Power/Knowledge
Editor’s Note: Eleanor has real journalistic credentials. She knows things. Sordid, depraved, secret, slimy things about our modern society. And whether she’s telling you a joke, or relaying hard-hitting news, her words carry weight and we’d all be wise to follow along. Laugh with her, learn with her and even disagree with her, but do pay very close attention to her, because chances are she knows something you don’t.
Our predominantly white and wealthy coastal surf enclaves could easily ignore this historical moment, and many of you will make sure I know that I’m supposed to stick to surfing, but this isn’t a discussion: We stand in solidarity with the black community, even if all we can do is march with them, educate ourselves, and our culture. Let’s get busy. —Travis
Huey Newton writes in his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide that reading forever changed the course of his life. “As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” A book has never stopped a bullet, but knowledge will set you free.
Sitting here from the comfort of my Long Beach home, swaddled in my privilege, wrestling with the idea that somehow social media silence equates to sympathy for the oppressor, I stare at the titles of three books: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale, If They Come in the Morning… an anthology edited by Angela Davis, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
Like Newton, my life has also been profoundly shaped by the books I’ve read. I know that words lose value when they’re hollowly posted, that words lose their meaning when they’re spewed thoughtlessly. I also know that words can inspire and incite. Nothing has liberated me more than exposure to opinions and world views different than my own. And for now, this is all I have to offer: the words of those far more eloquent, far more powerful, and far more urgent.
To those grasping, I defer to James Baldwin. I defer to Angela Davis. I defer to brother Cornel West. I encourage you to read Recitatif, Toni Morrison’s only published short story. Read Zadie Smith. Read Roberto Bolaño’s Police Rat. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates, anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but most saliently Between the World and Me. Read The Autobiography of Malcom X. Finally, I defer to Frantz Fanon, who wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that “…If the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.”
Knowledge gives us the tools to understand power, to think critically. With knowledge, you are better equipped to ask the right questions, to never stop asking questions. But don’t listen to me. Do your own research, I beg. Educate yourself to the fullest extent so that when confronted by the mouthpieces of authoritarians, you understand their coded language.
Not only do Black Lives Matter, but the battle for their lives is the only thing that presently matters. To quote James Baldwin (quoting the German theologian Martin Niemöller who was imprisoned at Dachau for his opposition to the Nazi regime): “If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” —Eleanor Sheehan
