Collective work is hardly en vogue in academia where the ivory rule of monadic, competitive individualism goes largely unquestioned. So all kinds of forces, seriously ideological, threatened to undermine this roundtable, a rare text without “an author.” We pulled it off anyway, despite the odds. It grows out of on-going conversations centered around our SUNY Binghamton-based Coloniality Working Group, and includes choice members as well as guests. The Condemnation of Little B is our preoccupation here, thanks to Elaine Brown (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). Thanks, indeed, to Elaine Brown!
Rigo Andino (Sociology);
Peter Carlo-Becerra (Sociology);
Karen Gagne (Sociology);
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz (School of Education and Human Development);
G. Thomas (English), Moderator;
Michael West (Sociology/Africana Studies);
Yerie Yoon (Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture).
Karen Gagne:
I found Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B to be innovative, timely, and historic in its portrayal of racism in America.
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz:
This book stands at the crossroads of the politics of research and activism. I think that what is timely here is that she brings us back to rethink the ways in which intellectuals (outside academia as well as within it) might be able to connect these two realms of our political life.
Michael West:
We expect courage from Elaine Brown. In The Condemnation of Little B, she has not disappointed us. In an early and oft-cited Washington Post review, excerpts from which now adorn the back cover, this book was likened to W.E.B. Dubois’s much-ballyhooed Souls of Black Folk, which itself was first published in 1903. The comparison, however, is wrongheaded. Souls’s historical importance rests, to a very large extent, on its appraisal of Booker T. Washington (most notably the essay entitled “On Mr. Washington and Others”). Yet rhetorically, at least, that essay is meek, couched as it is in a bashful, even deferential, tone. Writing just a year shy of a century later, Elaine Brown strikes a sharply different chord!
G. Thomas:
Point well taken. Believe me! I didn’t know what to expect, exactly, when I first picked up this second book. I just knew I saw Elaine Brown bring down the house at Chapel Hill when she spoke there during my post-doc, right after I’d read or re-read her autobiography. I took crazy notes at this talk and savored her politics and style. Then I opened this latest text and saw it become so many things. It’s a “biography” of one Black boy, so to speak, which is no less the historical biography of Africans in “U.S./America” at this point in time. It’s mass media studies, “journalism,” counter-criminology, courtroom diary and an extra-legal cross-examination... This class of mine (“Writing Against the Grain of Empire”) composed a long list of all the genre classifications possible for this text. I really liked “social contract theory,” as one student’s suggestion! There’s nothing like The Condemnation of Little B in terms of its constitution; and then there’s its mission. Nowadays, I feel like most publications are little more than just crimes against trees. Here is a work that takes on nearly everything as far as Black people are concerned and in a contemporary context where we’re actually bribed to avoid Black identification; when you can get paid as a basically anti-Black “Negro intellectual.” Not only was this book difficult to imagine, before reading it, but with all this dumb propaganda about “Black progress,” it’s not supposed to be possible. So much suffocating non-sense gets flushed with this one.
Yerie Yoon:
Yes, I believe that it is precisely her multi-disciplinary incisions into the comforts of established academia and government (two of “progress’s” favorite haunts) which render her text so compelling. She trains her unapologetic analysis on the very machinations of that comfort; and because she is not confined to the limits and sycophancy of an isolated discipline, Brown is exact in her damning revelation of how implicated Black leaders, their liberal (and conservative) white “allies,” and capitalist interests are in this “New Age” of “Racism.”
Peter Carlo-Becerra:
It’s quite clear that what Brown begins to expose is the contours of the colonial condition of Black America under the Clinton years, and its more specific manifestation in Atlanta, all through a brilliant unfolding of the circumstances surrounding the plight of Little B. In this sense the book’s signal achievement is not only to unmask the pernicious and pervasive imagery deployed by so many of the Clinton years as a “pro-Black” and even “first Black” presidency, but to advance an anti-colonial discourse on a mass level at a time when such an analytic has been roundly silenced outside of certain circles such as our own. In this sense, the reading and critical evaluation of the book must be tailored to an understanding of its value in this historical moment, especially for an on-line forum which, unfortunately, could be one of the few places where it gets an adequate reception.
Rigo Andino:
The Condemnation of Little B is a timely piece because it captures how race and racism have taken on a new twist in the “American” imaginary. This “American” imaginary is one of historical amnesia: one that denies its violent past towards its subjugated masses, one that denies its racist past and its present racial problems, one that claims that there is no poverty in the ghettos of “America” and that everyone or mostly everyone in the ghettos (i.e., the countless Bluff’s in the cities of “America”) are “dangerous individuals” and, last but not least, one that has constructed its so-called “other” (“Negro,” Black, Afri-U.S. populations) for the process of Euro-American self-affirmation. The process of this Euro-American self-affirmation is connected to the process of maintaining a cultural hegemony that is vital to the North American state.
Michael West:
Using this tragic case of Michael Lewis, a.k.a. Little B, as exemplar – and largely as exemplar, since the putative chief protagonist often recedes into the inner recesses of the story, only to be narratively resurrected as suddenly as he had disappeared – Brown offers a wide-ranging commentary on the state of Black America and the United States as a whole. Her major theme is the campaign of socioeconomic genocide against the poor (particularly the Black poor) and its handmaiden, the propaganda blitz aimed at the moral negation of the victims, which is to say a denial of their humanity. Here, Little B is merely a metaphor for a class and race war predicated on marginalization, vilification, and demonization—the necessary and essential prerequisites for any final solution, whether of the overt or covert variety.
This is a book about structural injustice and institutionalized inequality. Yet it is neither nameless nor faceless. Brown offers pithy portraits of various groups and individuals – New Age Negroes and Negresses, New Age Massahs and New Age Miss Anns, as she calls them – all of whom she identifies as complicit in the condemnation of both the actual and the metaphorical Little B. Her conclusion is stark: “no fundamental change in the status of blacks had occurred in all the intervening years” between two of her presidential bookends, the rapist and pedophile Thomas Jefferson and his ardent admirer and namesake, William Jefferson Clinton (209-10). The increasing conspicuousness, if not significance, of Brown’s New Age House Negroes – a category in which she includes, inter alia, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, Henry Louis Gates, and William Julius Wilson – hardly undermines her point about the historical endurance of the marginalization of the masses of Black people in U.S. society.
Karen Gagne:
Indeed, that it is an appropriate work for an on-going discussion of the linkage between “coloniality” and “americanity” really is evident throughout. Brown’s underlying theme, it seems to me, is that the institution of “Black slavery” not only was, but is, “first and foremost, essential to the very survival and existence of the American colonies” (137).
Rigo Andino:
The overall text provides a materialist approach to the dilemma of the so-called Black proletariat and, in particular, the “Little B’s“ of this country. Therefore, if one were to attempt to analyze this text under a world-systems rubric, one would have a problem because the text provides a local history of race relations in this country. In order to make this text one that would fit under a world-systems approach, Brown would have to illustrate how race relations in this country are similar to race relations in other countries by comparing the social processes of the United States to another nation-state. Nevertheless, the text can still be utilized to demonstrate race relations in a local context. Clearly, Elaine Brown connects these local processes to the larger global economy. She emphasizes the role of NAFTA and global narco-trafficking processes that are pivotal to the incarceration of young bodies in this country. The text clearly connects the local events in the Black community to the global socio-economic processes of the world-system. But, methodologically speaking, the text only provides a longue durée history of race relations in this country.
G. Thomas:
It’s important not to confuse comparativism with “world-conscious” analysis, if you will, however conventional that may be for too many analysts. For most canonical paradigms that speak of “world-systems,” “transnationalism,” or “globalization,” it appears almost sinful to speak of U.S. space in any concrete way, and in a concrete way that accommodates its Black/African experience. It’s like they’ll fall off the face of the earth if they treat this place as anything other than mere office space for their “theorizing.” This is certainly not what I would mean by “coloniality,” in my still anti-colonial speech; and this is surely also why the so-called “local” is left to a narrow “race relations” framework for conceptual riot-control in sociology.
