MMM: reply to Jerry and Jon

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (jones/bhandari)]

On Jerry about Black Business and Afrocentric Education(reply to Jon below):

Jerry urges a complex view towards Black nationalism; for example he
suggests that Black enterprise is not harmful and urges that Afrocentric
education should be supported.  The vast majority of Blacks work for
corporations; their interests cannot be represented by Black enterprises.
In his book The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, Adolph Reed gives the example of
how Coors agreed to make money available for Black enteprise if various
Black organizations agreed to pressure Black workers to exit from a
multiethnic strike.  Moreover,Farrakhan scapegoats other ethnic
businessmen, suggesting that they are the primary source of the problems
all African-Americans face.  This is a petit-bourgeois view and threatens,
as it has in the past, to direct activity in destructive ways.

Too young to be using such language,  Jerry says "right on" to Afrocentric
education.  Doug has suggested that such education threatens to make
students feel even more isolated from America, with even less of a sense of
belonging in this country with the right to shape its overall destiny.  I
enthsiasitically agree.

More can be said about it, as well. It romanticizes feudal patriarchy and
reinforces the leadership fetish through the emphasis on Kings.  It
exaggerates the continuities in African life, focusing in on the
preservation of so-called cultural traits from Africa.  It is based on lies
and does little to increase awareness of peoples' real situation. For
example, it tends to reduce all problems to racism and then advances the
most absurd imaginable explanations for racism. I am all for fighting
racism in histiography, but Afrocentric history, math or science is a
mystification and can only serve to impair students' access to ALL the
important achievements of the human mind, including but not limited to  the
work of Ibn Khaldun.

Also I doubt if Jerry would be as tolerant of an attempt by Christian
parents to have their children taken out of a period of composition or math
or physics or art to be inculcated with creationism.  So why the tolerance
for Afrocentric history?  By the way, at the high school at which I taught
for two years, Black boys were taken out of class for a special period in
Black manhood while everyone else (including the other ethnic groups) was
free to take other classes.  To me this was a great disservice to those
boys, especially considering the charlatans who ran that period.

>From Jon

" I didn't (and wouldn't) call Ralph a racist." Jon, read your own post.
You suggested that Ralph may have called the marchers oragutans. If this
wasn't an accusation of racism, then there is something terribly wrong with
you. Ralph however never did say any such thing.

  And note how much detail is in posts compared to the party line
statements we are hearing about populism, nationalism, ambivalence.

Now Jon continues to insist on the benign populist aspects of the MMM.  How
can a March be popular if half the population is formally excluded and
their demands and interests subordinated and that subordination now
sanctioned? The MMM has already transpired.  It has served to legitimize
Farrakhan and the idea of male- and race- exclusive  AGENDAS (the possible
radicalness of which you have not even attempted to specify); it has
increased the panic about Black men's degeneracy  and thus intensified the
threat of a crack down. I am  arguing that we must fight against race- and
-gender segregated politics as we attempt to bring out the class basis of
oppression. I would appreciate if you could be a little less vague about
what populist aspects of this march you are affirming. What is it about
this march that is making you ambivalent, except for the categorical
imperative to be so?

Rakesh









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