World War II produced two unforeseen events with profound implications for the rest of the twentieth century

In his must-read cultural analysis of the impact of the VietNam war on the American psyche, H. Bruce Franklin (who served in the JSAF, and, later, as a tenured professor of English literature at Stanford University was fired because, in the words of the university, "his views were so strongly held that he could not be rehavilitated from them" in his political activism which included incredibly successful efforts {along with Stokely Carmichael} to get signatures to bring to ballot referendum of whether or not the maker of the chemical defoiliant Agent Orange should be permitted to operate within the boundaries of Redwood, CA ... while not succeeding in their efforts, the activists and community organizers made the chemical maker VERY uncomfortable)


World War II produced two unforeseen events with profound implications for the rest of the twentieth century, including the cultural wars of our historical epoch. The first was the Russian Revolution, which sparked communist revolutions and revolutionary movements from Mongolia to Germany and then around the world. The second was the national liberation movements of the colored peoples in the colonies and neo-colonies ofthe great empires.

The embattled French and British empires had taken two very dangerous steps during the war: they had brought troops from their colonies in Africa and Asia into the European battlefield, and they had ordered many of their African and Asian subjects to violate the most fundamental taboo underlying white colonial rule, the prohibition against people of color ever committing violence against white people. What happened to the consciousness of the African troops from the French and British colonies, for example, when they were ordered to kill white Germans? Even more dangerous was the light shed on the fundamental rationale of white colonialism--what the British called "the white man's burden" and what the French called "la mission civilisatrice"--that the "West" was bringing "civilization" to the backward, benighted colored peoples of the world. The colonized peoples were of course already aware of the misery and oppression brought to their homelands by these civilizers, and so were some people from the colonizing nations. For example, back in the middle of the nineteenth century, a young American author and ex-sailor named Herman Melville, whose global voyages had allowed him to witness some of the ravages of European colonialism, became convinced that "the white civilized man," as he put it in 1845, is "the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth." During World War I, what Africans and Asians, as well as American "Negroes," say in the great cradle of "Western civilization" was an insane orgy of mass murder and devastation on an unprecedented scale, as the hallmark of this civilization, its miraculous technology and vast production, was used to turn portions of Europe into poisonous wastelands.

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In the global cultural and political wars emerging from World War I, the hegemony of European culture, as well as its alleged aesthetic and moral superiority, was directly challenged by people of color everywhere. This was the period, for example, of the May Fourth Movement in China, the Harlem Renaissance with its roots in the British Caribbean colonies, and the movement among francophone peoples in Africa and the Caribbean. Among the political and intellectual leaders who were to emerge from this awakening were Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya; Sukarno, first president of Indonesia; Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana; Mao Tse-tung of China; Carlos Bulosan of the Philippines; Agostinho Neto, first president of Angola; Leopold Senghor, first president of Senegal; and Ho Chi Minh. Many of these leaders were also distinguished literary figures, including such fine poets as Neto, Mao, Ho, and Senghor, who, together with Aime Cesaire, co-founded the negritude movement and translated many worked from the Harlem Renaissance into French. Culture, especially literary culture, in the lives of these anti-imperial revolutionaries was never divorced from political issues and action.

The explosion and recognition of multicultural and popular literature in America during the 1920s and 1930s must be seen in this global context of the anti colonial movement among people of color, the revulsion against the carnage of war, and the Russian Revolution, which was soon offering a theoretical basis for proletarian and ethnic literatures. It is no mere coincidence that the 1920s was the decade of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age, a term borrowed from African American popular culture. Then, when the Great Depression struck the United States in 1928, it also blasted holes in dams that had long separated "high" and "low" culture, releasing a flood of multi-ethnic, working-class, and sometimes even revolutionary literature that threatened to overwhelm the dominant British tradition.

The conservative reaction against the radicalization of 1930s culture was swift and increasingly powerful. In literary studies it took three interrelated forms. First was the cult of the "great books," originally codified by overtly racist propagandists and soon institutionalized at Columbia and the University of Chicago, two universities in urban centers most threatened by the rising flood of radicalism. Second was a rigidly tightened definition of the canon of "major" or "great" literature to be included in anthologies and course, one that eliminated all writers of color. but most important in shaping the study of literature in the 1940s, 1950, and 1960s before the impact of the Vietnam War was New Criticism.


