You keep belating this point. If I felt this was important, I would investigate it and respond to it if I found the data to be different. But I don't care. There are few black anarchists. Big deal. A lot of leftist groups have seemed and seem obsessed with recruiting blacks, in getting involved in the black community and so forth. This is not a big deal to me, and if some left-wing person says that blacks are underrepresented in some group I'm in, I don't really care. We're not like a job where we can turn black people away. Any black person who wants to join us and feed people for hours with Food not bombs, or talk about union stuff in the IWW, or volunteer at an anarchist bookstore is welcome to join us. Maybe there are anarchists who feel black people should be "recruited" to anarchism, but I'm not one of them. If they feel we are speaking for their needs, they'll come. If they don't, they won't. I'm more concerned if there are local black anarchists who would
feel uncomfortable that they're the only black anarchist than in recruiting blacks in general. In other words, the only time I'd think to recruit blacks would be to help make people of color already within a local organization more comfortable. And if they're Asian, or Mexican, or whatever, we'd have to recruit Asians or Mexicans for them if they felt uncomfortable. If other left-wing groups want to recruit people of color to them instead of to anarchism by saying they have significant "colored" representation and anarchists don't, more power to them.
While Yoshie thinks anarchists should be more concerned with anarchists stealing blacks from some other left-wing group into our groups, and spend time worrying about that, I'm more concerned that working class white people, e.g. the type of people I have regular contact with every day, are heading steadily further and further towards conservatism and the Republican party. Let's look at some recent polls: ------- http://www.ipsos-reid.com/media/dsp_displaypr_cdn.cfm?id_to_view=1622
Other key findings on Congressional party control preference:
* Republicans hold a lead among white registered voters (49%-40%), while trailing Democrats among African Americans (83%-3%) and Hispanic voters (58%-27%).
* White voters divide sharply by age, however, with whites under age 45 strongly Republican (54%-36%) and whites age 45 and older evenly divided (44%-44%). ----- So there are 5 white Republicans for every 4 white Democrats, and it gets more lopsided the younger one gets! Should anarchists be concerned about the rightward drift of whites? No, we should be, according to Yoshie, pulling part of that 83% of black Democrats into our part of the leftist camp.
Here's another article/poll from about a year ago:
Battles over abortion, gun control and other cultural values are dramatically reshaping the voting behavior of the American electorate, turning longtime working-class white Democrats into Republicans and moving many affluent whites from the GOP to the party of Roosevelt, according to political analysts and election data.
The transformation of voting patterns over the past three decades has weakened the long-standing link between income and voting among whites. Racial issues such as busing and affirmative action have pushed blue-collar voters into the GOP, at the same time that cultural issues, especially abortion rights, have built Democratic allegiance among white professionals. ---- I don't disbelieve this. What this is telling me is that the Republicans are more a party of the white working class than the Democrats - and the people are speaking with their votes and with their polling opinions. By the way, that Washington Post article is very good, I recommend reading the whole thing. The working class is going Republicans, and the upper class professionals are becoming Democrats. In the book "Left Hooks, Right Crosses" there is an article touching on this, which talks about how some rich suburb of pro-choice, gun control obsessed yuppies is becoming more Democratic. And my anarchist beliefs lead me to think gun control is very bad, and most anarchists I know agree. The NRA is standing up for us in this respect, as are the second amendment supporters.
I'd quote more from the Washington Post article to reiterate what I am saying, but you can read it yourselves. If Yoshie were an anarchist, I might listen to what she is saying, but she's not, and I don't like the idea of someone who doesn't care about anarchism and tell us what to do. They have their own agenda. If they want more blacks or people of color involved with something they should do that. I'm too busy talking to mostly white working class people about class issues to run around recruiting blacks and stealing them from other left-wing groups. I'm also too busy to be actively involved in helping East Timor and whatnot. Other people are, and bless them for it, but everybody can't be focused on everything. I think "recruiting" blacks kind of goes against the anarchist mentality. The anarchist mentality is to form groups with others in your community who share similar concerns and ideas, and then eventually federating with others. Thus, since the US is defacto
segregated, we're more likely to see affinity groups that are one color or another, and once in a while more mixed, together in a federation. It's representative. It's a reflection of society. You can have a group where blacks and whites are together and singing we are the world, but that is not a reflection of society. As I said before, if blacks and whites don't do non-controversial things like bowl together, or go to dinner together, or whatever, then the idea of them getting together and having a revolution together is absolutely ridiculous.
That you're trying to tell us what to do, and that we're not trying to tell you what to do, I think is an indication of who the zeitgeist is favoring. I'm not tying your arms from going out and organizing whites and people of color together - go do it, if you want. I can't be focused on stealing blacks from other progressive organizations, East Timor, organizing a union, workers at a factory in Haiti, press censorship in Russia blah blah blah. I can only focus on a handful of things. If you think people of color should be anarchists, and obviously you don't, you think they should be communists or marxists or whatever, then go out and do that. I have only so many balls to juggle. While this stupid sniping is going on, that not enough blacks are in one section of the left wing instead of another, who aren't mostly because anarchists don't feel a need to "recruit" blacks to their ideas like vanguard groups or the Democrats and for other reasons pertaining to the federal st
ructure of anarchist communities, the working class of the United States is barreling towards conservativism, the Republicans etc. as those polls and articles I posted show. So you can worry about which part of the left blacks and people of color are in, I'll focus on that, OK?
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