Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
>
> > How do you imagine reparations being "operationalized," as the social
> > scientists say?
> >
> > Doug
> *******
>
> Start with grassroots agitation to get Congressional hearings so the whole
> history can be laid out to the citizenry, lest we reproduce our amnesia.
Ian is thinking from the "right direction" here whether or not his proposed answer is correct or incorrect -- but the question was a very bad question, almost designed to foreclose useful _LBO-Talk_ discussion. It is a bad question from LBO because any discussion here is "from the outside," by its nature academic, while the question would only be appropriate "from the inside," as part of an internal discussion aimed at crafting a strategy.
This whole discussion has been carried out for the most part in complete isolation of what it "feels like" to be viewing the world from an activist organization (BRC) trying to work out a strategy. It is therefore insulting for obvious questions to be raised from the "outside" -- it suggests that those who, apparently after a lengthy internal discussion, have chosen this demand have given no thoght in the process to any of the juvenile questions being raised on this maillist.
One may operate _either_ from the racist assumption (an assumption which avoids facing the facts of U.S. left history) that independent black organizing ismillegitimate, _or_ from the assumption that such independence is essential to the future of "the" Left as a whole in the U.S. To build on the latter (the only legitimate) assumption requires rather different questions be raised tha those that have been featured in this discussion.
The BRC may well fail -- in which case it won't be either the first or the last major left project in the U.S. to fail (I've been engaged in a number of such projects: SDS, Peace & Freedom, RYM II, TNV, LRS, CISPES, the '88 Jackson campaign: They all eventually "failed," and I don't regret a one of them.) But if white leftists want to do more than sit in a chair by the side of the road and be a friend to men they would most usefully devote their intellectual energy and conversation first to understanding the considerations which have entered into this focus on "Reparatioms," on what the demand _means_, anyhow, to those who are raising it, then to exploring how they might organize in relation to it. (I wonder how many of the posts, despite Art's very emphatic statement to the contrary, still think we are talking about "reparations for slavery"?)
Again: Assume tbat some intelligent men and women have discussed this program at length and have already canvassed _all_ the obvious and many of the less obvious objections to it. Then pause and ask yourself why would you, at this point, be raising obvious questions.
Carrol