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August 29, 2004
"Black-skinned storm troopers" "in a Nazi-like salute"
"Black-skinned storm troopers" who gave "a Nazi-like salute" was how press and pundits described Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave the iconic black power salute in in 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Not surprising to anyone who's been following media leading up to the RNC protests, as pundits and the elites "advise" us with great passion about what kind of protests are acceptable and what kind are not.
Unfortunately, all this unsolicited and insincere advise has generated some unproductive responses: some people seem to have decided to lump together everyone criticizing the current dominant protest model with the insincere criticisms of the powerbrokers; and some people have taken that "advise" to heart and go out of their way to assuage the elites that the protests will be well-behaved and irrelevant. I think we should not let this cacaphony of "advice" and misdirection drown out the need for a real assessment of our methods of dissent.
The current "big-protest-for-one-day" model has run its course. Frankly, I believe, it's become relatively inept and almost disempowering. However, at this point in history, it might be more disempowering not to hold them before the movement can formulate better models so I am not advocating not holding them.
I am, however advocating coming to terms with a model that has been pushed to the limits of its success. The discussion has to be taken beyond those whose main aim is well-behaved protests and those who very mistakenly believe random destruction of a few windows is a sign of radicalness. In fact, window-breaking has evolved into the tamest of protests with a very predictable course. The media gets their images, all the pundits on their side and all our spokespeople know their well-rehearsed lines, the window-replacers come the next day and the whole country shrugs.
We need a new discussion, anchored by a new commitment and unburdened by the current straitjackets. We need a discussion free from the overwhelming worry of the current organizers of those big-protests about receiving a tsk-tsk from the elites or the punditry and free from the mistaken and misplaced energy that equates radicalness with the random destruction of windows and trash cans.
These are difficult and thorny issues and it's hard to judge the success of failure of a method in the heat of the moment. Here’s a bit more about what happened to Carlos and Smith after that iconic moment:
But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.The Associated Press report described them "in a Nazi-like salute". Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers".
The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: "We're sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, 'Boy, you did fine.' "
The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked."One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib," Smith said. "It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses."
Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
"There are still threats," Carlos said. "I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn't stop when you leave this planet."After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for "un-American activities" That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.
"I was going to 'Nam," Smith said. "I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there's a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive."
Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.
Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.
Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.
"I'd get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family," he said. "We had to chop up furniture, the kids' beds, to stay warm."
Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.
"That I survived," he said. "That I still have any sanity.
"My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn't deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico."
Posted by zeynep at August 29, 2004 01:42 PM
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Comments
Another irony to this story is that Tommie Smith was and I am sure still is one of the nicest people you could ever want to know. I knew him a very tiny little bit in 1965-66 when we were both students at San Jose State University. I knew who he was because I followed track & field. He was in one of my Psychology classes and later in one of my Sociology classes. I don't know if the other students even knew who he was. Although he was already a world class sprinter in 1965, he was a very modest and quiet individual who was very cordial and polite to everyone. He was not full of himself, and he had no entourage. No one did in those days. He simply showed up for class alone like everyone else and acted like he was just another student. He was articulate and intelligent. I liked him immensely as a person from the little bit that I got to know of him in those two classes. He wasn't overtly political in 1965 and 1966 that I know of, although his comments in class were always very astute, intelligent, and politically aware. But as far as I know he was not involved directly with organizations like SNCC or the Black Panther Party.
I was surprised when he gave the black power salute in Mexico City in 1968, but I thought, of course, that his political protest in the Olympics was not only appropriate but right-on. On a personal level it exhilarated me to see Tommie Smith and John Carlos take a political stand in the Olympics. My interpretation at the time was that they were protesting the racism inherent in an imperialist American system that was waging a racist and imperial war at that time in Vietnam. And I thought that they were protesting the war, too. I was totally shocked and surprised--youthful naivete no doubt--at the way the American media reacted to the Tommie Smith and John Carlos Olympics protest.
