Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

History is fucking boring in this country and sadly, Black history is far from the exception that proves the rule. According to the straight white corporate guardians of Black History Month Incorporated, It’s all pacifism and peanut butter. The entirety of 500 years of anti-colonialist struggle has been lumped into a 28-day infomercial for the resilience of the American experiment. We are all led to believe that when not engaged in providing their masters with mind-blowing new sandwich spreads, Black people or rather African Americans spent the lion’s share of their free time sitting on their hands and singing “We Shall Overcome” until the police state, in all of its benevolent wisdom, grew tired of clubbing these patient bible thumpers over the head and finally awarded them with the consolation prize of civil rights, chief among them being the right to freely engage in what the slave trade declared democracy.

Is it really any wonder that kids are so fucking bored. Just writing that last paragraph makes me want to erase myself with whippets and Benadryl. This is no mistake. History wasn’t written by the victors. It’s written by rich assholes who are heavily invested in convincing poor people that they’ve already won. If people in this nation knew the first thing about its real history not only would they be excited, they would be downright pissed off. The people who run this country are the most disgusting, lazy, pigfucking pond scum that has ever accumulated on Satan’s balls, and they always have been. George Washington was a coward, Thomas Jefferson was a rapist and Abraham Lincoln could have cared less about freeing the slaves. Assholes, one and all. The real heroes are the unruly renegades who they needed to build entire armies to kill, and an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of those fine renegades were people of color with attitude.

Black history is chock full of uppity negroes and negras who kicked their master’s pale ass until it was blacker than theirs before giving their indentured wives the first real orgasm of their miserable lives. Black history has to be rendered boring as fuck because otherwise people might actually take enough time to figure out that it is a history defined by an ongoing populist revolt against the mind-numbing conformity of WASP supremacy and that what it has to teach us applies to every shade of pissed-off lower class scum. Lenin once observed that if America is to ever have a revolutionary class, it will be the negro. He wasn’t wrong, but as usual that asshole was a day late and a ruble short.

Black folk have always been America’s most revolutionary class because no class has ever done so much fucking damage with so little ammunition. Black history, real fucking Black history, is a gift to everyone who has ever been fucked over in this country, by this country, and the greatest and naturally least understood gifts of real fucking Black history are Black Power and Rock n Roll. Two ingredients that when properly applied provide the collective fucked-over class with everything we need to build a bomb big enough to bring this prison state to the ground where we can kick its ass with our bare feet.

The fact that most Americans don’t understand the first thing about Black Power is hardly shocking when you consider the fact that most Americans don’t understand the first thing about race and the first thing about race is that it’s all bullshit. It’s a bunch of crap created to destroy the unity of class and the diversity of ethnicity. Black and white weren’t even widely embraced concepts until the late 17th century. Before then, America wasn’t so much a melting pot as it was a disorganized gumbo of different kinds of servants; African servants, Irish servants, German servants, all getting whooped and bamboozled by the same master class of cousin-fucking English noblemen until they could be properly assimilated long enough to pay off their debts, learn their place and praise Angloid Jesus. Then they could become servant-whooping noblemen too.

This all changed with Bacon’s Rebellion, when a disgruntled tycoon named Nathaniel Bacon decided that he wanted a bigger slice of colonial pie and gathered an army of African and European servants to take it by force. But what Bacon really did was arm and organize Colonial Virginia’s poorest subjects while inadvertently giving them a license to challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Long after Bacon dropped dead of fever, the English planter class remained haunted by visions of multi-ethnic peasants united by a shared lust to burn their precious capital of Jamestown to the ground. So, the aristocracy adopted the rigid legal caste system of Black and white. All Africans became a permanent slave class and most European Protestants were afforded the petty privilege of getting whooped less if they turned on their darker comrades and identified with their masters. This same formula was later tweaked and used to assimilate other slave classes into the melting pot of whiteness in order to make sure that they maintained the majority indefinitely.

Plenty of renegades of all different ethnicities, from the Seminole Nation to Saint Patrick’s Battalion, challenged this concept over the years but it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement broke bad that this resistance was finally crystalized into a movement that continues to threaten the very fabric of the system to this day. Stokely Carmicheal was a young negro organizer who spent the first half of the sixties as the hardest working man in the Civil Rights Movement. Between the years of 1960 and 1965, Stokely played a major hand in nearly every major civil rights demonstration across the South but by the time he reached the top of the movement as the head of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely was tired. He was tired of seeing his friends get chewed on by German shepherds. He was tired of being polite to the white establishment. He was tired of being a negro. So, Stokely made a conscious decision to be Black and make Black beautiful.

READ MORE