Some Thoughts on the Richard Aoki Debate
by Scott Kurashige | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
* Also appears at 8Asians.com
PART I:
“What did you know and when did you know it?”
That was the question thrown in the face of Old Left supporters as reports belatedly surfaced of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The allegation was that leftists in America (and beyond) were such naïve and blind ideological proponents of Russian Communism that they idealized the Soviet utopia and turned a blind eye to crimes against humanity. Of course, the right wing and the state wanted to do everything it could to discredit left-wing activism and the ex-socialists turned neocons smugly declared that they were ahead of the curve. But the liberals also were deeply invested in this line of questioning. Though they worked in coalition during the New Deal and World War II, liberals and leftists had a stark falling out during the Cold War, when (to make a long story very short) leftists accused the liberal establishment of selling out the people, kowtowing to the imperialists, and being complicit in the McCarthyist purges. So with supposed exposes of the left, the liberals sought to prove that they were the sound minds who pursued a rational course of democratic reform. A generation of scholars studying the American Communist Party from the 1950s through 1980s was caught up in this debate. Left scholars upheld the CPUSA for its challenge to U.S. Cold War foreign policy and claimed vindication as the liberals dissembled during the Vietnam War. Liberal (and to be fair, left-wing “anti-Stalinists” too) scholars denounced the CPUSA for being a puppet of Moscow that put Soviet directives ahead of its purported mission to serve the proletariat.
The debate was not irrelevant. It challenged activists to think about how they related to international “models” of revolution, how to understand the proper and improper deployment of state power, how to compare and contrast bourgeois and proletarian forms of democracy, and so on. But the debate did not speak to the issues on the minds of young activists coming of age in the 1960s/70s—whose global imaginations were inspired by China and other Third World models of revolution—nor by my generation of activists coming of age in the 1980s as struggles over apartheid, multiculturalism, and US intervention in Latin America took center stage. Robin Kelley’s first book Hammer and Hoeshowed us how to look at the history of the left from a grassroots perspective: the Communist Party could serve as a symbolic image of an alternative to capitalism; it took stands for racial equality that the cautious civil rights groups were more reluctant to take; and it could provide vehicles for those who wanted to engage in mass organizing against Jim Crow and class exploitation. The real debate and action occurred on the ground and regardless of what happened within the USSR and CPUSA, we were part of a legacy of struggle that connected the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s to the Black Power and Third World Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
I start with this story to point out that just as every generation must discover its mission, every generation must discover its history. Today a different question has been posed at Richard Aoki, “What did you tell and when did you tell it?” The Japanese American activist and former Black Panther, Aoki has been named as an FBI informer by author Seth Rosenfeld in his new book Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. For a different historical moment, a different connection is being used to discredit and disgrace a different radical activist and the movements he was connected to. But there are some strikingly similar patterns here too—radicalism by people of color is portrayed as something (mis)guided by an external force and left-wing politics are delegitimized while liberalism is offered as a more rational, sound, and democratic approach to social reform.
Aoki is not alive today to answer. When asked by Rosenfeld, he repeatedly denied being an informant and that Rosenfeld was wrong. Once again, the debate is not irrelevant. Rosenfeld’s allegation is an explosive one, and the history of FBI attacks on activists is long and growing. The evidence that Aoki (or any other prominent radical leader) was an FBI informant should be examined by those with expertise on or personal knowledge of the subject. This can’t happen overnight, and I’m waiting to hear a full response from all those folks with much more personal and scholarly connections to Aoki and the Panthers than I have. This includes, among many others, his executor Harvey Dong, biographer Diane Fujino, and scholars of Panther history like Donna Murch.
What I most want to stress is that we need to make sure to place the debate within the broader and proper historical and political contexts it deserves. That’s not something that Rosenfeld has done. On the surface, Rosenfeld might appear sympathetic to the movement because he’s critical of the FBI and one of his primary sources is an ex-FBI agent who has denounced COINTELPRO and supported activist claims against the government. But his research is insufficient, his analysis is frequently flawed, and he has acted in a manipulative and self-serving manner. As I will detail Rosenfeld has violated basic standards of sound historical research and journalist reporting. He also harbors a conspiratorial way of thinking and a political perspective that makes his characterizations of Aoki, the Panthers, and the Third World Liberation Front all suspect. He seeks to defend liberalism while generally discrediting late 1960s radicals of color as violent extremists who set back the gains attained during the earlier era of liberal hegemony. That’s why we need to flip the script. We need to go beyond the narrow question of “what did you tell and when did you tell it” and keep the broader focus of grassroots organizing and movement building at the center of our concerns.