Any American male or female who has watched any mainstream professional sporting events over the past 35 years already knows what a blow-hard and opinionated asshole Brent Musburger is, but I didn't know that he had used the description "black-skinned storm troopers." Brent Musburger simply lacks adequate intelligence. The entire American media, however, completely misinterpreted the entire Tommie Smith and John Carlos Olympics black-power salute. I didn't know John Carlos personally but in the case of Tommie Smith the media could not possibly have been more wrong in their assessment of him and his behavior on that day in August in Mexico City in 1968. I'm sure that this is, also, the case with John Carlos.
So what else is new? A free press? Never. Not in my lifetime anyway. During my lifetime dissent has always been oppressed in this so-called free and democratic society in which we are all trying to survive. In this American pseudo-democracy there is always a price to pay for speaking truth to white supremacy and power. This is, of course, extremely unfortunate and yet illustrative of just what kind of phony freedom we actually do enjoy in this country.
Sincerely,
Old & In The Way
Posted by: Phil Cicchi at August 29, 2004 07:45 PM
/ We need a new discussion, anchored by a new commitment and unburdened by the current straitjackets. /
Here's what I'd propose, while not meaning to be anyhow "heady" about it:
To consider - with _candor_ and with a genuine effort about fairness - what "the other side" is up about
then to hold that against what we see of it
and consider it, and after considering, to /explain/ it, in terms that a reasonable person may be inclined to listen to
then, when it's worked out on "this side" - settled, yet - with enough confidence on the parts of the ones seeking to make a change: to take it to someone with authority, and explain it to them, patiently, and yet not with any sense of weakness about it.
I wonder if it may require some repeated "iterations" - something like chipping through the walls - but maybe I've been too doubtful, myself, about the ability of "most people" to be innately /reasonable/, when a sufficiently clear explanation is made.
I might add this to it: To not think as if oneself is worked into a tight corner. I'm afraid that some do, and find a sense of desperation about it, when there's no fundamentally /real/ basis for it; I've done so, myself - it seems real, whatever doubt or severe concern - as long as it's in consideration, and /maybe/ it can't be just ignored, but it can be overcome -- and hey, without pills, even, and perhaps without any time beside a however-proclaimed "psychoanalyst", though probably not without some sense of real community.
Granted, nobody who I've met can think themselves into making a physical force of gravity to be inneffective - I mean, you can't think yourself into defying a force of gravity, and you can't think yourself into defying a state of hunger, all completely. To not envision perceptual road-blocks, though - like excessive doubts beside the real circumstances of the cause - there's some freedom.
I've wondered, myself, why protestors protest. I know there's anger and a want for a sense of solidarity, but all that I see of protests, in outward results, amounts to:"some people making noise". There's no /explanation/ in it, beyond the slogans etched onto some signs, and what a person might chance across, afterwards, if happening to know anyone who knows what the issues may be, which the protestors were so angered about.
I don't mean to belittle the will to protest a thing, either, or the will to 'make peace' about a thing, and fairly - but how much of a protest is aimed at making peace, and genuinely so? and how much if is for really resolving the issues at hand?
and I don't mean to belittle the efforts that are a part of any of it.
In my own proverbial ivory tower, I've wondered why protestors don't spend more time in just /thinking/ - and perhaps ever talking, and maybe talking at least a *little* more quietly - about what they're after, then hopefully resolving it, and then taking it to someone who would really be able to make a change about it, prospectively. Maybe I'd be naive for it.
To put another issue onto the table: My own grandfather has made a living by hauling logs, in California. I don't try to excuse any eco-sadistic 'clear-cutting' operations, for it, though I know that even my own father probably benefited by my grandfather's logging work, while he was in the home of his father, and that's probably how my grandfather payed for the Christmas presents, before he started into low-bed equipment hauling.
