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A Deadeye
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
Smith interviews Elaine Brown, former head of the Black Panther Party and author of A Taste of Power. Brown speculates that people associate the Black Panther Party with things other than guns. She believes that young men are drawn to the guns. Brown tells these men about Jonathan Jackson, who was 17, brilliant, and not a gang member. Nevertheless, he went to a courtroom alone and, “in the name of / revolution” took his own life. She asks them if it would be better if Jackson were still alive today. Personally, Brown would rather know Jackson.
Brown seems to suggest that a lot of the young men who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party were motivated by the clout that came with joining a countercultural organization known for its violent altercations. In a similar vein, the tragedy of Jonathan Jackson is a cautionary tale about getting so absorbed in the symbolic value of a cause that one becomes unable to actually fight for that cause. Brown insinuates that Jackson would have been of more use to the movement had he not taken his own life and had instead applied himself to supporting the Black Panther Party’s aims in other ways.
Themes
Brown believes that taking a gun to the street with no definite plans is “bizarre” and “foolish.” She claims one need only ask “Saddam Hussein / about the power and weaponry” of the United States, and its “willingness to use it.” Brown asserts that there’s no other country that’s better armed or prepared to fight. But Brown doesn’t claim young Black men should put down their guns. To the contrary, if one is Black and in America, she thinks it’s best that they have a gun, know which enemies to shoot, and know how not to be caught. However, waging a war against the country is different. Just ask Saddam Hussein, or the Vietnamese, or the Nicaraguans, Browns suggests, naming additional victims of the U.S.’s military conquests.
Brown’s call for gun-toting young men to ask “Saddam Hussein / about the power and weaponry” of the U.S., and its “willingness to use it” conveys the inability of less organized organizations or regimes to defeat the U.S., one of the most powerful (and armed) nations in the world. By extension, Brown’s analogy laments how individual people are mostly unable to exert power over connected, powerful institutions. Brown references a number of revolutionary movements that were quashed by U.S. interference or lack thereof (the 1991 Iraqi uprisings against Saddam Hussein, the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, the Sandista National Liberation Front of the Nicaraguan Revolution) to show how futile it can be for small groups to take on powerful institutions.
Themes
If a person is committed to helping their community, Brown insists they must have a “love of [their] people.” She warns people to not get distracted by ego, bravado, or “symbolic vestment.” Because right now, Brown argues, Black people are “a piss-poor, / ragtag, unorganized, poorly armed,” and “poorly led / army.” And at this rate, it will take them “twenty more years” to understand what will become of “Martin, Malcom, / and the Black Panther Party.”
Brown calls for advocates not to allow empty symbolic gesture and ego to let them lose sight of their true cause. She argues that succumbing to “symbolic vestment” has historically been the downfall of otherwise promising revolutionary fronts. Essentially, she insists that people get so distracted by the idea of a cause that they forgot what they must do to advance that cause. She cites “Martin [Luther King], Malcom [X], / and the Black Panther Party” as promising forces of the civil rights movement whose efforts were quashed by the people’s unwillingness to commit to change in the long run.
Themes
