Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?
Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies
Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’
Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?
Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism
Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism
Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die
Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers
Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property
Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’
From page 33, Derrick Bell in dialogue with his idealized version of himself, the female civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, now elevated to a prophetic goddess with supernatural powers:
“The power of prophesy does not guarantee conversion.”
At some level Bell knew that his ideas had more in common with religion than legal scholarship. He saw himself as a prophet laying the blueprints for the ideal society. The 28-year-old law students who opened their hearts and minds to him did so with the same mentality as the converts at a Billy Graham crusade, feeling an emotional, religious satisfaction they had never known in a secular household.
And now today we see faith in action; the viewers of MSNBC can articulate a more in-depth understanding of the Trayvon Martin shooting than those who witnessed it.
With the racial tensions rising in Florida while antisemitic demagogues feed the flames, note how political activism and religious devotion merge. The hoodie has now become an object to aid in worship, assisting the adherent in identifying with the new martyr of the permanent-victim class, the proletariat:
In an interview last week with Ion Mihai Pacepa by Madeleine Simon:
The Communists went to great lengths to make Marxism the only religion in every country where they seized political power. One of the first things I did on that memorable day of July 28, 1978, when I became a free man, was to fall to my knees and pray out loud, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. It took me a while. It was not easy to find the right words to express my great joy and thanks to the good Lord.
From Weasel Zippers, via Donald Douglas at American Power, the New Black Panther Party’s call for mob violence:
The way prophesies work is not that one predicts what will happen, but rather what one will make happen.
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon…”
In this both powerful and clear-eyed look at one of the several crackpots who’ve had an immense impact on the evolution of the incumbent’s understanding of the United States of America, David Swindle has slogged through an odious book to save the rest of us from having to do so.
One can easily see that if a man is enamored of Bell’s world view, it’s a simple hop, step and jump into a pew at “Reverend” Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Many Chicagoans claimed that Obama joined the 6,000-member house of “worship” for purely political reasons. But why and how could he and Mrs. Obama expose their impressionable young daughters to the anti-American and antiSemitic rants of Wright if they didn’t believe exactly what he did? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPR5jnjtLo
Thanks to David Swindle’s research and punctilious connecting of the dots, Barack Obama’s attraction to these mentors — like his friendships with William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and other such individuals — is becoming clearer and clearer. It is a grim commentary on the sources of the deeply divisive impulses at work in the heart, mind and psyche of the man currently our president.
It’s not just that they took their kids to Wright’s hate-fests, but Obama took the title of one of his autobiographies from a Wright “sermon” and had Wright as a senior official on his presidential campaign!
Until someone showed the country what Obama’s preacher *said*, Obama held the guy up as a moral paragon!
Heads up, folks, Obama’s still “borrowing” inspiration from others.
Obama’s latest initiative, We Can’t Wait, is taken directly from the title of Martin Luther King’s 1964 memoir of what King referred to as “The Negro Revolution” in 1963.
What does Obama mean when he uses that phrase? Hard to say, but the context seems worth noting.
For the pete of sake: “prophesy” is a verb; “prophecy” is a noun.
For example:
Isaiah prophesied about the Messiah.
Isaiah wrote prophecies about the Messiah.
Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?
Don’t even get me started on the book’s poor writing.
You’re a brave man, pushing through such slush. It’s hard to believe this guy is a professor of anything, much less a discipline so dependent on language.