It’s that, but it’s also that relative to the 80’s and 90’s, America has gotten less racist (actually and symbolically). It’s a very low bar, but it’s always shocking looking at media from those times and seeing the shit people used to not even bat an eyelid at on TV. A time before widespread bodycam use (yes, I know, there’s still a lot of dodgy bodycam business), before every citizen had a camera in their pocket, before the news would spread like wildfire on the internet, or a video of some professor saying the N word, or whatever.

America is an incredibly racist place, and the system - laws, media, whatever - has undoubtedly done their best to dismantle black radicalism, but America has also got to a point where it is less justifiable than it was to have an armed militia in the name of civil rights. The police are bad now, but they used to be magnitudes worse.

It’s the same reason we don’t have radicalism in general anymore - the usual factors like repression and surveillance, but also because many of us have our needs just about sated, and have the illusion of free speech. Conditions necessitate militia style resistance - the conditions currently do not necessitate such a thing (to the wider population).

As soon as the imperial profit tap runs dry, living conditions will go down, people rise up - as soon as the state represses them as severely as they used to, the time of militias will be born again.

There’s just a barrier for entry here where white leftists are only familiar with the surface level history (the rap beefs, which albums Fantano told them to like, etc) without knowing the ties between hip hop and the Black radical tradition and how the CIA killed Tupac. Due to the subreddit’s demographics it’s gonna be hard for that part of the history to reach the top and people remain in the surface level, incapable of synthesizing a coherent theory.

They should’ve made the connection that Tupac had familial ties to the BPP, was part of the YCL, and was probably assassinated by the FBI.

It’s an entertainment podcast

People should listen to audiobooks or perhaps college level, organized discussions (David Harvey has lectures and short Q&A about Capital going chapter by chapter, for example) if they want theory (in an audio format)

But that said, I do sort of agree that they should try harder to at least get people to seek out theory by giving more tastes of it dispersed throughout the podcast. Hakim usually is the best at it. He talks about something then says “Read Whatever by Whoever for more.” It just seems like between his “real job” and sort of realizing what people (their audience) want isn’t to be told to read books… yeah, he’s like “fuck it. Just subscribe, I guess.”

The sad fact is if you had a heavy, heavy theory oriented podcast. Like it’s basically just a review and highlighting of main points from a book, chapter by chapter. Very few people are going to listen to it. Some will, for sure. But let’s be realistic. I think all you can really do is what Hakim used to do more of which is shoutout books for people to go read. If it piqued someone’s interest they will go read. Of course the bottleneck or whatever here is the host(s) have to be incredibly well-read themselves. Hakim can rattle off a billion books because he’s clearly a theory nerd and has read, perhaps, too many books. That already places him in like the 0.01% of podcasters by education level (self or otherwise).

I guess what I’m getting at here is the same cliche. “Podcasts are slop content. Don’t expect anything. The best they can do is shame listeners into reading maybe one book.”

I think that the three of them attracted a much younger audience than they were aiming for, and they’ve kinda started trying to make things easier for that audience to understand (although that’s not exactly an excuse for Hakim who makes very historically-oriented stuff).

Hakim’s quality definitely went downhill. When was the last time he released a book recommendation video? I also don’t like how his newer videos are just him recycling his older videos that he has hidden(?). I feel like the newer recycled videos has less info compared with the original older videos, but I don’t have them to compare.

Yeah for real. Like all the BLM protestor organisers who shot themselves in the back and set their cars on fire after they died, they stand as a stark reminder that this oppression is current and active and until a certain tipping point is reached or a critical mass of people ready to die on their feet find each other, of course people are going to keep their heads down and focus on survival and providing for their families.

Plus like, the entire legal landscape changed in response to the BPP in its most active areas and presumably where a lot of the surviving family members are still based. You can’t just march around with guns and stand off with the police anymore unless you’re a psyop org. You’d just get massacred and the majority of the population would see it as a reasonable response. Fuck that, I can’t imagine the frustration felt by the people who would join a modern BPP movement but instead have to operate quietly in their neighbourhood self defense efforts.

Like I’m white and not from America, I can’t put myself in those shoes, but I can only imagine how incredibly miserable it would be to stay actively engaged with politics while living with the legacy of the earlier movements being so brutally repressed. The experiment was tried and it unfortunately failed, at least twice now, so any new movement has to be something new and adapted to the current material conditions etc.

ah ok

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