Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> White guys from small towns are the type of Americans who tend to be
> most overlooked by American leftists, most of whom prefer urban
> living.
Actually, re "overlooking," No. There is no way to organize in small towns. Some of us tried back in the late '60s to build something in McLean Illinois. It is a dinky little place with two blocks of fairly extreme poverty, it's only employer The Dixie Truck Stop. (It's on the old US 66, now I55.) But to organize you have to have something to DO -- and you need a varying minimal number of people in the "organization." In the 1960s Bloomington/Normal was a pretty small town (50,000 including student body at ISU, which had begun to grow in the mid-60s. There was activity in Bloomington because it had a 5% black population, including an extraordinary woman by the name of Beulah Thornton (later Kennedy), a factory worker with one year at ISU (where she had been the only black student at the time). She started a group outside the NAACP to do things the NAACP couldn't, I dropped by fairly casually, and was trapped as it were. But the point is, it would have been pointless for any national left organization to do anything with Bloomington at that time BUT "overlook" it, and were it not for the fact that B/N was beginning to grow rapidly then, it would have been pointless for any local radical to stay there were it possible for him/her to get work elsewhere. Even so, from 1970 to 9/11 we were merely banging our heads against the wall here. The area is no longer a small town, but there's still no reason for leftists elsewhere to pay any attention to us except as we organize locally and thereby merit attention. And it would be supremely idiotic for leftists to leave urban areas to organize in small towns. Even worse than the SWP sending its members into factories.
The way to radicalize small-town whites would be to organize around military bases or in the large cities where military pass through, not in the small towns they come from.
Carrol