Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

2. From Gorilla to Guerilla: Defining Revolutionary Identity

53 chapter two From Gorilla to Guerilla Defining Revolutionary Identity The title of this chapter plays on gorilla/guerilla, but it also signifies on dehumanizing discourses of American-style racism that compared black and yellow people to gorillas, apes, and orangutans in order to justify the array of legal, political, social, and religious ideologies that upheld a longstanding and sometimes lethal system of racial discrimination and segregation. From Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to the mocking Civil War and Reconstruction-era cartoons of Thomas Nast’s Harper’s Bazaar, from the nativist anti-Chinese rhetoric of the nineteen teens and twenties to the Yellow Peril propaganda of World War II, this racist trope lurks in the dark corners of racial representation even today. In light of this history, listeners have sometimes reacted with suspicion and, on occasion, anger when I outlined my assertion that African Americans and Asian Americans adopted a guerilla subjectivity to represent the ideology of ethnic nationalist revolutionary struggle against racist oppression in America. Time and again, I have had to explain that I meant “guerilla,” not gorilla. Yet, the echo remains, adding another layer of meaning to my formulation. The guerilla subjectivity asserts a full and empowered humanity that defies the disempowering, dehumanizing racist tropes that for so long justified the oppression and repression of the descendents of Africans and Asians in America. Ironically, this troping on guerilla and gorilla is not uncommon in contemporary African American and Asian American popular culture. Rappers like Gorilla Joe and Guerilla Black, rap groups like the Gorillaz, and even 50 Cent’s G(uerilla)-Unit all play on the menacing associations linked to both terms. On the surface, both terms evoke aggressive, resistant, and hypersexual representations of black masculinity and the black male body.1 While we could read these namings as acts of playful, revisionary appropriation, these seemingly unironic appropria- 54 Defining Revolutionary Identity tions often highlight the issues of representation and self-definition explored in this chapter. Ultimately, I assert that though the guerilla coalesced as a representation of revolutionary ethnic nationalism and icon of resistance, the political and ideological import of this figure was eventually appropriated in blaxploitation film and Bruce Lee/kung fu flicks to signify the very types of brutish black and menacing yellow masculinities that sell videogames, mp3s, and action games today. Using the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, Regis Debray, and Eldridge Cleaver, I will begin by defining the parameters of the guerilla as a disciplined, ideologically grounded, solitary agent who engages in political and cultural action designed to disrupt oppressive social practices. Then, I will trace the development and institution of this identity position through the pages of The Black Panther and Gidra between 1969 and 1974. This five-year period encompasses the entire initial run of Gidra and the ensuing period during which the social implications of the legal changes of the 1960s were highly contested. Ultimately, I hope to show that the rhetoric and images of the guerilla found in the pages of these newspapers provided ideological and visual referents for a developing revolutionary consciousness on a weekly and monthly basis. I still think today as yesterday, that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it, and that is the fact that many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men, that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.2 W. E. B. Du Bois’s words from 1953 appeared in a full-page article commemorating the life of the African American scholar, activist, and expatriate in the January 4, 1969 edition of The Black Panther. His words update his famous 1903 dictum and provide a new paradigm for late twentieth century activists who were becoming familiar with Fanon’s Marxist-inflected, anticolonialist critique of colonialism and neo-imperialism . Du Bois’s remarks condemn the “civilized persons” who tacitly condone war against and tolerate the misery of “Others” to maintain Defining Revolutionary...