Dedication Preface Chapter 1

NOTES DEDICATION I. Elaine Pagel gives this interpretation of the Nag Hammadi's "Gospel ofThomas," verse 70, in the documentary From jesus to Christ. For an introduction to the Nag Hammadi or Gnostic gospels, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979). Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer's translation ofverse 70 reads: "Jesus said, 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."' See Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas Homepage, www.epix.net/ -miser?!thomas.html PREFACE 1. See "Anthropology ofAfrican Americans: From Bones to the Human Genome," James E. Bowman, University of Chicago, and "Anthropological Measurement," Fatimah L. C. Jackson, University of Maryland, papers presented at "In Honor of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Conference on the Study of African American Problems," University of Pennsylvania, February 23-24, 1999. 2. See Ida B. Wells, Crusade for justice: The Autobiography ofIda B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 197 4); Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiog raphy (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1987). 3. See Joy James, "Symbolic Rage: Prosecutorial Performances and Racialized Represen tations of Sexual Violence," in Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender & Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133-153. 4. For discussions of black male profeminist activism surrounding the march, see bell hooks, "Marching for Justice: Feminist Interventions," Black Renaissance Noire, Vol. 1, No.2 (Summer/Falll997), 32-41. CHAPTER 1 I. Former Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) introduced HR 611 into the U.S. Congress to close the School of the Americas. For more information on the School of the Americas, see Mary A. Fischer, "Teaching Torture," GQ (June 1997); and, David Huey et al., "On the Offensive," Glabal Exchange Report (June 1998). Global Exchange lists Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as the site for the "School ofWarfare," which has also fomented ami-indigenous violence in the Americas. 192 SHADOWBOXING 2. The phrase "shadow government'' was popularized during the Iran-contra hearings in the 1980s. See Imide the Shadow Government, Declaration of Plaintiffs' Counsel filed by the Christie Institute, U.S. District Court, Miami, Florida, March 31, 1988. 3. The history ofMrican American soldiers and warriors in the U.S. is conflictual. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln opposed the use of armed black soldiers. W E. B. DuBois's Blac.k Recomtruction in America: An Essay Toward the History ofthe Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962) states that 200,000 black troops eventually fought in that war, following the model of "General" Harriet Tubman. After the war and Reconstruction, Ida B. Wells and others carried arms to protect themselves as they organized for black freedom and equality. World War I and II saw black organizations (amid protests from black radicals) mobilize to desegregate the armed forces and allow Negro soldiers to serve in combat rather than be restricted to the domestic sector of service units. While on U.S. shores, the "Deacons of Defense"-an Mrican American organization committed to armed self-defense against Klan and racist terror emerged during the southern civil rights movement with military strategies that saved the lives of civil rights workers and black community people. During the same period on foreign lands, responding to the perceived incompetence or racism of white officers who seemed to routinely "lose" black infantrymen stationed on front lines in the Vietnam war, African American rebels at point positions allegedly lobbed grenades behind them into the relative safety zones of white officers. Back home, reportedly because of their military training in Nam, Black Panthers such as Geronimo ji Jaga (Elmer Pratt) were spared the martyrdom of Chicago Black Panther Parry chair Fred Hampton and Panther leader Mark Clark, who were killed by police in a predawn raid. Amid insurrection, military and guerrilla battles, and ideological struggles, literature by black revolutionaries and rebels exerted a transgender appeal for both females and males who saw themselves as colonized people under siege and at war. See Robert Williams, Negroes with Gum (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962); Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches ofAmi/car Cabral, ed. Mrica Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched ofthe Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 4. Americans are both entertained and pacified when violence is used by blacks in boxing spectacles, action films, and on foreign battlefields. However, many conventional Americans become alarmed and incensed when Mrican Americans deploy violence (or merely its imagery) for their own collective, political objectives. In a schizophrenic relationship to violence, America is alternately enamored and terrified by its use. In a July 1998 TIME magazine special report on gun violence, Richard Lacayo reflected on the magazine's cover story, "The Gun in America," that appeared three decades earlier: It was 1968, just days after the murder of Robert Kennedy, and before him of Martin Luther King Jr., when the exit wound was becoming a standard problem in American politics .... But that sequence of killings also produced a briefly effective national revulsion against gun violence. Before the year was out, Congress would pass the Gun Control Act of 1968, a milestone law that banned most interstate sales, licensed most gun dealers and barred felons, minors and the mentally ill from owning guns .... Millions in the U.S. believe passionately that their liberty, their safety or both are bound up with the widest possible availability of guns. So 30 years later, guns are still very much with us, murderous little fixtures of the cultural Notes 193 landscape. We live with them as we live with computers or household appliances, but with more difficult consequences-some of them paid in blood. Among the industrial nations, this cultural predicament is ours alone. Richard Lacayo, "Still Under the Gun," TIME, July 6, 1998, 34-35. 5. Kathleen Neal Cleaver, "Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1966-1972)," in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered}, ed. Charles Jones, (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1998), 237. According to Cleaver, soon after a visit from David Hilliard's "emissary," the FBI arrested Geronimo ji Jaga (Elmer Pratt) who was underground in Texas; eventually the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) charged him in the shooting ofwhite schoolteacher Caroline Olson. Although Huey Newton barred all Panthers from cooperating with Pratt's defense, Kathleen Neal Cleaver became one of the few Panthers to testifY at the trial, stating that he was in northern California at a Black Panther Party meeting during the time of Olson's murder in southern California. Based on the testimony of police informant and perjurer Julio Butler, and the LAPD withholding evidence supporting his innocence, ji Jaga served rwenry-seven years in prison before a Judge ruled that he should be released in June 1997 on $25,000 bail, pending a new trial. See Don Terry, "Los Angeles Confronts Bitter Racial Legacy," New York Times, July 20, 1997, AI, AIO. Given his military leadership in the U.S. army and his strategic skills credited for the low Panther casualties following the December 1969 LAPD and SWAT raid on the Los Angeles chapter (days after Chicago police assisted by the FBI executed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark), Pratt's youth seems extraordinary. Kit Kim Holder notes though that the Black Panthers were primarily a youth organization (see Kit Kim Holder, "The History of the Black Panther Party 1966-1972: A Curriculum for Afrikan-American Studies." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1990). For information on the FBI's counterintelligence program, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wtzrs Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Churchill and Vander Wall, eds., COINTELPRO PAPERS (Boston: South End Press, 1990); and Kenneth O'Reilly, "Racial Matters':· The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989). 6. E. Franklin Frazier, The Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). 7. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1987). 8. This work uses the terms "black" and "African American" interchangeably to denote people of African descent living in the United States. "United States" and "America" are commonly referred to as synonymous. The quotation marks around my initial use of ''America" recognizes the (imperial) fallacy of equating the United States with the Americas. "State" refers to the U.S. government and its attendant apparatuses--educa tional institutions, media, military, police (in the Gramscian concept ofhegemony) that grant it political legitimacy. To these might be added the "private" sector of corporate wealth that is heavily subsidized by public monies and that is deeply invested in shaping domestic and foreign policies. For a discussion of state abuse of power from an antiracist feminist perspective, see Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 9. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 18. 10. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought(Cambridge, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 11. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Wordr: Black Women & the Search for justice (Minneapo lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 67. 194 SHADOWBOXING 12. For definitions of"womanist," see Alice Walker, In Search ofOur Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), xi.

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