I don’t remember how I got into this. I was wrestling with Adolph Reed’s bracing critique of anti-racism. I picked up “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic” by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (‘LR’), who propose a radically different way of understanding U.S. history and racism in particular. That got me into Edmund S. Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom,” and from there to Nell Painter’s “The History of White People.”
First that I heard Sean Wilentz is an enemy of the Left. That would be the same Sean Wilentz on the board of Dissent? Wilentz the consistent ent of Reaganism and it's Trumpy progeny? Give me a break.
I haven't read The 1619 Project, but it's on my shelf, waiting. I've heard commentators opine not that capitalism is founded on race but that specifically North American capitalism had to invent race, specifically anti-Black racism, to justify the institution of slavery that enabled it (North American capitalism) to thrive.
For me the problem is one of organizing: how to insist that class is fundamental, and insist that the real enemy is capitalism, while acknowledging the special role of slavery and anti-Black racism in perpetuating it. How to insist on class solidarity while neither ignoring nor minimizing the racism that most people of color experience as their primary and most immediate form of oppression.
We do get into ruts in our thinking. Interesting new intervention in class vs. race issues is Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America. Desmond has good creds in that, while emphasizing poverty in all groups, he was a part of the 1619 Project. Max and others may wish to review it. Somebody should.
Each north american nation must assert its valid claims to patriotic status we all are of the same country
With equal national rights liberals
refuse national rights for obvious historically obvious
Reasons
Uneven Exploitation must continue
While oppression a l8beral no no
Must be camouflage
All north american nations are equal
From first nations to last
Each has a unique heritage and legacy
Each strives for liberation
Spontaneously both righteously and wrongheaded
Even us settler pale faces
Have a place here
First nations to last
We are all north Americans now
Viva LR
Blew off all that ON hot air and forgot my pount
These north american nations struggle
Amongst themselves
1619
Is a righteously aggressive assertion
Of patriotic status
This is never a zero sum contest
Though it can easily bevcouched as one
Comrades we must all welcome 1619
And celebrate it
Not as a purgative of white sins
But as a glorious celebration
of the black north america struggle
Assert assert assert
international sympatric
righteous struggles
Are the glory of our shared continent
First that I heard Sean Wilentz is an enemy of the Left. That would be the same Sean Wilentz on the board of Dissent? Wilentz the consistent ent of Reaganism and it's Trumpy progeny? Give me a break.
I haven't read The 1619 Project, but it's on my shelf, waiting. I've heard commentators opine not that capitalism is founded on race but that specifically North American capitalism had to invent race, specifically anti-Black racism, to justify the institution of slavery that enabled it (North American capitalism) to thrive.
For me the problem is one of organizing: how to insist that class is fundamental, and insist that the real enemy is capitalism, while acknowledging the special role of slavery and anti-Black racism in perpetuating it. How to insist on class solidarity while neither ignoring nor minimizing the racism that most people of color experience as their primary and most immediate form of oppression.
The range of the national.question
Is broad enough for more then a few
Conflicting visions
Community is a soft word
Nation among nations
Alas
The very phrasing
sweats with the wounds of past antagonisms
Why should the contradictions vanish
At the intonement
Of a liberal.wish
While super exploitation remains the fact on the ground
We do get into ruts in our thinking. Interesting new intervention in class vs. race issues is Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America. Desmond has good creds in that, while emphasizing poverty in all groups, he was a part of the 1619 Project. Max and others may wish to review it. Somebody should.
Paul R