Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 19:57:20 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: RAHUL: CLUTCHING YOUR PEARLS


>a lot of West Indians and Africans think American blacks are
>inherently inferior.

Don't get me started, I'll tell everything I know.

I could transmit endless reams of eyewitness testimony as to these
conflicts.  Of course you are right.  However spicy my anecdotes
might be, however, perhaps I should not tell too many.  In my
spite of my own sometimes borderline remarks, I believe that
promoting ethnic hatred is bad karma, except of course against
French intellectuals (which has just been exacerbated by someone
who dared to compare William Blake to the Marquis de Sade).  Yes,
there are class and cultural differences that keep black Americans
farther away from Africans and West Indians than from whites in
many instances.  There is also a certain amount of xenophobia in
general among black Americans: suspicions against foreigners,
foreign-sounding names, potential takeovers of the USA by foreign
powers, etc.  It's sad, but it is a phenomenon not limited to only
one oppressed and psychically bruised group.

Someday I shall have to see Mississippi Masala again.  Perhaps I
was too innocent to detect the subtext you describe.  I never
stopped to ponder the motives of the filmmakers.

>Indians do have sex -- that's why there are so many of us.

I regret to say I lack personal experience in this department, but
I am more than willing to broaden my horizons.  Could you help to
arrange something?

>As long as I remain in my ivory tower, .... However, people are
>dying out there. If somebody does something to try to stop that,
>I have to give them credit, even if I think they're full of
>shit.

Is it possible that this very attitude is an ivory-tower one?
Perhaps your very tolerance and yes-buts are a luxury?  If you
recall, I never recommended sitting in judgment on people in a
tight spot, but I also warned against mindless cheerleading from a
safe distance, which may serve no other purpose other than
indulging your own sense of guilt and alienation.  If you have the
luxury of not having to walk in someone's shoes, don't you also
have the obligation to avoid thinking within their limitations?

>You espouse a certain purity that's very seductive.

I've never espoused any purity.  I don't come from the upper
middle class and I'm not an ultraleftist purist or whatever
political type you may be familiar with.  I don't think there is
anything deep or profound about acting expediently or making
necessary compromises.  Why?  Because circumstances will tell you
when you have to compromise.  But when there is nothing at stake
for you personally and you shack up with hoodlums when it's not
really necessary, then you are a dangerous adventurist criminal,
and I'm sick of that crap.

>As I approach the advanced age of 27

27?!  Youth is wasted on the young.

>I'm looking forward to a coffee-colored world someday.

What's the point of revolution without general copulation?
Night-time integration cannot be stopped.

>but I don't think Blake was quite sane himself.

You are quite mistaken.

>What I was getting at is that the mix of personal feeling and
>politics can be very powerful, when it's done correctly, and
>that both Blake and Cleaver partake of that power. In the same
>way, Einstein and Steven Hawking were both physicists. I'm
>surprised at your reaction, since it seems to go against your
>own oft-stated dictum of not judging art by its political
>content or implications.

You've completely lost me.

>I can't go along with you on considering the Panthers the
>highest stage of revolutionary struggle in the previous epoch

I am not committed to this position.  It's just a possible
example.  There may be much better ones in the USA, not to mention
Europe and the third world.  Though I am rather cynical  --
possibly much more cynical than you are! -- about much of the crap
that went down in the 1960s, including the Panthers, I do believe
the BP represents a new stage of organization, however flimsily
erected.

I don't see any signs out there that anyone is going to attempt to
do something similar on a more sophisticated level: in fact all I
see is regression.  The Black Panther Militia is essentially
fascist.  The right-wing wave that has swept the country has in
its own peculiar way swept over the black social formation.  Do
you know whom black Washington opinion-makers are holding up as a
role model as we speak?  Booker T. Washington.  I kid you not.

>if there's one phenomenon to study to understand what are the
>new organizational forms that will be possible, it's the
>Zapatistas.

I don't deny it.  How about the Workers Party in Brazil?  Given
the chaos of the post-Stalinist industrialized states in Eastern
Europe, one should keep a sharp eye out there too.  Perhaps I have
not lived up to my responsibilities to discuss political
strategies, but I bet others out there are far better equipped
than I to discuss the specifics.  I do think there is something
missing in people's general orientation, though, and some of my
hard-core activist friends who generally don't have time for
academic intellectual pursuits agree with me that we need to work
on reviving the public sphere by addressing this now crucial,
terrible, ripping contradiction between alienated labor and the
mysterious power of accumulated capital to produce.


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