James Withrow writes:
> There's no getting around the fact that racism has been a defining
>characteristic of U.S. society since its inception. And that the same
>is true for sexism the world over for all time. (Well, I guess you
>could deny the second sentence if you insisted on it having a literal
>meaning.) Anyway...
>
> Rather than worrying just about certain classifications of
>disrespect: racism, sexism, or even the ageism that cropped up recently
>uncriticized-- rather than worrying about these classifications and
>others, an organizing campaign is better off if you just begin with the
>assumption that we need everyone, that no one should go neglected.
But racism and sexism are more than just behavioral, social-interactive "classifications of disrespect". As far as organizing campaigns go, yes a purpose needs to be found for every last individual. The project of finding a purpose for each individual is a material project in two respects: 1) it finds a task, work, an actual bodily engagement for the individual, whether that be sealing envelopes or writing press releases or securing locations for meetings, etc (I have no experience directly organizing, so you know better than I), and 2) The project itself is an ideological operation of building solidarity, union consciousness.
That said, the ideological operation of building union consciousness does not necessarily subsume a deconstruction of racist or sexist ideologies. In fact the dismissal of racism and sexism as mere secondary behaviors of disrespect dangerously ignores a multiplicity of ideological operations (or leaves them opaque).
I realize that the street-level dynamics of organizing are complicated and somewhat restrictive. People need to be mobilized. However, the ideological functioning we might call "mobilization", or consolidating of group (worker) identity, can still leave in tact the ideological functioning of prejudice, on a different level. Just trying to flesh these things out, drawing largely from the excellent syntheses, homologies, and genus-species relations of ideology in Terry Eagleton's _Ideology: An Introduction_.
One's reading of racism on an anecdotal, experiential level--say someone lives where many races and ethnicities co-exist in an empirically OK way (hmm), or one has organized workers of different races and ethnicities with some success--is a different reading from that of the kind of structural, systemic racism behind, for example, the fact that 1 out of 7 African-Americans is ineligible to vote due to felony conviction (I'm eliding *much* in the way of issues of "crime" and poverty here).
>
> Someone we think we have no use for (and that's the ultimate in
>disrespect) may have a hidden disability that upon diagnosis would make
>his/her behavior easily understood. Campaigns work best when you find
a
>purpose for every last possible individual.
>
> Frankly, I think a national politics based on that notion is more
>broad-based than these de-humanizing classifications we assign people.
Questions of any kind of "humanizing" aside, it's a matter of pulling apart already evident classifications that relations of production and consumption have been resposible for, how these relations, in one way quite impersonally, perpetuate these assignations.
>I'm not saying to forget about racism or sexism. I'm just saying that
>stopping there is a mistake.
Starting there is a good thing though.
-Alec (Hi James)
>
> James in Philly
>
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