>
>> Yeah. If you went to an anti-war march full of middle-class hippies
>> and loudly declared it to be somehow lacking in authenticity due to
>> the absence of burly "working-class" types, you'd be treated as an
>> annoying pest, even a reactionary.
>
>
> I don't get this either. This wasn't someone going to the march and
> yelling at participants. It's someone writing about how to get more
> participants involved.
>
>
>> But if you instead attributed the lack of authenticity to the
>> absence of people of color, somehow you've put your finger on an
>> inexcusable failing of the organizers and weeks of workshopping would
>> be required to rectify the error.
>
>
> Let's take another example. If there'd been a little workshipping to
> rectify this kind of error during the Prop 8 vote in California things
> would very likely have turned out differently. Instead, you wound up
> with some misplaced scapegoating of blacks in California for the loss.
[Just to be clear, Doug didn't write the things you're responding to here, it was me.]
There's nothing wrong with giving white activists advice on how to attract and appeal to non-white activists - on the contrary, that sounds very useful. But the tone of the piece, at least as I perceive it, isn't really about just offering up some helpful advice, it's about blaming and shaming the Seattle organizers for the composition of the demos. And one gets the feeling that Catalyst probably does a lot of that, though I don't really know.
That opening quote, about how the people who showed up to the prison demo "didn't look like me" and therefore the whole affair is somehow undemocratic, is really a bit much. Sure, showing up at a meeting and seeing that nobody looks like you can be uncomfortable, and might even at times deter your participation. But I mean - really. The only time I've gone to jail in a demo was at a march in NYC about the Amadou Diallo case, where I was sitting at home reading a book one evening and heard the march outside and decided to join in. As it happened, the march was fairly racially mixed - but suppose it hadn't been. Imagine I'd written a post on Lbo-talk the next day saying "I went to check out the Diallo march, but everybody was black so I felt a bit uncomfortable and left." People may or may not have been able to muster any scraps sympathy for such a sentiment. But if I then went on to actually condemn the organizers for their failure to accommodate my delicate white feelings by presenting enough white faces to make me feel comfortable - I mean, talk about chutzpah.
SA