>One of the reasons Doug finds it so hard to understand this question of the
>"black community" is that he not approaching the question dialectically.
Oh, right, I always forget that!
>There were dogmatic Marxists in the SWP who hated this notion of a "black
>community". We had a big debate in the party in 1971 against the "For a
>Proletarian Orientation Tendency", whose arguments were of a Spartacist
>nature that both Doug and Rakesh reflect. They kept harping on the danger
>of the black bourgeoisie. If we didn't expressly target the black
>bourgeoisie in our agitational literature, we would be giving it aid and
>comfort. What was revealed in the course of the preconvention discussion is
>that there is hardly any black bourgeoisie to speak of. Except for a
>handful of men in the food, communications and auto retailing business,
>there are no legitimate bourgeois figures. Also, Andrew Hacker reveals in
>his latest book on money that black people are grossly underrepresented in
>upper management. Private corporations, despite public relations effort to
>correct their racist reputations, remain lily-white at the top levels. Only
>5 of 104 corporations--Sears, Xerox, Mobil, Kraft and Merrill Lynch--have
>African-Americans in senior executive positions. The Forbes 400 list has
>cited more than a thousand different men and women since it began the
>survey in 1982. Of this group, only five--less than one-half of one
>percent--has been black.
Black members of the Forbes 400, or black senior execs of the Fortune 400, would be black members of the U.S. bourgeoisie, not members of a "black bourgeoisie." There aren't many now, but there are a few. Vernon Jordan is a member of the U.S. ruling class who is also black. I don't think his primary loyalty is to "the black community." Ditto Ron Brown. Brown's father ran a hotel in Harlem, which would have made him a member of the black bourgeoisie (petit or grande we can argue over). His son joined the U.S. bourgeoisie.
I never said anything about "targeting the black bourgeoisie." I'm all for targeting the bourgeoisie unmodified, which in the U.S. context, would be a 95% white population at least. Targeting black people specifically in any context would be ugly & dangerous. Nor have I ever "harped" on the danger of a black bourgeoisie. And I've never taken the "class not race" position, since in the U.S. class and race have formed each other, um, dialectically. I was objecting to the habit of treating African Americans as a lump of people undivided by class, region, generation, or gender. That would be undialectical, wouldn't it?
Doug