Dave McReynolds on PK's (From Committees of Correspondence mail-list)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have read the posts and realize it is easy for all of us to jump too
quickly.

If we go back to the Million Man March, I never saw so much white guilt in my
life. I was really happy when Charlene Mitchell was one of the few on the
Left to raise solid questions about why folks weren't asking about the role
of women. And there were some very sound reasons to question Farrahkan (I
rarely saw such nonsense as his numerology, which I watched live).

But . . . in fact the MMM was more complex than any of us had really
understood. It was middle class, it wasn't anti-White,  it was - in its own
way (and without trying to equate them) touching some of the things the
Promise Keepers are touching.

The likely impact of MMM will not be to strengthen the hand of the black
separatist elements in society, and the impact of the Promise Keepers is not
going to be men beating up on gays and their wives. I say this as a "gay man"
(I really do hate that word gay - I vastly prefer homosexual or even queer,
but what can I do!) who should have all my fears aroused by watching
Christian men marching together.

Damn it, they did more to get blacks involved than the Socialist Party (or
the War Resisters League) or a lot of our groups. And if we stand back and
take a long long historic look, America has always had waves of
"fundamentalism" which, instead of leading to reaction, often led to social
reform. There were very strong elements of this grassroots fundamentalism in
the Debsian movement, and the the "red tent meetings" out on the plains of
Kansas, etc.

What isn't helping with the PK's, anymore than it did with the MMM (where I
was slow in seeing beyond my own political preconceptions) is to lump
everyone together. In the case of the MMM, to see it as anti-women, or
anti-white, or, worst of all, as pro-Nation of Islam. And what we have seen
here is much too complex to jump to conclusions. No, of course these folks
aren't "left", but if we are ever to build a Left we have to find a way to
reach them. Ditto those who marched in the MMM.

Both movements are too fluid, too empty of a clear political agenda, for us
to "define them by our reactions to them".

Fraternally,
David McReynolds