What does it mean to be a radical?

Freddy Paine, Jim Jackson and Grace Boggs, Thursday, August 20, 1998.

FP: Grace and I have been talking about radicals of the past and the changes that have taken place since my entry into the movement in the l930s. Today they are scattered all over and there are mighty few around. I don’t know if there is any organization of them. The Communists, the Trotskyists, and the Socialists - all made up only a small group. But we were sure that we were going to lead the world. That kind of thinking prevented us from really listening to the people. We were a strange group to the point that we were ridiculous. I am not talking about the infighting among the groups. I am talking about the attitude to the world as a whole. For example, when I was working on the Militant, the SWP paper, and the New York Times came to the office, everyone would grab it to see what we were going to write about and who was going to write the article. They would choose a topic and assign it. It was a strange and isolated world. Our comrades who were working in the plant were isolated also. They went home to a life that was altogether different from that of the workers. So we weren’t speaking with the people we worked with. I am not talking about the very small fry like myself but people who were really involved. Why did we do that? We thought we were going to lead the world.

JJ: When we look at radicals and at ourselves, I think we have to see that we get locked into our own minds. We stop thinking dialectically. We feel that we have discovered the truth and that is what everyone around us should do. Radicals tend to see leadership on a wide basis and not on a community basis. They tend to feel that they don’t have to change because they have already changed and others have to change. In the process the ideas that radicals hold seem to be consuming them so that they can’t give the type of leadership to the community that helps to develop leadership in the community. Black radicals are no different from white radicaIs in this. I have a feeling that black radicals see young people as their army who should be fighting for the same things - Black Power, Black Nationalism, black unity - as we did, instead of going to the people and discovering what they are struggling over.

 I’ve been reading the concluding chapter of Clayborne Carson’s book on SNCC. What made SNCC and the movement in the South so powerful in the l960s was that the SNCC youth went to the people. They struggled alongside the people. Their ideas came from the people. In that way they were able to create programs related to revolutionary change, social change and social awareness. I believe that radicals, including myself (and I struggle with that), feel that the change has to be in others. We see ourselves as victims. It is not me that has to change, it is you. There is a separation between the people and the radicals which gets wider and wider. I like what one of the SNCC leaders said: “It was the people who allowed me to be a leader. I didn’t create myself as a leader.” Most people see King and Malcolm as leaders. I think they saw themselves as teachers, trying to get people to understand what has happened socially and to analyze what is going on in their lives.

GB: I am going to play devil’s advocate. I like the idea of being a radical. To me it means that you stand for radical change. It also means being anti-capitalist and I believe that being anti-capitalist is essential to being a human being  Those are the two ingredients of being a radical that I wholeheartedly embrace. I don’ t want to throw out the baby with the bath. So I describe myself as an untraditional radical. What does that mean? You have both given an adequate view of the traditional radical. One of the main things I learned from CLRJames - it was one of his most valuable contributions - was to listen, especially to the grassroots. As Johnsonites we adopted Lenin’s analysis (in “The Trade Union Dispute”) of the three layers in the movement: The Bolshevik leaders were the first layer; the trade unionists were the second; and the workers and peasants were the third. For us in the l950s, rank and file workers, blacks, women and youth played the role of Lenin’s workers and peasants. They were the ones who were going to bring the radical changes and therefore they were the ones we should listen to carefully, in order to learn how to lead. What was missing in that analysis - which CLR made - was our contribution as radicals, which is something that needs discussion and clarification in every period. It is not Either/Or - the people OR the radicals. There has to be an interaction which, however, can only be meaningful if you are with and among the people. There are contributions that untraditional radicals can make. To speak only of what the people bring is to leave out the very important conributions of leaders, for example, of King or Malcolm or the SNCC kids when they went to the people and, absorbing the energy of the people in struggle, were able to provide visionary and creative leadership. Not to recognize that is to miss a very important part of what goes into revolutionary social change.

