyal individuals: Roosevelt was willing to make exceptions for Japanese Americans of demonstrated loyalty once they were properly vouched for, and he had approved John Franklin Carter’s plan during fall 1941 to organize protection for “the loyal Japanese” in case of war. However, in the absence (and sometimes in the presence) of evidence of loyalty, the presumption remained, and in an extreme situation it overshadowed all other considerations. When Carter’s “Roosevelt” character is asked about the feelings of Japanese Americans who were deported “because they had slant eyes and yellow skins,” he remarks coolly, “Their patriotism was suspect.” Roosevelt’s decision to approve the race-based exclusion of West Coast Japanese Americans followed logically from this view that they were incapable of being true Americans. Already in his 192os articles, FDR justified discriminatory legislation by ‘Americans” toward a group he gratuitously referred to as “unassimilable aliens.” His refusal to admit discriminatory intent in the race-based exclusion of Japanese immigrants during the 192os logically precedes his willful blindness toward the role of racial bigotry in catalyzing Californians with longtime nativist grudges to press for the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
As a follow-up to his February 5, 2018 assault on “identity” politics titled “The Bankrupcy of the American Left”, Chris Hedges now takes aim at “diversity” with Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford as an all-too-willing accomplice. The July 8th Truthdig article titled “The Con of Diversity” allows the two to defend what they see as a class-based politics against the liberal Democrats using “identity”, “diversity”, “multiculturalism” and other tricks to sidetrack the necessary fight against the capitalist system.
Diversity in the hands of the white power elites—political and corporate—is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson) who sell their souls for a taste of power.
To his credit, Glen Ford emphasizes the need for affirmative action even though for some on the left, starting with Walter Benn Michaels, it is just as much of a con game. However, he complains that somewhere along the line it mutated into diversity and as such no longer served the needs of the Black community. “Stripped of its core, affirmative action morphed into ‘diversity,’ a vessel for various aggrieved groups that was politically versatile (and especially useful to the emerging Black deal makers of electoral and corporate politics), but no longer rooted in Black realities.”
The one thing that surprises me in this put-down of diversity is how tone-deaf it is when it comes to the most urgent issue of the past year or so, namely the #metoo movement that is taking on the sexual assault culture that exists in some of the key sectors of the American economy from the film industry to restaurants and the media.
As a film critic, I have been paying closer attention to the abuses that have been around since the 1920s through the “casting couch”. For the past 90 years Hollywood management has been male-dominated in a way that other industries have not been. Unlike finance, for example, Hollywood producers can rely on an “old boys network” that would not be allowed in banking or the brokerage business after the 1970s forced human resource departments to act on complaints by women being treated as sex objects and denied opportunities. All you need to do is look at the statistics for 2016. Women accounted for only 17 percent of all the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors who worked on the top-grossing 250 domestic films. Blacks did not fare much better. Across the 100 top movies of 2017, only 6 directors were Black while 92 percent of all top executives are white.
What this means is that it is easier for a bastard like Harvey Weinstein to force himself on women trying to work in film and for the top studios to put obstacles in the way of Black directors and actors. As must be understood, film is one of the most powerful ways in which mass consciousness is shaped in the USA. For every Ava DuVernay, there are a dozen hack Caucasian directors who feel no particular need to address the racism that has brought us Donald Trump. Obviously, having women, Blacks and Latinos in powerful management positions in the film industry will not lead to socialism but on the other hand if it has some mitigating influence on the sexism and racism of this empire in decline, why treat their presence as if it were an insidious plot to preserve the status quo?
A lot of the reasoning embodied in the Hedges/Ford collaboration is reminiscent of what I heard around the time proposals were being made to allow gays in the military. If you are for allowing gays in the military, this must mean that you are a supporter of American imperialism. This absurd argument did not engage with the reality that many people join the armed services because they had no other employment options. Gay teens in some isolated rural village were not likely to read some advanced revolutionary thinker before going down to the recruitment station on a main street filled with empty stores, after all. And even if they did, the revolutionary rhetoric would not put food on their table.
