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Record W4405612912 · doi:10.3138/cras-2024-003

“Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker”: The History of a Phrase

2024· article· en· W4405612912 on OpenAlex
Bill Freind

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Review of American Studies · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnarchism and Radical Politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSloganPoliticsPoetryArtPersonaMAGIC (telescope)HistoryLiteratureArt historyLawPolitical scienceHumanities

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

During Amiri Baraka’s sentencing in 1967 for possessing an illegal weapon, Judge Leon Kapp read parts of Baraka’s poem “Black People!” including the line “[t]he magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker!” This quickly became one of the most powerful phrases of the 1960s: an anarchist group in Manhattan went by the name Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and the slogan was central to the student uprising at Columbia University. This became a form of political blackface in which White radicals claimed they occupied the same position as Black people. Simultaneously, Baraka sought to distance himself from it. Recognizing that African American voters could dominate Newark politics, Baraka constructed a cynical public persona, blaming the riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. on “outside agitators.” At that point, the phrase was little more than a bit of radical chic that apolitical bands like the Jefferson Airplane could mouth.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.282
Threshold uncertainty score0.995

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.008
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it