I want to be clear about what I am and am not doing here. I’m not doing a full book review, and my analysis is necessarily provisional. Normally I’d wait for more evidence and interviews to come out, but this is a different case. When an author makes sensational claims in a short excerpt (just like Amy Chua did) that gets wide coverage, we need to respond with what we have to work with right now. So this is largely a review of the controversy sparked by Rosenfeld’s article on Aoki (which he published with a related video and timeline by the Center for Investigative Reporting) accompanied by a quick but incomplete reading of the most relevant parts of the book and footnotes.
1 THE ALLEGATION
Rosenfeld says he interviewed a former FBI agent named Burney Threadgill, who claims to have trained Aoki to be an informant in the late 1950s—around the time he graduated from high school. Aoki is alleged to have given reports on the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and student activists. Threadgill says he worked with Aoki until 1965 then handed him off to another unnamed agent.[1]
Rosenfeld also says that Aoki was still an FBI informant as a member of the Black Panthers in 1967, according to one FBI document that blacks out the name of an informant coded as T-2 but does not censor a parenthetical reference and a note in an adjacent column that links T-2 to Richard Matsui (sic—his middle name was Masato) Aoki. In the book, Rosenfeld says the November 1967 report also states that Aoki (actually it’s T-2 giving the report but Rosenfeld has already concluded T-2 is Aoki) reported to the FBI in May 1967 that he had joined the BPP and was "minister of education.”
Additionally, Rosenfeld says that former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen reviewed his evidence and concluded that Aoki was an informant.
Finally, Rosenfeld cites an interview with Aoki in which he repeatedly denies having been an informant. But he also asserts that Aoki’s added wording that can be taken as “suggestive statements” he was an informer and “an explanation” as to why he was an informer.
There are no documents to backup up the deceased Threadgill, who could have outright mistaken Aoki for another informant he trained—name me an Asian American who hasn’t been mistaken for another Asian by a white person. Nonetheless, if Threadgill’s interview can be found to be credible by corroborating evidence, this is historically significant and should be studied further. We know that in the aftermath of WWII, young Japanese Americans were a bundle of contradictions—still facing intense racism but also being embraced as a model minority. Richard embodied this contradiction—he was a stellar student but also got into fights and trouble with the law. He joined the army in the 1950s ready to be a gung-ho soldier but was discharged and then became a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War. By his own admission, Aoki was politically backwards in the 1950s. Thus, Rosenfeld says that Aoki fit the profile of someone who could have agreed under duress to do informant work in a deal to avoid prison time. This is circumstantial evidence, but at least here—unlike all of this discussion of the late 1960s—it may be consistent with Rosenfeld’s claim.
What we do know conclusively is that Aoki went through a transformation from the 1950s politically naïve youth to a 1960s committed radical. What should we make of this? Rosenfeld attributes all of Aoki’s radical actions in the 1960s to his being an FBI informant. Perhaps further evidence will prove him right, but the burden of proof is on him. Another possibility is that Rosenfeld is dead wrong. Aoki was never an FBI informant, and his political transformation was comparable to what thousands of Japanese Americans and people of color genuinely went through in the 1960s. A third possibility is that Rosenfeld is partially correct: that a checkered past in the 1950s—with the cops, the military, and/or the FBI but not necessarily all of them—made Aoki more angry at the cops, the government, and the capitalist system and fueled his militancy in the 1960s. Or perhaps there’s even another possibility—that if Aoki was forced to maintain a secret relationship with the FBI, he tried to turn it to his or the Panthers’ advantage by spying or reporting on what the FBI was doing. As a sixties activist suggested to me, there were “double agents” who were part of the movement—some with divided loyalties but some with purported full loyalty to the movement that tried to outgame the cops and FBI.
The point is that all we can do is engage in speculation at this point. In reality much of what professional historians do is responsible speculation—emphasis on the word responsible. You should do as much research as possible, only draw conclusions to the extent they are supported by evidence, and consider all alternative possibilities. This is not what Rosenfeld has done. His claim may prove to have some validity, but it may also prove to be false. The point is that he is making much stronger allegations and insinuations than what is supported by evidence and not doing research or contextualization to highlight other plausible conclusions. He has treated those who knew Aoki best as opponents, keeping them at arm’s distance from his research rather than viewing them as vital sources to give him a fuller picture of Aoki and historical context.
We must understand that Rosenfeld thinks like a conspiracy theorist. That doesn’t mean he’s entirely wrong. There was certainly an FBI conspiracy to destroy the Panthers and attack movement activists. And even the most off the wall UFO conspiracy theories probably have some purpose—e.g. the government may not be hiding alien bodies and spaceships but it’s certainly developed secret military weaponry it doesn’t want revealed.