Once inside the military, they had a right not to be killed by homophobic soldiers as was the case with Private Barry Winchell who had begun dating a transgender showgirl in 1999. When he was sleeping, another soldier crept up next to his bed and smashed his skull with a baseball bat. All this happened during Bill Clinton’s homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. What was needed then and what is needed now is the kind of diversity and diversity training that makes such acts impermissible. If homophobic soldiers cannot be educated to respect their gay comrades, they can at least understand that a gay captain or a gay general might have the power to put their ass in the stockade for a few months for stepping out of line. This would have been the kind of thing The Weinstein Company needed or Mario Batali’s restaurant empire as well.
If there’s anything that cries out more for some diversity, it the underrepresentation of Muslims across the board in American society. It is especially egregious in the military where Muslims have to put up with treatment that is even crueler than what gays and Blacks have put up with on occasion.
Two years ago Raheel Siddiqui, a Marine recruit of Pakistani origin, committed suicide after putting up with months of harassment from a drill instructor who forced him into a dryer multiple times. The drill instructor ended up being sentenced to a long prison term but why submit any soldier to this kind of abuse even if there are stiff punishments associated with it? The presence of Muslim captains and generals can go a long way in preventing such behavior even if risks being denounced as a capitalist trick in Truthdig.
Until we have a new society based on respect for every human being, there are measures that can be taken to uphold such respect even if they are being meted out by managers or by judicial writ as is the case with affirmative action. When a Hollywood studio, a media company or a restaurant empire decides to carry out preferential hiring and promotion practices to help ensure that the upper ranks reflects the ethnic, racial and gender make-up of the lower ranks, we have no business opposing that. Such “diversity” policies are in their own way a reflection of the same social forces that produced affirmative action. In a perfect world, working people would have the good sense not to mistreat their fellow workers but in country like the U.S. that has been built upon racism, colonialism, and the secondary status of women, a little force is advisable whether by statutes or by managers intent on punishing wrong-doers.
Let’s never forget what happened in Cuba after the revolution triumphed. Fidel Castro declared that refusing to cut an Afro-Cuban’s hair was now a crime. That, much more than stirring speeches about racial equality, helped to elevate the status of Black people in Cuba even though racism continues to this day. Racism took hundreds of years to take root in Cuba and even a revolutionary government cannot uproot it overnight.
Reading about the Philly Socialists participation in a sit-in at ICE headquarters in Philadelphia was all the motivation I needed to donate $100 to their fund-drive. Rewire.news reported:
Hundreds of protestors in Philadelphia on Monday night set up camp with tents, tarps, lawn chairs, and beach umbrellas. They organized a space for volunteer medics and a people’s kitchen, providing free first aid and food to those at the camp. They received so many supplies they had to start rejecting and moving the supplies to an off-site location.
“From the beginning of the camp, from its inception, the tactic that we agreed upon was like strict non-violence,” a member of Philly Socialists who asked to remain anonymous told Rewire.News. “I was really proud because when it came time to do that [tactic], everyone did it and no one broke. Everyone stuck to the tactic.”
This is exactly the type of activism we need today, one that is based on militancy but at the same time non-violence, although my tendency would be to use the word mass action rather than non-violence. During the Vietnam War, mass actions never sought confrontations with the cops although they were organized to be defended against both police repression or ultraright attacks.
I have no idea whether Philly Socialists is bigger or smaller than the DSA in Philadelphia but there is one thing I am sure of. They never would have gone overboard supporting the “radical” lawyer Larry Krasner for District Attorney.
Jacobin, the voice of the DSA, was thrilled with Krasner’s election as should be obvious from this article posted last November crowing over Larry Krasner’s victory.