Although New Criticism came to be regarded as an apolitical methodology designed to study literature for "its own sake," without any corruption influence from ideology or social context, that was neither its founding purpose nor its enduring effect. The original New Critics, first coalescing at Vanderbilt University, explicitly presented themselves as "reactionary" saviors of the culture of Western civilization from the encroachments of the subcultural influences of colored and other working-class people. Their announced purpose ... was to combat "vulgar" culture, promulgating in its place the "finest" values of "the Old South" and literature congenial to their ideology. For example, the leading New Critic Allen Tate declared that "the Negro" had "had much the same thinning influence upon the class above him as the anonymous city proletariat has had upon the culture of industrial capitalism," and then went on to explain that "the Negro" "got everything from the white man," but "we could graft no new life upon the Negro; he was too different, too alien." The hallmark of New Critical methodology--intricately detailed and nuanced readings of texts--was actually a corollary of these texts deemed worthy of study, texts filled with elaborate ambiguities and ironies, texts therefore not easily accessible to common readers. In the two decades after World War II, New Criticism triumphed not only in American higher education but in the teaching of literature throughout elementary and high schools as well.

Larry Pinkney, the former Black Panther who won his release from being a political prisoner in Attica by arguing it on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, takes up the issues here, in an editorial he published in 2007, entitled "COLLECTIVELY DEFINING OURSELVES."


This is also precisely why trojan horse US Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, went so far as to smugly and most inaccurately state that "there is no Black America." [Reference NPR: Can Barack Obama Win the Black Vote?] Obama's "there is no Black America" assertion is an abomination, and is exactly the kind of dangerously ridiculous and demeaning rhetoric that Black America has endured from white racist political candidates. Perhaps, he wishes that there were "no Black America" and no Black American collective consciousness of Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Haimer, Medgar Evers, or even Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps, he wishes simply to define Black America out of existence. Black America will never allow itself or its ongoing collective struggle to be defined out of existence by Mr."There is no Black America"- Barack Obama or anyone else, regardless of their biological color. This is an example of how utterly horrendous the act of allowing others, who in actuality do not represent our social, economic, or cultural experience, to define who Black Americans are and can be. To Barack Obama, we Black Americans will surely say, as did our African ancestors, "Beware of the naked man who offers you clothes." Black America does exist and we shall continue this struggle to collectively define ourselves.

In our daily lives we must reject the subtle and overt racist assertions of white America. Simply replacing some white faces with a few biologically Black faces in television commercials for some white owned product or company is not progress or freedom. It is opportunistic exploitation, combined with cynical tokenism on the part of white racist, corporate, capitalist America. We must not let ourselves or our young people be defined by this most insidious form of cultural and financial exploitation. As Gil Scott-Heron and others so aptly said back in the day, truly "the revolution will not be televised." An important part of this ongoing political and cultural revolution or struggle in America (and it is ongoing) is all about definitions and defining. We must continue to collectively define ourselves as Black people in the 21st century.

Another potent weapon regularly used by others to negatively and inaccurately define us Black people and other people of color in America is the so-called "news" and information media. Just as when the so-called news and information media actively sought to demonize and discredit Marcus Garvey, his organization, and those who were a part of it, including the parents of Malcolm X, so it is today that it does precisely the same thing, albeit now sometimes utilizing a few well-placed token biological "people of color" to be white America's defining spokespersons of disinformation.

So it is today that far too few of our young Black, Brown, and Red youth know the repression against, and the actual detailed histories of, struggle by organizations in the 60s and 70s such as the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and even the Black Panther Party etc. Indeed, today, the American "news" media continues to play a pivotal role in defining and misinforming people nationally and globally about the deplorable and worsening social and economic conditions endured by the vast majority of people of color in America. Moreover, even presently, a favorite bogey man / disinformation target of the US news media continues to be the Black Panther Party, which the US Government viciously wiped out, just as it had done to Marcus Garvey's organization in years prior. [Reference Biased Reporting on the BPP - Assata Speaks - Hands Off Assata - Let's Get Free].

We must not, for example, buy into the well perpetuated myth that all rap, hip-hop, or spoken word is disrespectful and monstrous for it is not, as the hip-hop / spoken word artist Black Man Preach demonstrates on the cd / album Bumpy Tymes. It shook me to my core and reminded me of the awesome responsibility we have to pass on active consciousness to our younger sisters and brothers. If we seriously do this, they will, more often than not, respond by defining positively themselves and their Black people. As back in the day, the incomparable Pharaoh Sanders wailed, "The creator has a master plan...." Ah, yes.

All of us have the sacred responsibility to take an active part in this ongoing process of defining and articulating what and who we people in Black America are. ALL of us must be the lions and lionesses that collectively define and articulate for ourselves, our youth, and the rest of the world, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future - as we keep on keeping it real.