> so three days of exclusion just doesn't seem like that much.
Nathan, you have not responded to my argument as to the reactionary consequence the exclusion of non-blacks has on the kind of agenda a black radical congress is pressured to agree on in the absence of non-blacks. If you would cut out the parts of my post where I tried to lay out the problem, then perhaps you would see it. It's no answer to say that you know radical blacks who will be there; I am trying to outline the forces which will trap them as well.
>Your comments seem to be a strange echo of conservative complaints about
>black student organizations, black graduations or other racially-defined
>communities that sustain folks in majority white environments.
I have been to quite a few black graduations, including my roommate's and Donna's (that you think these are closed to non-blacks is strange, though I was quite ticked off by the choice of speakers in recent years). I have taught as a grad student in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley (to which I was drawn because of Mike Davis' argument about the importance of the black and chicano working class within the working class; I wanted to dig deeper into the American proletariat). In neither case (grads or ethnic studies courses) have non-blacks been excluded (indeed I, a non-black, taught a composition course in African American studies at UC Berkeley and most recently assisted, as a non Cambodian, in a course on the plight of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States). I am a militant integrationist (and a big supporter of affirmative action). Of course in the eyes of reactionary black nationalists that may make me a conservative. I think Ward Connerly is a fucking pig.
Nathan pointed to the good work done by the Congressional Black Caucus and now the Progressive Congressional Caulcus (though he didn't answer my question about the problems in the creation of majority minority districts). The greater representation of these groups is claimed to have great promise, but didn't the Democrats control the Presidency and Congress in 1992-94? Did we get health care out of that? Eventually we got a better minimum wage but welfare reform along with it, signed by our president and the true horrors of which will only be manifest in the next real downturn. We got a bigger EITC (though it seems little effort to make sure those who qualify for it really get it, so it may turn out to be largely a failed reform to the obscene problem of working poverty.) and then Clinton readjusted tax breaks for families with kids in college so that poorer families don't qualify for them (and of course families without college kids are defacto penalized for being stupid, I suppose). And we have the continued torture of the Iraqi people. We have Clinton embracing every African leader implementing structural adjustment and turning to the unfettered market--the consequences of which will only be greater misery. We got intellectual property rights but no labor rights in trade agreements. Sanders wants to build prisons and signed on to the crime bill; and Waters seems to now think that the most important problem in the black community is a CIA drug war which in the end only confirms the assumption that the biggest problem confronting blacks is drugs, whatever their source. As far as I can tell, the House Democrats are bunch of criminals and demagogues, and bourgeois to the rotten core. But then if my academic career fails, I am not looking for a job in those rotten burro-cracies of the Democratic Party or the AFL-CIO.
>You did argue that we should define a radical Congress by those who reject
>the Democrats and reject the present AFL-CIO leadership. It's not that
>such criticism can't be justified, but the place to start on building the
>Left is finding our unities and beliefs, not our exclusions.
As I said, the organization of this black radical congress is implicitly based on the failures of the Democrats and AFL-CIO leadership in addressing the needs of the black population. I didn't invent the problem of blacks feeling excluded from the dominant institutions of the Left; if they think these institutions are racist through and through--and why else would they have organized this congress-- it's not my fault. But it's one of the great signs of health in this country. My whole point is that blacks are not the only ones failed by those institutions and that conscious recognition of that is the sine qua non to raising the heat in America.
best, rakesh