But as any revolutionary could have told you, once in office Krasner would make sure to toe the line. As part of his “transition team”, he named former Philadelphia District Attorney and State Supreme Court Justice Ronald D. Castille, a Republican who denied Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeals repeatedly. His animus directed against the “cop killer” was so obvious that in 2016 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Castille violated Mumia’s rights when he reinstated an execution order against him as a Supreme Court justice after the order had been vacated and after he’d already argued for his execution while prosecuting the case as district attorney. Instead, he should have recused himself from the case, especially since it is considered unorthodox for a judge to rule on a case he has previously prosecuted.
For an alternative take on Krasner/Castille, I recommend The Philly Partisan, the online journal of Philly Socialists. Titled “Thoughts On Larry Krasner’s Appointment of Ron Castille to His Transition Team for the District Attorney’s Office” and written by Kempis “Ghani” Songster (co-founder of the Redemption Project, Pennsylvania State Correctional Institute of Graterford), it should be all you need to read to convince to contribute generously to their fund-drive:
When a close friend of mine told me that a family member of his on the outside told him over the phone that Larry Krasner included Ron Castille in his Transition Team, I didn’t believe it. Then my friend said that, in fact, the report said Castille was Krasner’s first pick. I questioned the accuracy of the report he got from his family, i.e., his son, so hard that he started to question whether his son had read the report correctly. I mean, he started to doubt his own son and whether he himself heard his son right. That’s how hard I was defending Krasner. In my mind, there was no way someone who ran on an unprecedented, unapologetic, uncompromising “End Mass Incarceration” platform would seek and rely on one of the “purveyors of mass incarceration” to advise him on how to transition to what he promised, and what we hoped, would be a new culture in Philadelphia’s DA’s office.
Then I read the article myself in the Dec. 1 issue of the Daily News with my own eyes. I wasn’t totally surprised, which is sad, because I had seen this kind of thing before. Barack Obama campaigned aggressively on the lofty idea of Change, then when he was elected president he filled his cabinet with some of the unsavory characters who caused the problems he campaigned against. When I read the article about Krasner’s transition team, I was more like, “Deja vu. Here we go again. Politics as usual.” But, I wasn’t thinking that Krasner was flipping his campaign script and double-crossing the people who believed in him, voted for him, and put in super-hard yards to get him elected, as has been done by countless elected officials to their voters, time and time again. I was more like, “Noooo, Larry, you don’t have to do this. It’s unnecessary. You have a mandate!”
With respect to the rationale about “a symbolic transition team,” what does/would such a team with Ron Castille on it symbolize? What do We want, and what would We have, the transition team for Philly’s new DA symbolize or be “symbolic” of? What does Ron Castille symbolize? Is he a good symbol? One main campaign promise of Krasner’s was to change the culture of the DA’s office. Ron Castille does not represent/symbolize Change. Contrarily, he was one of the purveyors of the culture that Krasner promised to change and that the people elected him to change.
Castille was DA of Philadelphia from 1986-1990. He was the DA when his ADA Jack McMahon made the training video for and in front of young rookie prosecutors, schooling them on tactics for using peremptory strikes to exclude people of color from the jury in order to racially stack a jury prone to convict a defendant of color. That videotape was included in Castille’s office library for rookie prosecutors to check out and use as a training tool.
Castille was Chief Justice of the PA Supreme Court that ruled Miller v. Alabama/Jackson v. Hobbs “not retroactive” to JDBI [juvenile death by incarceration/life without parole] cases on collateral review. Castille wrote the opinion — Commonwealth v. Cunningham. He wanted to maintain DBI sentences for condemned children such as me who raised their JDBI issue on collateral. If Krasner includes Castille on the transition team, then he might as well include Lynne Abraham, too; and also Seth Williams, if he wasn’t in prison right now. Krasner’s election into the DA’s office should show that the people who put him there have won that particular institutional contest. But winning the symbolic contest is indispensable to an absolute victory in the institutional contest. Not only does the inclusion of a “symbol” such as Ron Castille in the “symbolic transition team” send mixed messages and confuse the people, but it symbolizes that we have not truly won the symbolic contest. That is, we have not won control of the narrative, the reshaping of the culture, and the meaning of all this.
