[lbo-talk] more "who"

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Sun Nov 1 13:17:34 PST 2009


shag wrote:

heh. so [Michaels'] audience are people who would never support leftist causes anyway?

..............

I don't know about that.

What I do know however is that the 'Experts of Color' link Doug posted (<http://bit.ly/6w3NF> to the pdf for those who missed the thread's origin post) is a solid illustration of the concept of racial justice vs. social justice Preston Smith discussed with Doug in Dec of 2008:

<http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2008/08_12_04.mp3>

The gist, for those who missed it the first time around or who don't recall is that a significant element of the civil rights (now 'diversity') sector is much more concerned with ensuring space is made for minorities at the table as currently set than with anything resembling significant social change.

By this measure, the positions of Colin Powell and Condi Rice in the Bush administration (to name two very prominent examples) can be interpreted as racially just, even while those two note-worthies happily furthered the Dubya era's baby shambles imperial project.

In one of the Micheals related threads, Chuck Grimes commented that 'no one was fooled by the Bush admin's rainbow appointments.' This observation, which so smoothly meshes with standard left thinking on who is and isn't racist (with the implication being that those Bush-era crackers were only making token appointments) entirely missed the new thing right before our eyes: racially and gender diverse neo-conservatism. The Lebanese who made building-sized posters depicting Rice as a vampire during the IDF's 2006 invasion of their country recognized that she was an actual player, not an empty symbol.

And here we get to the heart of Reed's point as I see it: if you focus your politics on defeating racism, you're likely to miss or misinterpret the meaning of events such as the appointment of historically excluded people to various inner circles. You're also much more likely to believe that the knockabout everyday racism of people across the country (the inevitable stories about segregated proms, Walmart employees calling the cops on black men with credit cards and so on) is the state of the art.

But as I wrote in a previous post, it's possible for both the future and the past to co-exist -- for a black guy to command predator drone attacks on hapless Pakistani and Afghan villagers while, somewhere in the U.S., a flat head gets bent out of shape because he sees an 'interracial' couple.

.d.



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