> the war against structural racism.
The idea of making war on an abstraction always has baffled me; I had the same problem with the war on terror.
One rather thinks that the direction of the Occupy movement will be determined in large part by who shows up, and what exactly they're concerned with. Maybe 'structural racism' will be high on the list, and maybe it won't. My impression was that the Occupiers had some pretty concrete concerns. There's no reason why stop-and-frisk, for example, shouldn't be among them; many of the Occupiers have now seen what police power really amounts to at first hand.
The statistic that somebody cited earlier -- namely that 99% of the Occupiers are melanin-challenged -- doesn't agree with I've seen at the New York occupation. One hasn't done a count, of course, so can't say with any assurance that average Occupier is more or less brown than the average American. But melanin is not scarce.
I doubt that Obama-worship is actually contributing much to deterring POC from showing up -- to the extent that they are being deterred from showing up, a question which remains a question in my mind. If any deterrence is happening, it's a more subtle phenomenon than that. But on the other hand I doubt that it results from any structural racism on the part of the more palefaced Occupiers, and I seriously doubt that it would be reduced by any attempt at a painstaking affirmative- action policy on the part of the Occupiers who *are* showing up.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false.