I am so tired of their “local/global” dichotomy and appreciate The Condemnation of Little B for how it enables us to transcend it, as Brown transgresses this “Thou Shalt Not Think U.S. Colonial Space” code. The current “prison-industrial complex” is explicitly tied to advanced capital’s Fortune 500, on the Olympic stage in ATL. Brown’s history of the South’s “Rise Again” is most interesting in this respect. For, with white rage over Black pseudo-emancipation, it’s the economic boom of white world wars that revitalizes the confederate region. When Brown writes, “America could not claim and hold its rightful place as global leader in the shadow of these problems of crime and poverty, [B]lack crime and poverty, sometimes inner-city problems” (68), these “local” cities are “global” and vice versa. The “local” is never severed from the “global” in the first place. We can add here that Condemnation’s indictment of figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice is due to a complicity that is, once more, at once “global” and “local,” killing “colored folk” everywhere.
Karen Gagne:
Brown continually connects the local and the global, and the historical with the contemporary. She brilliantly weaves the case of one Black 13-year old’s entanglement in a local set-up/conspiracy in with the government’s efforts to oust the Sandinistas and deal with the Iranian hostage business in the 1980s. These events, as well as post-Pinochet Chile, post-Shah Iran, and post-Marcos Philippines, “trigger the trafficking and mass use in the urban ghettos of America of the new, cheap, smokable, highly addictive drug ‘crack’ cocaine.” These global events would “congeal,” as Brown writes, to “create the conditions that would bring about worse suffering to American blacks than anything since the Emancipation Proclamation” (162-163).
Brown threads the “two Jeffersons” together with Clinton’s “kinder, more palatable racism.” His racism effectively did recall the Jeffersonian justification for slavery, which suggests that the fault for the continuum of Black misery lay…in some flaw in blacks themselves. This recast racism for the 21st century invoked the “crystals of New Age rhetoric relating to the power of introspection and self-healing” (176), while calling for a “return to the ‘fundamental principles’ of the Confederacy!” (186).
While eliminating “big government” for poor Black women and children, and criminalizing the poverty of Black mothers with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Clinton super-sized it for rich corporations with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). These agreements, of course, in turn, eliminated the jobs of poor (many Black) working people in the United States, who were to be replaced by starving people in the Third World and Eastern Europe (183). In addition, surpluses from welfare cuts serve to fund “corporate welfare,” as in the case of Lockheed Martin, Citicorp, and Gtech Holdings Corporation (195).
Yerie Yoon:
Of course, with another Bush in office (and here, Brown’s connection of the first Bush, through Clarence Thomas, with the second Bush, framed by the discussion of the New Age House Negro, is beautifully made [224-6]), we are tempted to consider Clinton with a forlorn nostalgia, and remember him with the same mantra that elected him into office: He is “not Bush” (174). But Brown totally disallows this romanticization. Her readers are forced to see Clinton as the president who out-Bushed Bush, and under whom New Age Racism is established on the firm grounds of that very slavery he disingenuously “could not understand.” His “New Age Order” gives rise to a neo-slavery that institutionally manacles Black people to the miserable conditions of an insidiously “kinder, more palatable racism” (176), condemning them in alarmingly increasing numbers to further impoverishment and imprisonment, while simultaneously damning them because they do not “want to earn enough money to live in decent housing, eat healthy food, have adequate medical care, get a good education, and provide a brighter future for their children” (214).
Karen Gagne:
I am most interested in this discussion of the business of the modern prison, which Brown illustrates as the “up-and-coming” form of neo-slavery. Even cheaper than Eastern European and Third World labor, a steady stream of free (as in freely available) labor acquired through often set-up young Black boys and girls is proving quite the profitable plantation. Brown notes that private corporations like Environmental Technologies Group and Crisp County Solid Waste Management Authority, in Georgia, for example, work with multi-million (or billion?) dollar groups like Corrections Corporation of America, Cornell Corrections Corporation, and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation to compete for the international private prison market. As private corporations, these “businesses” are not subject to public oversight or scrutiny (350), resulting in cruel and unusual punishments. Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Yoshiba, IBM, Boeing, and Microsoft, just to name a few, as well as Nordstrom, Jostens (which sells graduation caps and gowns), Revlon, Pierre Cardin, Target, and Victoria Secret, all use prisoners to make their products. Brown writes, “CMT Blues, which is actually located at the maximum security prison Richard J. Donavan State Correctional Facility, not far from San Diego, has inmates make T-shirts under CMT’s contracts with Mecca, Seattle Cotton Works, and Lee Jeans, among others” (350).
