Saul Alinsky, Rochester, and the “Farting negroes”

Excerpted by Nicholas Stix


“So the last shall be first . . .”
Alinsky’s Farting Negroes
By Irmin Vinson
September 6, 2016
Counter-Currents

Saul Alinsky

The term “negritude” (roughly self-aware blackness) came into common currency in the 1930s and 1940s among a loose alliance of francophone black poets and intellectuals, most them from France’s colonial empire. It was part of their campaign to destigmatize blackness and to assert the special qualities of their African heritage. The most important figure in this influential movement for négritude was likely Leopold Senghor, a poet and professor of African languages who later became the first president of Senegal.

Jean-Paul Sartre summarized the ideas of negritude in his preface to Senghor’s anthology of black poets: “Insulted and enslaved, [the black man] stands up straight; he takes up the word nègre, which is hurled at him like a stone, and proclaims himself, in pride, as black, face to face with Whites.”

The authors who promoted a positive reinterpretation of blackness argued for the value of traditional African social structures and folkways, which were (so the argument ran) based on distinctively black intuitions and emotions. Embracing one’s negritude, or taking pride in one’s blackness, involved a kind of mental decolonization whereby people of African descent recognized that their history was not uncivilized or antithetical to civilization, as many blacks and almost all Whites then believed. blacks were, instead, heirs to a different kind of civilization. Traditional African cultures reflected African racial traits and should not be judged by the standards of Hellenic logic and reason, which had shaped the various national cultures of Europe and had privileged a restricting Western idea of what being civilized meant. A civilized African was not a contradiction in terms.

In the 1960s the slogan “black is beautiful,” popularized by the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, encapsulated this growing movement for racial pride and racial solidarity among people of African descent. There was beauty in the physical appearance of blacks, and there was dignity in the African cultures that blacks had produced on the Dark Continent. blacks had not discovered electricity or explored the oceans and the skies, but they had their own historical accomplishments and distinctive spiritual qualities of which they could be proud.

[N.S.: Since then, black supremacist propagandists have arisen, asserting in “histories” that blacks did indeed “explore the oceans and the skies,” including discovering America, before the White man.]

These ideas of a positive negritude and of the beauty of blackness, however we may view them, should be kept in mind when interpreting Saul Alinksy’s most infamous exercise in community organizing, a planned black “fart-in” at a performance of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Since this event never occurred, nor was it likely that it ever could have been engineered, it is best thought of less as a serious proposal for real-world activism and more as a striking fantasy expressing Alinsky’s own racial fixations, specifically his hostility to us and his disdain for the blacks he organized….

[Read the whole thing here.]