Light from Minneapolis: an introduction to photographs by Nick Kiekenapp

Before he was murdered by the Chicago PD and J. Edgar Hoover, the charismatic Illinois Black Panther Party leader, Chairman Fred Hampton, was famous for saying: “You can kill the revolutionary but, you can’t kill the revolution.” For a long time, I ruminated and mulled: how sad it is that he had been so wrong. The bloody international counter revolutions of the long 20th century had been final and fatal, I believed (and future ones would be even worse!). After COINTELPRO, Condor, Iran-Contra, FBI’s anti-domestic terror program against anti-globalization movements, the militarization of police departments, and the slow movement of white supremacists and race war preppers into American police departments, I lamented that there was likely nothing left of the hope that a different, better world was possible. Reagan and Thatcher had won. Americans think that communism and fascism are the same thing. And, as available as the contrary histories and philosophies are to the average person, no one cares to look.

But our children have more recently also seen the collapse of the myths of the American way of “life”—Black people killed with impunity, their parents downsized and put in the poor house with medical bills, their friends sacrificed to the gun lobby, and the minority rule of a resentment-crazed movement electrified by personalized propaganda and disinformation with a kind of intensity the world had never before seen. And then suddenly my students, parents, cousins, siblings, and high school friends want to talk about socialism. Suddenly, many more of us seem to understand the meaning of white supremacist terrorism and “fuck the police”—even Body Count made a comeback! As revolutionary and Marxist psychoanalyst Franz Fanon reminds us:

And I now see what Chairman Fred meant, perhaps channeling Fanon. The fire of revolution smolders within the deadly system itself and its torch is passed among us in glowing embers, awaiting shared breath and historic wind to rekindle the blaze.

This energy is illustrated by Minneapolis-based musician Nick Kiekenapp captured the light of this revolutionary fire as he bicycled around his neighborhood along Lake Street taking pictures in the heat of mid-June. He saw carloads of armed white people from out of state converging on the city and the park across the street from his house, strange piles of bricks sitting on street corners, immigrant businesses burned, and the American Indian Movement armed and protecting parts of the city against white supremacist shooters/arsonists/brick throwers. Nick’s pictures show a city grieving the same tragedy their ancestors did and the loss of the illusion that those days were over.

Gilmore (2017), theorizing abolitionism and the radical Black tradition, invokes Raymond Williams to remind us that our radical “traditions [are] a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors” (239). As confederate monuments fall from town to town, and youth and Boomers reconsider the quiet and garish brutalities of the last century (and their concrete material connections to previous centuries), we can see the torch is still lit. And, perhaps, as we start to reselect our ancestors now, we will begin to see the larger meaning of James Baldwin’s still powerful insight, continuing Fanon’s, that our society is ruled by whiteness perpetually and implicitly terrorized by the tyranny of its mirror—the idle, the propertyless, the criminal, the Black. And, to be released from this self-imposed tyranny, that whiteness must consent to “become a part of that suffering and dancing country,” which we, “armed with spiritual traveler’s checks,” have previously only “visited surreptitiously after dark” (Baldwin 1963: 96).

“Where, then, is the positive possibility of [America’s] emancipation?” Marx (almost) asks, well before he congratulates Lincoln on the American abolition of slavery.

Is Marx’s “re-winning of man” becoming part of Baldwin’s “suffering and dancing country”? Is “wrong generally” the fact that our world was and is built by murderously forced and commodified labor, composting the theory and practice of humanity as it created it? If it is, we can see the torches of Chairman Fred and our other ancestors all around us. Perhaps the images of Minneapolis show us that we have begun to see that we owe it to our ancestors to pick them up those torches and finally end this world of generalized wrong—to re-win ourselves and to build a new country, which is the dissolution of all countries.