It hasn't been my experience that there are more people of color associated with the Republicans than with the anarchist movement. As people have said in previous messages, who looks like an anarchist can be deceiving. There is an anarchist subculture called "travellers" who dress in black and wear the circle A which contains many upper middle class kids. Many people from the outside looking in probably think that they are all of what consists of anarchism. They aren't.
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> Are blacks and other people of color who do join anarchist and
> socialist groups merely tokens, in your opinion? Don't we have our
> own reasons to join them when we do join them? I happened to join a
> group called Solidarity, but I didn't do so to become a token,
> whatever you think of the presence of the people of color who do join
> such groups.
Are people of color who join leftie groups merely tokens? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. No black person says "I want to be a token", thus, the question is what were the people who recruited that person into the group thinking? Their intentions are what determines tokenism. I think Clarence Thomas was picked as a token, especially because he was replacing Thurgood Marshall, and I think the types of groups Thomas S. was talking about sometimes recruit people of color for the wrong reasons in the same manner.
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> Aren't there reasons _other_ than making you feel better about yourself
> and defending the legitimacy of your politics in others'
> eyes when you make efforts to make any institutions -- especially
> left-wing political institutions -- racially representative of the
> nation we live in?
Yes there are - the latter are good reasons to, the former are bad reasons to.
I hear all the time from working class white people that they are sick of hearing about reparations and so forth. Chomsky says - "The 'angry white man' has a lot to be angry about". Which is true - inflation-adjusted wages are below what they were thirty years ago so working class white men do have something to be angry about. Never mind things like reparations divided by race - stuff like social welfare is shot down because it is alluded to that "urban" "welfare queens" are draining money from the white working class. If stuff like social welfare can be shot down by inferring it benefits blacks to the detriment of whites, you can forget about reparations and stuff like that (forget about it in terms of it ever being a reality).
Blacks and whites and people of color are drawn together by struggling together for things that are in all of their common interest. Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein long ago once worked with Protestants across the street from a Catholic community to get a traffic light installed. This was the type of inter-group work that People's Democracy tried as well. In Adams's case, a Protestant reactionary from elsewhere was sent down saying that the traffic light was a papal plot and the cooperation was scuttled, leading him to believe that working class Protestant/Catholic cooperation was impossible, since if a small group of people couldn't cooperate on getting a traffic light installed, how could they run a country together? Well, it failed in that situation, but if blacks and whites and Asians don't go bowling together, what are the odds that they are going to have a revolution together? These groups are reflections of society - you can make a political group that is not a reflection of society, where you have 20% people of color in your group even though <1% of people of color buy into your groups ideas - this doesn't really change anything, it just makes you an oddball group. Or to restate, I think it's more important for progressives concerned about racial harmony to socialize with people of color, or work on minor common interests (traffic lights, whatever), than to join revolutionary organizations together. ----- Sometimes, though, such groups look like they almost relish and actively look for physical confrontations with the Klan, the police, and the like. That's a problem from the points of view of most people of color.
Well, fascist types and socialists have been fighting in the streets for over a century, it's a long noble tradition.
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