And, Brown adds, all this is “specifically related to crack cocaine.” Ninety percent of the people convicted of federal crack cocaine possession charges are Black. Possession of cocaine rarely results in jail time, while possession of five grams of crack carries a mandatory sentence of five years. The slightest role in a drug transaction, or as in Michael’s case, even no role, can arm prosecutors with “extraordinary power to convict more and more people without evidence” (353). Meanwhile, Clinton, like all those before him, did nothing to stop the flow of cocaine into the United States via Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia.
G. Thomas:
“New Age Massah,” indeed. Karen’s comments recall for me Brown’s sparse references to indigenous, Native “America,” insisting on recognizing U.S. society as a continuing settler colonial one; not to mention her recollection of “American Century” rhetoric (Inter national “Manifest Destiny”) when she analyzes anti-Black imagery in Henry Luce’s Time magazine (37); as well as Brown’s schematization of Africa’s role in North American politics historically: “First, Africans were abducted and exported to America by European colonialists for slave labor. Centuries later, under the Truman doctrine…the United States returned to Africa to kidnap the continent’s bounty of natural resources by setting up neo-colonial chieftains…The ‘Clinton Doctrine’ was to seize a massive new marketplace and cheap labor base for American corporations under the theory that what was good for corporate America was good for Africa” (198-99).
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz:
What I see in Brown’s text is a two-fold challenge to us as activists and intellectuals. First, she urges us to see how internal colonialism is affecting the everyday fabric of our lives, not only the lives of those like Little B, but the lives of all of us who belong to a group of oppressed people. Her discussion on affirmative action comes to mind, the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in University of California Regents v. Bakke, the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, to just name a few examples. All of these cases enrich the analysis, illustrating the abysmally unequal racial differences within the United States. Secondly, to some extent, she links the case of Little B to other forms of U.S. racial/colonial oppression and practices, not only across the United States but also in the rest of the world. In this sense, I agree with Karen on how Elaine Brown brings together the local and the global. I especially appreciated Brown’s discussion of how “Clinton courted the African ‘market’ for the benefit of private corporations” (196), not only for the exploitation of cheap labor in Africa, but for similar objectives in the Caribbean and the rest of the world. This is one of the ways in which she connects the socio-economic conditions surrounding the case of Little B with what’s happening outside the United States.
Karen Gagne:
My favorite part of the book is the conversation between Elaine, Michael, and his sister, Ta-Ta, about eating the candy Sugar Daddies. In the context of the joking about their crack-addicted mother--who was paid to testify against her son--losing her teeth to the candy, there is a return to the scene of the crime, Henry’s. “‘Wait a minute. You mean the Suhs actually sold candy and other real stuff there?,’ [Brown] asked. ‘They really sold sodas? Nobody ever talked about what kind of soda Kenya supposedly bought—if it was a soda she bought.’ Ta-Ta brightened, ‘Just go look at the tape from the video camera.’ ‘There was a security video cameral there at the time?’ ‘Yeah, me and my girlfriends used to check ourselves in the TV at Henry’s all the time’” (337-38). Conspiracy or ignorance? Doesn’t matter, really: Michael is still locked up, isn’t he?
Rigo Andino:
Brown provides an in-depth analysis of how the Atlanta, Georgia’s media depicts “Little B,” and for that matter, the way most of the continental U.S. media depicts countless young boys of African descent as “dangerous miscreants” who prey on so-called “good family people.” In this case, she illustrates the violent cancer that has been eating away at the cultural fabric in the same fashion as Michael Moore’s unprecedented film Bowling for Columbine (2002), where he shows how guns and violence are just an ingrained element of “America’s” violent past. Brown illustrates this by comparing young boys in “middle America” with young inhabitants of the ghetto. Interestingly enough, her analysis demonstrates how the U.S. state continues to refashion its racial patterns for capitalism. In other words, Brown suggests that these Black bodies are confined to peripheralized spaces in North America’s so-called global cities, a periperal confinement that sustains and maintains expendable bodies for the world capitalist economy. Further, as she mentions, NAFTA and other aspects of this economy structurally deprive Black communities across the United States. Her interrogation of race relations in this country brings her to the question of the Black middle-class. According to her, this class has become the quintessential element of a false notion of “Black progress” in this country. She highlights the falsity of this notion by targeting those Black individuals who play the role of “symbols.”
