In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 red dragon, Blue warrior Fred Ho’s Ethical Aesthetic SAlim wAShinGTon I think of Fred Ho as a red dragon, signifying upon his Chinese ancestry and his commitment to socialism. Indeed, he has named his media company Big Red in part in honor to Mao Tse-tung. For Fred, “Red” also refers to his intellectual and cultural indebtedness to Malcolm X, known in his hustling days as Detroit Red—(light skinned blacks frequently being referred to as being “red [boned]”). I call him a blue warrior, because he has infused his work with the African American blues-jazz aesthetic, and has been a steadfast warrior against capitalism and national and gender oppression. Fred Ho is a fearless revolutionary who early in life found out that capitalism—based not only on the exploitation of workers, but also slavery, genocide, imperialism , patriarchy, misogyny, and the rape of the earth itself—must be resisted. Ho strives for consistency and truly models the notion that resistance must come in all forms. He is willing and able to take the fight against various forms of oppression to many levels, but ultimately has chosen consciousness as his domain of battle. The compendium of black thought that operates through love, openness, and acceptance in part, and resistance, critical thinking, and irony as well, is the matrix within which he has staged his most heroic battles. I first met Fred Ho in 1976. I was an incoming freshman and he a sophomore at Harvard College. We were both profoundly alienated in the Ivy League setting, despite what on paper would have seemed like more than ample preparation for each of us. I was a graduate of an elite prep school and Fred the son of an academic. The truth was, however, that in addition to our pedigrees, we were possessors of complex and sometimes contradictory selfidentities , and frequently at odds within the social world of our would-be peers. For my part, I was cautious after the battles won and lost in high school 121 Fred Ho’s Ethical Aesthetic and weary from the social dislocation I felt while being inducted from the working class into the U.S. educational elite. But mostly I was dismayed at the class and cultural differences between the scholarship kids I associated with in high school and expected to find in college and the shameless bourgeois wannabe children of the black nouveau riche I so frequently encountered at Harvard. As the younger brothers of the first generation of “oppressed minorities” to invade the halls of the nation’s elite educational institutions in large numbers, in response to the freedom movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we were betwixt and between our aspirations for high achievement in that setting and our revulsion at the decadent excesses and shallowness of many of the privileged class of which we were (however reluctantly) a part. The Fred Ho I met in the late 1970s was an intense young man, dedicated to revolution, and ready to teach and enlist me—and others—in the cause. We began by mobilizing protests against the upcoming Bakke decision, one of the early lynchpins in the dismantling of affirmative action. Soon we were working in a cultural organization based in Boston’s Chinatown, participating in Marxist study groups, and staging protests, among other things. Aside from Fred’s undeniable intensity and tenacity (once, after a lengthy conversation, I remember him reaching under his bed, with the eye gleam worn by proselytizers reeling in the fish for Christ, for a stash of—you guessed it—political newspapers and pamphlets), he had well-researched and articulate positions on everything from the role of the petty bourgeoisie in capitalist economy to the failures of the Cuban revolution to the abandonment of socialism by the Soviet Union. And while he supported student activism, such as struggles to induce Harvard to divest from apartheid South Africa and resisting the university’s attempts to strip the Afro American studies department of its political content and structures, it was always clear that his political focus was wider and deeper. My own political leanings at the time were toward Black Nationalism. I had joined the AAPRP (All African Peoples Revolutionary Party) and the RNA (Republic of New Africa), found the white socialist would-be organizers trying to sell newspapers in Roxbury’s black ghetto not only ridiculous but offensive, and saw the “loonies on the left” (trust-fund socialists) in Harvard Square as maybe a step or two...

Share