Rosenfeld’s problem is he wants to fit all of history neatly into his conspiracy theory.
Rosenfeld’s reliance on former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen is most sketchy. Swearingen is an important witness in general—he has renounced his former work with the FBI and sought to expose COINTELPRO. But Swearingen is also on a quest to uncover conspiracies. He’s aided Geronimo Pratt and the survivors of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, but his greatest notoriety comes from a lifelong quest to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John F. Kennedy. (Thanks to Harvey Dong for pointing me to Swearingen’s website www.oswalddidnotkilljfk.com.) Most importantly, unlike Threadgill, Swearingen does not claim a connection to Aoki. It’s fine that he condemns COINTELPRO (and maybe the FBI is also hiding what it knows about the JFK assassination), but Swearingen offers no insight one way or the other in the matter of Aoki—except to offer this ludicrous comment posing as expert testimony:
“Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in a Black Panther Party, because I understand he is Japanese,” he said. “Hey, nobody is going to guess – he’s in the Black Panther Party; nobody is going to guess that he might be an informant.”
While Rosenfeld tried to do so on Democracy Now, there’s no way he can spin this to his advantage. Who in their right mind would think that a Japanese American would be the perfect person to infiltrate the Panthers? You would immediately stick at out and arouse suspicion as to why you were there and where your loyalties really lay. Swearingen, on this specific point, clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, has no real knowledge of Aoki, and has apparently never heard of the model minority stereotype which marked Japanese Americans as the antithesis of black radicalism. For Rosenfeld to use this quote as “proof” is spurious, irresponsible, and racist, casting a pall of suspicion over the authenticity of any Japanese Americans (the “perfect” informants) in the radical movement. Again, it leads one to suspect that because he lacks sufficient evidence, he is trying far too hard to make Aoki fit his conspiracy theory.
Furthermore, Rosenfeld has doctored a quote by Aoki to make readers more likely to believe he is confirming his claims. Rosenfeld writes in his initial article, “Asked if this reporter was mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, ‘I think you are,’ but added: ‘People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.’” The problem is that Aoki never said this—at least not in this manner and in this context. He said, “It is complex” in response to Rosenfeld’s statement the he was “trying to understand the complexities.” As those who knew Aoki best have stated, he often times spoke with humor, irony, and allusion. All he does here is repeat what Rosenfeld said, and he could very well just be stating that history is complex but Rosenfeld’s analysis is based on simplistic logic. Perhaps more significantly, Rosenfeld has spliced disparate statements of Aoki’s together. Aoki never said “People change. It is complex.” in that immediate succession. In fact, Rosenfeld provides no recording or transcript of any kind to indicate the context in which Aoki said “People change.” Again, the question arises: if Rosenfeld was so confident that Aoki’s comments substantiated his claims, why did he feel it was necessary to slice and dice his words and rearrange them to suit his agenda?
We need to review more real evidence. The most damning evidence that Aoki was an informer is Threadgill’s interview, but even that, if true, only substantiates Aoki being an informant until 1965. Rosenfeld focuses on Aoki not where his evidence, if less than definitive, is at least relatively strongest (up to 1965) but instead where it is weakest and flimsiest (1965-69) because that’s what best serves the story he wants to tell. The 1967 FBI document—the only one cited by Rosenfeld—is ambiguous. As Diane Fujino pointed out, “T-2” could refer to an informant assigned to Aoki or a wiretap placed on Aoki. And there’s nothing else for Rosenfeld to stand on. But again, even if Rosenfeld’s interpretation of the 1967 document is provisionally correct, he has no basis for treating it as if it’s conclusive and absolutely no basis for characterizing Aoki as an informant during the 1968-69 ethnic studies strike at UC Berkeley.
Rosenfeld and Swearingen say the FBI is withholding further documentation because it does not want to reveal the extent of Aoki’s work as an informant. To be certain, we do need to press the FBI to release these documents. The FBI is definitely guilty of hiding its secrets and dirty tricks. But Rosenfeld wants us to take a big leap and see that as evidence that Aoki’s work with the Panthers must be part of a bigger FBI conspiracy. How can we be certain what these documents would reveal? It’s just as plausible that the FBI does not want to release more documents because the evidence generally implicates the FBI in nefarious acts against the Panthers rather than offering more specific evidence implicating Aoki. Or again, perhaps the issue is “complex” in ways we and certainly Rosenfeld have yet to consider.
