Blazing Saturdays (3)

Good Negroes and Bad Negroes (with bonus Gil Scott-Heron content).

Back in ye olde Tea Party days, Dick Armey, the former Republican congressman who ran the Koch Brothers outfit that Astroturfed much of the movement into existence, traveled the circuit with a warmup act: an African American radio host named Mason Weaver, author of a book called It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. “You see, slavery was a choice,” Weaver would say. “The master didn’t lock up those slaves at night. There was no ball and chain. They stayed because they thought like a slave. We don’t need hope and change. We are Americans. So we are free. What the heck are we going to change to? Back to slavery?” The John Birch Society retained a similar circuit-riding Black speaker in the 1960s, a former Communist who let his audience in on a secret: the civil rights movement was a Soviet plot to seize the states of the Old Confederacy, as revealed in a Soviet government document from 1928.

The presence of Black people is indispensable to reactionary formations like these. It is how they convince others, and themselves, that they are not racists. Even though, of course, in actual fact, it is the most racist thing about them.