On Oct 26, 2009, at 7:22 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> So the great evil of this 'manifesto' is that it was a level-headed
> look at the structural barriers for the involvement of people of
> color, namely:
A lot of this sort of agitation - this piece, Wise, Catalyst - focuses on racism on the left. It's as if these structural barriers are the fault of the organizers of Seattle and not American society. The emphasis is also always on race. There was a lot of similar anguish around the anti-Iraq war movement five or six years ago - people around the Brecht Forum and UFPJ tied themselves up in knots over the lack of participation by people of color (at least that's the way it was in NYC, don't know about elsewhere). Much of the attention, though, was trained on the organizers for somehow not being inclusive enough (and that, despite having a 50,000-watt radio station, WBAI, that identified itself as speaking precisely to this audience). But much of the problem is a vast degree of apathy and detachment among poorer people of color - and what interest and attachment there is isn't on issues of war and peace. "Not our issue," as the Martinez piece put it.
And I don't know what kind of conclusion we are to draw from this argument. That Seattle was "wrong"? That the antiwar movement was "wrong"?
Are the most oppressed and marginalized groups going to be a great source of political activism, really? Isn't part of being oppressed and marginalized being disengaged?
Doug