PART II:
2. THE INSINUATION
“Man who armed Black Panthers was FBI informant.” That’s the headline from Rosenfeld’s article on Aoki. http://cironline.org/reports/man-who-armed-black-panthers-was-fbi-informant-records-show-3753
Now Rosenfeld is very careful to say that there’s no clear-cut evidence that Aoki did any of his work for the Panthers at the direction of the FBI and that he’s never found any document saying Aoki told the FBI he gave the Panthers guns. So he’s covered his ass in this regard. But that headline is clearly nudging readers (especially casual and lazy readers) to think that Aoki was actively working to undermine the Panthers when he armed them—and certainly all the initial chatter flying around the web centered on just that thought.
The mainstream media has been shocked by Rosenfeld’s would-be “discovery” that Richard Aoki supplied the Panthers with guns, as if he’s uncovered some previously mysterious figure who forces us to rethink the whole origin and history of the Panthers. But we have openly known for decades that Aoki supplied the Panthers with an initial stash of guns. The Panthers advocated armed self-defense in the age of intense police brutality and a time when most in the black community saw the cops as an occupying army. The Panthers inspired wide support from the community for their militant opposition to white supremacy AND their survival programs. Aoki was a militant and yes, armed, revolutionary activist, but the Panther leaders asked him to give them guns—not the other way around.
We also already knew that the FBI infiltrated and disrupted many civil rights, Black Power, and left wing groups in the era of J. Edgar Hoover. One tactic used was to have agent provocateurs spur radical groups to violence to justify the state using repression against it. The Panthers were heavily infiltrated and got into many violent clashes with the state that devastated their ranks and led to increased internal dissension. While that makes many activists inclined to believe reports exposing yet another informant, we should not let that bias our view of Rosenfeld’s specific claim about Aoki’s relationship to the Panthers.
Now, we need to continue to debate the effectiveness and consequences of the Panther’s initiation of armed self-defense patrols and their decision to confront the state—both done under the auspices of the Constitution—as well as the way they handled incredibly heightened contradictions when the state targeted them. But Rosenfeld has already concluded that arming themselves was a disastrous move for the Panthers and set back the entire movement for social justice. Thus, in his view, Aoki’s supplying the Panthers with guns—something that has, rightly or wrongly, made him a militant folk hero among radicals—makes him immediately suspicious as a potential saboteur. He’s nudging us to connect the dots in order to strengthen his conspiracy theory.
However, the insinuation that Aoki gave Huey Newton and Bobby Seale guns at the direction of the FBI does not make sense—at least not based on the evidence provided at this point. Aoki met Huey and Bobby at Merritt College before the Panthers were founded and helped lead them in study of revolutionary theory. Are we to believe that Aoki helped raise the political consciousness of Newton and Seale, so they would then found a revolutionary party, so he could then arm the party, so that the party could then become a target of COINTELPRO, so that Reagan could benefit by making “silent majority” appeals for law and order AND that Richard Aoki would make sure he kept up the charade by posing as a dedicated and committed activist for the rest of his life? Someone should ask Rosenfeld if he thinks this Manchurian Candidate scenario is plausible—otherwise the misleading aspect of the headline should be corrected and Rosenfeld needs to admit that the circumstantial evidence goes almost entirely against his argument.
What Rosenfeld does conclude is that—regardless of whether Aoki did so at the FBI’s direction—Aoki’s militancy and distribution of arms influenced the Panthers and helped lead to their downfall. He takes Aoki’s role within the Panthers out of context and takes the Panthers advocacy of armed self-defense out the historical context of the late 1960s. Why does he do this? Primarily out of ignorance, but it’s a willful form of ignorance.
As I’ll explain below, most of the book does not concern Aoki or the Panthers—other aspects of the book are discussed and researched to a far greater degree. So Rosenfeld drew media attention to the Aoki narrative not because it’s central to his book but because it was the most sensational sound bite he could use to draw attention to himself ahead of the book release. Of course, this is standard marketing practice for a corporate book publisher trying to maximize profits. But let’s be clear that the mainstream has never heard of Aoki before and doesn’t really care—except perhaps on a local level in the Bay Area—about him as an individual or icon. The story is circulating because of the specific (and largely negative) role the image of the “Black Panthers” plays in mainstream America.
Whenever you hear the “Black Panthers” discussed in the mainstream media, you should be suspicious right away. The Panthers are a fascinating, complex, and contradictory historical entity. But in the mainstream media and mainstream politics, they are almost always a simplified symbol of Black Power—and to most white middle-class people (liberal and conservative) Black Power recalls a terrible time of urban rebellions, when black militants were burning down cities and forcing whites to flee to the suburbs. It’s all part of racist fantasy history: the reality is that whites were fleeing cities for decades, even when whites held urban political power, because capitalists were moving jobs to the suburbs and it was easier to build all-white neighborhoods in newly established suburban tracts. Then, of course, urban rebellions and Black Power militancy only erupted after years of nonviolent resistance and legislative lobbying proved inadequate to overcome white hostility, capitalist maneuvering, and liberal arrogance in the quest for equality.
