"They don't think it be like it is," baseball player Oscar Gamble once eloquently offered, "but it do." And, to quote Denzel Washington, "If you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed, if you do read it, you're misinformed." I was transcribing some notes from an old notebook I was filling up around 6 years ago and while reading my previous thoughts on what seemed to be a rise in populist attitudes, cults of personality and a steady increase in divide and conquer tactics it made me think a lot about what has filled that span of time. Thanks to incendiary media tactics and a growing cultural gap the country seems to have been swiftly fracturing itself meanwhile, with "race relations worse than they've been since the early 60's" it seems an odd time for a group that some media is calling "Black Supremacists" to be cozying up alongside some deplorable types who've earned the honorary title of "White Supremacists."
I mean, so long as you've not really read the history and just guessed based on how "people" with "opinions that matter" continually frame "how it really is."
This isn't the first time this has happened, of course. In fact, if you look back and see how this pattern repeats itself you'll notice some interesting patterns. Often you'll see "natural enemies" (or what the mainstream media attempts to paint as irrevocable adversaries) join arms against a common threat in order to shake off shared oppressors. One example from quite a while ago would be the unlikely, but not at all uneasy alliance between the American Nazi Party's George Lincoln Rockwell and prophet of the Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad, an seemingly odd kinship that is much mirrored by the mutual respect of some leaders of the White Nationalist community and that of Hotep's Black Nationalists.
George Lincoln Rockwell was the controversial leader of the American Nazi Party and in the early 60's one of his main goals was to negotiate a mutually beneficial truce between the ANP and the militant black nationalists of the Nation of Islam. Bear in mind, this is 1961 and the Black Panther party wouldn't be founded for another 5 years, so NOI was as militant and extremist a group of black nationalists to be found in the United States.
Fans of the so-called horseshoe theory will chalk this up to extremists having more in common despite the side of the spectrum they are on than moderates and centrists. That doesn't explain the whole picture though, I don't think. Rockwell was frank, pulling no punches when he told ANP members that the prophet Elijah Muhammad was a personage to be respected as he had: "gathered millions of the dirty, immoral, drunken, filthy-mouthed, lazy and repulsive people sneeringly called ‘niggers’ and inspired them to the point where they are clean, sober, honest, hard working, dignified, dedicated and admirable human beings in spite of their color […] Muhammad knows that mixing is a Jewish fraud and leads only to aggravation of the problems that it is supposed to solve […] I have talked to the Muslim leaders and am certain that a workable plan for separation of the races could be effected to the satisfaction of all concerned—except the communist-Jew agitators."
thegoldwater.com/news/6830-Richard-Spencer-to-Israel-I-m-a-White-Zionist
Believe it or not, even this instance wasn't some new and unprecedented happening. Marcus Garvey, considered one of the prototypical proponents of "Black Pride" and "Black Power" and "Black Liberation Theology" philosophy. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association advocated a separationist policy. Garvey met with leaders of the KKK and afterward basically advocated that they should organize their own organizations similar to the KKK "so that they could look after their own interests" rather than appealing to white people to do it for them.
At another time, he spoke out if not in favor, at least expressing understanding of tribalism and ethnic-based in-group preference:
"You cannot blame any group of men, whether they are Chinese, Japanese, Anglo-Saxons or Frenchmen, for standing up for their interests or for organizing in their interest."
In fact, Garvey preferred the naked racialism, even racism, of certain of these groups to the shrouded patronizing micro-managing of well-meaning would-be white savior types:
"I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together."
