PicoBlog

The comparisons between today and 1968 have me revisiting some of my favorite documentaries about this time period. “Berkeley in the Sixties,” is a terrific introduction to several student-led liberation movements that grew out of and adjacent to the Free Speech Movement on UC-Berkeley’s campus, including the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, the women’s movement. This 1990 documentary from director Mark Kitchell features some fabulous archival footage and interviews with people who were there, reflecting back after 20 years or so. It was nominated for Best Documentary.

Another Oscar-nominated documentary about this period that I’ve re-watched recently is “The Weather Underground,” a 2002 film from co-directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel. It’s an excellent look at the radical movement that embodied some of the revolutionary spirit of the time and it does a great deal to override the conventional wisdom about the group, which goes something like this:

“These young people were both horrified and driven crazy by their knowledge of who we are in the world. They were too young to know how to react, so they went off the deep end…” (Gloria Emerson, Harpers’ Magazine, from here)

Instead of the “driven crazy” and “off the deep end” narrative, the film spends some time on the politics of those in the Weather Underground Organization. What it reveals is the way that their anti-war activism was clear-eyed about the connections between militarism, imperialism, and the quotidian racism and police brutality in everyday life in the United States for Black Americans. Their effort to “bring the war home,” through a series of escalating direct actions, was a way to force Americans to pay attention to what was being done in their name. As Mark Rudd, a former WUO member, explains, “Our strategy was to make the war visible so that people couldn’t just ignore it.”

Another former member, Naomi Jaffe, elaborates on this when she says (at about the 21:00 mark):

“Violence can mean a lot of different things. We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. I think that’s the part that is really the hardest for people to understand.”

The film discusses the strategic bombing, targeting centers of imperial power without causing harm to actual humans, as a way to get the American people to rethink their tacit endorsement of the U.S. government’s industrial scale violence against the Vietnamese people.

Later, Mark Rudd says this about violence:

Americans are taught, again and again from a very early age, that violence which is not sanctioned by the government is either criminal or mentally ill. So our violence was categorized as that: criminal AND mentally ill.

Part of what struck me watching the film this time was the radical anti-racism and challenge to the white power establishment that was at their core.

The film also features Todd Gitlin (1943-2002), who offers his sociological expertise that “no one was talking about” the Weather Underground among his circle of friends, which seems to be the only metric he considers. He goes on to say, “I mean, there was a lot of interest in the women’s movement,” but not the radical politics of the Weather Underground. What Gitlin misses, like most sociologists who study social movements, is the way that the Weather Underground was successful at challenging the dominant culture of whiteness.

The view of the Weather Underground as principally a white-led anti-racist organization gets more room to breathe in Dan Berger’s 2006 oral history of the group, Outlaws of America. In it, Berger writes:

Anti-racism and support for the Third World were its guiding principles. It was a group of white North Americans who defined struggles against colonialism and white supremacy as central to any social justice movement. The group sought to use the white privilege and largely middle-class background of its members in the service of revolutionary change. It attacked government and corporate buildings with bombs, as is well known, but also through its [sic] media-savvy. The group released dozens of communiqués; wrote and published a book, a regular newsmagazine, and strategic pamphlets; and was featured in a documentary while still on the run. It was, in short, part of a “culture of resistance,” a vibrant and dynamic revolutionary movement dedicated to fundamental and progressive social change. Racial oppression and war were key questions animating its actions. In so doing, the group’s legacy raises lasting questions about white supremacy, global U.S. power, and social justice endeavors.

The lasting legacy of the group is really about the challenges it made to white supremacy and the global reach of the U.S.’s imperial power. But this legacy gets erased in the obsession, a compulsion almost, with the group’s sometimes violent strategy and the very US-tendency to deny the way power works.

It reminds me of the way the history of John Brown gets taught: that he was “driven crazy” and “off the deep end” because of his religious views, which led him to oppose slavery. Criminal AND mentally ill, our cultural go-to’s for dismissing radical challenges to whiteness.

We need better narratives of radical, getting-at-the-root, resistance to whiteness by people who are raised white. We need a more robust liberation narrative for white people who are resisting white supremacy than merely “anti-racism,” with its implied individualism, implicit bias, and compatibility with corporate DEI initiatives.

Ultimately, as Berger points out, much of what undermined the Weather Underground was that when the war ended in 1975, some of the guys reverted to old tactics meant to ensure a white, male, heteronormative leadership that excluded women and queer people. To me, those are failures in prioritizing a truly inclusive collective care, things that Laura Whitehorn told me recently, today’s student-led movement is so much better at than the WUO.

At the end of the film, I was struck by the divergence in views about the legacy of the Weather Underground. For his part, Mark Rudd regards the group as a failure and that he still feels a profound remorse for his involvement in the WUO and disavows what he refers to as a “violent political strategy.” Another former member refers to the group as a “terrorist” organization and that he regrets his involvement.

Laura Whitehorn, on the other hand, offers a different take. She says, “I still have hope. …I think people never stop struggling, they never stop waiting for the moment when they can change the things that make their lives unliveable.” And, Naomi Jaffe, says with a smile:

“I would do it again. In a revolutionary context, I would want to be part of that. It was a precious, precious opportunity. I think the world came close to making those changes and I think that makes a difference in terms of the ability of movements to make change in the future. The fact that there is a history of resistance, a history of white people’s participation in resistance, I think it makes a difference in the ability of that kind of movement to emerge again.” [emphasis added]

I agree with Laura Whitehorn and Naomi Jaffe. People never stop struggling and we need to be able to connect earlier struggles to the present ones. The fact is that the Weather Underground mobilized white, mostly middle-class, students to resist global white supremacy and US imperialism. In that way, it is part of the history of peoples’ struggle that has made today’s student-led movement possible.

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