Whenever certain Americans want to revel in their backwardness and ignorance, they bring to mind the bogeyman of Black Power to remind themselves that they need brutally racist cops, racial segregation, and gated communities to maintain law and order. Whereas movement organizers use history to expose patterns of oppression, these white populists use a warped sense of history to promote this notion of white victimhood. They remind us that America was seriously threatened by “Black Panthers” and that this legacy is still with us.
So whenever a black activist gets into trouble with the cops and the behavior of law enforcement comes under scrutiny—e.g. Mumia Abu-Jamal or Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, (the former H. Rap Brown)—the media will identify them as “Black Panthers,” even if in the case of these individuals (and Angela Davis), the Panthers are only a very small piece of their histories and far overshadowed by other involvements. That’s why CNN’s 2002 story on Rap Brown was headlined “Ex-Black Panther convicted of murder.” Because calling him the “ex-Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer”—even if that’s what he’s most historically known for—just wouldn’t have the desired effect. http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/09/al.amin.verdict/index.html
And the big thing is that the Panther bogeyman never goes away. The Tea Party is up in arms today about Eric Holder because they say he won’t prosecute bogus charges of voter intimidation of whites committed in 2008 by—you guessed it—the Black Panther Party. Yes, folks, they want us to believe the (new) Panthers swung the 2008 election to make sure we have an evil Muslim as president. Of course, if that’s true then it makes sense for the right wing to pass Voter ID laws to disenfranchise poor people and people of color, right? As Sarah Palin would say, “You betcha!”
Whatever Rosenfeld’s own political sympathies, the marketing strategy he adopted for the book is to present a sensational story linked to the Panthers, when in fact most of his own research and strongest claims are on things not directly connected to the Panthers. Again, that’s par for the course for corporate media and publishing. But it shouldn’t be standard practice for the nonprofit and ostensibly social justice-minded Committee for Investigative Reporting that gave Rosenfeld a platform. And though he doesn’t really claim to be a movement historian, folks should be very clear not to mistake Rosenfeld for one.
Rosenfeld’s Aoki story fuels the idea that the Panthers were not a serious group—that their core identity and program from its origin were shaped by an FBI informant. But the Panthers were deadly serious and deserve serious attention—they were neither a simplistic bogeyman nor idealized revolutionaries. They were part and parcel of a history that must be studied and understood in ways that Rosenfield has no desire to do.
3. THE LIBERAL NARRATIVE
Rosenfeld’s book is generally designed to uncover an FBI conspiracy. In much of the rest of the book (not discussing Aoki), Rosenfeld may have some good points to make about Reagan’s relationship to the FBI and have documentation to back him up. But he’s strongly suggesting that readers make a leap of faith when discussing Aoki’s would-be conspiratorial role within the Panthers and especially the Third World Liberation Front strike for ethnic studies at UC Berkeley.
In fact, most of the discussion about Aoki in the book involves the TWLF at Berkeley—not surprising since the book is mostly about student activism at UCB. Here's the thesis (p. 8): “Each of these men [Ronald Reagan, Berkeley president Clark Kerr, and Mario Savio] had a transforming vision of America and exerted extraordinary and lasting influence on the nation. By tracing the bureau's involvement with these iconic figures, this book reveals a secret history of America in the sixties. It shows how the FBI's dirty tricks at Berkeley helped fuel the student movement, damage the Democratic Party, launch Ronald Reagan's political career, and exacerbate the nation's continuing cultural wars.” Savio—the white free speech activist from the early 1960s—is “brilliant”; Reagan—the right winger—makes a pact with the devil (J. Edgar Hoover) for political ascendancy; Kerr is the reasonable, underappreciated liberal who was trying to be a responsible steward but was a casualty of the new ideological polarization. Three white male protagonists represent the 60s and the transformation of America.
Again, I admit to needing more time to fully analyze the book, but we can at least contextualize it by highlighting how this thesis is entirely consistent with the simplistic white liberal narrative of the 1960s. The general story already laid out by previous books goes like this: the activism in the early 1960s was wholesome, nonviolent, and integrated. But then the late 1960s was dominated by urban rebellions, violent militants, and black separatists who undermined all the achievements of the early 1960s and provoked a white middle-class backlash that led to Nixon, Reagan, and now the Tea Party. The simple story of the 1960s—already ripped to shreds by many, many historians—takes everything out of context, as if the US liberals didn’t push Vietnam and the Cold War, as if most white suburbanites weren’t already against the full program of civil rights and integration, as if there wasn’t a Third World movement for liberation that led US communities of color to see themselves as fighting a war against internal colonialism.
