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Uncle Jake's Converted Protest or
The Misuse of "Angry Nigger" Icons by Anarchist Negro Cross
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On 1/31/01, Jake Carman, acting president of BAAM (Boston's Anti Authoritarian Movement) began his folk-rock the anti-vote drive.  It began with a no-feedback allowed post to BAAMBoston, where he is now primary events planner and webmistress.  It continues with postings to all of the usual Circle-jerkle A listserves in New England.  It continued and most likely culminated at Boston Indymedia Center where BAAM's / Anarchist Black Cross' official flyers could be downloaded for dutiful reproduction by college students who don't want to vote, need a political cover story, but can't think up their own nifty Stop The Vote slogans.

I took aesthetic issue with most of the posters, mainly because they were your typical banal red banner drops and a bunch of crappy black and white photocopies reminiscent of the stuff that A.N.S.W.E.R. pumps out in the hopes that their logo will be photographed on a front page in a newspaper.  Jake Carman is really about zero steps removed from A.N.S.W.E.R. anyway, but in this case the ads are for NeAnarchist.net, a new not for intellectual profit company he is starting.

The most glaring thing about the flyers -- the most objectionable-- was that Jake Carman posted racist material to Boston Indymedia and that Jonathan McIntosh deleted the objections to that material.  The material in question is two versions of flyer depicting an angry black man raising his fist and shouting with his mouth stretched open, while pumping a fist of inordinate size such as in the stylized Marxist or socialist-realist form:

I understand the lack of creativity, the borrowing, the crappy fonts, and the fear of craftsmanship in these organizations.  It's subcultural. Coke bottles are de Devil. However, I cram to understand the fact that Jake Carman hails from a loose organization of white college students in Boston and Allston, numbering at various times from one to at most 15 persons:  Who posed for this banner?  It says "flyer borrowed from Zabalaza.net." Now that organization is at least funny.  An anti-capitalist bookstore that sells books against capitalism in that capitalist country.  We've all seen that before.  A picture of 50 black South Africans holding an Anarchist Black Cross flag?  Ok.  That's a new one.  Brit-loving anti-ANC dreck from ultra-communists on a campus in Johannesburg, purporting to be the black voice of the townships?  That's more likely.  Its full name is in fact: The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation, and consists of mostly one guy whose mailbag is in Fordsburg, South Africa.  Ah, the self-importance magnifying glass of the internet!  Anyway, enjoy this spoof:

OOPS! Cardinal rule violated.  Name named, face pictured!  As you see, Jake Carman is much smaller and much lighter than an Angry Black Man.  He isn't even a Tanarchist.  It is clear that Carman likes the Zabalaza organization because it is allegedly melanin-infused, and because it adheres to Labor Theory of Value, and more importantly its idea of autonomous communities, an idea Carman has been trying to rub off of the Zapatistas (APPO, his previous love), and put into a small off-campus concrete apartment project in Allston.  But whether the whole of South Africa's black population is ralled behind the South African Anarchist Black Cross or whether it's just some stupid white guy is a lame question left for another day.  The relevant thing is Carman's use of this angry black dude image.

What's wrong with it:

Carman has gone out of his way to find a group (tribe) in Africa that he believes shares his views of autonomous community, Labor Theory of Value, the dyad of low expectations of work / high expectations of reward, the hopes of pillaging the rich, and getting photographed in a black hooded sweatshirt with a bullhorn.  Carman has found such a group in "Afrika," but his previous group was allegedly Oaxacan Mexican.  This speaks to a psychological need of the campus activist/slacker to feel as though he is subsumed by a larger, blacker political thing than himself, and that his ideas actually reverberate back to him from a multiracial Solidarist group rather than issuing forth into the empty blackness from a depraved little white boy.  It is this urge which drives Carman to dress in black hooded sweatshirts and post his Stop the Vote flyers with "angry black man" iconography attached.  Since Carman is a white university student, he cannot justify his rage, and so "Uncle Jake" Converts his anger through placing Mammy Stamps on his flyers.

But that's only the mental or identity dysfunction that leads to such a racist act.   It does not speak specifically to the mechanism of the act itself.  The act itself is reprehensible.  The act itself is identical to the placement of a Cream of Wheat Rastus, an Uncle Ben, or an Aunt Jemima onto one's protest flyer to prove that it is authentic protest material.  We are led to believe, by the use of a cooning emblem --and it does become a cooning emblem in Jake's hands-- that his protest movement is Double Whipped, Ole Fashioned, Fast Rising or better yet:

Maybe Anarchizzum
ain't got no Real Negruhs
I don't know what them things is,
If they's bugs, they ain't none in
Anarchist Black Cross,
but it's sho' good to throw a brick through a winder
and cheap
Costs 'bout next to nothin'
to print a great big flyer heap.

Carman's stylebitten "angry nigger" is really no different from Aunt Jemima, although the real woman, Nancy Green, a former slave turned pancake flour advertising persona, was a real woman.  Carman's angry man is likely an Xth gen copy of the likeness of some real guy with some real problems and real issues, but Carman is using it in the same way as an advertising stamp, and not as a personal mark. It is used like a Calumet indian head is used to advertise baking powder.  And it should be seen as such, as quick leavening hype for protest hoe cakes; as parboiled white protesters using blackface.