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz:
Once again, I would point out how Elaine Brown is so good at connecting research and activism with her strong belief in education as a means to promoting social justice. Within this context, I think that her analysis of established Negro “intellectuals” is very much to the point. She discusses Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1998 “documentary” film The Two Nations of Black America (218). Her characterization of Gates as a “House Negro,” and the critique that follows, piercingly demonstrates the extent to which these established intellectuals have become establishment intellectuals precisely by abandoning, themselves, any claim to activism or by disowning the activism of others, past and present, which created the historical conditions that enabled these same intellectuals to reach the positions they’ve obtained in academia; in mainstream party-politics; in the mass media; and/or in government. Here she really takes them on and she does so with all the leeway of somebody who is not concerned with tenure processes in academia and the power relations that such things entail. Some of us still struggle with trying to strike a balance between the two, but without falling into the trap of becoming something like the “House Negroes” she dismantles so well.
G. Thomas:
My first reaction to “The Abandonment” chapter was, “Finally!” I mean, “Damn!” I kept telling people it was like a guerilla intellectual “drive-by” on so-called H.N.I.C.’s! When I was in graduate school, doing “literary” things, it was unthinkable for most academics to go after “Skip” Gates in public without suffering undercover consequences; and even then we were supposed to choose between him and Houston Baker. How ridiculous! Today it’s still commonplace for Negro academics to very loudly knock Molefi Asante or his “Afrocentrism,” for example, while the far more influential Gates escapes such absolute disdain. As far as I’m concerned, Asante can have his Asante-centrism, which is what it really is, with his clear politics of accommodation. But I will never dismiss Africa with Asante like the average talking head. Nor would I go chasing paper at Harvard’s “Dubois Institute” the next day, as if that old lumpen-aristocrat “Dream Team” garbage ain’t worse.
The fact that Brown fearlessly and scrupulously takes out Gates, not to mention Cornel West and Orlando Patterson, before moving on to so many other academics and politicians and journalists and celebrities, impressed me deeply. I especially appreciated how she dismantled William Julius Wilson. That part reminded me of The Death of White Sociology, as a project (not the book, strictly). It spoke to my long-standing concern with colonial sexual ontologies writ large in Western “family” discourses. These pathetic projections of “pathology” saturate our context now more fully than they did with “The Moynihan Report.”
Nonetheless, the impact of this one chapter on me was not simply intellectual. It was high time someone of stature gave “Colin & Condi” something other than an “Image Award.” Just like it was high time for Chris Rock to be exposed for what he is, and Sam Jackson, and of course Oprah, and everyone who gets it good in “The Abandonment.” I love how thorough Brown is. I would just tell people about this one piece and their eyes would bug: “New Age House Negroes,” “New Age House Negresses!” It all reminds you how Malcolm X got down. You know, “Not only can I say what I just said, but I can drop it like a bomb and you cain’t deny it.” This is my favorite chapter by far in The Condemnation of Little B.
Michael West:
Far from deferring to what she would call the Black New Age powers that be, Brown takes them on with gusto. Her astringent pen ever at the ready, she comes to us in the jeremiad tradition. The outstanding Black representative of that tradition is, of course, David Walker (who in 1829 wrote his Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America). Brown’s searing critique of the New Age Negro bourgeoisie, such as it is, also is reminiscent of E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (written in 1957). Indeed Walker and Frazier are fused in Condemnation, Brown artfully merging the righteous indignation of the one with the comical depiction of the other. The resulting synthesis is a powerful indictment of what passes for leadership in Black America – in the political, economic, cultural and academic realms – as well as in the United States as a whole.
