> When blacks truly riot violently on their own as in Cincinnati, white
> anarchists, many of whom relish the mystique of street battles with
> the police, are nowhere to be found in the riot.
Actually, this isn't exactly true. Before I knew much about anarchism, my main contact with anti-capitalist culture was, as Chuck0 has mentioned, through the US punk scene. When the LA Riots happened, the long-running leftist punk journal, Maximum Rock-n-Roll, carried an issue of photosfrom the riots, and actually did document scenes of white, crusty punk rioters in the thick of it, ripping up cars and such (kind of funny in retrospect, and it did reek of the kind of tokenism justly assailed on the list recently). The Cincinnati riots also did prompt a fast mobilization by the mostly white ARA of the area.
Yes, the anarchist movement in the US is mostly anglo, as is most of the anti-corporate globalization movement. The insinuations that this stems from something instrinsically racist in left-libertarian thought are, however, absurd. Historically, as even you have conceded, the anarchist movement developed most fully in Latin nations - Spain, Italy, Mexico, on the periphery of white European capitalism. In these peripheral areas where anarchism developed, the peoples were regarded as "swarthy" or Mediterranean and just downright inferior by the eugenics-influenced whites of the time. The well-known anarchist figures from that era - Sacco and Vanzetti, Ricardo Flores Magon, Praxedis G Guerrero, Enrique Magon, buttressed the commonly held idea that anarchism was an "immigrant's" philosophy, a dangerous foreigner idea that threatened Americanism.
Fast forward to today, and despite thriving anarchist movements in other parts of the world, represented by groups such as Nigeria's Awareness League (see Sam Mbah's African Anarchism, See Sharp Press), or Cuban anarchists in exile (see Cuban Anarchism, also See Sharp Press), and esp. in S. America (interview with prominent Argentinean anarchist theorist Osvaldo Bayer at http://flag.blackened.net/ias/10bayer.htm )
In any event, there are a couple of good resources for anarchism as it relates to anti-racist struggles, esp. at the Anarchist People of Color page: http://www.illegalvoices.org/apoc/ , the RACE page http://passionbomb.com/race/ You can find plentymore anok self-criticism there.
On the other hand, plenty of African-Americans can be seen in the Farrakhan-led NOI. That doesn't make it right. And if tomorrow every African-American joined a Maoist group, that wouldn't make Maoism right, either.
> Folks in the black bloc appear to show up at demos mainly populated
> by others who don't share their ideology and use the crowds as cover
> for their vandalizing, maneuvering themselves so they won't
> (hopefully) get arrested, leaving the crowds to fend for themselves
> when the police riot. It's the non-anarchist crowds who are left
> holding the bag. The boy who was killed in Genoa, Carlo Giuliani,
> was not a member of the black bloc.
What you say is true (I share this criticism of black blocs, that they often parasitically use the mass of the protest as a springboard for their own unaccountable activites) - except for the absurd insinuation that black blocs caused Guiliani's death. Guiliani was killed by violent Italian cops, not black boc'ers.
Brian
--
"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." - Friedrich Nietzsche