1. because congressional legislation has been hard to attain, the target has been the courts. this was really obvious in the case of civil rights struggles. the NAACP started planning an assault on the courts in the 1930s [hastie, nabrit, houston, ransom, marshall]. ransom's strategy was to start with higher education. their successes established the foundation upon which to bring the brown v b.o.e. topeka to trial 2. we should all already know about roe v. wade, the legal assault there was, at first, about ensuring that docs didn't get nailed for providing abortions for the wealthy who could afford to encourage docs to give them abortion by taking advantage of allowances for the "mental health" of the mother. 3. more civil rights advances via executive order in the 60s 4. the argument is that, b/c these weren't made through the process of a long drawn out battle in congress, people didn't see them as legit. they saw these policies as having been established by fiat, forced upon them. [e.g., the process of an election--debates, competition, etc--is a legitimatizing process-- think of the difference in rhetoric here in the states over an election [voluntary] v. australia [not voluntary]. when we supposedly have a "choice" [even as laughable as most ppl find it] then it will seem more legit, even if the game is rigged ppl still think they have some smidgeon of agency, than in Aus where there is no choice and the game is rigged and they can't even opt out by refusing to vote! 5. no one cares that the warren court is dead or that these aren't viable strategies. what matters is that they delimited the range and scope of what people thought possible and, especially, how the opposition has responded: not only have they fought back through the courts, they've been very vocal about their opposition and have done all they can claim a majority as "on their side". and they can. so the consequences are what i was talking about and, i presume, michael was also getting at this. 6 when we were fighting the nuke dump siting the same polarized politcs got played out. one faction wanted to go the route of the law: their strategy was to fight it in the courts by showing the siting to be unconstitutional. the other faction said, "screw that! no politics as usual for us. we've been down that road before" they preferred what i've called a "politics of identity" strategy. but, of course, the people who worked through the system actually "won" in the sense that the nuke never got sited and, in large measure, because they did find the siting unconstitutional, at the state level. otoh, the "winners" don't see how the "ID politics" crowd managed to make things politically difficult and made a scene with the media. the downside, of course, was that the ID politics people still came out looking like idiot obstinate farmers
7. why is it so hard to, for the purposes of analysis, disentangle racism and SOP in the diallo case? those cops would have shot a white suspect too. the difference that's important is that they stopped him b/c he was black, looking for a black suspect. that's racist. the 41 fucking bullets, that's racist. but the hair trigger finger, that's fucking SOP.
8. sleeper's a dick for not getting a klew about the already entrenched racism that has shaped the stats. he's also a dick for comparing cases that aren't comparable. however, what he said in closing is worth considering:
I'd rather see such dead-end politics upset by the hardier faith of
East Brooklyn congregations, South Bronx churches, the Queens
Citizens Organization and other mostly nonwhite but doggedly
integrated organizations trained by the Industrial Areas
Foundation. They build housing (with hard-won help from
Giuliani), sustain new schools and fight (against Giuliani) for "living
wage" jobs. Their dynamism makes racial psychodramas pale.
Not incidentally, they've changed police officers' perceptions of
their corners of tough neighborhoods.
Why don't we keep faith with them? Haste to create a
"movement" around the Diallo case is a sop to the consciences of
white elites, who have no serious intention of redressing the
inequities that divide not only whites from blacks but also whites
from whites and, these days, blacks from blacks. Doing that
requires more than the much-touted but eerily anticlimactic
"movement" for racial justice sparked by the deadly bungling that
killed Amadou Diallo.
WOW what an incredible asshole!
i don't particularly care for Sleeper's comparisons with cases that simply aren't comparable. nor the idiotic comment about the demographics of violent crime as somehow not reflecting police practices that target the poor. i read another one at the salon site, author was shapiro. highly recomend it . it's right on the ball and it's about damn time people started talking about structural and institutionalized opression and domination of the poor.
what IS the point of rallying around this particular case with any amount of effort when indeed there are many other things that can and should be done? i'm not saying don't express outrage or demonstrate. but if that's all anyone does or if you think that this can be the basis for some sort of larger movement, we're in trouble. it might get people there, it might get them to donate money, but if you don't have the infrastructure of social movement practices then fuhgeddaboudit.
sleeper makes a strong sociological point when it comes to social movements: they need local resources, bases of social solidarity located in neighborhood, networks of reciprocal obligations, real live actual imperfect people doing and accomplishing, struggling and resisting for whatever they happen to think they need. like i've told y'all before, the neighborhood watch is the closest thing we have to police oversight. so i go there and gently raise the issue of making sure we *watch* the police, hoping to eventually establish an alternative as they had in the city where i used to live.
i forwarded an article about an impoverished disabled mother talking about the difference between social and intellectual capital. what do you think is going to be more important to her son? to my son? to the kids that run in and out of this house everyday who have all witnessed cops abusing people at some point in their lives. all of them, from 8 on up, have heard the stories about the cops and how they treat people in this neighborhood. my own kid saw me slammed up against a wall by one. and most recently, he's heard about how both me and another resident had the cops try to search our place when we called a report of an attempted intruder. what do you think is going to make a difference in their lives? the politics of the Spectacle on the TeeVee? or looking around them and seeing people struggling for change where they are, right here and right now? i just fail to understand what exactly is so ridiculous about sleeper's commetns above as a preference for how struggle might best proceed. it just seems sure as hell obvious to me that a show trial ain't the platform.
so, he's grinding his fave axe...whoopee! him and every other person writing for salan -- heck, writing for this list.