The liberal narrative generally forgets that by the mid-to-late 1960s MLK was so alienated from establishment liberalism that he declared the US government to be world’s greatest purveyor of violence. It distracts us from the failures and contradictions of liberalism. It wants to see white working-class and middle-class voters as manipulated dupes rather than genuine supporters of Nixon’s and Reagan’s racist and imperialist agendas. And especially here, it excludes the context for the rise of late 1960s militancy. Activists from the center-left to the far-left were looking for ways to transform the street force of the rebellions into disciplined, political organization. The Panthers heightened the political contradictions and the physical confrontations with the police and the state to unprecedented levels. Just as Fanon wrote, they tapped into a sense among the people that the violence inherent in white supremacy and imperialism was breeding militant opposition. Aoki provided the Panthers with some of their first guns, but long before that he helped lead Huey and Bobby in theoretical readings that guided their political development when they were Merritt College students. As Diane Fujino has pointed out, this does not fit the profile of an informer. And among many must reads, please see Donna Murch’s wonderful book Living for the City for more on the Merritt College period.
What the white liberal narrative refuses to accept is that young African Americans—sent to die in Vietnam, abused by the occupying force of the police, denied jobs from the shrinking industrial economy, watching nonviolent protestors repeatedly lynched, beaten, and jailed, and portrayed as the enemy by whites guarding their segregated suburbs—did not need any outside force to convince them that America was so rotten at its core that it was time to either burn the whole thing down or organize to overthrow the ruling class. All the liberals could do at this point in history was try to co-opt the insurgent movements in order to preserve their hold on power. Meanwhile the right wing went after the movements with savage ferocity.
If the left’s limitations are viewing rebellion in too celebratory a fashion (as James and Grace Lee Boggs argued, breaking the threads of an illegitimate order is but an initial step toward revolution), focusing too much on state repression as the source of its downfall, and not sufficiently examining its own internal contradictions, the problem with liberal history is its constant focus on the how the far right and far left tore apart America in the late 1960s and its false belief that the mid-20th century era of liberal hegemony was a time of good will and harmony rather than an imposed order that turned a blind eye toward many sources of oppression and repression.
Rosenfeld does provide a twist on the standard narrative. He wants to blame the FBI for being the most influential provocateur that disrupted a unified, peaceful, and democratic movement—rather than a more common liberal target like the Weathermen—but he also wants to delegitimize some radicals of color in the process.
Thus, we need consider Rosenfeld’s portrayal of Aoki in the Third World Liberation Front. His book does not provide any evidence Aoki was working for the FBI during the UC Berkeley ethnic studies strike, so the entire argument is driven by insinuation and based on circumstantial evidence. It goes like this: Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement were good, wholesome examples of (white) radical (but not Communist or violent) activism in the early 60s. Reagan and Hoover investigated and attacked Savio and the FSM but it was all without merit: every claim that Savio was a Communist or a subversive was dubious because Savio was just a brilliant, articulate proponent of freedom and democracy. (I say “Good for Savio” and will not hate on him.) However, Rosenfeld continues, the TWLF—even though it had some justified claims—was violent and turned off many white students. More than that, for the author’s thesis, the violent and extremist TWLF made Reagan (and Nixon and Hoover) look justified in their repressive calls for law and order. Savio is Rosenfeld’s hero, and he’s using a negative portrayal of Aoki to provide a contrast.
And since the book’s big claim is that it’s exposing a conspiracy, Rosenfeld strongly suggests that the TWLF’s “violent” turn was sparked by Aoki working on behalf of the FBI. His main claims are that: a) Aoki frequently rejected compromise and behind-closed-door negotiating with the administration but instead always pushed for more militant actions, including the use of violence as a tactic to sustain the strike; and b) Aoki, who he admits was a constant advocate for Third World unity, was in the middle of intense conflicts between African American and Chicano leaders of the TWLF. I will let Asian American Political Alliance and TWLF veterans and scholars like Harvey Dong provide the full analysis of these points. But again, let’s make clear that Rosenfeld is not telling us anything we didn’t already know. We know Aoki was not Gandhi, but he was far from alone in this regard. And we know that beneath the public presentation of Third World unity, there were all kinds of suspicions and tensions as activists struggled to hold the TWLF coalition together. None of this circumstantial evidence implicates Aoki as an FBI informer.