If all Krasner did was appoint Castille in order to deflect charges that he was too radical (no, we can’t have that), it might be tolerable. But unfortunately, that was a prelude to a decision that makes DSA and any other “democratic socialist” think long and hard about their orientation to the Democratic Party. One of his assistant DA’s found that there was no bias in Castille’s rulings on Mumia despite the opinion of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. So the trail of broken Democratic promises continues.
I have just spent probably the longest 90 minutes of my life watching the first episode of “The Deuce”, an HBO series that examines prostitution and pornography in New York City in 1971. The show is co-written by George Pelecanos and David Simon, the creative team behind “The Wire”, another highly acclaimed HBO series that I could never stand for more than 5 minutes. Both shows are highly exploitative. In the name of gritty realism, they pander to the tastes of an educated urban middle-class that gets its kicks out of gaping at society’s lower-depths, especially African-American petty criminals who are stereotyped in this fare. In “The Wire”, it was drug dealers; in “The Deuce”, it is pimps and prostitutes. Despite the lofty pretensions of the men and women behind this series, it is nothing but Blaxploitation tailored to the carriage trade. All this would be forgivable if there was something dramatic going on. Sitting through the first episode was analogous to watching paint dry, to use a hoary cliché. How something as lurid as pimps and whores going about their business could turn out to be so humdrum and predictable indicates to me that Simon and Pelecanos’s reputation has been overblown to the nth degree.
“The Deuce” includes Richard Price and James Franco as executive producers, who likely had an influence on the story’s narrative arc. Price, a one-time very good novelist, began a steep decline once he began writing policiers like “Clockers”, a 1992 novel based on the cat-and-mouse games played by cops and African-American drug dealers. Expecting something approaching Dostoyevsky based on the rave reviews, I couldn’t get past page 50 or so. This novel evidently qualified Price to begin writing for its first cousin “The Wire” ten years later. Price also adapted the very fine British Criminal Justice TV series about a young man falsely accused of murdering a woman he met on a one-night stand into the mess called “The Night Of”. Like “The Wire” and “The Deuce”, it was mostly a way for Price to highlight repulsive and grotesque African-American characters.
In addition to executive producing “The Deuce”, James Franco plays twin brothers Vinnie and Frank Martino. Vinnie is a bartender from Brooklyn while his brother is a Vietnam vet with a gambling addiction. Evidently the two of them become pioneers of the porn industry but I don’t have plans to stick around to watch the characters “making it”. I find pornography in and of itself to be a crushing bore so I don’t expect a film about its rise to break the mold.
Like Franco, Maggie Gyllenhaal is both an executive producer and an actor. She plays Eileen “Candy” Merrell, a street-walker in Times Square, where most of the action takes place. Unlike the other whores, she works on her own.
Setting the tone for the sort of pimps that are featured in “The Deuce”, we meet C.C. and Reggie Love hanging out in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. They are dressed in the garish costumes featured in Blaxploitation films of this period, conked hair and all. The predictably named Reggie Love, who has returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam, is singing the praises of Richard Nixon whose ability to intimidate the Vietnamese makes him a fellow pimp in spirit. From there the conversation turns to how they want to line up some white bitches for their stable. Listening to the dialog between the two characters is a revolting experience akin to that produced by the scene in “Dumbo” where crows are stand-ins for Black people.
When C.C. spots a young woman who has just deboarded a bus from Minnesota, he strides toward her with a cane in his right hand. No, he is not disabled from a tour of duty in Vietnam, only using it as a fashion accessory. It is obvious that subtlety is not a word found in Simon and Pelenacos’s vocabulary.
