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the michael character - literally my master's thesis lyrics

amiri baraka in cuba
“all these young guys down here, they took power, they just did it, guns in hand”
robert f. williams in his big straw hat
came to see the land
where racism was falling back

a ripe 25, a riper 36 both embraced radical politics
wouldn’t get their heads beat in
rejected unilateral non+violence
both took to the black revolution:
a third world people colonized by the red, white, and blue
which harold cruse and john henrik clarke thought too
but with a more robust theorization

they were way more impressed with castro’s land reform
than his proclamations of eradicating racial discrimination
but all four took a nod from frantz fanon
and saw black freedom as a decolonizing process, partially thanks to cuba
but only partially thanks to cuba

fast forward to 1967
honorary prime minister of the bpp
and former sncc chairman
stokely carmichael called for black power
in a book of the same name that posited how
the state built an internal colony
that precluded the achievement of substantive racial equality

meanwhile baraka promoted black arts
cultural self+determination
to cultivate a counterhegemonic identity to precede the black political nation
casa de las americas and icaic in cuba did the same thing
it’d be hard to draw a causal link
but the similarities are more compelling than you’d think

but over the years it became very clear
that socialist reforms had not unmade
cuba’s racial oppression
but the general consensus among the top brass was to say “no way!”
thus pushing black radical activists away from the castro regime in significant numbers
baraka and angela davis stayed
but (robert f.) williams, eldridge cleaver, and carmichael went the other way

but all told this whole generation of thinkers shared some critical paradigms
black third world identity
the internal colony
nationalism
and state violence

“so castro and the cuban revolution are part of this decades+old discourse of history of black transnationalism. but, crucially the experience and perception of cuba morphed that history into the modern ideas of the black third world and the internal colonies the ideas that the black americans, a national minority, constituted an internally colonized people, right? uh, third world people had never heard of the material to define that. uh, it was theorized this idea of of state violence, um, uh, mass incarceration and police brutality being examples. and so in a lot of ways these sort of discursive innovations that came out of human evolution underlay a lot of black radical thought today. and even though we don’t want to overstate, the impact of course is quite considerable.”

cuba!

- the michael character lyrics

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