G. Thomas:
How perfectly on point! Walker plus Frazier well beyond Dubois (who is idolized, predictably, by these very New Age Negroes)! It’s a perfect description particularly since Brown stays in dialogue with Black “nationalist” historical material (Garvey/Washington-Dubois, Malcolm/King, Panthers/Black Power, etc.) throughout Condemnation. Should we add then with Michael that Brown (first and only female BPP “Chairman”) also goes beyond Maria Stewart (Walker’s very important protégé) in her grass-roots “working-class” militancy?
Michael West:
Agreed entirely. Stewart, for all the significance of her contribution, was constrained by the times in which she lived as well as her own class position. She seemed to have entered the public realm of politics hesitatingly, even apologetically, apparently believing it rightly to be a male space. Hence her virtual taunting of Black men (read: the men of the “free” colored elite) to demonstrate their “manhood” by vindicating the rights of Black people, “free” and slave. Ex-”Chairman” Brown, as “sassy” as she wants to be, gives not a hoot about contemporary “conventions” of class, gender or nationality! She is as unapologetic as she is unrelenting.
Karen Gagne:
As Michael compares Brown’s “searing critique” to those of David Walker and E. Franklin Frazier, I wonder if Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro (written, or published, in 1933) could also be included in this comparison, in the “astringent” use of the pen, not only for the big names that Brown takes on but also for the not-so-big leaders such as those in at the local Atlanta community (church and school officials, etc.). These “leaders” both look the other way and condone the police drug trafficking that leads to a “witch hunt” for so-called “street thugs,” even sighing in relief when Michael Lewis is captured. Like Woodson, Brown challenges the tempting appeal to “the talented tenth” for remedies when they have offered no evidence of vision.
G. Thomas:
I always put Frazier and Woodson’s book together, like “twin” texts even; so I have no problems with Karen’s suggestion at all: Michael’s characterization should stick with us for a long time.
Michael West:
I wholeheartedly accept the emendation offered by Karen and Greg. Woodson’s text – which, like many such works, is more often cited than read – must be part of the dialogue. As much as anything else, Condemnation is about the mis-education of the Negro, the New Age Negro. I was really struck by this point while reading the book, and scribbled a notion about “hegemony.” Is there a more apt term to describe how Atlanta’s Negro governing (which is not to say ruling) class – and perhaps large sections of the middle-class, perchance even portions of the working-class, yea maybe even a slice of the lumpen-proletariat – embraced, with such alacrity, the racist class warfare launched by the local media against Little B? I confess to not having read Woodson in many a moon myself – it’s a book worth re-reading every so often – but unless my memory is playing tricks on me, I recall a passage wherein it’s stated that if you convince someone that her proper mode of entrance is the backdoor, she will not only use that entrance every time, but will actually cut out a backdoor if one is not already there! One is tempted, though only tempted, to conclude with Martin Delaney: “…we have been, by our oppressors, despoiled of our purity, and corrupted of our native characteristics, so that we have inherited their vices, and but few of their virtues, leaving us in character, really a broken people.” The temptation, though, probably ought be resisted, not least because of the implied denial of the agency of the oppressed. But then, again, isn’t that what hegemony is all about?
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz:
I remember when I was in Puerto Rico during the 1970’s trying to finish my B.A in Education and involved in the social activism of the day. I was very much impacted by the political agenda of the Black Panthers in the United States; and, particularly, I was very much involved in the “Free Angela Davis” Campaign. It was also a moment when many global connections related to oppression and solidarity were being made. I especially remember when at one meeting a student shouted, with a sense of surprise and awe, that the new “chairperson” of the Black Panthers was a woman by the name of Elaine Brown. Since then I have followed her trajectory as a social activist. I always wanted to learn how to navigate my way through highly male-centered groups that were involved in the struggle against colonialism. At the same time, I tried to help open a space for women when these same groups (so concerned with oppression and exploitation) were not able to see the connections between colonialism and gender oppression. Elaine Brown in The Condemnation of Little B proves to me that she still has that wonderful ability to take on North American racism and oppression. This cross between research and activism is one of the signature features of Elaine Brown’s work. She has that rare quality of being accessible and politically timely.
