Date: Wed, 16 Apr 97 3:41:34 EDT
From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: Postmodern Performance (Re: M-I: PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME FIVE)







		Mr. Henwood,



	Among people whose very humanity is called into question, it seems
to me that a degreee of separatism is necessary for creating a "safe
haven"  where dignity can be completely restored.  It also springs up
organically given a vast history of common experience.  Black separatism
is bogus when it tries to be an ethnic separatism.  America has always
been black and white, blacks are not exactly immigrants.  Black separatism
has a revolutionary fire precisely because it truly represents no ethnic
struggle, but a microcosm and distillation of capitalist oppression. Black
Americans are hated because they had to be, historically, in order to
justify their economic status.  Their African cultures were never the
issue.  Those cultures were disregarded, broken up and homogenized under
slavery.  Blacks could then become simply "persons other than we", by dint
merely of the way they looked, whose role in society was our capitalist
whim.  They could then become a model to dress in the propoganda of the
"bad worker" who proves to the good workers that something other than
power dictates social class.  While this is a common experience among the
oppressed, the purity and completeness of the oppression, and the
resultant stigma, demand a kind of unified resistance among those who
suffer it. 


	Black nationalism, as you correctly posit, is quite
anti-dialectical because it seeks to assert a bourgeois concept of ethnic
struggle over what is clearly an economically based phenomenon.  That's
why the Africana and Black muslim movements are filled with myth.  Of
course it's understandable since the alternative is embracing the both the
insurmountable-seeming class struggle and the struggle of people who just
"look different" and are punished for it. The temptation is to pick the
"looking different" struggle and tell yourself you'll get back to the
other. The temptation is not only justified by the fact that it cuts down
the workload, but also by the fact that movements are stigmatized when
represented by stigmatized people.  The question for socialists is how to
deal with the social stigma of being black.  Simple "integrationism" is
insufficient because it contains no positive assertion of the worth and
value of those who are black, *because* they are black, not simply because
they are fellow citizens. If we can put forward the right position on that
issue, we would be far ahead in the game. 




	peace







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