I agree with the arguments being made by Art and Carrol. It is the failure of a still too-White, too-male too-straight left to build bridges across those boundaries of privilege that restrains effots to put together a mass movement for social and economic justice. This is also the argument of cross-boundary activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and the late Audrey Lourde.
"The real act of discovery lies not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes"
--Audrey Lourde
Bernice Johnson Reagon has discussed the practical problems of coalition work in terms of risk and discomfort. She built a metaphor around her problems breathing due to being at a high altitude for the first time at a 1981 meeting of women in Yosemite National Forest:
"You got one group of people who are in strain--and the group of people who are feeling fine are trying to figure out why you are staggering around, and that's what this workshop [on coalition politics] is about this morning."
"I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I'm gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you're really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don't, you're not really doing no coalescing."
--Bernice Johnson Reagon
= = = = = = = = -Chip Berlet
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 7:34 PM Subject: Leftists (white) and Black Liberation, was Re: Civil Rights
>
>
> Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:
> >
> > That's exactly why I retracted my counter-insult. Listen to the guy, he's
> > angry as hell but he's also telling us clearly why, if you care to read
> > between the epithets. He's blaming the white left of having auto-destructed
> > by deserting the blacks.
>
> Those from an SWP background dispute this hotly, but I have always
> argued that (regardless of one's estimation of the Panthers) the
> anti-war movement's failure to take a stand against the repression of
> the Panthers in the fall of 1969 marked the beginning of the death of
> the '60s left. The end of that slow death was the failure of the ERA --
> a failure which in part at least reflected the switch in the women's
> movement from militant tactics to "sensible lobbying," which necessarily
> included a de facto betrayal of the black movement.
>
> Around November 20 1969, at a fairly large meeting of the Moratorium
> here at ISU, Jan, I and a couple SDS students urged the local moratorium
> to take a stand against the ongoing repression of the Panthers; we were
> defeated rather overwhelmingly. (It would confuse the focus on the war
> we were told, and it might turn off some people who otherwise would
> support us. Hah!) Two weeks later Fred Hampton was dead, murdered by
> Cook County and Chicago Police. At the large Moratorium rally in San
> Francisco on November 15, David Hillyer of the Panthers was booed loudly
> by a largely white audience when he declared the right of blacks to
> self-defense. Things were, I believe, slightly better in Los Angeles,
> probably because of the strength of ATM -- the Chicano Moratorium, but I
> don't know any of the details.
>
> The limit of CIO organizing in the '30s was the limit of its willingness
> to take a stand against racism and to organize black workers. Some black
> workers in Memphis (I only know the details of this hazily) had on their
> own organized a local of the Tobacco workers (not the name, which I
> don't remember), were having considerable success, and were beginning to
> organize white workers. The national union took over the local and
> stopped the the racial mixing. On this list and elsewhere one runs into
> endless metaphysical quibbling about whether a "black community" exists,
> and various triumphalist statements are made about large black support
> for the death penalty, for Democrats, etc. with sneering questions about
> who speaks for the black community. Etc. ETc. Etc. Etc.
>
> I haven't been following this thread closely, and Art does seem a bit
> overwrought this time on this particular mini-topic -- but yes the
> general point is wholly correct that over and over again "the white left
> [has] auto-destructed by deserting the blacks."
>
> Carrol