Peter Carlo-Becerra:
This really is an example of a work that could only be written by someone who is not determined by any specific conventional methodology, per se, but rather by a deep and sharp sense of the way in which the colonial moment is lived, and has been lived by Black people in the U.S. within the span of a lifetime. In that sense, this work could only have been written by someone like Elaine Brown.
Rigo Andino:
I think a compelling book of this magnitude could have been written by a conventional scholar, but academic politics usually place so many constraints. Elaine Brown’s involvement at the highest level of the Black Panthers Party gives her a grass-roots connection to activism, thereby eliminating political barriers that the ivory towers provide. Brown’s intervention speaks to the line drawn between “academics” and “activists,” on one level, because she was able to discuss issues that most scholars would not include in their scholarly texts.
G. Thomas:
I agree with Pete, most emphatically. No matter how generous I might force myself to be, I just cannot imagine a text like this coming from within the matrix of contemporary academia. It escapes the standard intellectual compromise at every turn. It does not elaborate some alien disciplinary agenda over a Black body. It has nothing to prove to any scholastic “master.” Its ultimate priority is not to be academic or intellectual but to be conscious, and actively so, on behalf of a Black child whose wretched condition is a shared one. Her Little B represents not only millions of Black youth, he represents millions victimized by vicious academic misrepresentation; by sociology, maybe most notoriously, but by criminology, psychology, etc… It’s hard to imagine an author going against this tremendous grain epistemologically, casting her lot with “Little B’s,” completely, rather than against them.
At first, when I was reading the opening section, titled “Scapegoat,” I thought: “She’s not going to write this book as a Panther (or ex-Panther), per se. It looks like she’ll background that strategically to represent for this lil’ boy.” I was totally wrong, of course. She says she wants to join this “rag tag army,” first, of Little B and his lawyer Patrice Grant-Fulcher, which is reminiscent of that earlier army against all odds. Later, when MAJJ (Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice) is formed, Brown describes it as “our small ragtag army of mothers” (341). She first quoted Huey Newton on “illegitimate Black capitalists” (20). She would go on to rehearse this whole history of Black struggle, 20th century in particular, at one point confirming her Panthers were done in by COINTELPRO and “battle fatigue” (238). So, without some big formal announcement, her entire perspective is very much BPP, it turns out, which ain’t hardly fashionable in academia. Instead, there’s been this huge backlash against Black Power’s “de-colonization of the mind” which is part of the continuing counter-revolution (whether it’s called COINTEL or not).
Karen Gagne:
Importantly, Elaine Brown ends this book with a message to Blacks in America. She implores all that in order to “finally march out of the hell of Monticello…we must look away from the brutal master of this house and become masters to ourselves. We must seize our lives and destinies and collect our due. The goal of freedom must return to the top of our agenda, for it is the only business of a slave” (357). Finally, “the history of the black struggle suggests the American society may not be capable of accommodating the freedom of black people, that it may be inherently incongruous with the character and structure of America to share its wealth, even with those who represent its very source” (359). Brown is calling for a “plan B,” so to speak. That is, to reverse the first quote I read earlier, the only way to exterminate the institution of Black slavery, once and for all, is first and foremost, to remove the “American” colony.
G. Thomas:
Toward that end, I want to think further about what to do with this book, inside and maybe more difficultly, outside colleges or universities. I’ve taught The Condemnation of Little B twice already in two different courses. I’m still learning how to teach it best. My first idea was to treat it as a sort of textbook, much as I generally hate textbooks, in a class I teach called “Slave & Neo-Slave.” For that, it’s a perfect match. It works in a variety of other ways, too. For instance, if I want to assign some U.S. Black history synopsis to students, but I don’t want that history to be bogged down by some evolutionary/integrationist slant, there it is. In addition, there is Brown’s wicked exposé of white media machinations: “The Fourth Estate,” or fourth arm of the ruling race, caste and class. That is priceless in a classroom. Students respond to that part amazingly well. Pedagogically, I find Condemnation a very dynamic text. It was most exciting for me personally, however, as a political teacher, when I did “teach-ins” to support Brown’s appearance at both Binghamton and Syracuse; in other words, outside the classroom or academic convention.
