> I know I resolved to stop this, but HOW DO YOU
> CONFRONT RACISM? Does it have a home address?
It does. Social structures exist in time and space, embodied in our productive and non-productive wealth and ultimately in us, people. E.g.:
http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/seg.htm
Or here:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/articles/notequal.html
Or here:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
How do anybody confront any form of social oppression? First, they resist it individually, fighting against its most superficial manifestations. Then they fight it collectively and move to dismantle the deeper social structures that underpin it.
How did Black people resist and fight against slavery? How have Black people resisted and fought against the ensuing lack of civil and political rights? How are Black people resisting and fighting against their current specific social condition as Blacks? Don't Blacks, as a race, experience living and working conditions that distinguish them from the experience of Whites? Or should Blacks abandon their struggle against their specific social condition?
How about Latinos? Are they supposed to abandon their struggle against their specific forms of oppression, because the various forms in which their oppression manifests itself shifts historically -- yesterday it was their territorial dispossession, now it is their legal status, tomorrow their focus may be on something else?
If your point is that Blacks cannot liberate themselves without going beyond forms of oppression that are specific to them, that Blacks cannot be free by and for themselves, that Blacks can only be free as individuals through society -- i.e. through their association with others as individuals, Blacks and non-Blacks -- then you are not really saying anything that Marxists didn't know already.
But the concrete decision -- the where, when, and how -- for Blacks to go beyond the specific needs of their race is something that will be determined by Blacks, not even by Black radical intellectuals (as important as their role may be), but by the bulk of the race in political motion.
At this point, given the state of the world, telling Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asian, or Afro-Americans that they should dissolve their struggles as a race, internationally or in a particular national setting, and blend into the broader struggle for human (or broader national) emancipation, well, it's not bad propaganda, but it is counterproductive as an agitational device.
Again, what am I missing?