JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
>
> There's something wrong with the way this discussion is going, then. The
> movements of the 60s were instigated by the black struggle first. Women's
> liberation came directly and documentably out of the Civil Rights Movement
> and specifically black-led SNCC, just as the Women's Rights Movement of the
> 19th c sprang from the anti-slavery struggle. If we can't understand this is
> the wellspring then we (Euroamericans and others) won't see why we not only
> should want, but desperately need the leadership and contributions of the
> African-American movement. The question is can white folks follow black
> leadership, and I don't mean by joining the organizations but by shutting up
> and listening for a while.
This is central -- and should be the point of _departure_, the taken-for-granted base, of all discussion of building a left in the United States.
In the '60s, a _huge_ majority of those whites who were in one way or another at one level or another at the forefront of various movements (and most specifically the anti-war movement) had been first radicalized by the black movement. Were it not for two local black people and two SNCC workers from Mississippi who came up here on a fund-raising drive, I would probably never have become involved in politics. I think there are thousands of white radicals from the '60s who could say the same.
No black movement, no anti-war movement worth a damn.
Incidentally -- anti-war movements never _stop_ a war that has begun; they limit its damage, including its expansion, and they involve people in political action, hence keeping alive a radical current. (As Justin has pointed out, the November (1969) Moratorium stopped a planned use of nuclear weapons against Chinese installations in North Vietnam. Even earlier than that, I think the growth of the movement in '67 and '69 contributed towards preventing war on China. There were many in the Pentagon who urged such a course.
Not so incidentally. I imagine the people in Washington do read a little history -- and some of them must know that the current anti-war movement is orders of magnitude greater than was the anti-war movement as late as 1967. It is really threatening already, as weak as it may seem to the current equivalent of schoolboys escaped from a Jesuit college.
Carrol
> 'People of Color' is a phrase that obscures the specific history of slavery
> in the Americas, so if we're going to use it we should understand that it has
> this weakness, although it has other strengths.
>
> Jenny Brown