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Freitag, 26. Januar 2018
When Toni Morrison Smacked Down a Racist Biography of Angela Davis
"Who Is Angela Davis? is a Cyclopean view of Angela Davis
that leaves the reader with a wholly useless biography, somehow
offensive in its one-eyed stare"
“On the other hand, who is Regina Nadelson and why is she behaving like
Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was
privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way? How Liza
could get to the point of actually crossing the ice or how Angela Davis
got to the point of actually joining the Communist party was quite
naturally that white intelligence informed them both; and since Harriet
was prey to the scientific racism of her day she attributed Liza’s
feistiness to the genetic transference of information via white blood;
but Regina lives in the 20th century and is an enlightened racist who
knows about cultural determinism, which is to say Angela got her courage
not from white blood but white culture and that her sublime militancy
was spawned by white teachers, white boyfriends, white psychoanalysts,
and a special brand of white terror perpetrated on some respectable
colored folks for how else could she dally with Black Panthers and fight
Ronald Reagan and carry the Card, for surely no black folks influenced
her (except abstract victims and her middle class—read white-oriented—
family) which is why Miss Regina who knew Angela at Elisabeth Irwin High
School didn’t take the trouble to interview any blacks as she went
about collecting her data and rejecting all eyeball to eyeball or flesh
to flesh contact with any of the ‘other blacks’ with whom Angela tried
to form a Black Student Union or the ‘adherents’ that were drawn into it
or the ‘other black groups’ she worked with before joining the party or
those other irrelevant black souls Angela knew all her life, for, as
Miss Regina’s labels show, Angela’s ‘people’ were not worth talking to
anyway for whenever she needed a black view all she had to do was quote
Frazier, DuBois, Baldwin or some other black with a real name, and not
even Angela herself was a reliable source, for in the chapter
‘Conversations in Jail’ Miss Regina quotes exactly 23 words Angela
actually spoke and they were directed to Margaret Burnham, the rest of
them being culled from writings and speeches, so the consequence of this
singularly parochial research is that Angela Davis is revealed to be
pretty much like Regina Nadelson, an American. ‘People see her as a
black leader and as a liberated woman. There is something else that
matters to me: she is an American.’ And as for her personal regard for
her subject, Miss Regina likes her; ‘She is kind and funny.’ Yessum, Miss Regina. We all are. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/when-toni-morrison-smacked-down-a-racist-biography-of-angela-davis/
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