"What was special about the 60s was that there was only one thing happening, one movement. And that was the civil rights movement. There were different organisations coming from different angles because of geography, but in essence everybody had the same objective. It came so suddenly, from so many different angles, things happening in so many different towns and cities at once, that the "powers that be" were caught off-guard.
Until the 60s, "the movement" had been the exclusive property of middle-aged and old people. Then it became a young people thing, and as the 60s opened up, the key word became "activism", with Stokely Carmichael and the SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], "freedom rides" [challenging segregation on interstate buses], and sit-ins. There was a new feeling of power in black communities. And once it got started, it was on the powers like paint.
But at some point a difference was created between "equality", "freedom" and "civil rights". Those differences were played up because something had to be done about the sudden unity among black folks all over the country. Folks got more media attention whenever they accentuated the differences. There were media-created splinters. Otherwise the civil rights movement would have been enough, and would have been more successful. Accomplishing the aims of the movement would have made "gay rights" and "women's rights" and "lefts and rights" extraneous.
But divide and conquer was the aim of programmes such as COINTELPRO [the FBI's covert attempt to infiltrate and disrupt groups deemed "subversive"]. And even though it ended up working damn near backward, it worked. They separated the fingers on the hand and gave each group a different demand; we lost our way. *
*How different is this from the interpretation of post structuralism that classifies any commonality as metanarrative?
The "separate fingers" : the "Organs without a Body " to invert Deluze's "Body without Organs"
How can we acknowledge the complexity and difference of the subject/subject position and maintain some inclusive ground?
What is that inclusive ground now?
Is it the inclusive noise that enfolds the exclusive 'signal'?
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