> To continue thinking out loud, if the oppression of minorities has
> had to continue in much more covert ways, it is precisely because
> overt oppression is no longer acceptable, and that can be considered a
> victory of sorts. BUT... we don't have lynchings, we have a prison
> system that substitutes for it -- with the government's seal of
> approval. We don't have segregation in the schools, but we have an
> underfunded urban public school system that is largely attended only
> by minorities. We don't have slavery, just an ever-growing number of
> people competing for minimum wage jobs. You see? In some ways, the
> social-historical articulation of racism in the last twenty years has
> actually led to a situation where in order to fight racism, you must
> fight for the public/common good: you must fight for the rights of
> felons, for the legalization of drugs, for detox programs, for
> socialized health care, for a living wage, for high-quality public
> education, against the death penalty...etc.
A very good statement of the agenda we have on our plate, I think.
In the '70s, I belonged to a group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_a_New_Society) which set out to analyze the national and world system in such a way that the interconnections between many issues of these kinds could be made visible, and concrete action projects (nonviolent ones in the tradition of Gandhi, MLK, etc., we assumed) could be developed from them. (We were very much aware of the problem of "paralysis of analysis," but we believed that the traditional left analysis, based largely on Marxism, was significantly out-of-date in many respects.) We had a certain amount of success, and the anti-nuclear-power movement, etc., took off from our efforts. But this is a huge job, which still is largely incomplete.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax