Status Updates From Because a white man'll neve...

Oops, I referred to Pearl Gibbs earlier as a woman, he is not. MY BAD!

When can we start posting screenshots on Goodreads good grief what I just read was: 😭😭😭

Truly something to think about.

Paul Coe be dropping dimes it seems, need more info on him.

Hmph. Maybe strong characteristic analysis regarding the “black” classes, but no strength in the analysis of class interests within a capitalist system regardless of race.

I have to remember that KG didn’t necessarily hold anti-capitalist sentiments which surprisingly isn’t non-typical of radical Oceanians of the past.

Kevin Gilbert is not helping his case at all with the Black Israel nonsense yo! Of course I always speak too effing soon when I start praising somebody.

Whoever told him it was okay to conclude like this……… In writing……… In the archives forever………

One thing I don’t understand is how in-tune and clear a person could be about their own material and social reality but then completely off when it comes to others’.

KG wrote he wants for the Aboriginal people a Black Israel………

Sigh.

I appreciate KG’s out-right critiques of the arbiters of liberalism in Aboriginal affairs. He has strong self-crit but also shamelessly gives note to where others fell short or simply gave up.

Idk how much more contradictions can contradict. Time and space complicate universal truths ya know…

It’s only dawning on me now this book’s resonance with Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s [Black Power] but for the Aboriginal people in “Australia.”

KG’s black analysis would piss somebody tf off today. XD

On some occasions I agree with KG, on others I don’t. For instance, in this section he says not everything is the white man’s fault and then says ‘detribalized Blacks’ choose to drink alcohol and eat junk food/make poor choices. But I think recognizing a pattern amongst communities, regardless of if you think individual choices are at the heart of these pitfalls, can be tied to systemic (de)regulation.

Too much fire. Gem after gem after gem.

Lmaaao @ this chapter… Four points of the black compass… AND FACTS!!!

“The white man as policeman, boss, rent-collector, welfare man and bully in a thousand forms casts the central shadow on their lives.” *Internal cry of exhaustion.*

Whew! This chapter on Black theatre! 🔥🔥🔥

I’m going to finish this today/later today hopefull. It’s hard to read after a rough week @ work ngl.

Bobbi Sykes is mentioned often by Kevin Gilbert; she was a landmark in Blak history.

Sometimes it really is the short but compact books you have to trudge through. I am enjoying this one though… It’s interesting how ‘Black Power’ is triggered, accumulated, embraced, enacted, and thought about both domestically and globally.

“When you dislike a man who is black, that does not make you a racist. You are a racist only if you dislike him because he is black. This is a simple truth and yet I will venture to assert that much of what small ‘l’ liberals today call ‘racism’ falls into the first rather than into the latter category.”

Sigh, this book makes me hope for the departure from the co-operation and romanticism of militant language. We can really think beyond sentimentality and superficiality if we truly wanted………

Lightbulb: Liberation as a symbolic meaning in urban areas vs. liberation as a soul desire for those close to the ground. *Different class associations, interests, and material realities although genealogy/identity is shared.

“In retrospect, the Embassy contributed nothing to the Aboriginal land claim in terms of theoretical detail. Its contribution and its historical importance lay rather in the fact that it put the idea of land claim well and truly in the news. The need for a nation-wide black conference to thresh out the land claim issue thoroughly is obvious.”

Oooh, page 61! Gotta come back to that!

Absolutely insane to think of time frames via the Pacific/Oceania when looking at our histories more intimately rather than zoomed out, especially this book being published in 1973, prior to Papua New Guinea independence. Whew!!!

“The question of recognizing an Aboriginal right to land, or compensation for land, not presently reserved for Aborigines, but which was alienated from them at some time in the past, has not received serious attention from any Australian government....No part of Australia...has yet been purchased from Aborigines by the Crown.”