1/ There are 2 Oscar-nominated films this year that involve 60s activism in Chicago. One features inspiring resistance & organizing in the face of oppression. The other is about the Chicago 7. Sorry, but any comparison between Fred Hampton and Abbie Hoffman, et al is grotesque...
2/ I knew Abbie, Tom Hayden & William Kuntsler. I had real respect for the latter two and felt genuine empathy for the first of these, bc of his personal demons. But what Hampton was doing was far more revolutionary than anything the 7 dreamt of, let alone did at the DNC in 68...
3/ It bothers me that when we think of activism we tend to gravitate more towards the epic protest model (like the action at the DNC) rather than the more difficult, day-to-day organizing that Hampton was doing w/the Panthers (not to mention the cross-racial class analysis)...
4/ We remember street marches and the excitement of all that. But the Panther's breakfast program and community-based political education programs and work to shift gangs into political alliances, and outreach to radical working-class whites was revolutionary...
5/ Anything Hoffman & Rubin did was performance art, self-indulgent to the core. That narcissism is what allowed Jerry to ultimately become a venture capitalist before his death, for instance. That turn wasn't shocking at all...
6/ To be sure, the others were deeper. But none of them were as revolutionary as Hampton. Yet I fear white progressives, in particular, tend to be more enamored of the 7...
7/ I don't mean to suggest the work of the 7 was all for shit. It wasn't. I just worry that feel-good moments (like reading the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam at the end of the trial) feed the idea that this kind of thing ended the war or something...
8/ Abbie really believed he & his compatriots stopped the Vietnam war, which is false. And there are several million Southeast Asian folks who would say as much but can't bc this country killed them, most AFTER the Mobe, after Chicago, after the movement's biggest moments...
9/ That doesn't mean the antiwar movement was meaningless, let alone wrong. It was important for building capacity, developing long-term commitments to change among its participants, and perhaps forcing the US to hesitate to send troops to Central America in the 80s...
10/...though even then, our proxy forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala managed to kill lots of people, w/or without US boots on the ground, so, even that is pretty thin gruel to some extent...
11/ I'm just saying that at a time when folks lament "performative activism" re: social media posting, let's recall that sometimes IRL protest can be performative too. The hardest work is the community-building work Hampton was about. It doesn't make headlines. But it's crucial.
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