What seems clear to me is that Rosenfeld would have portrayed the TWLF as a turn toward violence that prompted a right-wing backlash whether he thought Aoki was an FBI informant or just a revolutionary activist. This is because his general perception of the TWLF is negative—again, in contrast with the good, nonviolent activism earlier in the 1960s. This is clearly a topic he knows little about and does not understand. How, for instance, does Rosenfeld explain why the San Francisco State TWLF erupted into bigger clashes with the police—including a full on police riot—on a more advanced timeframe when Aoki was at Berkeley? He basically ignores this inconvenient truth. SF State is mentioned only in passing. And to show how under-researched and amateurish the ethnic studies segment is, Rosenfeld never even mentions S.I. Hayakawa, the conservative and Reagan-appointed Japanese American president of SF State went to great lengths to smash the first strike in history for a college of ethnic studies. Reminder, this is supposed to be a book on how Ronald Reagan used attacks on radical student activism to advance his political career! I’m sorry but whatever the other merits of his book, I cannot take Rosenfeld seriously when he’s discussing the TWLF. Even more so here, Rosenfeld’s ignorance demonstrates how his portrayal of Aoki is tied to his underlying conviction that there must be an FBI conspiracy to account for the history of the TWLF. (Again, he’s careful to suggest readers make that conclusion without saying it definitively, although he is far more definitive in portraying Aoki as an FBI informant during this period.)
Of course, it’s so much easier to blame Aoki for the “violent” turn in campus protest when you disregard what went down at SF State and don’t even consider the role Hayakawa played in deploying excessive policing and state repression to put down an educational social movement. To repeat, Rosenfeld’s characterization of Aoki is tied to a white liberal narrative of the 1960s that at least in part wants to blame violent activists of color (portrayed here as steered by the FBI) for the demise of liberalism and the rise of the New Right. It fails to place late-1960s militancy in proper context and is in many ways antithetical to the movement history put forward by the founders of ethnic studies.
PART III:
4. THE ICON
I can appreciate how and why Aoki became an Asian American icon. Japanese Americans have used and needed icons in diverse ways. Before World War II, when Japanese immigrants were barred from citizenship or full membership in the American body politic, the community held up Japanese homeland figures as their icons and used economic nationalism as an entrepreneurial survival strategy. The Nisei generation saw all their citizenship rights stripped away, so their leaders put forward Japanese American war heroes as model citizens who proved their ethnic group could make great contributions to America. When this morphed into the model minority stereotype and was manipulated by conservatives and anti-black racists, Sansei radicals looked for models of resistance and Afro-Asian solidarity. Of course, Yuri Kochiyama fit the mold perfectly, but sadly her health issues have limited her in-person exposure in recent times. Richard Aoki was there for those younger activists who needed to be shown it was possible to break the mold and chart a new path forward.
To be frank, I did not know Richard Aoki personally and only met him in passing. I doubt that he was personally well known by most Asian American activists coming of age in the 1980s. When I briefly talked with him later in the 1990s, I was excited to meet him. But I had already begun to question the limits of militant agitation and the form of Marxism-Leninism I presumed he espoused, and I saw Aoki more as a historical figure of interest rather than a potential role model. My view of him changed after seeing the positive impact he had on a younger generation of Asian American activists. He wasn’t telling them to pick up the gun and “off the pigs” nor was he demanding they follow some doctrinaire theory of revolution. He was accepting where they were coming from and encouraging and inspiring them to live a life dedicated to social justice. I have heard from many Asian American and Bay Area activists, who are deeply concerned about the hasty conclusions being drawn about Aoki and troubled that his legacy of Third World solidarity, his warm and generous spirit, and his positive contributions to movement building have been overlooked.
Those who cherished what Aoki gave them should hold onto that. It doesn’t matter what “origin story” people have of Aoki. If you received something genuine from him, no one can take that away from you.
At the same time, we need to generally rethink the issue of iconography—a very personal one for me since I work closely with someone who has become a movement icon. And the more Asian Americans—in and more full and general manner—become part of the narrative of US history, the less we will need to rely on individual icons to represent us. We need to recognize that all people are contradictory because the world is contradictory and to be human (esp. a person of color in the US) is to live a contradiction. The mainstream presents us with whitewashed histories of icons to promote national mythology and patriotism. We don't need it, since we have more important lessons to learn by studying how anticolonial founding fathers like Jefferson and Washington were also racist slaveholders taking over native lands. Nor do we need the capitalist media strategy of building up icons for profit in order to tear them down for more profit. We need to resist the either/or thinking that you are either a pure revolutionary or a total sellout. Too much self-inflicted damage has been done in the name of “purifying” the movement.
