Thomas Friedman: David Bowie of his fiefdom?
has anyone seen Labyrinth? not the new cool one, the 80s cheesy one with David Bowie and some muppets. it's a musical, as i recall.
i had to write to someone yesterday basically to tell him "You have no power over me!" Like, how difficult is it to realize, ensconced in the authority of privilege, that the kind of authority you exercise works on belief alone and nothing else? That you can't just say things to people and expect that, because you're powerful, they're going to comply? I had to explain that to someone at the Imperial University and i feel as though it didn't go well.
At any rate, today, Thomas Friedman has written an op-ed entitled "Where is Martin Luther al-King?" It's behind the Times Select subscriber wall, but before even encouraging people to reade it i sort of have to remind people, a) MLK is not, in fact, the only Black person worth his salt, and it's really lame to keep holding him up as if he were, and b) the closest Muslim figure analogous to MLK already lived and died. his name was el-Hajj Malik Shabazz.
Before he was assassinated, Malcolm X took the pilgrimage to Mecca and took on the title of Hajji or el-Hajj. He pretty much converted when he broke from the Nation of Islam and, while he was still a Black nationalist, his advocacy for unity among African-Americans and African peoples was accompanied by an appeal to solidarity with people who of all national, racial, and ethnic groups shared his views. Much like King's advocacy with the SCLC was rooted in the teachings of Christianity, for what it's worth, Shabazz's advocacy for unity and solidarity was rooted *firmly* in Islam. Shabazz lived at the same time as King, he ministered to people of the same classes in the same media, sometimes in the same cities, and had he not been assassinated, he and King would have inevitably gravitated toward one another in much the same way that labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Quaker pacifists like Bayard Rustin-- who were not at all of the same political stripe as King-- gravitated toward each other quite independently of the relatively unknown Rev. Dr.
Meanwhile, King was a hell of a lot more sympathetic to socialism and the people living under anti-Communist persecution at the end of his life, and yet you don't see appeals to revitalize that part of his legacy. as far as internationalism goes, the man we know as Malcolm X was way out ahead of him on that one when he died in 1965, at least publicly.
So what pisses me off (if one can be pissed off in the name of peace) is that the legacy of straw-King (not the real person but the image of him) gets trotted out every 5 minutes in order to make every leader in the Islamic world, past and present, look intrinsically violent when in fact nonviolence is a strategy that has exemplars everywhere, far (as in the people, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, who worked with Mohandas Gandhi and taught King everything he knew about satyagraha in the first place) and near (as in Black nationalists in the United States who never actually waged a war or anything against the state, even though they were under constant surveillance and death threats). When comparing people, past or present, to King, folks always seem to forget that nonviolence was only one of several distinguishing characteristics of a program that also included a little too much socialist-minded internationalism, for some, and way too little feminism, for me. So instead what we get is a half-assed comparison that doesn't do justice to the actual Civil Rights movement, and that is just as often openly hostile to what the Ella Bakers and Coretta Scotts of the 20th century were trying to achieve.
So why does a cad like Friedman wave the rare and brilliant lens of King over Islam to look for nonviolent leaders if he doesn't believe there are any? If he's suggesting that there are no brown people who could be examples of nonviolence, why doesn't Friedman ask where the white nonviolent peace activists are? Oh, because he might find them-- the white proponents of the current anti-war movement include some especially nonviolent white feminists like Medea Benjamin. He'd probably find nonviolent Asian Americans resisting the abusiveness of the military like Steven Funk, James Yee (a Muslim-- does not compute, Friedman, does not compute), and Ehren Watada. He'd probably find nonviolent Latino/a and Native people. But that would suggest that maybe there *are* nonviolent leaders, past and present, instead of feeding the binaristic, a priori assumption that there *aren't* any. Instead, a broke-ass liberal like Friedman has to insult the legacies of one decent Black Christian and a whole lot of decent Muslims just to suggest that a) a non-pacifist white liberal op-ed columnist is the one who gets to decide what constitutes the best possible image of Black people, ever and b) no Muslim could ever live up to that magical, mythical image.
