The Racism of the Anti-War Movement

I watch with puzzlement as MoveOn and other liberal interest groups make Cindy Sheehan the central figure in what they hope will be a revitalized anti-war movement. Like everyone else, I have nothing but sympathy for someone who has lost a son. However, I have to question the shallowness of a movement based off of the concept that our children are dying over there for no good reason, so we need to bring them home ASAP.

Really? That's as deep as the critique goes? We shouldn't be over there, our kids are dying, so let's bounce? It just seems rather shallow and egocentric to say that the overarching reason for leaving the war is that our poor kids are dying. At least in mainstream media coverage, there is no sense of an overall analysis of the reasons we are in Iraq on the left -- or at the least, an acknowledgement of the suffering of Iraqi mothers and fathers along with American ones.

As far as I can tell (and given Howard Dean's punt on "Meet the Press" a couple of weeks ago when asked what the plan for Iraq should be: "We're waiting on the President's plan!"), there's no sustained critique of the Iraq debacle beyond (a) the President lied us into war (which he did) and (b) get our troops out now! To me, I think the lack of a credible alternative policy on the left says a lot about the impotency of the Democratic elite and the futility of many of the new liberal interest groups.

Why? Because a thoroughgoing critique of the Iraq debacle, to be effective, has to go much further than the mismanagement of the project. After all, if you are arguing mismanagement, then you're ceding the legitimacy of the occupation. And it's not legitimate. A real critique involves critiquing America's imperial project as it is being pursued in Iraq, and the real goals of the administration. Only when they embark on that analysis can the anti-war left expect to gain any traction with an American public clearly fatigued about the war. Critiquing the imperial project also helps frame the issue not just as, how do we get our boys out, but also as, what does America owe to the Iraqi people for fucking up their country? To which the answer should not be, six enduring bases and at least 5 more years of occupation.

In any case, Naomi Klein lays out a credible critique of the war project and what a real anti-war movement would look like in this In These Times piece. I don't need to re-invent her wheel, I co-sign her 100%.

Black rage is not the cause of black problems

For some reason, John McWhorter is suddenly getting a lot of shine again -- he's had op-eds appear in both the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last two weeks. And it's puzzling to me, because the things he has been saying are so bizarre ideologically and incorrect textually, that I find it hard to understand why the editors of either paper saw fit to publish his tripe and lend it any legitimacy whatsoever. The Times piece was so absurd as to be laughable, in its simplistic attempt to use John H. Johnson's passing as a platform for a call for black people to aspire to be like white people, whom he posited as normal.

However, the Post piece masquerades as scholarship and pretends rigor, so it deserves more extensive comment.

The first and most obvious flaw of his piece is to start out with a false premise, one to which he can then draw a faulty contrast to the Watts riots of 1965. He refers to "the polite sleeve-tugging and forms of nonviolent protest typical of the earlier civil rights generation." This is nothing short of fantastical. First of all, nonviolent direct action in the Deep South was born as a tactic in a region where Blacks suffered nothing less than state-sponsored terror, where Bull Connor famously had an armored tank for his local police department and anyone who participated in civil rights labored under the shadow of violent reprisal. The protests of the earlier civil rights era were borne of a strategy of shaming the federal government into extending equal protection to all its citizens and promoting human rights -- a strategy that not only had largely run its course by 1965, but had been shown to be wildly ineffective outside the South.

McWhorter can't understand the Watts riots because he misunderstands the civil rights movement. Yes, the NAACP had been struggling for years and had achieved stunning judicial victories. Yet they had not been able to get so much as an anti-lynching law passed until the people took to the streets and began to demand their human rights. Sure, in the civil rights marches, black frustration with American apartheid found a focus -- yet instead of puzzling out the lack of focus in urban riots, McWhorter chooses to make spurious assertions that black rage was somehow misplaced.

McWhorter puzzles over the idea that Black folks "had been dealing with the short end of the stick for almost 400 years. If black American history from the early 1600s to 2005 could be condensed to 24 hours, then these riots took place at 10 p.m. Why not before?"

We hadn't?

Gabriel?

Denmark Vesey?

Nat Turner?

The Maroon communities of South Carolina and Georgia?

The Seminole Wars?

Lacking this context, he is free to go off on a tangent where he does no less than assert that the inspiration for black rebellion was...white people!

That's so laughable I'll leave it where it is. Utter foolishness.

But then he flows on to more historical inaccuracy and nonsense, quoting Bayard Rustin in a speech to SNCC in 1963 about the need for an overall social reform plan, and then ignoring the Freedom Summer that they organized in 1964, their work in Lowndes County, Alabama, and the Meredith March against Fear in 1965 that registered over 5000 voters deep in the heart of Mississippi. He overstates the impact of welfare rights organizations...ignores the impact of black middle-class flight and corporate careerism on black communities...discounts the effects of de-industrialization...and refuses to even attempt to examine the underlying reasons that poor black people have rioted in this country, whether Watts in 1965, Miami in 1980, or LA in 1992.

I could go on...but idiocy makes me tired. More later.