Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 10:21:52 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: RAHUL: CLUTCHING YOUR PEARLS


Rahul, I agree with your perceptive remarks about the "n" word.  I
am just curious why you find "Mississippi Masala" (or was that
"Virginia Vandaloo"?) execrable.  I thought it was a great film,
but obviously I have missed something.

As for black people being as bigoted as anyone else, that is
regrettably the case, but, ironically, that bigotry seems to be
addressed more toward other minorities than toward whites.  When I
lived in Baltimore, I was startled to hear blacks constantly refer
to all oriental persons as "chinks" in casual conversation.  Later
I found out this was common in several cities, though I never
heard it in Buffalo, possibly because one never saw any outside of
the university.  My ex from Brooklyn told me this was a common
expression there ("let's go the chinks for dinner"), and she is no
bigot.

Then we could move on to black anti-Semitism, which Trotskyist New
York Jews do their best to cover up.  In fairness, however, nobody
ever talks about the strain of black philo-Semitism that is not
uncommon among older generations, but not among the hiphop
generation, for which we owe a debt to Public Enemy and other
inspirational role models.

But worst of all is black American hatred toward West Indians and
Africans.  Nothing can match a nasty confrontation between an
African and an Afro-American.  Skin color engenders zero
commonality, not least of all because "they're taking our jobs."

Of course you all knew all this, didn't you?

As for the black church, it seems to me you have confused the
issue.  If I were going to stage a cultural event here and
associate it with some political or fundraising organizing drive,
I would probably have to make it a rap concert, if I wanted to
reach the young.  If I wanted to ever again involve myself in any
other local action here, I would have to go to churches.  That is
naked pragmatism.  Nothing wrong with that, but what does
pragmatic compromise have to do with the intrinsic value of
anything?  As Gertrude Stein said, shit is shit is shit is shit.
Or does your cosmology dictate that all of social phenomena are to
be judged in terms of their instrumental organizing value to your
vanguard ambitions?  This is of course the way the left thinks,
which is why I shun them.

As for schizophrenia, I'm not sure what you mean, not knowing much
about contemporary Ghandiism.  I haven't seen much of this
ambivalence.  I've seen a range of attitudes from the rare
militant atheism to spending one's every waking moment in church.
There are many many people whose church membership exists for
purely social reasons, to be socially included, which is not much
different from how other minority groups function.  There are many
Bible believers who hate preachers because they are crooks and
phonies, and prefer to read the Bible at home.  There are others
who never found a church they liked, either because they didn't
want to be manipulated by the pastors or be subject to the
cattiness of the members.  Then there are devoted churchgoers who
search for their mates _outside_ of church because they can't
stand church people of the opposite sex.  Is this ambivalence?
You tell me.

About the Black Panthers: look, because I think it's necessary to
study them, it doesn't mean I have to love them.  I think the
leaders were knuckleheads.  Please don't bring up Eldridge
Cleaver: he was a psychopath.  Please don't compare me to him, or
worse, compare William Blake to him.  Are you insane?

As for SOUL ON ICE, a lot of stupid well-meaning whites (what
other kind is there?) were taken in by this book, but a lot of
blacks were horrified and thought Cleaver was a sicko.  Cleaver
fooled naive whites because he was so articulate and intelligent
for someone of his background, and they were so thrilled he could
walk upright that was enough for them.

One must study the Panthers for other reasons.  First and
foremost, it was a grassroots movement that attracted a whole lot
of ordinary, non-adventurist, non-psycho people in the rank and
file.  If the leaders were as sincere, level-headed, and
intelligent as the followers, maybe the organization wouldn't have
been destroyed so easily.  Given the characters who ran the
organization, destroying it was a piece of cake.  A number of
decent people lost their lives because of the police.  The
Panthers' influence seems to have been extensive, and they
represented a new stage in community-based organization.  Their
Achilles heel was, to oversimplify, their vanguardism, while their
real strength was their grassroots base.  Being socialists of a
sort, they were a new stage in socialist organization, something
that could not be predicted within the classical Marxist-Leninist
vanguard framework, although sadly some of that same thinking was
embedded in that movement, i.e. the debased "third-worldist" and
Maoist form of Marxism, i.e. the low-rent kind.

So the Panthers should be studied and studied very critically, far
more critically than the limited self-criticism of leaders who
have written their autobiographies or otherwise gone out on the
lecture and Bar-B-Q circuit.

The point is to study the highest stage that class struggle
reached in the previous epoch of revolutionary upsurge, i.e. the
1960s, and learn what can be learned from that experience.   Never
again in the USA will any of these Marxist-Leninst parties ever
play a decisive political role.  The next form of political
organization will spring up overnight.  The task is to look around
at the gathering forces and study both what is there and is not
there and to find that fulcrum of social transformation, which is
not to be found by tailing after the first two-bit charlatan that
tries to stick his dick in your mouth.


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