The Brotherhood's vague activism
The Brotherhood is a strange cultish organization that recruits the narrator after seeing him deliver a scattered but passionate speech. Despite much confusion and many awkward and racist interactions, the narrator climbs the ranks, becomes a community leader, and delivers more of his trademark speeches. The Brotherhood is weird, and at times, I found their goals unclear. They want equality, I think, and pursue various shades of activism, including race and sex-based advocacy.
But the people at the top of the Brotherhood's hierarchy aren't actually affected by those issues, like the rich white people at the parties, and more specifically, Brother Jack. The organization's higher-ups seem to believe in a vague moral idealogy that they awkwardly attempt to translate onto modern issues. But they're not very good at it, and sometimes don't even seem invested in it. For example, plenty of the members are straight-up racist, or at least covertly racist, so it's clear that everyone isn't that connected to the goals the Brotherhood supposedly pursues. The genius move of sending the narrator, a man, armed with information provided by a man, to speak on women's issues is another example of this.
To me, the Brotherhood represents this weird kind of one-size-fits-all activism and really only benefits the people already at the top, who can have a fun time calling each other Brother while less important members actually invested in these issues try to accomplish meaningful things, and often fail, because the directions they've been given don't make sense in the real world.
Hey Erin, great post! I think the Brotherhood's main goal is to gain followers rather than solve issues, which is probably what you mean by "benefitting people at the top." Maybe the purpose of the Brotherhood's vague goals is to appeal to as many people as possible, even people with conflicting views, so that they can further add on to this "cult" as you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of "one-size-fits-all activism" is really interesting and it fits really well into my ideas about the Brotherhood. I saw the Brotherhood's goals as reducing all issues in the world down into one (general equality and maintaining their rights, fighting "dispossession") so that the Brotherhood, as the protestors of that problem could take on a leading role, uniting the groups previously seen as lower (black people, women, etc.) and wielding strength through them. By treating all of the groups with "one-size-fits-all activism" the Brotherhood can work towards unifying their issues.
ReplyDeleteRight, and the Brotherhood's reduction of all the world's inequalities into one general problem creates microcosms of those issues in their own organization - the leaders all being white, often racist, and seemingly wealthy, choosing a random black guy to be in charge because he seemed easily manipulatable, unqualified men being made the voices of women, etc.
Delete
ReplyDeleteYour description of the discrepancy between the surface-level characteristics of the Brotherhood and the driving forces at its core resonated with me. As many other readers may have experienced, I became extremely upset at the shocking hypocrisy of the Brotherhood, and I think that when the narrator explains his struggle with honesty at the beginning of the epilogue it provided a way for me to articulate what is so wrong about the Brotherhood. The narrator explains how he has grown accustomed to being a yes-man, and the Brotherhood to me was the best example of a group demanding such an attitude from its constituents, repressing individual expression and personal engagement with the Brotherhood "ideology."
Yeah, the Brotherhood's primary allegiance is definitely to maintaining their own power structure, rather than solving the issues they say they care about, which leads to their repressive practices.
DeleteThe general vagueness of the Brotherhood's ideals is almost certainly part of Ellison's critical view of the Communist Party--rather than, say, a reflection of his inability to write a political organization with a coherent message. But it raises questions about the effectiveness of the critique, if an American communist at the time wouldn't even recognize their organization and its ideals in Ellison's cartoonish version. The class in general has had a lot more to say about Wright's depiction of American communists by name in his novel, in part because he gives us a lot to go on: we can be specific about what the communists in _Native Son_ believe, and we can apply critical pressure to their attempts to address structural racism and to represent Bigger in court. With Ellison's Brotherhood (and on this point I more or less agree with the spirit of Howe's critique), they are such cartoonish villains that it's hard to take them seriously as a reflection of organized political activism in the real world.
ReplyDelete