So, some points. I don't know where the term `anti-racism' comes from. I never heard anyone use this term in the past. Personally I wouldn't use the term now, because I don't know what means or who it points to.
So, an honest question who are these anti-racists? Give me some names that I might recognize these evil anti-Marxists. I've never been to an anti-racist rally for example.
Whatever it is at least Reed gives a few more general distinctions between the present and the past:
``The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution...
...Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement”''
Since I have a living memory of these struggles either in the news mostly at the time, and in the street on some occasions, that smoothing effect is palpable. The media productions definitely do wash out the fear, hatred, violence, and the sort of nauseating feelings or sometimes frantic joy in the cool down phase that went with all that. I've never seen anything that evokes or addresses that very concrete part. Poverty was also palpable, concrete easily seen. That is much less so now. Even with greater inequality, somehow the `visible aspect is now more hidden. I am not sure how to make that visible. I think the best potential is within the immigrant labor movements.
I want to get to a point that Reed didn't make and should be underlined. (I can't remember if I posted this before or not.) Much of the early phase of the civil rights struggle was not only targeted and specific, it was planned out by lawyers with national organizations like the NAACP in particular. What they did was take the legal concept of separate is inherently unequal, and choose targets in public accommodations, public facilities that were legally segregated. The national level organizations then chose states and selected local groups. Then they brought in a big name leader like King, and a team would organize a specific action. The point was to draw the state law into federal court, and force the state laws to be over turned. The other point of course was to keep the struggle in the public mind. The latter was not directed so much at the public as in `tolerance' or `anti-bigotry' mode. It was more directed to expose the political establishment as hypocrites and do nothings, even in the face of their own laws.
At the time of the civil rights act, I thought you know, this shouldn't even be necessary if the bastards followed existing law. Equal protection means equal protection. Due process means due process. I know this sounds like heresy. But that's what I thought at the time. I later changed my mind because the act provided new ways and means to enforcement and an administrative arm of government (OCR, etc) to work with. If the state gives you some more tools, who should turn them down?
At the end of the article, I am still not sure who Reed is addressing. I have to suppose a `diverse bourgeoisie' who wants to believe we are passed all that. But who here on LBO believes we are passed anything? Just exactly who here was fooled by the rainbow coalition Bush cabinet?
So, I keep asking myself, why belabor this obvious and not very relevant point to the people who actually compose LBO? It's beginning to sound a lot like a lecture from party headquarters by our commissars. And who the fuck are they by the way? God damned well place bourgeoisie academics their own damned selves.
The more I read this shit over and over, the more it pisses me off. You know, since when have you scribblers in the high art of class righteousness done shit for me? You asked for my money, and I gave it. Now you insult me this fucking shit, over and over? Kiss my ass. And by the way, what's with putting the black guy out in front?
Chuck Grimes