Leaving aside the message of this dubious product, there are stylistic choices that strike me as boneheaded. In the ninety minute pilot for “The Deuce”, there are 46 separate scenes, most lasting no more than a minute. They all involved different characters, sometimes overlapping in the by-now overused “coincidence” fashion of films like “Crash” or “Amores perros”. You know the sort of film I am talking about, right? It is one in which 25 different characters cross each other’s path beating the kind of odds you would find in the NY State Lottery. The hub for all of these coincidences is the House of Korea, a restaurant in Times Square where Vinnie works as a bartender that is favored by pimps, prostitutes, cops and businessmen far more interested in getting drunk than eating some of the best cuisine on earth.
Additionally, to appear faithful to the period, nearly every character smokes cigarettes during the dialog. It becomes a huge distraction since it is so italicized. As I said, Simon and Pelenacos are not into subtlety.
Since the device of having such brief scenes is meant to draw you into the texture of Times Square society in 1971 rather than to develop the characters psychologically, you begin to tire of the fragmentation. Price used the same approach in “The Night Of”, which he clearly borrowed from “The Wire”. I much prefer something like “The French Connection” or “The Godfather”. If that makes me a moldy fig, so be it.
I think Ishmael Reed had the last word on this crap in an interview he gave to Wajahat Ali on Counterpunch:
ALI: Let’s talk about the media. Here are some popular examples of media content and personalities that have gone mainstream and are successful: Oprah. Will Smith. Jamie Foxx. Tyra Bank. Tyler Perry. The Wire. Barbershop. American Gangster. You’re known as a vociferous critic of mainstream media and its tendency to stereotype. So, why complain now? You guys– African Americans – have made it.
REED: The Wire– you know, David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90’s on Chris Welche’s show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner– it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc.
ALI: Was that HBO?
REED: Yes. HBO does all this kind of stuff. I called in and told Simon, “You’re using this kid.” Later I said it [was] like Buffalo Bill going around the country exhibiting Indians. He got really pissed off and went to the New York Times, where he has a supporter there named Virginia Hefferman, another Times feminist who, when it comes to Black urban Fiction, can’t tell the difference between the real and the fake; she’s his supporter. She said that George Pelecanos, David Simon, and Richard Price are the “Lords of Urban Fiction,” when the Black Holloway authors like Iceberg Slim can write circles around these guys when it comes to Urban fiction.
Simon, Price and Pelecanos’ Black characters speak like the cartoon crows in those old racist cartoons [“Heckle and Jeckle.”] Henry Louis Gates knows this about “The Wire,” yet his right wing blog, The Root, carries an ad for “The Wire” today and a glowing article about this piece of crap. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an intellectual entrepreneur all right. He condemns my work as misogynist yet supports Simon’s Neo-Nazi portrait of Black people. “The Wire” and novels by Price and Pelecanos should be submitted to the Jim Crow museum at Ferris State University– this is the website: www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/, where they can have a honored place alongside of some of Robert Crumb’s Nazi cartoons.
When I was researching my novel Reckless Eyeballing, I attended a lecture sponsored by the San Francisco Holocaust Museum, March 26,1984. The program said that the stereotypes about Jewish men in the Nazi media was similar to that about Black men in the United States. I thought, what on earth are they talking about? And then I went out and examined some of this junk, especially the cartoons in the newspaper Der Sturmer – see Julius Streicher Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semite Newspaper Der Sturmer by Randall l. Bytwerk. I was shocked. Jewish men were depicted as sexual predators, raping Aryan women. They were exhibited as flashers. Both Bellow and Phillip Roth’s books include Black flashers. Jewish men especially those immigrants from Russia were depicted as criminals. Jewish children were seen as disruptive, a threat to German school children and so on.
If any one looks at this stuff for example, you’ll find a perfect match for the way that David Mamet, David Simon, George Pelecanos, Stephen Spielberg and Richard Price portray Blacks. They are very critical in their projects about the way Black men treat women, yet none of them has produced a project critical of the way that men of their background treat women.
