Comment While I, like the
editor of Race Traitor, also agree with Tamara Nopper’s
views, her paragraph regarding John Brown merits extensive criticism.
First, on a somewhat academic note, she writes that W.E.B. Du Bois’s
John Brown (1909) was “less of a biography and more of
an interpretation.” It should be pointed out to her that all biography
is interpretation--so there is nothing “more or less” about
it.
Secondly, as to Brown himself, there is no doubt that he approached
the struggle with flaws both personal and ideological. He certainly
imposed his own political ideas about the strategy of struggle upon
black Canadian expatriates, for instance, some of whom resented the
idea of fighting under the banner of the US as Brown insisted. “Upper
case” Black intellectuals sometimes isolate and identify this
tendency in Brown as an aspect of white supremacist thinking. But from
this biographer’s perspective, I doubt it. John Brown was (to
both his credit and his fault) generally insistent that his word be
the first and last in any effort, whether in family, business, or in
struggle against slavery. His own brother chided him from childhood
concerning this “imperious” tendency, and he himself acknowledged
it. So it is arguably improper, or at least inexact, for Nopper and
other stringent critics like herself to racialize Brown’s tendency
in this case.
Nopper also says that Brown had “fucked-up views that Blacks
were still enslaved because they were too ‘servile.’”
To borrow from her own phrasing, this is interpretation more than biography.
Brown indeed held strong opinions about the lack of militance in some
quarters of the black community, especially among those living in the
racist North. We may debate both the legitimacy of those opinions, or
(as I suspect is the case with Nopper) whether he even had the right
to hold opinions about blacks. Brown was apparently not sophisticated
enough to realize that holding opinions about blacks made him a white
supremacist, and that it was the epitome of “white” hubris
for him to interact and collaborate with blacks from the standpoint
of leadership. Of course, had he waited to be led by his famous black
colleagues, it is doubtful that any of his militant pursuits would even
have taken place.
Furthermore, Brown hardly held that the enslaved “were too ‘servile.’”
Indeed, he assumed that the enslaved would rise up when appropriately
armed, and then sought to do so. He had not only studied the record
of enslaved peoples in world history, but had paid special attention
to the record of historic and contemporary militant black efforts, including
the Haitian triumph under Toussaint L’Ouverture. Indeed, Brown
assumed and expected that enslaved black men and women would fight.
Nopper’s analysis and criticism are profound and justifiably
exacting in many respects. But her judgmental remarks about John Brown
(and by implication the other “white” men who died with
him in the effort) are inexact and “historically speaking,”
perfidious. Of course, I am not suggesting that Nopper owes her “gratitude”
to Brown, or that she must otherwise pat him on the back in retrospect.
(And I doubt that Brown himself would desire that.) But clearly, in
her ideological world, “whites” are to be seen and not heard,
and not speak unless spoken to. They are not even allowed to hold opinions
and should accordingly “fuck off” if they do. Hers is a
world where even John Brown is offensive.
Indeed, contrary to what even appears to be a concession on her part,
Brown did far more than illustrate the impotency of “moral persuasion”
(known as “moral suasion” in his own time) as an antislavery
weapon. In life he modeled a caring, principled ethos to which his entire
lifestyle and family were committed, and for which they materially and
socially sacrificed a great deal. Ultimately, Brown and three sons gave
up literally everything including their lives in an attempt to both
oppose chattel slavery and uplift the humanity of blacks in a unabashedly
racist society. They did so based on the best intentions that any humans
could muster, including their own personal spiritualities. If that is
not good enough for critics like Nopper, then I suspect nothing will
be.
In the struggle for justice, leadership and vision are neither color--nor
politically--bounded. Notwithstanding the truth of Nopper’s somewhat
vulgar jeremiad, in the long run, revolutions are first won in the hearts
of the principled people who rise up first--often alone and imperfectly--to
fight and lead. Paternalistic white activists and resentful upper-case
Black critics notwithstanding, one good John Brown is worth an army
of righteously indignant commentators. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. |
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