7 Comments
Sep 26, 2022Liked by Dumisani Washington

stunning and so helpful. never knew any of this, wow.

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Great work. Cleaver was obviously a far from perfect human being, but he was a talented and honest writer. That last quote from Cleaver does a pretty good job of summing up where I am these days.

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Mar 6, 2023·edited Mar 6, 2023

Thank you for this fine article, which really helps to illuminate a critically important chapter in history, one that nowadays is so often viewed through the distorted lens of left-wing hagiography, on the one hand, or the equally reductive lens of right-wing, ahistorical demonization, on the other. It is eye-opening to discover that Cleaver's views were not frozen in time, nor are they to be dismissed as the ideological apostasies of a man who "turned conservative Christian" and in so doing lost his way. Quite the opposite! I can't help but wonder about the case of Angela Davis, nowadays worshiped by the Left as political saint and elder whose every position is to be received with unchallenged reverence. She owes much of her early, superlative education to two brilliant German-Jewish philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who took her under their wing, yet her later, full-throated embrace of anti-Zionism and the antisemitic BDS movement indicates she never undertook the kind of remarkable intellectual journey that Cleaver made. If anything, she seems to be stuck in time, and in so doing has become a far less interesting (and certainly less relevant) figure than she was in her youth. Is she blind to all the things Cleaver came to see so clearly?

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Worth every penny.

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A very interesting and informative article Dumisani. After Eldridge Cleaver's return to the United States in 1975 did he have any dialogue with any of his former Black Panther Party colleagues? Did he author any books detailing his experiences in Cuba & Algeria?

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