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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.

It's not hard to look up.

It's not terrible as a book, as much as I'd take a lot of its summaries with mountain-sized pieces of salt (in particular, I remember being impressed by how poorly the book glosses around Soviet funding of the organizations while describing Soviet influence or organization as propaganda). But for however the reviewers call it a 'descriptive' study, it's very much a descriptive study from the perspective of someone that really fucking likes communists and communism. There's occasional recognition of faults and failures, but they're things like :

The little Red Scare had taken its toll by the middle of 1939, forcing liberals and labor into temporary retreat and ruining the Party's hopes for a Southern Democratic Front. As CIO and SCHW leaders geared up for their own internal investigations and expulsions, an unexpected event in Europe hastened their actions. In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with fascist Germany that cleared the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland and simultaneously enabled Russia to invade Finland. After an initial period of disbelief, two confusing months passed before the Comintern announced a substantive change in the Party line. The old antifascist slogans were dropped as the Central Committee launched a new campaign to keep America out of the "imperialist war." The era of the Democratic Front came to an inauspicious end.

or

The ILD's persistent mass campaign on Peterson's behalf proved to be a painful thorn in the side of the newly reconstituted NAACP. When the Birmingham Post published an article linking the two organizations as defenders of "Negro cases," the local NAACP branch responded with a patriotic letter distancing itself from the ILD and claiming no connection whatsoever with the Scottsboro case. In fact, distinguishing itself from the ILD seemed to be the whole point of the Peterson campaign, with respect to politics.

or

The case of white Birmingham Communist Fred Keith provides us with an instructive example. When three Birmingham Party members were invited to the Soviet Union in 1932 to study at the Lenin School, Keith wanted desperately to go, but Hosea Hudson's criticisms of his work among the white unemployed convinced other members of the district committee to reject his request. After three blacks were chosen over Keith, he turned informant and complained to authorities about the favoritism blacks allegedly received in the Party.

That is, Hammer and Hoe details a lot of ways communist groups were sometimes incompetent, occasionally became unintentional strawmen, and were often insufficiently communist; it has few places where it considers or even describes potential solutions to a given economic or social problem other than more Stalins communism except to consider these things conservative interlopers. The 25th Anniversary edition opens with a preface explicitly spelling out that "I'd be lying if I said Hammer and Hoe was conceived as a purely academic contribution, unburdened by presentist concerns", before highlighting perceived overlap with the 1990s South African revolution.

There's a fair criticism that the Stop WOKE Act doesn't actually have any rules about communism, and in that sense, yes: I don't think you could honestly say Kelley blamed people for the racism of their ancestors at any point, both because it's not the focus and also because he was too busy blaming them for the insufficient communism. In that sense, the inclusion on the list is pretty obviously and overtly a political moment (ed: and not even an especially competent one: the recommended authors for 4.1 and 4.2 are far more controversial in Stop WOKE-specific ways).

But even if I hadn't previously read the book, I don't think I'd have had to make really difficult calculations on its political position, or the political position of its inclusion on the Florida DOE's list.

Yes, I am sure the book is terrible, and horribly biased, etc. But the point is that the document doesn't claim that. It complains merely that he wrote a book on the topic.

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