This is not what happened at all. Rakesh went ballistic when I interpreted his remarks that the BRC was "isolating" itself from the white working class as tantamount to saying that they were provoking a backlash. Instead of defending himself from this charge, he cursed me out and resigned from the list. The type of exchange we were having is fairly typical of the kind that goes on regularly in print media between Adolph Reed and others. If anything, my accusation was much milder than the kind that is routinely made between black intellectuals who have these sorts of political differences.
Rakesh has a tendency to blow up. A few months ago he was in a debate with some folks on the Spoons lists, including me and Carrol Cox. When Carrol agreed with me on one point or another, Rakesh said that we must have been a couple of queers because we never disagree with each other.
Rakesh wants the right to make highly provocative attacks on independent black political action without having people taking a tough stand in response. He thinks that it is okay to make the charge that Malcolm X cooperated with the Ku Klux Klan in terrorizing civil rights activists. In reality Malcolm X's father was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. While the NOI occasionally made outrageous claims that the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan was more honest than the liberals about what they sought--even being in ironic consensus that separatism was a solution to America's race problem--the notion that the NOI or Malcolm X had anything to do with "terrorism" is slander.
The sort of politics that Rakesh is espousing is rooted in the Marxist backlash against black nationalism which began in the 1960s. The Spartacist League, the Progressive Labor Party, the CPUSA at a certain point, all professed the need for "black-white" unity and accused Malcolm X and other such thinkers as driving a wedge between blacks and whites. This is complete bullshit. The wedge already had been driven in the 19th century when white workers were coopted into supporting racist exclusion in the trade unions.
The 1930s saw a partial healing of these divisions when the CPUSA fought to integrate the trade unions. After WWII, the CPUSA was driven out of the unions and old racial privileges began to reemerge. Under the impact of the black power movement of the 1960s, black caucuses began to form in the unions and fight for affirmative action. Many Marxists were disoriented by these iniatives and thought that they "divided the working class," including Alex Cockburn and your own magazine, LM. To the CPUSA's credit, it supported such initiatives and Gerald Horne wrote an excellent book on the subject.
If you analyze the position of Rakesh, the Spartacist League and others, you can only come to the conclusion that independent black political action is counter-revolutionary. This sort of position is well-known to the organizers of the BRC and I am not surprised that they decided to "moderate" who would attend the conference. As it turns out, most of the people who support this position are not African-American.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)