Obama Wants the Spooks
Hanging out with my former Black Panther friend a few weeks ago in Harlem, I had an opportunity to met Sam Greenlee. It was cool to be drinking and chatting with a guy who’s radical imagination so profoundly shook the American cultural landscape through fiction and film.
In his 1969 book The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Black nationalist Dan Freeman conceals his political views long enough to become the token Black in the CIA. The government’s ridiculous performance of inclusiveness backfires, however, as Freeman leaves the agency with all of his weapons and communications training and heads for Chicago. He trains young Blacks in the city in violent and non-violent tactics aimed at securing justice and freedom for the people. I have to admit, talking to Mr. Greenlee spoke to that part of me that secretly joneses for that kind of armed uprising.
Just a few days later, a friend (and one of the coolest prison industrial complex abolitionists that I know) forwarded me this from the Washington Post in disgust:
Obama Administration Looks to Colleges for Future Spies
To the list of collegiate types — nerds, jocks, Greeks — add one more: spies in training. The government is hoping they’ll be hard to spot.
In recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.
So, Obama wants to recruit “ethnically and culturally diverse” young people to the CIA. Seriously? And through universities by offering competitive scholarships and assistance to those taking the “intelligence” courses? All toward perfecting state violence…likely against those black and brown people most harmed by capitalism and hate in the first place. Lord, no.
I’ll admit that some part of me wants to say that these kids should go ahead, get themselves a scholarship and get on that Spook model. The organizing and fighting impulse that’s at the root of The Spook is exactly right as I see it. And the critique of the state and its corresponding engagement with Black struggle and longing is dead on. But Audre Lorde is right when she says that “the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house.” Participation in this program sounds all bad to me, and its disgusting that Obama would even propose it.
This fall, let’s skip the CIA courses at freshman orientation and read The Spook Who Sat by the Door instead. We don’t need their tools. We have it in us to build something better.
