Radical Talking Points

19Jun08

The comments discussion about Black Liberation Theology has inspired me to write some thoughts on the radicalism in social movements. Political scientists view political movements in cycles. This is usually to explain why social movements, which have often been around for decades, suddenly experience success and why they tend fate and dissipate. The most studied social movement has been the American civil rights movement. In the case of the civil rights movement the 50s and 60s were tremendously successful periods, and yet the steam of the civil rights movement died out during the 70s and 80s. You see similar patterns in other social movements and you can look to various explanations for their success.

I’d argue you can identify a sub-trend within social movements; specifically that of increased main stream radicalism. Since you’re reading this on the internet I figure it makes more sense to view in terms of particular messages that generated from these radical sub movements. One group of radical political messages from the civil rights movements you might be familiar with is messages about the essential evil of white people and/or the total rejection of whiteness. They’re a lot different versions of this message ranging from emphasis on black self reliance, to calls for assertive or violent challenges to the existing social structure or whiteness. This quote from Black Liberation proponent James Cone is a good example of radical messaging.

“The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.”

In feminism you a similar rejection of males broadly, including claims such as all heterosexual sex is rape, all men are potential rapists, etc. Within the gay rights movement you can find groups that suggest heterosexuality is disgusting or other similar extremist sentiments.

A couple of things to I think are important to remember about these types radical messages. First they tend to come after the social movement has made significant progress. The black panthers didn’t get big until after the civil rights movements had scored a series of major successes. I’d speculated that these successes created both space for more radical movements and heightened expectations, which were then exploited in recruitment. The success of more traditional elements of the civil rights movement created a situation where more radical elements could move in and suggest that traditional activism was in fact moving too slow. Radical feminism pretty clearly picked up steam after more traditional feminism had become successful in mainstreaming the concept of gender equality. Similarly the gay rights movement is a little more complicated because it largely sprung forth from the space created during the 1960s. To a certain extent any gay rights group had an essentially radical attitude. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s you see more radical groups such Act Up coming to the forefront.

Once you under this basic dynamic you can understand more about nature of the particular messages that these movements create. Radical groups are necessarily going to be extreme and provocative in there messaging. Since they are trying to claim space away from the traditional groups, they can’t do that without making extreme claims. Basically radical messaging is focused on creating something that will offend the mainstream and emotionally connect to people tired of political sensitive messaging. Radical messaging is both therapeutic for the potential activist and threatening to the opposition.

Another thing worth remembering is that radical thinkers usually mellow out and/or their followers diminish greatly after a few years. Generally speaking there is limited organizational potential for many of these radical ideas. It might feel good to say it and it might scare people out in the sticks, but “destroying the white enemy” isn’t really something you can open an office and spend the next twenty years of you’re life doing.

Finally, decades later radical messages are turned into political footballs when it’s desirable by conservative forces and plastered on blogs or media. These messages might not have same emotional appeal to sympathetic minds that they once did, but they did still sound radical and scary. Generally speaking former radical thinkers are not really interested in retracting or denouncing their own previous statements, even if their current rhetoric has changed drastically.

While I think it’s important to understand where they come from and what they really are I’d suggest that defending radical messaging is probably a mistaken desire. While they might be taken out of context or used to make spurious associations, they are in fact meant to offend people. Getting into a long winded defense of the context of these quotes isn’t going win anyone over to your side that wasn’t already there. That’s just revisiting the battles of the past.

The essential quality that makes Liberalism superior to Conservatism isn’t that it better solved the problems of the past, but that Liberalism can better solve the problems of present. Conservatives have no plans that address any of the problems facing America, except when they co-opt and water down liberal solutions. The very fact something a scholar wrote when Barack Obama was 8 years old is presented as a criticism of him is a testament to the epic inability of Conservatism to critique the liberal agenda for change.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Black Liberation Theology, James Cone, Radicalism, Social Movements