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From: blp Category: Life Date: 01 September 2006 Time: 07:20 PM Review: I was reminded of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which, like this, is about the overwhelming difficulty, emotional and intellectual more than material, of being black. More than material? It's practically impossible to start having these discussions without feeling like an outburst of righteous indignation is around the corner, but yes, with no slur intended, more than material. The psychotherapist Fritz Perls came up against just this righteous indignation in the sixties when he tried to put blacks and whites together in a room to air their grievances. The blacks weren't playing. They couldn't. Given the chance to vent their rage, the rage never seemed to burn itself out. The sessions had to be stopped before someone got killed. It's not that there's no material element, but in the end, in both these works, what you end up with is blacks in all kinds of material circumstances, even comfortable ones, who are caught up in a philosophical and sociological condition of maddening, frustrating impossibility. They're racist agains themselves, going along with a religion that denigrates them - Christianity (according to the TV show), preferring light skinned blacks and straightening their hair by time consuming and physically painful processes. One black woman in the show described blacks as being like crabs in a barrel: you can leave the lid off because the crabs will keep pulling each other back in whenever one tries to escape - as if blacks as a whole can be generalised into an entity so damaged by abuse that it can't stop self-harming. And why not? Self-harm isn't just a matter of perversity. It's also the result of a perceived devil's bargain where your only choice is the least worst option. The Black Power revolutionaries in Godard's One Plus One chant their intention never to learn whitey's language properly: 'Ain't gonna learn it. We ain't gonna learn it' and insist, quasi-mystically, that even if they do speak the same language as whitey it's never going to mean the same thing. Like Howard the Duck, they're trapped in a world they never made, stuck with a language that is not inscribed with their history. The problem isn't lack of pride; it's shame, the shame of the abused. Never mind that no one really owns the language and it's alienating for all of us and never mind that no one really needs pride and so pride becomes part of the problem. 'We built the pyramids. Jesus was black' the black party guests in Shoot the Messenger intone piously, allowing themselves the language, but finding another way to deny themselves the right to their own intelligence. The problem isn't the 'reality' of these things - language, pride, and, to pick on the word that was said to define a 'politics' for oppressed and marginalised peoples, identity - the problem is their utterly powerful symbolic resonance. People only worry about the quality of their own identity to the extent that they have been displaced or subjected to a lack of freedom. There's the trick, the vortex that sucks you in: a fixed identity is a lack of freedom in itself. It's this kind of thing that makes people participate in their own oppression. Even if you suss all this out, there's still the hell of other people to deal with - white people and black people who's expectations are narrow, who see you already as having more of a fixed identity than a white person who, as the poster above pointed out, are seen just as people. Race is still a huge issue. It's just that it's less a matter of indignation than grim depression.