> My guess is that awareness of racism would probably be more
> important as an organizing tool in Bloomington, Indiana than it
> would in, say, a small town in Vermont.
>
> I'd certainly make it an issue while organizing a workplace beset by
> racism. Of course, if you believe that every workplace is beset by
> racism...
(Incidentally, my Bloomington is in Illinois, not Indiana. Many years ago a speaker we were sponsoring here from the Black Workers Congress flew from Chicago to Bloomington Indiana, then had to bus it to Bloomington IL. He was a very good speaker though.)
This would be satisfactory if each community, each workplace, were a complete entity in itself, not intertwined with the rest of the capitalist system. It might still be satisfactory from a defensible but I think outrageous point of view, that Fukuyama was right, that history had ended, and that all that was possible anymore was a bit of fiddling here and there, within sensible bounds. And it might be possible from the point of view (which I find utterly wrong in even its most sensible forms) that the hope for decency in the United States rests on the election of democrats to office and persuading those democrats to do good things.
On any of these assumptions, racism, subordination of women, endless harassment of immigrants, deeply impoverished sectors of the overall working class, are just part of nature. And so to attempt to act in any major way against them is spitting into the wind. Do a little good here, do a little good there, brighten the corner where you are, go home to your wife and family, stay there by the fireside bright. Sunday school songs of the 30s were the epitome of individualising the world, and Leadbelly is the greatest artist of loneliness I know. And I think your world is a very lonely one.
There is such a powerful and enormous literature, establishing over and over again the way in which the oppression of black people penetrates every corner of U.S. life, and has for 200 years (before that the oppression was hierarchical rather than racial, but that is another long argument), that to claim that confronting race depends on local circumstances is breathtakingly arrogant.
(Incidentally, some of the most subjectively and overtly racist people I ever met were from the little central Illinois town of Arthur, black population 0%.
Carrol