When two screeners submitted to NYFCO members for consideration as best film of 2016 happen to deal with racism against people of color who are gifted mathematicians if not outright geniuses, your first reaction might be to consider it a coincidence. But upon further reflection, despite all of the gloom about the election of Donald Trump, the film industry still sees such stories as eminently marketable rather than Rambo retreads. Not only are the films marketable, they are first rate.
“Hidden Figures”, which opens everywhere on January 6th, 2017, tells the story of three African-American women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and who had to deal with both racial oppression and sexism. Of the three, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) receives most of the attention. Now 98, she calculated the launch window for the 1961 Mercury mission. As the daughter of a lumberjack in segregated West Virginia, she had many obstacles to overcome. Although I have little use for President Obama, I thought he exercised good judgement when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
While its venue was in art houses last April, where features generally make a fleeting appearance unlike the Multiplexes that will screen “Hidden Figures”, my readers will certainly want to take advantage of “The Man Who Knew Infinity” now on Amazon streaming. This is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (played by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel), who grew up poor in Madras, India and demonstrated a mastery of mathematics from an early age. Working as a lowly clerk after the fashion of Bob Cratchit, his supervisor was struck by a notebook of formulas he kept, so much so that he encouraged him to send letters with a sample of his work to universities in England. After Cambridge don G. H. Hardy (played to perfection by Jeremy Irons) reads the material, he invites Ramanujan to come to Trinity College and fulfill his dreams. Like NASA, however, the institution is racist to the core and almost crushes Ramanujan into the dust.
While both films have most of the well-trod inspirational elements you would associate with such tales, they rise above the genre and soar. This is mostly a function of their faithfulness to the historical context, informed to a large extent by the well-researched books they are based on. Written this year, Margot Lee Shatterly’s “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” was sparked by conversations she had with her father, who was an African-American research scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia where the women in “Hidden Figures” worked. As for “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, the source material was a book of the same name written in 1991 by Robert Kanigel, who worked as an engineer before becoming a free-lance writer in 1970. In 1999, he became professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. So clearly, we are dealing with authors who are very much wedded to the stories they write about.
In addition to Katherine Johnson, the other two Black women facing discrimination at NASA are Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Vaughan was the supervisor of the West Area Computers section at NASA that despite the name consisted of African-American women whose job it was to do tedious calculations and check the mathematics of other employees, almost like fact checkers at the New Yorker Magazine. Known as “computers”, they had to be much more rigorous than those working for a magazine since the lives of astronauts depended on it. The West Area was segregated from the main buildings at in Hampton—separate and unequal. The women could not even use the bathrooms on the main campus or even the water fountains. When Katherine Johnson ended up working with the white scientists, she had to walk a quarter-mile to return to the West Area to go to the bathroom. When Mary Jackson decided to become an engineer to get away from the drudge work of being a human computer, she found out that no college in Virginia would accept a Black person. Undaunted, she took a night class in a high school after winning a legal case to gain such a right.
In some ways, the film will remind you of “The Imitation Game”, which was also about a crash program run by mathematicians and engineers. But unlike “The Imitation Game”, “Hidden Figures” is much more of a human drama since there is a daily battle by the women to be recognized as equals to whites and to men. In the most stirring scene in the film, Katherine Johnson explains to her boss (played capably by Kevin Costner) that she disappears a couple of times a day from her desk in order to go to the bathroom in a segregated area. Appalled by the waste of time and the disrespect to a fellow worker, he goes around NASA and tears down all the signs indicating facilities for the “colored”.
As another coincidence, the film climaxes with the successful orbital flight of John Glenn (Glen Powell) in 1962. Glenn died two days ago at the age of 95. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate his orbit around Earth, Johnson was called upon to verify the numbers because Glenn refused to fly unless Katherine verified them first.
When Ramanujan arrives at Trinity College, he is met by racism from every quarter. Even his champion G.H. Hardy mixes well-intended paternalism with jibes about sending him back to India if he doesn’t make the grade.