So again, i have to say, liberal anti-intellectual pseudo-intellectuals? "You have no power over me." The idea that people should accept that all the politics that define them, past and present, can be reduced to their racialized image in your mind is sophomoric, at best, and racist, at worst. Also, shave that freaking moustache. in the words of our great leader Dr King, "you look like an *sshole."
i had to write to someone yesterday basically to tell him "You have no power over me!" Like, how difficult is it to realize, ensconced in the authority of privilege, that the kind of authority you exercise works on belief alone and nothing else? That you can't just say things to people and expect that, because you're powerful, they're going to comply? I had to explain that to someone at the Imperial University and i feel as though it didn't go well.
At any rate, today, Thomas Friedman has written an op-ed entitled "Where is Martin Luther al-King?" It's behind the Times Select subscriber wall, but before even encouraging people to reade it i sort of have to remind people, a) MLK is not, in fact, the only Black person worth his salt, and it's really lame to keep holding him up as if he were, and b) the closest Muslim figure analogous to MLK already lived and died. his name was el-Hajj Malik Shabazz.
Before he was assassinated, Malcolm X took the pilgrimage to Mecca and took on the title of Hajji or el-Hajj. He pretty much converted when he broke from the Nation of Islam and, while he was still a Black nationalist, his advocacy for unity among African-Americans and African peoples was accompanied by an appeal to solidarity with people who of all national, racial, and ethnic groups shared his views. Much like King's advocacy with the SCLC was rooted in the teachings of Christianity, for what it's worth, Shabazz's advocacy for unity and solidarity was rooted *firmly* in Islam. Shabazz lived at the same time as King, he ministered to people of the same classes in the same media, sometimes in the same cities, and had he not been assassinated, he and King would have inevitably gravitated toward one another in much the same way that labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Quaker pacifists like Bayard Rustin-- who were not at all of the same political stripe as King-- gravitated toward each other quite independently of the relatively unknown Rev. Dr.
Meanwhile, King was a hell of a lot more sympathetic to socialism and the people living under anti-Communist persecution at the end of his life, and yet you don't see appeals to revitalize that part of his legacy. as far as internationalism goes, the man we know as Malcolm X was way out ahead of him on that one when he died in 1965, at least publicly.
So what pisses me off (if one can be pissed off in the name of peace) is that the legacy of straw-King (not the real person but the image of him) gets trotted out every 5 minutes in order to make every leader in the Islamic world, past and present, look intrinsically violent when in fact nonviolence is a strategy that has exemplars everywhere, far (as in the people, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, who worked with Mohandas Gandhi and taught King everything he knew about satyagraha in the first place) and near (as in Black nationalists in the United States who never actually waged a war or anything against the state, even though they were under constant surveillance and death threats). When comparing people, past or present, to King, folks always seem to forget that nonviolence was only one of several distinguishing characteristics of a program that also included a little too much socialist-minded internationalism, for some, and way too little feminism, for me. So instead what we get is a half-assed comparison that doesn't do justice to the actual Civil Rights movement, and that is just as often openly hostile to what the Ella Bakers and Coretta Scotts of the 20th century were trying to achieve.
So why does a cad like Friedman wave the rare and brilliant lens of King over Islam to look for nonviolent leaders if he doesn't believe there are any? If he's suggesting that there are no brown people who could be examples of nonviolence, why doesn't Friedman ask where the white nonviolent peace activists are? Oh, because he might find them-- the white proponents of the current anti-war movement include some especially nonviolent white feminists like Medea Benjamin. He'd probably find nonviolent Asian Americans resisting the abusiveness of the military like Steven Funk, James Yee (a Muslim-- does not compute, Friedman, does not compute), and Ehren Watada. He'd probably find nonviolent Latino/a and Native people. But that would suggest that maybe there *are* nonviolent leaders, past and present, instead of feeding the binaristic, a priori assumption that there *aren't* any. Instead, a broke-ass liberal like Friedman has to insult the legacies of one decent Black Christian and a whole lot of decent Muslims just to suggest that a) a non-pacifist white liberal op-ed columnist is the one who gets to decide what constitutes the best possible image of Black people, ever and b) no Muslim could ever live up to that magical, mythical image.
So again, i have to say, liberal anti-intellectual pseudo-intellectuals? "You have no power over me." The idea that people should accept that all the politics that define them, past and present, can be reduced to their racialized image in your mind is sophomoric, at best, and racist, at worst. Also, shave that freaking moustache. in the words of our great leader Dr King, "you look like an *sshole."