Some years ago, I attended an Anti-Racist Action convention in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is the home of Ohio State University and at least a third of the city’s population is Black, but there were hardly any other Black people in attendance, except one guy who called himself a “Black skinhead,” a middle aged Black woman and a few other people of color, maybe 20 in all. It was clear to me that there had been no attempt to bring in folks from the Black communities in Columbus and other Ohio communities with substantial Black populations like Cleveland or Cincinnati. They did not even attempt to bring Black students off the OSU university campus.

Thus, you had this weird spectacle of hundreds of white people in a huge auditorium arguing and giving sanctimonious speeches about racism, from which most Blacks/POC were excluded. In attendance was every “alphabet soup” leftist sect you can (or can’t) think of: SWP, ISO, IWW, SL, SLP, Love and Rage and so on, under the banner of Anti-Racist Action.

At some point during the Plenary Session, to which I was hurriedly added, while an older Black woman was speaking about her experiences with racism, a white radical jumped out of the crowd, rushed up to one of the microphones and blurted out: “you shut up, we know what racism is!”

[...]

It is interesting that almost none of the white people in attendance in the conference contradicted the disrupters or defended the Black woman’s right to speak. I can only remember myself and the other people of color shouting them down, along with one white guy, Michael Novick, who was on stage with us. We afterwards became friends, but I recall coming away with a very bitter feeling overall. The next day, I pulled all the people of color together to issue a statement de-nouncing the incident, and calling for them to do the same. Because they were caught off-guard, the leaders of the conference agreed with our criticisms at the meeting, but then some weeks later they barred me from all subsequent ARA meetings for my “racial disruption.”

So when the OWS solidarity group, Occupy Memphis, was created in Memphis, Tennessee, myself and my wife, JoNina, rushed over to Overton Park in Midtown to attend the meeting. The first thing we noticed was that this park was in an upper middle class community, mostly white, and when we got to the canopy where the meeting was being held and strode in, ready to join the fight, we were literally shocked into silence. This meeting was an all-white affair of 100 white activists; ourselves and one other Black guy, who seemed to be an employee of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, and was taking pictures of the meeting, were the only peoples of color at the event. We felt like we had been kicked in the stomach, felt sickened and angered! Here, Memphis, Tennessee is a majority Black city (65%), and the people who organized this event could not even invite one social group or activist in the Black or Hispanic communities. In fact, they did not invite us, even though I was on the mailing list of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, who despite what they claimed, were ones who organized the entire event. It was an activist friend whom we knew who passed on her invitation email to us.

[...]

I also posted my impressions and denunciations of the group to my own FaceBook page, and almost immediately, peoples of color and anti-racist activists returned post telling me that in their cities, the same problems were happening. In fact, I heard from activists in ten cities in a matter of hours telling me they experienced the same thing. I began to understand that this was a national problem throughout the “Occupy” movement, leading to the inescapable conclusion that they did not care if activists of color took part. Then I started seeing letters and articles from activists of color telling me that they not only experienced exclusion, but overt acts of racism and attempts at racist intimidation by activists and erstwhile leaders of various “Occupy” city solidarity chapters. When they tried to raise these matters within the local groups, they were met with indifference, hostility, and threats. This kind of blatant racism is intolerable, but it shows the nature and degree of internal racism in Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity groups.

[...]

Such racism will ultimately be the defeat or death of this movement, just as it has for other previous coalitions ostensibly created on a white radical class basis.

[White workers] have stood behind almost every discriminatory and oppressive policy of the labor movement and the government. It is only because of the Civil
Rights movement of the 1960’s that this began to change. Even so, they never supported Black radical labor unions in the automobile plants in Detroit and other cities during the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and gave very little support to Chicano-Mexicano field workers in the agribusiness industry in the Southwest. It was those autonomous Black-led unions that actually represented the Black workers and all workers in those plants, where the UAW conspired with the auto companies to protect a white job trust that engaged in racial discrimination, while zeroing in on Black workers for the worst forms of repression and harassment.

Anonymous37 wrote: Tue Jun 21, 2022 7:58 pm So a reddit user is creating a site to replace the now sadly defunct longform.org.

This new site, https://longformarticles.net/, only has 3 articles so far, but I suppose it's worth bookmarking in the hopes that there will be more there.

Anonymous37 wrote: Tue Oct 25, 2022 8:52 pm "The Crypto Story" by Matt Levine in Business Week -- a primer about crypto. Useful as a starting point or explainer.