FP: I agree with that. We did a lot of good. We had to clarify ourselves in the first place. But when I think of the l930s I also see that we isolated ourselves. We also did a lot of good by clarifying the situation. We were under the influence of the Soviet Union and that needed a lot of clarity. New ideas came to the fore.   I knew only one man - A.J.Muste - who said again and again that while what the Soviet Union was doing was wonderful, we were living in the U.S.A. and that we had to work out what to do right here, especially in relationship to the union movement, was what mattered. This was at a time when the Soviet Union was trying to woo John L..Lewis to the red trade unions or the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). The period of the ILGWU preceded the creation of the CIO. There was a lot that was done, a whole lot of good work. Nevertheless we isolated ourselves. Could we have done differently? 

JJ: What irritates me about radicals is that we don’t see the community out of which we came and where we built the movement in the past , as important, and think only in national terms. We leave the community in a void. I like to think that being radical means bringing history to the struggle. You use this history as a kind of launching pad so that the people you are working with don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  You help them see where they have come from, how they developed, and what they achieved. So they can move from there with an understanding of where the society has moved economically, socially and politically. 

 I agree that anti-capitalism is what radicals see and continue to see -- now on a global level. But I don’t worry about capitalism.  I worry about how we negate our responsibilities in the sense that we owe it to people to return to the community and do a lot of teaching so that leadership can really develop in the community. I try to get out of the “hurry up” syndrome that wants to see change right now. The scene moves so fast. Before we knew it, Black Power was here and the isolation began. Blacks had to be by ourselves and make others pay for what they did to us. When you go into the community, you see this reaction of people saying “You got the education, you can do it.” This comes from our not having done the teaching and the organizing that we did in the past which put us in the forefront. We didn’t arrive there just because we were against segregation or for more jobs. We got there because we worked with people in the community. We got educated along with them. But we have kept a lot of that education secret. This is what helped make leadership. I remember people shouting “Teach!” when Malcolm talked. That is what we haven’t done.

GB: I am not sure I know what you mean when you say that King and Malcolm were teachers rather than leaders. What we have seen happen - and we have experienced this locally and nationally - is that Malcolm and King have been turned into icons - so that we can’t learn from the important changes and development that they went through. We don’t allow them to change and develop so that we can understand the need for ourselves to develop and change.

I am very appreciative of the role that radicals played in creating the labor movement. Jimmy never forgot this - he came to Detroit in l937 and almost immediately was drawn to them. The people were already challenging capitalism because the Depression had exposed the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie. But radicals brought them greater clarity about the capitalist system, more audacity (they were ready to take risks) and organizing experience. You can’t appreciate what took place in the l930s without taking into account what radicals brought. I don’t want to discount this or to see it discounted. Similarly you can’t understand what happened in the l960s without appreciating the role of SNCC, which was created by young people (encouraged by Ella Baker) who were able to connect with the energy of the grassroots movement and provide creative and imaginative leadership. Even in the North, It was not only Malcolm but people like Cleage, the Henry brothers, ourselves, the UHURU youth like General Baker, and many others who gave radical leadership to the Black Power movement. The question is how you merge or interact with the movement of the people, instead of being isolated from it. Radicals isolate themselves by living in and trying to complete the past, or by getting most of their ideas from reading the New York Times, or by spending most of their time and energy struggling against other political tendencies.

 To me the Black Radical Congress was important because (1) it reintroduced the concept of radicalism into the black community and (2) so many young people just got on buses and came, especially from the South, bringing questions with them. They wanted to know how the veterans of the movement of the 60s, now in their fifties, became radicals. Two things remain in my mind from the Intergenerational Dialogue which opened the Congress. (I’ve seen this on video, except for the dialogue with Angela Davis which, I’ve been told, was not very good because the young partner in this was too much in awe of her). General Baker from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit and DRUM asked the young woman with whom he was paired what message he could take to his five children and eight grandchildren. Her answer was that rage or anger could take you only so far. To go beyond that you need Love. That is worth a lot of thought in this period when there is so much anger, so much rage. 