So, my point was: that I have a "family link" to someone with a more personal perspective about the proverbial "tree spike". Granted, he would haul the wood - he wasn't one of the fellows at the saw - and it seems that his work occurred before tree-spiking became anyhow of a "fad" of bloody protest (noting, also: there were perhaps not so very many cases of tree-spiking, but any "fewness" of it that would not even excuse a one) and yet, I don't think he was unaware of how an exploding saw might cause some /painful/ damage, for the one person at the handle, and for anyone who happens to be in line of eye-sight, to it.
and some people seemed to think - or were we the one supposed to think it? - that such a sort of waiting booby-trap could be a means of protest? not merely a means of physical damage, removed of any point or of any other effect?
Thankfully, I've not known anyone who's been hurt, courtesy of a spike lain into a tree. I know that I'm not the only person as so, though.
Now, I don't mean to turn this into an attempt at criticing "Earth First", but I wonder how the torching of a ski-resort could accomplish anything but a case of blasted ridiculous fire-damage, either.
So, I guess I still have some complaints of my own.
/ We need a new discussion, anchored by a new commitment and unburdened by the current straitjackets. /
yes.
( maybe one of those straight-jackets would be : an attempt attempt at branding oneself as being partisan to an innately secular faction )
and yet, there are allegiances that may stand and hold, without any outward label.
Incidentally: For the vote, I've registered myself as non-partisan. I don't want anything to do with any political parties, any more. People *are* people, regardless of attempts at partisan allegiance -- but, as for the decision of it, I mostly just don't want for my name to be counted as a vote for any one of the "two" "big" US political parties, and I don't want the sense of not having done enough, if I ally myself to a "third" party, while doing nothing to drive it forward. and I'm not so sure that a political party is worth driving forward, honestly. (I've yet to hear much of philosophy about government, either - and beyond the perhaps more patriotic works of Jefferson, and others anyhow related - though I know that political parties are, evidently, somehow written into the operations of the US electoral system, at least with the "primary" elections, whereby a party's candidate is chosen to run in the "main" election, etc. "I'll just be glad to see Kerry in office". no joke. and no naivete, though I'm pretty much 100% sure that he's a far better person than Bush, for the jobs at hand - and probably likewise so, in more general terms of appraisal.)
Non-partisan we're born, and non-partisan we meet the ol' sheol, it's a plain rule of things.
We may gather around in allegiance, about an issue. If we would think of the issue, however, or the party that we gather into, as if it would define us - we would then be grossly neglecting our own individual worth.
Now, I'll quit borrowing your ear, and thank you for each reader's time in what you have each known and written, and in reading this.I'll close it by saying "hooray for the telegraph" - really.
("technology" advances, apparently, as one other rule of human existence - but yet should anyone make a fuss about it? Science is science, and it doesn't go particularly well with light-headedness, at any point. Still, as to the prior: The telegraph was a precursor to the computer, it seems, just in how it went, and yet still goes - little bits of mechanically-encoded meaning, screaming across a wire - and all of it really /is/ an extension occurring of, and as someting of a result of, human means for /communication/. So, just "hooray for the telegraph", in its place in things of broad, moment-by-moment more "historical" - and yet, in every moment, as significant as ever it was in the prior - human existence. No hooray for nationalism about "technological" holdings, though, or for "intellectual property" policies that serve to entangle any people in nothing more than excessive argument and the passing of dollars and wind - there's something that I suppose there might not be any huge group, yet protesting, though EFF.org remains as one center standing forward about it)
So, I guess I've issues to work-at still, even about a 'puter. To the waiting day ... er .. night, then.
Posted by: Sean Champ at August 30, 2004 12:21 AM
Renember Gandhi? His means of resistence meant sacrifice, not a day or two off singing chants in the street. The elites are deaf until they hear the sound of solid commitment to "disarm" them sitting firmly on their doorsteps.
Posted by: S. Norris at August 30, 2004 04:27 PM
You say "The current "big-protest-for-one-day" model has run its course. Frankly, I believe, it's become relatively inept and almost disempowering." Along those lines, you might be interested in:
Marching in Circles
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=264
Let's Put on a Show! Spectacle vs Reality in the US Peace Movement
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0317-13.htm
Love your blog, BTW. Thanks for doing it.
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