Responses to my post are all detached from the actual conditions of mobilizing resistance to concrete issues. If you don't accept, at the level of mobilizing resistance, the slogan of "fight racism," the Tim Wises will win the struggle.
On Equality:
"The main idea of Rousseauian socialism is, obviously, equality. Equality is a many-sided notion, but within this tradition it means the renunciation of the super?uous, from luxury to the cultivation of the self, from agonistic competition (resulting in excellence) to the enjoyment of high art divorced from the needs of the community. The Greek word for equality, homonoia, also means etymologically 'being of one mind'. The Rousseauian community is frugal, musical and martial. It is hostile to individuation and text.13 It is also hostile to opinion. Opinion is an aspect of sociability in bourgeois society, while being the traditional enemy of philosophy, the counterpart of the quest for truth. The empty variety of individual opinions is reducible to a mind bent to the service of powerful interests, an expression of the self which is neither a result of an unbiased, dispassionate contemplation of reality (nature) nor an authentic outward sign of inner feeling. The competition of diverse opinions is not even a competition of egos for their own sake, merely a competition for quick adaptation to the demands of power with the aim of advancement: an adaptation without a true belief in the excellence of the opinion assumed.14 Bourgeois sociability is false, the people - restored to its natural status - is (or was) authentic. 'True feeling' as the criterion of adequate elementary morality is reminiscent of the Calvinistic idea of 'justifying faith' in Rousseau's Geneva.15
"Equality, thus, is opposed not only to hierarchy, but to variety or diversity as well. The expression 'chattering classes' was invented much later by Don Juan Donoso Cortés, but Rousseau was certainly opposed to Öffentlichkeit qua 'talking shop'. Opinion as instrument is a travesty of any honourable intellectual endeavour. The same would go, I am afraid, for any 'freedom of expression' conducive to a frivolous parataxis of competing egotisms. Rousseauian socialism is moralistic, not historicist. Lukács said that nature becomes landscape when one looks at it as it were from outside, when one is separated from it. For Rousseau and the Rousseauians, 'the people' is nature not landscape; it is not considered from afar. Solidarity, pity, sympathy have ordained closeness. Propinquity enjoins a modesty of political aims. The emancipation of the people does not mean the abolition of the people (as in Marx the emancipation of the proletariat means - decisively - the self-abolition of the proletariat). It means the abolition of aristocracy and clergy; basically, it is not the abolition of 'class' but the abolition of 'caste' or 'estate', whereby the Third Estate - the commoners - become The Nation.
"THE ACTUALLY-EXISTING WORKING CLASS (AND BOURGEOISIE)
"Why (and how) could modern socialists mistake the abolition of caste for the abolition of class? There are several reasons."
See Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class
http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm
It is simply impossible to use the slogan "Equality" in actual practice; the slogan "Fight Racism" can be so focused in practice that all the issues raised in this thread can, in actual practice, be avoided.
Carrol