I've been really quiet on this post about whether "we" should talk to religious people/militia people/"them", in part because the overwhelmingness of getting involved in this particular shouting match has seemed unappealing. Of course, in saying that I'm acting a "moderation" that in fact I don't feel - in principle I'm on Yoshie's, Katha's, Carroll's side: that is, they are essentially correct about the double standards they are constantly being hit with. Having said that, I want to make one rather different comment that I hope will be usefully explanatory about the dynamic of the conversation.
I have just written a book defending a particular, careful, narrow construction of "African America identity politics" (forthcoming Cambridge UP early 1999), and the following is a version of the argument of that book.
When people on this list exhort each other that the correct leftist line at any given moment is to talk to "them", whoever "they" are, we forget that due to deeply embedded issues of social and psychological identity, issues that, because they are implicit in our childhood development and our objective socioeconomic position at a given moment, can't simply be waved away with a flash, each of us is actually able to speak effectively to a relatively narrow range of people. Thus the exhortion "you should speak to the people I think are important" is a particularly useless and damaging one: in fact, arguments about who is worth speaking to in principle can mask the fact that the people making them are, practically speaking, more comfortable and more effective speaking to their preferred subjects. The simple fact is, for reasons entirely beyond anything I do (or prefer to do), I am a more effective teacher of African American literature to white students than black students. This doesn't mean I've never had black students I'm close to, but that a certain class of white students enters my classroom more willing to accept the idea that the US is a white supremacist society if it is proclaimed by me, a white teacher, than they would if I were black; and for completely other reasons, black students are more likely to be taking my classes because they are interested in "their culture", rather than for the political/intellectual reasons white English majors and leftists enroll. As a result they are likely to be more resistant to the overtly politicized (and marxist) approach of my classroom. Faced with a black marxist teacher teaching identical content, they would tend to be less resistant (though by no means unresistant).
Ultimately, these facts require a psychoanalytic theory to explain them. And of course marxist cultural studies is necessary to explain the narrowness of the group that even potentially can be "my students", of whatever racial background, to begin with.
The point is this: I know how to talk to certain white students about white supremacy - and also marxism - rather well. (It is a conspicuous fact in my case that I don't mean "white male" - actually white women are the large majority of "my" students, and the ones I'm closest to have been lesbian/queer. I don't know how that generalizes; I have some ideas, but they are beyond the scope of this post.) Because I do, I often learn in a rather nuanced way what their white working and middle class families "really" feel, the extent to which their religion/rurality/etc. is more or less open to left politics.
Now, if, like Wotjek, I were the kind of person who generalized this very particular experience, related to my social identity, to the truth about left politics, I would loudly claim that "the left" is not serious about talking to the people I am serious about talking to, and therefore there would be something wrong with us. Instead, I prefer to assume that my interests and abilities make it possible for me to talk to specific people, people who might, upon seeing Yoshie, completely refuse to engage at all. If I assume that, I will make two further assumptions: (1) that it is inappropriate to preach to her about who she should feel its worth talking to; (2) that if marxism, quite apart from identity issues, is important, then to the extent it is largely practiced (at least at the professional/academic level) by white men there is a major problem. If that's the case, it is the particular responsibility of white male marxists not so much to personally try to organize women of color (if we are not effective in doing so), but to respect, listen to, learn from, and interact in a mutually productive way with the women of color who are (or are potentially) already interested in what we know. They may be able to tell us stuff about organizing people who we've never been able to talk to.
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