Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Nobody Commodified Breakfast

Keeling discusses ‘blacks with guns’ and how it changed common senses of blackness while reaffirming common senses of masculinity, and points to the increasing commodification of blackness and ‘blacks with guns’ particularly, but I think it would be a mistake to let this be the only legacy of the Black Panthers or to say that the “image became the movement.” In “Power!” Huey Newton expresses regret? frustration? that ‘blacks with guns’ was what got picked up by people starting BPP chapters nationally, and not the “more important” social programs of the Panthers, but I think we can at least partially attribute to the BPP a change in common senses around the role of police in the community and the community in policing. There are still groups like Copwatch (members of which carry video cameras to document police, rather than guns...) and Anti-Racist Action (which among many other things sometimes holds house demos at cop’s houses to hold them accountable for instances of brutality or murder).
Keeling posits that images that interrupt the sense-motor flow and cause ‘thinking’ to take place can make a multiplicity of changes to common senses; that the cinematic will mobilize some to further the interests of the dominant hegemonic power structure. We see that ‘blacks with guns’ is now completely embedded in our hegemonic common senses, and we see that nobody seems to have commodified breakfast programs, while it was the threat to U.S. sovereignty embodied partially by the breakfast programs the provoked the response of Cointelpro and the eventual destruction of the BPP at their hands (Keeling, 78 - also for a good documentary about the rise of the bloods and the crips in the void left after FBI’s destruction of the BPP - http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhdKqG9531Bj0SaJkU ).
The question: what does the legacy of the BPP teach us in regard to commodification (as people hypothetically trying to overturn a racist order)? Many anarchists/anti-capitalists marching or rioting nowadays will tell journalists in no uncertain terms to fuck off. Does allowing oneself to be ‘captured’ as an image still inevitably entail being taken up and repeated in a particular way to reinforce hegemonic commonsense with our new proliferation of ‘user-created media’?

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