On 2013-07-14, at 4:22 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Jul 14, 2013, at 4:01 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Michael Smith might want to reconsider his comment: "I find harping about racism (or, worse yet, 'structural racism') so tiresome and retro..."
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> I'm going to say this for like the 100th time, you can don hoodies and hold memorials and solidarity actions and it won't do a damn thing to change Florida law.
This discussion hasn't been about tactics. You're caricaturing, in quite an offensive manner, the behaviour of the many hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who have turned out in recent years to protest overt expressions of racism such as police shootings in black ghettoes, anti-hispanic legislation in Arizona and other states, and white vigilante actions against Muslim mosques and other institutions. These men and women almost universally did not wear hoodies nor did they, as you indelicately put it earlier, "jump up and down, pointing and screaming racist." Moreover, no one disagrees that deep reforms are needed in employment, housing, education, immigration and other state policies to effectively attack the social inequities which disproportionately affect these racial and ethnic minorities. We disagree, however, in that I don't see these demonstrations as a waste of time but, as history has repeatedly shown, an essential spur to legislative progress on all these fronts.
In any case, as I said, this discussion hasn't been about tactics. Put plainly, it's been over whether racism is still deeply embedded in American society or whether the issue has become "tiresome" (Michael Smith), "irrelevant" (Wojtek) and "way out of date" (your words).