It's an effort to build alliances between blacks and other non-whites. Cooperation between blacks and Latinos, blacks and Asians, blacks and American Indians, blacks and Arab-Americans, etc. is far from given; it has to be struggled for. When there are not enough such efforts to build alliances, the sort of tragic and violent stand-offs between, for instance, blacks and Koreans as seen in some events that happened before and during the LA riots are likely to be recurrent. Notice that small shopkeepers in depressed neighborhoods are (sometimes recent) immigrants from Asia and the Middle East (especially Koreans and Lebanese, it seems). The sort of jobs that poor new immigrants often get (e.g., maids in hotels) are often the ones for which poor blacks compete. For all job competition, though, black support for civil rights, civil liberties, immigrant rights, etc. tends to be higher than white support for them, even (especially?) after 9.11. That's a ground for hope.
At 11:26 AM -0500 1/3/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>It's interesting that there are so many complaints about the
>anti-IMF movement in the US. being almost exclusively white. Since
>most of the victims of the IMF are "people of color," shouldn't
>there be more solidarity coming from Americans of color? Why isn't
>there?
The catastrophic war on crimes and drugs (racial profiling, police brutality, high levels of arrests, indictments, imprisonment, etc.), high rates of unemployment (especially of youths of color in inner cities), shortage of affordable housing, etc. are immediate problems that black activists and many other activists of color must work on in their own communities. The anti-globalization movement in the USA has yet to create strong links between the local, the national, and the international levels of analysis and activism.
The anti-globalization movement in the USA never fully disavowed protectionism, not a very appealing position to blacks in the USA who sympathize with the plights of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean islands, and Latin America, a downright obnoxious position for communities of color in the USA that have large numbers of more recent immigrants from nations that may become targets of US protectionism.
Some sections of the anti-globalization movement in the USA seem to live for confrontation with the police. Black activists, immigrant activists, etc. can't afford to do that. The police are gonna come down harder on you than on white activists. Activists of color have fewer financial resources to fight off charges in courts. There are already too many blacks and Latinos in prisons.
We can change the situation by disavowing protectionism and focusing on the demand to "Drop the Debt." -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>