We need to embrace contradiction as the source of true change and transformation. We can have imperfect historical role models who learned from their mistakes, as well as some who never resolved their contradictions and thus bequeathed them to us. As James and Grace Lee Boggs have stated, “we are all works in progress”—indeed, revolution is a complex, protracted process not a single moment on a path of linear progress. And let’s never forget that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.
5. THE FALLOUT
So where do we go from here?
First, let’s demand that Rosenfeld answer the critical questions that many of us have posed and let’s demand that ROSENFELD now release the documents and recordings that he says substantiate his claims. Let’s hear the full, unedited recording of his interview(s) with Aoki. Then let’s do some of our own research and draw our own conclusions about all the evidence viewed in proper context. Let’s NOT set a very bad precedent by destroying a movement activist’s reputation based on the word and agenda of an outsider. If Aoki can be found guilty based on such inconclusive evidence, then none of us is safe. Remember that one of the most outrageous tactics COINTELPRO used to discredit movement activists and spur infighting was to send bogus mailings that purported to “out” FBI informants within the Black Panther Party and other groups.
Second, let’s re-start a longer conversation that people in the movement need to have about how we view state repression, how we respond to infiltration, and how we handle internal contradictions. This is not just a historical matter. When I lived in Los Angeles, I worked closely with Chicano movement veteran Carlos Montes, who has recently been hit with politically motivated charges and has a case pending in court. And there are too many more contemporary examples to count, including spying on peace groups as moderate as the Quakers. One knee jerk response is to “tighten” security and do more internal policing. But too much secrecy can lead us into smaller and smaller circles increasingly divorced from contact with the people. And “internal policing” of the movement is exactly what the cops want us to do when they spread fear among us—it almost never turns out well. We need to develop proactive ways to build a healthy movement culture, resolve non-antagonistic differences, and promote sustainable relationships that preclude us being susceptible to outside agitators or informants.
Third, let’s make this crisis moment a teachable moment. Let’s remember that the truth can and must be convened from every available source. So if Rosenfeld has provided even a partial-truth, we must discern what that is (even if he can’t do it himself) and reckon with it. But let’s not forget that we need to research, write, and study our own movement histories. As Amilcar Cabral said, “Tell no lies; claim no easy victories.” We need to learn from our shortcomings rather than spread heroic falsehoods. We need to analyze our contradictions rather than put our role models up on a pedestal. And most of all, we need a historical narrative of America that shows how all of us who have been labeled and have labeled ourselves as “minorities” are becoming the new majority. Rosenfeld’s book that focuses on three white men to tell the story of how America was transformed during the 1960s will not be very relevant to the America of 2042. The story of the struggle for Third World unity and liberation—a story rife with contradiction and positive and negative lessons—is one that we can claim as central to where we’ve been, who we are now, and who we are becoming. We all need to do a better job of writing this kind of history—including and especially scholars of ethnic studies—for this is a history that will determine our future.
***
Scott Kurashige has been a campus and community activist since the late 1980s, was based in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and has been primarily based in Detroit since 2000. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles and co-author with Grace Lee Boggs of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. He is also director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program and a professor of American Culture and History at the University of Michigan.
[1] I need to clarify one thing here. When Rosenfeld released his story on August 20, 2012, all kinds of speculation and discussion was flying through the air. The book was not out; I had no idea who Rosenfeld was; I had yet to see all his evidence; and I had yet to reach anyone who was close to Aoki or a scholarly expert on the Panthers. In the midst of a discussion with friends on Facebook, I wrote a note with some initial thoughts that was reposted on the web without my knowledge. The main emphasis was that we needed to wait and see more evidence, especially because Rosenfeld seemed to be making hasty and spurious judgments. The main question, dictated by the headlines, was whether Aoki gave the Panthers guns and did other work for the Panthers at the direction of the FBI. I pointed out many reasons why this seemed implausible based on what I knew about that history and how Rosenfeld was distorting it. There’s one statement I would clearly have not have written had I known my words would go beyond the Facebook discussion. In response to the Threadgill assertion that Aoki was an informant from the late 1950s to 1965, I wrote “Let’s accept this.” As should hopefully be clear from the context, I was saying “let’s accept this for the sake of argument and see if Rosenfeld’s claim holds up.” In other words, even if you concede that Rosenfeld is correct in this one regard, there’s no way his whole argument can be substantiated. But as I have always specified, none of Rosenfeld’s evidence is conclusive and all his claims about Aoki must be held to greater scrutiny.
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