حسن’s Reviews > Soul on Ice > Status Update

There is in James Baldwin's work the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer"

"Baldwin felt called upon to pop his cap pistol in a duel with Aime Cesaire, the big gun from Martinique."
.. Ouch that hurts, because it's true.

The chapter on Mohammed Ali could be one of the best and most powerful texts ever written to be dedicated as an homage to his memory.

"Essentially, every black champion until Muhammad Ali has been a puppet, manipulated by whites in his private life to control his public image. --->

"slave in private life, a king in public-this is the life that every black champion has had to lead-until the coming of Muhammad Ali.
M.A. is the first "free" black champion ever to confront white America. In the context of boxing, he is a genuine revolutionary, the black Fidel Castro of boxing. --->

The social Darwinism of "survival of the fittest" manifests also through sports..Interesting: "Our mass spectator sports are geared to disguise, while affording expression to, the acting out in elaborate pageantry of the myth of the fittest in the process of surviving(..)all of our mass spectator sports give play to the basic cultural ethic, harnessed and sublimated into national-communal pagan rituals."

"The "paper tiger" hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the"White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet. James Bond feeds on that secret little anxiety, the psychological white backlash, felt in some degree by most whites alive."

"Malcolm X delivered a merciless and damning indictment of prevailing penology.It was only a matter of time until the question of the prisoner's debt to society versus society's debt to the prisoner is injected forcefully into national and state politics,,and into the consciousness of the body politic."
*this recurrent point reminds me of how important it is to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish

he was a symbol of hope, a model for thousands of black convicts who found themselves trapped in the vicious PPP cycle: prison-parole-prison(..)Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals (..) look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions: in the jungle there is no right or wrong.

I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto- in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day- and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. -->

At the moment I walked out of the prison gate, my feelings toward white women in general could be summed up in the following lines:
I love you/Because you're white,/ Not because you're charming Or bright...
I hate you/Because you're white./Your white meat/Is nightmare food./White is/The skin of Evil./You're my Moby Dick,
White Witch,/Symbol of the rope and hanging tree,

Cleaver believed that the younger generation of whites would be wooed away from their omnipotent administrator fathers by African-American dance and music. Whites began to dance better, but that didn't make them more humanistic.