Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 11:29:28 -0800
From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: IDENTITY POLITICS AGAIN


Don't be so convinced that they are naive (response to Ralph's post below).
 The absolute suspension of reason from the WHITE LEFT when it comes to
analyzing Black leaders and spokespeople leaves African-Americans
contained, mystified and sometimes terrorized by them, without any support.
 

Sure, there is criticism of Farrakhan for his anti-semitism.  Not enough,
but some.  Though little criticism of his agenda for ghetto revival: women
forced into submission, total rollback of govt assistance, stores based on
super-exploitation, and of course mysticism about social life--all the
better for enlisting self-exploitation among the people in bow ties we have
all had the oppty to meet. 

The first concentration camps Farrakhan will help build or rather perfect
are the ghettos into which minorities, primarily African-Americans, have
been forced to live.  

This is a failure of solidarity right here in the US.  And that isolation
will only leave African-Americans with little other option than to identify
with these Black leaders (the best analysis of these leaders I believe
comes from Adolph Reed, Jr). 

But I don't think white lefties are naive about Black leaders.  This way
they don't have to deal with African-Americans, forcibly ghettoized,
despised by many and now publically humiliated by the whole 
Murray/Herrnstein fuckery.    

All the lefties have to do is listen to the opinion of African-Americans as
crystallized for them by some total demagogue.  Here is a violence of
abstraction (or representation) to choke and die on. 

I stopped listening to the local progressive radio station KPFA because not
leaving African-Americans alone, it kept featuring African Liberation
Weekend, which sometimes bordered on the insane, e.g. Frances Cress
Welsing's analysis of the white fear of genetic annihilation as the basis
of modern history.  This on the progressive radio station!  So low do the
demands of rationality drop when it comes to discussion allowed by WHITE
LEFTIES on and by the African-American community!  

White lefties   support these leaders, while they privately scoff at the
quality of that same leadership, knowing full well that, no matter how
radical they sound, they are doing their damndest to prevent another
explosion in name of a grand strategy "in our own interest" or of spiritual
rehabilitation.

Naive radicals?  A contradiction in terms, Ralph.   What was it James
Baldwin said:  someone who continues to act innocent, long after that time
is gone, becomes demonic.  

Hey, Marxists, if we are smart enough to know that the economy isn't about 
allocating scarce resources to maximize that metaphysical entity of
utility, most of us can figure out that African-Americans are often
contained and suppressed by their leaders and that they must be fought off
along with Rush Limbaugh and other grotesqueries, e.g., Bill Clinton.   

ps will someone please respond to my posts about countertendencies and the
new mercantalism? 

pps I read the first section of Robert Guttmann's book How Credit Money
Shapes the Economy.  For all you NON-ECONOMISTS out there (like me), this
is a wonderful book, a good quick critique of neo-classical economics, a
very clear description of the role of money both in bourgeois economics and
in reality, and an excellent survey of the crisis we are in.  This is only
the first section, but it is clear, and accessible to all of us. A real
contribution to demystification.       

>.  And Richard Wright warned
>his naive white radical friends repeatedly: "Negroes can be
>fascists too."
>
good nite,
Rakesh



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