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Lightning But No Rain
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Cornel West, a scholar, sits at his desk. He’s wearing a three-piece navy suit, a pocket watch, and eyeglasses. He is surrounded by books and papers. Smith describes West’s desk as “a fortress.” West explains how the goal of life is to “gain / access / to power and property / and pleasure / by any means you cayan.”
West’s analysis that the point of life is to “gain / access / to power and property / and pleasure / by any means you cayan” situates gang violence within the broader goal of securing power, personal property, and status. In this way, West insists that a gang member’s goal is comparable to anyone else’s.
Themes
West establishes two ways to gain security. First, there’s the American “frontier myth,” which dictates that there exists a moral imperative and reward for expanding “by means of conquest and dispossession of duh / people’s land.” He relates this to Richard Slotkin’s description of America as a “gunfighter nation.” West suggests that America’s archetypal heroes, such as cowboys, use guns to “expand the fronteer,” acquiring more land to develop, resources to mine, and subordinates to rule. West sees the gunfighter culture as a dangerous exhibition of “a dee machismo / ethic.”
Richard Slotkin is a cultural critic and historian. He has done extensive research on violence within the American myth of the frontier. West contextualizes gang activity within the broader trope of American exceptionalism and westward expansion. West interprets contemporary gun culture as an example of a “machismo” ethic. “Machismo” refers to an aggressive, masculine pride. It’s this masculine pride that fuels gang members (and the pioneers before them) to engage in violence and war to protect and expand their claim to the land, and to ensure their hold on power. Yet, America has sanctified the pioneer myth and failed to see gang warfare as just another iteration of the same idea.
Themes
West cites the popularity of Rambo and gangster rap as evidence of the culture’s fixation on a machismo identity. He posits that gangster rap’s machismo creates an alternate narrative where marginalized Black men can band together to “outpolice” and “outbrutalize” the police. However, one consequence of this is that once Black men become the “police agents,” “the interests of black women / are subordinated.” While West contends that it takes bravery to defy the dominant authority, he still sees this rebellion as existing “within a patriarchal mode.” It ends up recycling the same types of oppression and struggle.
West posits that the machismo impulse of American culture encourages a culture of oppression even among oppressed communities. West’s formulation shows how oppression inspires oppression, further dividing communities. While Black resistance to oppression is an attempt to regain agency lost to over-policing and racism, this resistance gains power in the same, unjust way as the system it tried to overcome. Both the police and Black “police agents, after all, subjugate another group (Black people as a whole and Black women, respectively). This is an example of how justice is ambiguous and complex, as it often causes one group to suffer so another group can achieve justice.
Themes
As a result, the best Black people can do “is hold up / a bloodstained banner / of a black struggle.” While a power struggle is necessary for change, West thinks it’s also important not to become amoral and give up on striving for “the broader possibilities of human / beings engaging in interaction that accents our humanness,” rather than constructed identities, such as gender or race. At this time, the best anyone can do, West argues, is identify and reproduce the best qualities of the past.
West’s image of “a bloodstained banner / of a black struggle” is a cynical metaphor for the historical pattern of Black rights movements to rarely enacting real change and improve the circumstances for Black people. At the same time, he cautions Black people not to become too consumed by past failures that they disregard “the broader possibilities of human / beings engaging in interaction” as a collective whole. While West is pragmatic about the limited ability of revolutionary movements to create real change, he contends that without an inner idealism and sense of hope, enacting change is all but impossible.
Themes
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West describes how the Black Panther Party expanded on Malcom X’s “boldness and defiance.” While X’s movement was rooted in machismo, it also captured what West describes as “a certain internationalism,” in that it acknowledged the roles played by people of color, progressive white people, and people who identify with the poor, working class. With all Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s bad ideas, people often forget that they possessed this broader, internationalist perspective, West notes.
The ”certain internationalism” West attributes to the Black Panther Party recalls West’s earlier remark about the possibility of humans engaging in their shared “humanness.” That is, he suggests the party brought people together from all walks of life in pursuit of a shared goal. He seems to identify that a collective consciousness—a feeling of unity and interconnectedness—is essential to revolutionary groups determined to create social change.
Themes
Once the Black Panther Party was dissolved, West explains, conservative forces, primarily corporate elites, swept in and “reshape[d] society” to suit their interests. And this is the cultural climate America has been dealing with for the past two decades.
West considers the Black community’s condition in the aftermath of the 1992 riots within the broader context of the conservative takeover of the 1980s, with Reagan Era policies “reshap[ing] society” to suit the interests of the corporate elite, often at the expense of marginalized communities.
Themes
