Making Sense of "End Racism." Some observations on Wojtek's queries

[Carrol Cox]

> The proposition "End capitalist oppression!" entails a set of programs
> that, if implemented, are likely to achieve an empirically observable set
> of objectives stipulated by that proposition.[SNIP]

"If implemented!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I take it that the road to the power to
implement those programs makes up 100% of the concern of these various
threads. *ALL* my posts on racism have been solely concerned with the
concrete historical tasks of building a revolutionary movement in the
United States. Racism is *the* barrier (and always has been) in the United
States to unity in the struggle for *all* progressive goals from better
lighting in a local school to the overthrow of capitalism in a socialist
revolution. 

There is an immense (and not altogether harmonious) and crucial literature
on the various issues involved, too much of which I myself am not familiar
with, but it is crucial to gain an understanding within a marxist
framework of those issues.

> When it comes to
the proposition "End racism," however, I am at utter loss.
>  What the f**k are we supposed to do (individually or collectively) to
> achieve that end?  

So am I as a matter of fact. So are the various lefts in the United
States. So are most blacks. That is why we do not, at the present time,
have "A Left" in this country. And that is why I proclaimed in a very
brief post a week or so ago that the BRC *might* just be the trigger to
the reinvigoration of a leftist movement.

The (academic) woods are full of people (some white, some black) who have
various individualist routes to fighting racism, which I have never taken
much interest in. There is also no particular point in blaming
individuals, even aggressively racist individuals. And one does not,
incidentally, "end racism" (though that is acceptable as an agitational
slogan), for racism is not a thing or a set of ideas but an ideology, an
ideology continually recreated by and making sense of (that, after all, is
the purpose of ideologies) the material conditions of U.S. life.  One
tries to work out ways to organize to destroy those conditions. 

But that is another set of 500 page volumes and years of struggle.

One point that can be somewhat operative at the individual level. Whites,
radical whites, anti-racist whites, still tend not to trust blacks to be
intellectually competent, to feel uneasy about any situation or event or
campaign that does not "prove itself" in the eyes of whites, in the only
way that is possible, having white leadership.

All of us can keep fighting against that impulse in ourselves.

Carrol