The Comedy of the Revolution

If one happened to wander into a screening of Black Dynamte uninitiated to the vaguaries of this particular film, one could easily mistake it for a 70s-era blacksploitation film.

Loaded with black revolutionary ideology, Kung Fu fighting, and sexual innuendo so thick one could cut it with a chainsaw, Black Dynamte resembles blacksploitation cinema right down to its cheap 70s-era film stock.

This is actually intentional, as Black Dynamite is a parody of such films.

As a send-up of blacksploitation cinema, Black Dynamite can't help but address the bizarre racial/political fantasy underlying it all. When Black Dynamite finally moves to confront the progenitor of a conspiracy to use malt liquor to shrink the penises of black men, it turns out to be none other than Richard Nixon himself.

The sad thing about this is that, when one examines the most virulent and extreme examples of black revolutionary ideology, this is actually only barely hyperbole. It's only barly parody.

Interestingly, it's movements like the New Black Panther Party that are spreading the kind of vile racist rhetoric that today one doesn't even hear from the Ku Klux Klan.

Cetainly, the New Black Panther Party will never rival the KKK in terms of the kind of social and civil devastation it can inflict upon its targets. But the rhetoric offered by individuals such as King Samir Shabazz -- a high-profile leader within the New Black Panther Party -- is striking.

"If you want freedom, you're gonna have to kill some crackers," he seeths in a now-popular documentary segment. "You're gonna have to kill some of their babies."

"I hate white people," Shabazz earlier thunders. "All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him. Because we're still in this condition."

It would be foolish to pretend that institutionalized racism has played no role in the plight of black Americans. Tragically, many of them continue to live in neighbourhoods beseiged by drugs, poverty and crime.

The folly of the New Black Panther Party is that they pretend that racial separation will magically eliminate these problems. It won't, because as unpopular as it is to give voice to this fact (it can quickly attract accusations of racism, some of which are politically-motivated), many black people themselves are part of the problem.

Simply put, there are predators among the black community that prey on their neighbours for their own benefit. This is no different than the predators that exist within any other community -- racial, ethnic or civic. The difference is that individuals like Shabazz seem to all but deny the existence of such predators.

Ironically, as Black Dynamite points out, the prevalence of socially and civically debilitating drugs in black communities is not the result of a white conspiracy, but rather the result of black-on-black crime. When Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) goes to a "state of the game" meeting of pimps to declare his war on drug trafficking and recruit help in his crusade, most of the pimps present are prepared to go right on enriching themselves at the expense of their community.

Contrary to the claims of black revolutionaries who insist that the advent of crack cocaine was the result of a CIA conspiracy, it was, in fact, black people who invented crack cocaine. They did so as a manner of making cocaine sales more economical -- allowing them to make far more money off of raw cocaine than they had previously been able to.

It's the severe disconnect from reality that renders the most extreme strains of black revolutionary politics so laughable that moderate blacks can't even begin to take it seriously -- as Black Dynamite makes perfectly evident.