It's up to anarchists to figure out if it is wrong or racist or if it is a problem at all. As a socialist currently residing in the USA, I think socialists should do better than the US military, corporations, the Bretton Woods institutions, etc. If I were an anarchist, I would think that anarchists should do better than the US military, corporations, the Bretton Woods institutions, etc. also.
I've found the following essay by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin on the subject, which argues that it's a problem that the anarchist movement is "overwhelmingly white" and looks like a "white rights" movement:
***** Anarchism and the Black Revolution Lorenzo Komboa Ervin
...The Anarchist movement, which is overwhelmingly white, must start to understand that they need to do propaganda work among the Black and other oppressed community, and they need to make it possible for non-white Anarchists to organize in their communities by providing them with technical resources (printing of zines, video and audio cassette production, etc.) and assisting with financial resources.
One reason there are so few Black Anarchists is because the movement provides no means to reach people of color, win them over to Anarchism -- and help them organize themselves. This must change if we want the social revolution to take place in America, and if we want North American Anarchism to be more than "white rights" movement.
The type of organization needed must be a "mass" organization working to unite all workers in common class struggle, but must be able to recognize the duty to support and adopt the special demands of the Black and other non-white peoples as those of the entire working class. It must challenge white supremacy on a daily basis, it must refute racist philosophy and propaganda, and must counter racist mobilization and attacks, with armed self-defense and street fighting, when necessary. The objective of such a mass movement is to win the white working class over to an anti-white supremacy, class-conscious position; to unite the-entire-working class; and to directly confront and overthrow the Capitalist state, and its rulers. The cooperation of and solidarity of all workers is essential for full Social revolution, not just its privileged white sector.
For instance, an existing organization like Anti-Racist Action, if adopting such politics as an Anarchist group, should be given a higher priority by our movement. Every city and town should have ARA-type collectives, and every existing Anarchist federation should have internal working groups that do work around racism and police brutality. In fact, the type of group that I am talking about would be a federation itself to coordinate struggles on the national and maybe even international level.
This would be a revolutionary movement, not content to sit around and read books, elect a few Black politicians or "friends of Labor" to Congress or the State Legislature, write protest letters, circulate petitions, or other such tame tactics. It would take the examples of the early radical labor movements like the IWW, as well as the Civil rights movement of the 1960s, to show that only direct action tactics of confrontation and militant protest will yield any results at all. It would also have the example of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion to show that people will revolt, but there need to be powerful allies extending material aid and resistance info, and an existing mass movement to take it to the next step and spread the insurrection.
The Anarchists must recognize this and help build a militant anti-racist group, which would be both a support group for the Black revolution and a mass-organizing center to unite the class. It is very important to wrest the mass influence of the racial equality movement out of the hands of the left-liberal Democratic wing of the ruling class. The left liberals may talk a good fight, but as long as they are not for overthrowing Capitalism and smashing the state, they will betray and sabotage the entire struggle against racism. The strategy of the left-liberals is to deflect class-consciousness into strictly race consciousness. They refuse to appeal on the basis of class material interests to the U.S. working and middle classes to support Black rights, and as a result allow the right-wing to capitalize unopposed on the latent racist feeling among whites, as well as on their economic insecurity. The kind of movement I am proposing will step in the breach and attack white supremacy, and dismantle the very threads of what holds Capitalism together. Without the mass white consensus to the rule of the American state, and the system of white skin privilege, Capitalism could not go on into the next century!...
<http://www.tao.ca/~lemming/abr/abr1.htm> *****
I don't think Anti-Racist Action, which is also "overwhelmingly white," is an answer, though. The dearth of black anarchists and anarchists of color in general has causes deeper than lack of propaganda work among black and other oppressed communities and of technical and financial assistance for the few non-white anarchists there are.
At 3:43 PM -0800 12/29/02, Thomas Seay wrote:
>Does the fact that the Democrats or the Republicans for that matter
>have black members make them "right"?
Doesn't make them "right" but it makes them stronger than otherwise, and they know it.
At 3:43 PM -0800 12/29/02, Thomas Seay wrote:
>Back in my leninist days (a long long time ago) I belonged to the
>Communist Workers Party which was BY FAR more racially heterogeneous
>than any of the existing left parties in the USA. What did that
>mean? Did it mean we we had the correct "line"?
It's possible that the CWP did have a strength (social or ideological or whatever) that other left parties did not possess. Worth analyzing, in my opinion.
At 3:43 PM -0800 12/29/02, Thomas Seay wrote:
>Should people have just automatically signed up with us because we
>had large numbers of blacks, hispanics and asians? Is that the
>criterion?
That's not the only criterion, but one of the important criteria. _If_ other things were equal, it would be the decisive criterion. I wouldn't join an all-white or all-male movement, even if their "line" on racism or sexism were correct, nor would most people of color or women.
At 3:43 PM -0800 12/29/02, Thomas Seay wrote:
>It was just tokenism, which is a rabid form of racism on the Left
>(and, in the case of Republicans, the Right).
It is obvious, however, that you can't defeat tokenism by making your movement "overwhelmingly white." The answer is to do better than tokenism. Why support affirmative action if you don't practice it? -- Yoshie
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