From a reader

Fertile Ground for BA’s Message

May 12, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

To the editors:

I wanted to share a story a friend of mine told me this morning. He went to the movie The Company You Keep, which grapples with the legacy of the ’60s, on Saturday night. There were about 100 people there. At the end of the movie, as the credits began to roll, he stood at the exit and distributed BA’s new piece “A Question Sharply Posed: Nat Turner or Thomas Jefferson?” He did some very simple agitation as he passed them out, saying that “it’s right to stand with the oppressed against oppression,” but mainly focused on getting out a lot of copies of the statement, reaching 40 or 50 people with the statement.

People were very open to taking this, often commenting positively. With one couple, though, the male came out and very loudly said that two wrongs don’t make a right (even as he took the flyer). My friend replied that a distinction has to be drawn between people standing up against oppression coming from a place of genuinely trying to end that, and people and forces who are trying to enforce oppression. And as the couple passed, his wife turned to my friend and quietly invoked Malcolm X on the need for the oppressed to take determined action against their oppression. It seems that some things that seemed to have been (correctly) settled in the ’60s have been reversed or at least “neutered” in the thinking of many people, and there is work to do—including with this statement—to “un-reverse” that. At the same time, this short but very “packed” statement from BA takes even the positive sentiment of the woman above much further, leading people to grapple not only with the whole history of the struggle for emancipation of humanity from all forms of slavery and oppression—but with the future of that struggle as well!

My point in this is that in any urban area, at any given time, there are many venues featuring cultural works, talks, exhibits, etc. that grapple either with historic or current issues or periods of struggle and/or where things are going today. There are concerns that people have which draw them to such events in the first place and then further open them up to think and engage even more deeply with the very concerns that brought them there. These venues are fertile ground for the message in this statement. So let’s really get this great piece out in a big way to all these kinds of sites as a big part of getting BA Everywhere!

A reader

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