Word: cleaverly
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...Cleaver has a deliberate control of words which he drops on the page like little bits of acid. "The policeman and the soldier will violate your person, smoke you out with various gases. Each will shoot you, beat your head and body with sticks and clubs, with rifle butts, run you through with bayonets, shoot holes in your flesh, kill...
...Cleaver feels the white man in America made the black slaves into superstrong bodies, stripping them of their minds. In the process, according to Cleaver, white men became competent administrators and thinkers, but became alienated from their bodies and burdened with a sense of physical impotence. Such a split between mind and body arises in any class society, but can usually be overcome. In this country, however, the split has been made permanent by racial division. It is this overcoming of the racial division which holds the key to restoring the sanity so desperately needed by both white and black...
...other side of the solution involves the blacks' search to think for themselves. The desire for courses in black history, the political and economic awareness spreading in the ghetto, the black banks, local control of schools--all these, Cleaver would say, are efforts by black people to fight off a feeling of mental impotence which is just as serious as the white alienation from its body...
...CLEAVER points out that the black man's problems in America are not independent of those of other oppressed pepole. It is no accident that Malcolm X went to Africa, that Martin Luther King was against the Vietnam War, or that the Vietcong have warned black soldiers of impending terrorist activities in Saigon. "The blacks in Watts and all over America could now see the Vietcong's point: both were on the receiving end of what the armed forces were dishing...
...emphasis in Cleaver's book is on black/white phenomena in the individuals of this country, our society, and the world. He tends to ignore two things. First, he has long passages of bitter criticism of the white race for genocide and brutality. I think the was in Biafra shows that genocide is not an evil committed only by the white race. Secondly, Cleaver has an intricate description of the psychological hangups resulting from our divorce of mind and body. These are crucial to our self-understanding, but I think our psychosexual problems in America are caused by the machine...