> On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> Maybe one of you could explain why Mumia's cause has failed to find
> any significant black support.
>
> Doug
In the abstract, why should any particular cause elicit specific support? There is a wide range of injustices in the world. For various reasons, sections of the Left have seized on Mumia as representative of a host of political and judicial evils in the country, but there are many people involved in fighting the various components of those evils without necessarily feeling that Mumia is "the case" they care about. Partly the problem is, as I noted in another post, that the very multiplicity of issues tied to Mumia means that folks concentrating on one area may see the other issues involved as "baggage" distracting from their core concerns.
The Scottsboro Boys gained broadbased recognition as a case because lynching was a singular evil represented in the black community as a method of terror to suppress the whole black community in the South. The fit because case and broad-based consciousness was clear and unmistakeable (which never means that organizing is not needed, but the message was unified.)
But there is no necessary reason one, relatively complicated case like Mumia's, should capture the imagination of activists in the same way. There are many criminal justice areas where black activists have organized extensively- disparate impact of drug laws, the contra-cocaine connection, police brutality, and so on, and for whatever reason, the same activists have not always seen Mumia as the posterchild for their issues.
The more relevant issue is to turn the question around and ask why so many white left activists have seized on Mumia as "their" cause. Could it be that educated articulate voice of Mumia's they heard on scattered radio commentaries, a person THEY could identify with rather than the less white-friendly hip-hop slang or crudity of the typical black victim of our criminal justice system?
It is clearer to me why white activists would pick out Mumia as fitting within their "comfort level" as a person, than why it is necessarily a case that every activist should jump up and down on the case compared to another.
Of course, once a particular case takes on critical mass, it often makes sense to raise it higher to break through media blockades through collective support, but such "bandwagon" campaigns are very subject to the exact limits of sectarian alienation that we have discussed in the case of Mumia. A lot of black activists might have been willing to jump on the Mumia case once it got a critical mass compared to other cases, but given the nasty political swamp in a lot of areas, they probably decided that they'd rather work on the issues in other ways given the hassle.
-- Nathan newman