In many ways, Hardy is a more interesting character than Ramanujan because he is constantly being forced to reckon with the disjunction between his prejudices and the reality of the young man in front of him who he finally acknowledges as the Mozart of mathematics—a man who could penetrate to the heart of a math puzzle and solve it as easily as Mozart could write a sonata.
In one scene, Ramanujan is sitting in a lecture that Hardy has pressured him to attend in order to compensate for ostensible deficiencies in his autodidactic training. When a professor asks him why he is not taking notes, he replies that it is not necessary since he understands the material on the blackboard completely. Not believing him, the professor goads him into explaining what the formulas on the blackboard are about. Nonplussed, Ramanujan arises from his seat, goes to the blackboard and provides a sophisticated solution to the problems being posed by the professor. This does not result in congratulations but instead being thrown out of class for his perceived arrogance. Apparently he doesn’t know his place.
Unlike nearly every film I have seen about scientific matters or chess, this is one that makes very clear what made Ramanujan such a genius. He was the first to crack the “partition” problem that the film elucidates.
Take the number four. There are four ways to calculate the number of paths to that number using simple mathematics:
But what if the number was 3,789,422 instead? Was there any way to use a formula to arrive at the number of ‘partitions’ and bypass manual calculations? This is a problem that has vexed mathematicians forever until Ramanujan solved it. I have no idea what the practical application of such a formula would be but Ramanujan, unlike most men at Trinity College including Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam) who were atheists, was deeply religious and once told Hardy that god gave him the insights to solve such problems. For him, solving math problems and praying complemented each other.
The Wikipedia entry on Ramanujan, who died of TB at the age of 32, is most informative:
During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. His original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, have inspired a vast amount of further research. The Ramanujan Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan.
Deeply religious, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity: “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”
After seeing both of these films, I could not help but be reminded of one of the main reasons I became a socialist in 1967. When it is such a battle for the women of “Hidden Figures” or Ramanujan to rise to the top, think of all those who were not fortunate to be given a chance. What a waste of humanity when class divisions require a mass of workers to be treated little better than a horse or any other beast of burden. I put it this way in my review of a documentary about Ousmane Sembene, the brilliant Senegalese film director who was thrown out of grade school for assaulting an abusive teacher:
I became a socialist in the 1960s largely on the belief that capitalism held back civilization by preventing a large majority of the world’s population from reaching its maximum potential. If the children of Asia, Africa and Latin America could enjoy the same benefits of those in rich countries, especially a top-notch education and the leisure time to develop innate talents, that could enhance the possibility of a great artist like Picasso or the scientist who could find a cure for cancer emerging out of formerly neglected regions.
Saul Bellow once asked tauntingly “who was the Zulu Tolstoy” in an obvious dismissal of African potential. Considering the career of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who is the subject of the great documentary “Sembène” that opens on November 6th at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, you would conclude that the potential is enormous, held back only by what Andre Gunder Frank once called the development of underdevelopment.
She argues that affirmative action divides the working class
COUNTERPUNCH DECEMBER 2, 2016
It goes without saying, that as we fight to end all forms of discrimination, as we fight to bring more and more women into the political process, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans – all of that is ENORMOUSLY important, and count me in as somebody who wants to see that happen. But it is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class in this country and is going to take on big-money interests. And one of the struggles that we’re going to have…in the Democratic Party is it’s not good enough for me to say we have x number of African Americans over here, we have y number of Latinos, we have z number of women, we are a diverse party, a diverse nation. Not good enough!
As someone who had little use for Hillary Clinton or any Democrat for that matter, there was something a bit troubling about the “class trumping identity” plea since it reminded me of contradictions that have bedeviled the revolutionary movement from its inception. While the idea of uniting workers on the basis of their class interests and transcending ethnic, gender and other differences has enormous appeal at first blush, there are no easy ways to implement such an approach given the capitalist system’s innate tendency to create divisions in the working class in order to maintain its grip over the class as a whole.
