A Look Inside James Baldwin's 1,884 Page FBI File
lithub.com
lithub.com
"The FBI did not investigate writers according to their literary merits. As Kurt Vonnegut's biographer, I can tell you that, despite his publishing Slaughterhouse-Five— one of the most popular anti-war novels of the 1960s— the FBI didn't keep a file on him. But the bureau did monitor the lives and works of Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry (a 1,000-page file), W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright, among others.
What the bureau opposed was African American literature and its potential— a backhanded recognition of that genre's power to influence readers. No cultural upheaval would be coming from the likes of Roth, Updike, or Mary McCarthy, for reasons you no doubt understand."
It's not as if this has changed much. Compare the treatment of e.g. Black Lives Matter with white groups or individuals which are overtly pro-violence, e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazi-br...
No, what's surprising is that some people think this was then, and things now are different.
> It's not as if this has changed much. Compare the treatment of e.g. Black Lives Matter with white groups or individuals which are overtly pro-violence, e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazi-br....
I think the implication is not much has changed
Civil Rights groups were branded as subversives with potential communist leanings.
If you have any family members that were involved with the anti-war movement or with the labor movement, you may want to file your own FOIA request. They were surprisingly responsive. Not within the statutory limits mind you, but less than a year.
(I can't parse "gay propaganda" without interpreting it as massively homophobic, care to elaborate?)
The reason they are homophobic is because making a normal activity immoral gives them something they can use to defame people.
Similarly, the reason they are racist because having a frightening other makes it easier to control the populace. You need a bad part of town to keep prices up in the good part.
These underlying racist/classist/sexist/homophobic motives then reach around acausally and individuals think we are in a post-racist or post-sexist society, that black people commit crime, or that Jews run the world, or whatever. The system reinforces itself because it needs to in order to survive. Rational basis for both the -isms and the denial of their power forms out of nothing to serve the end goal of GDP growth and consolidation of wealth in the capital class.
It also provides a cultural grounding for policing "good whites" and "bad whites". You can't use merit, because then the rewards are too predictable and people won't get addicted to them. When you ground badness in a neighbor culture, it means people who are part way between cultures (i.e. all of us) never really know exactly when the rewards are going to come, so they become addictive. Only people at the extremes know when the rewards are coming: rich whites (always), poor blacks (never). Both groups use that freedom from political addiction to control culture. Whites architecturally, blacks artistically. Wall Street and Hip Hop.
That's also why you see black culture bifurcated with some moving "towards the bottom" and some "towards the top". There is a power source in both directions, in thug life and in assimilation. Of course this also provides free propaganda for racists... "look how they move towards badness"...