Elaine Brown, Former Leader of the Black Panther Party: "As a former leader of the Black Panther Party and co-author of the forthcoming biography of Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), both of us partisans in the powerful efforts for change that are the real, albeit fictional, centerpiece of Daniels’ film, I am compelled to comment on this latest public shame heaped upon black people by the most notable of the Neoliberal Negroes, Henry Louis Gates. It was bad enough that Daniels and Winfrey pandered to racists by producing this minstrel show, The Butler, their passage to Hollywood having been purchased with black blood. It was bad enough they invented a “Black Panther” character in order to disparage and vilify the Black Panther Party and its important contribution to the ongoing struggle for black liberation, justifying the FBI’s deadly assaults on black resistance to oppression. But, for the head of African American studies at Harvard, who rose from West Virginia irrelevance to Yale on the winds of change stirred by the Black Power movement as led by the Black Panthers, and right there in New Haven, who only a minute ago whined about his personal, little experience with a racist cop in his beloved Cambridge, to advance some notion that this film was beautiful in that it exposed white people to the way black people really behave (huh?) is the very bottom of bootlicking. Daniels, Winfrey and the other obsequious black participants in this shameful production, made more shameful in the wake of the verdict in the case of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, by Winfrey’s recent apologia for Paula Deen’s racism and Daniels’ recent assertion that whites can still love blacks though calling us “niggers,” have openly embraced an idea even the most unctuous Uncle Toms and House Negroes during 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow never uttered: that it is better to wait on Massah than oppose slavery. If it were worth the effort, I would urge a black boycott of this film. In the tenor of the times, there are more pressing issues to address in an America entrenched in racism.—Would there were time and place, however, to render unto Oprah what is hers for slapping a “Black Panther” in Daniels’ dishonorable film. As for Gates and his ongoing efforts to rewrite black history to soothe the sensibilities of whites, who argued in his own, duplicitous documentary The Two Nations of Black America that he was part of that “black nation” that was closer to whites than to the “boys in the hood,” history will not absolve him." ⭐North Star⭐
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 19:10:33 +0000
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