Karen Gagne:
I will definitely use it in the next course I teach! It gives an excellent twist to the standard “Contemporary Social Problems” undergraduate course that many future sociologists would have to take. To begin with, it turns the ever-present middle-class sociological/pathological question of “what’s wrong with ‘our’ nation’s youth” (a topic surely on many a syllabi) right on its head.
Yerie Yoon:
I certainly agree, especially when the students in my class tend to come from that population of our youth (read: of color) that requires examination and “fixing.” Very often, although they are familiar enough with the sometimes flippantly applied appellation “House Negro,” they remain fixed within the pernicious logic of that New Age Racism which promises the illusion of social mobility through “excellence, [that] best deterrent to racism” (the personal “philosophy” of self-help’s reigning maven, Oprah [242]), even as their bodies are criminalized and policed into oblivion. Brown’s rigor and scholarship are accessible; but perhaps more importantly, they resonate with students who can now analyze and appreciate how profoundly critical the position of a House Negro is for the maintenance of New Age Racism.
Peter Carlo-Becerra:
Condemnation will be quite useful because what the book manages too do is something that very few do at all. Brown manages to weave her narrative about the condition of Black folks here in the States through the details surrounding everything concerning Little B’s life. It is as if the colonial condition unfolds as she turns a street corner in her remarks on a neighborhood she has just passed, and the hidden history of Atlanta in relation to Black people is revealed. Truth is: I have never read a book that manages to do this so seamlessly while, at the same time, exposing the historical moment as if the author had the benefit of hindsight.
This is what makes the books so useful to teach. For one thing, it breaks with the bankruptcy of the claim that only the academy and its institutions can “speak truth to power.” In fact, here we have a moment that is being illustrated with the greatest attention to detail, historical, social, cultural, and political economic details. It also comes at a time when we are being inundated by scholarship which ostensibly is about race and the colonial condition, but is either so esoteric as to be inaccessible to the folks living that condition, or so watered down that it becomes another footnote to (or trend in) the standardized “white” disciplinary knowledges, which they are supposed to be challenging.
Rigo Andino:
This text is unprecedented and could be useful in courses that revolve around U.S. local histories, race and race relations on a global scale, class relationships in the Black community and an array of other courses.
Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz:
I teach in a Human Development department where students are supposedly being prepared to become professionals in the social services and the criminal and juvenile justice system, among other places. Elaine Brown’s book would be extremely useful in terms of encouraging my students to see social welfare and the justice systems from a much more critical perspective. At the same time, this book would allow students to clearly see how the social practices of these governmental agencies are consistently (mis)read and enabled by and through the mass media. Such is the case in her indictment, throughout the whole book, of mainstream newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Chapter two and chapters four through seven cover everyday-life survival in Atlanta’s ghetto, the area called the Bluff, during the 1990s: this coverage is in fact a particularly hard-hitting exposé of how and why it is that poor Blacks in the U.S. are institutionally framed, literally condemned, to fail at anything other than being social outcasts; and this exposé is presented in a manner that is well within the reach of most undergraduate students. The racial and class polarization of this condemnation is eloquently illustrated by the contrast Brown establishes (in chapter three) between how the justice systems and the mass media in the U.S. deal with alleged “[poor-Black] superpredators” like Little B and how the very same institutions have dealt with the long list of “misunderstood” middle-class white boys “gone wrong,” those who have shot their way through high school after high school and/or suburban homes across this country during this very same period. In this sense, her book is not only accessible but speaks to the issue of how these oppressive institutions and practices are interconnected. There’s definitively an anti-colonial discourse-analysis in this book, an approach much needed in our curriculum.
Michael West:
Not since David Walker, perhaps, has there been a more unalloyed and uncompromising rendition of the status of Black folk USA, articulated in such urgent and fiery language. Three cheers for Elaine Brown: one for keeping faith with the Black jeremiad tradition of Walker; one for acting as a tribune for the condemned little boy from over the Bluff (Little B’s Atlanta ghetto); and one for her love of the people, that indispensable foundation of revolutionary praxis.
G. Thomas:
No doubt, “All Power to the People!”
© 2003 Africa Resource Center, Inc.