On Wed, 28 Sep 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
> The civil rights movement was about repealing Jim Crow laws and
> achieving voting and other civil rights for black Americans. It had very
> specific targets.
I'm totally on Adolph's side about political action needing a specific target. And that "anti-racism" doesn't usually present one. And that on top of that, has other serious downsides.
But I wonder if it's possible to ask a technical, focussed question rather than just being for or against Adolph. I don't question that his argument is generally true. But I question that it's universally true, which is how he presents it in that article you have posted: show me one case.
Ok, here's a case -- I think. I eagerly await his refutation.
The case: police treatment of civilians in Bed-Stuy. This was recently in the news because a police officer wired himself and recorded all his colleagues and the recordings got posted on the Village Voice website, where you can still listen to them. They're kind of boring, to be honest. The summaries inform you with much less time and effort. And the main finding isn't at all a surprise (except perhaps in its intensity): that the police are consumed with juking their stats. What they want is high statistics of police doing stuff, but low statistics of arrests, because higher arrests mean crime is rising.
What results from this? Lots of stop and frisks.
What's interesting about Bed Stuy is that it's very recently become a transitional neighborhood. I think the white population is now around 30%.
However, as you would imagine, these stop and frisks that the police are so pushed to make aren't equally distributed among white and blacks. It's almost entirely blacks who are getting stop and frisked.
Now, that seems like a specific target, a policy a neighborhood activist would like to change. And we all know this is an infuriating and central issue among the populace, and correspondingly highlighted by many local black activists.
Isn't this, then, a counter-example? It's a policy that touches people's lives a lot; the mechanism lies entirely in the attitudes of state agents; and you can measure what you want to change.
I'm sure Adolph has run into this example before. Does anyone know his answer?
Michael