Benjamin J. Davis, born on this day in 1903, was American lawyer and communist who was elected in 1943 to the New York City Council, representing Harlem. Davis was persecuted by the state via the anti-communist Smith and McCarran Acts.
Davis became radicalized through his role as defense attorney in the 1933 trial of Angelo Herndon, a 19-year-old black communist who had been charged “attempting to incite insurrection” because he tried to organize a farm workers’ union.
In 1949, Davis was among a number of communist leaders prosecuted for violating the Smith Act. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1962 Davis was charged with violating the Internal Security Act (also known as the McCarran Act), but died before the case could come to trial.
“Whether one agrees with the Communist Party or not, one must at least know the truth about it. One must not permit his ideas to be shaped by the hysteria which now passes as a ‘crusade against Communism’… For example, the canard that every Communist has his pockets lined with ‘Moscow gold.’ If that were true, one could be sure that there would scarcely be any room in our party for workers. The capitalists, to whom gold is god of the universe, would crowd them out.”
- Benjamin J. Davis
I hope you nerds have a good month of September 
Remember no crackers
It’s really similar to when people leave abusive/extremist religious sects, but don’t do the work of unraveling their brainworms. Example: recognizing the Mormon church is problematic and leaving it, but then clinging onto racism influenced by the mark of Cain nonsense or homophobia present in most Abrahamic religions.
One of my in-laws is like this. He’s a turbo “”““centrist””“” reactionary libertarian crypto fascist who no longer practices Mormonism nor believes in Christianity in general and thinks this makes him some type of authority on philosophy and politics. Yet he’s still incredibly queerphobic and, while not outwardly racist towards black people, is incredibly racist towards Arabs and Latine people.
It’s pure laziness to avoid doing any kind of introspection or investigating similar experiences by other people. It’s the assumption that, because you figured out one problem in your life, you know everything there is about all other problems. White so-called “anti-racists” are similar. They think because they figured out racism is wrong, they are now the greatest authority on the topic and have no need to continue analyzing the rest of their beliefs.
It plays into the white savior trope, where a white person must lead infantilized PoC and become better at being that ethic group than the actual ethnic group. It’s like every white person’s dream to be put in charge of a Native American organization, where they will personally lead the liberation of indigenous people. They will transform from being white into some type of Crazy Horse replica, showing Native Americans how to be Native American after they’ve consumed the lived experiences of PoC as though they went through those same experiences.
Anywho. I’m ranting and sleepy but yeah. People don’t want to continue doing the work of unraveling their problematic behaviors.