That civility thing

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Before beginning a quick reply, I would like to call attention to two
articles in recent NACLAs  by Donna DeCesare. In the current issue, she
documents how resident aliens often apprehended for petty crime have been
deported in accordance with the Anti Terrorism Act of 1996 (I believe). So
gang kids have been deported to El Salvador where there is controversy
about how linked these deportees are to the rise in street crime. DeCesare
focuses on the stories of a few kids who have been deported to Haiti, how
their families in America have been shamed, how they attempt to make a new
home in a human hell. First class reporting. And something quite real that
makes me embarrassed to submit the following. 

Ingrid,

  I actually think Ken's insinuation that I may be
a Nazi because Mattick may have sponsored one was fair in the context of
the Klan/NOI-Malcolm X relation I had been emphasizing. That was fair
play. I provided a response, and have yet to check into Mattick's
relationship with Strasser refererence to whom is not to found in PMsr's
writings to the best of my knowledge.  

 I seemed to have posted some inappropriate insults. Well,  I didn't
want to try to appear superior on the basis of my putative civility.  I
could care fucking less about winning any argument on such grounds.  I am
not comfortable occupying the moral high ground. 

Now I owe Arthur a couple of replies. As for Kwanzaa, I see it 1. as an
effort to stimulate the buying of more stuff for celebration and 2. I
am skeptical of how African and thus radically "other"  black American 
life really is and concerned about the attempt to ground morally the life
of all blacks  in a pseudo African philosophy which discloses some
primordial or racial unity of  African blacks, diasporic or not (though
the growing diaspora is within Africa itself given displacement and
movement of economic and political refugees--a couple of books out by
Frances Deng from Brookings on this which I haven't even skimmed yet) and
3. I can't stand to hear Karenga's name when the celebration begins. 

At functions, I see about a third of the people  very
skeptical, another third  indifferent, another third really into it. And
at the same time Kwanzaa does raise important questions about blacks'
relationship to Christianity and to Africa--so I understand how it strikes
a chord. I once read an interesting book about the relationship of black
Americans to Africans by Bernard Magubane, The Ties That Bind. I wish I
had time to revisit it. 

Arthur, I have taught high school and  college comp, and lived in mixed
neighborhoods. I have talked to a lot of people, and it's never been a
mattter of my imparting  radical views to them; it's often been a matter
of my revising my own beliefs.  I am only participating
on LBO now because of time constraints, so I may not participate on the
BRC line the posts from which are most stimulating. 

As for Down on the Delta, I am concerned about how completely the City is
repudiated for life in what would be an apparently perfectly segregated,
albeit highly idealised,  black belt in which economic activity would be
secured mainly  through black entrepreneurship. 

Yours, Rakesh