 The other thing was what Ahmad Rahman said. He’s the Black Panther who was paroled in l991 after spending 21 years in prison and who is now writing his Ph.D. thesis in Ann Arbor on Kwame Ture. Asked what was the most important lesson he had learned, he stressed the need to go to the people and learn from them. He backed this up with the story of how as a teenaged gang member he was forced to leave home and go live with relatives in Pittsburgh after an opposing gang threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of his mother’s house. At the predominantly black high school in Pittsburgh, he discovered that students at the white high school across town were eating much fancier lunches (e.g. pepper steak). So he proposed a lunch boycott until a counselor explained that this was the only meal that many of the students ate all day. Being among the people and taking their needs into account you have to think differently, he said. People need a lot of encouragement to know what they are capable of and to expand their imaginations. This is what radicals can bring by explaining what the common people have done in the past, how they developed, what they achieved and didn’t achieve.

 We need to be able to point out both the negative aspects of being radicals, especially the tendency to live in the past and to feel more at home with each other, and the positive contributions and opportunities that come from being among the people.

FP: I recall my first arrest. I was scared shitless. I didn’t know what was going on, but I gained strength from others around me who had been arrested before. I learned from them that being arrested was not a horrible but an honorable thing. A couple of years ago I was speaking to a group of workers, predominantly Mexican-American, brought together by my neighbor who was working with the ILGWU. One man was amazed that I had been arrested. Mexican-Americans are arrested all the time for being “illegal” but being arrested as part of the struggle was entirely different, an essential part of the struggle almost like being able to run a mimeograph machine.

 I started by criticizing radicals. We had to start by clarifying ourselves. But unfortunately we didn’t make enough of a distinction between the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers because we were not associating with the workers.  We tried but we weren’t really there. Nevertheless that was a period of clarification for ourselves which we had to do. We can’t lose sight of the fact that it wasn’t until we got to CLR that we began to change our attitude and begin listening.

JJ: Radicals do have a tendency to isolate ourselves, to not be with the people. Also to talk down to people. Our teaching is very important because a great deal of it comes from experience, not out of a book. We tend to think of what we have done and not to realize how things are changing. So we distance ourselves especially from young people instead of understanding the world in which they have grown up and forgetting that we were once young. When I look back, I realize that I never considered myself a radical - but others did. I thought of myself as socially concerned. I always thought that what was happening was happening not only to others but to me, and that the only way I could change things was by getting down and into the struggle, in the process making decisions and attempting to give some leadership. I became a radical more from dealing with and struggling with people. My facts and views came from the struggle.

GB: I think the difficulty with radicals is that they become Leftists. First you get radicalized. For example, I was radicalized by the March on Washington movement. Then I was fortunate to run into CLRJames with whom I was able to study and develop ideas. I was an untraditional radical because I learned from him the importance of listening to people. My next good fortune (though not CLR’s) was that he had to leave the country because if I had continued to work with him I might have become a Leftist. Instead I went to Detroit where I was able to live among the people, developing my ideas in relationship to the struggles of the people.

 When I look at black radicals today, especially the ones that convened the Black Radical Congress, it strikes me that those who were the New Left of the l960s are now the Old Left of the l990s, coming together to fight the Right and the liberals and other political types and tendencies, instead of going among the people to learn their concerns and to develop your ideas from the struggles of the people. 

JJ: I think the distinction you have made between being a radical and being a Leftist gives a whole new perspective on what radical politics can be. Once you become a Leftist, you fight the ideas of other Leftists or liberals or Rightists. So you become locked into your own ideas and into old ideas instead of developing new ideas in relationship to the struggles of the people.

FP: I agree. I consider myself damn lucky also in that I started with AJ Muste. We were called all kinds of names by the Trotskyists. They taunted us, said we didn’t know Marx - which was true. But AJ stuck to his guns; he insisted that it was this country that we had to change. We were not looking dialectically at our communities per se the way that Grace is. She is damn lucky that Detroit is a big city but also small enough to get involved. My foundation was AJMuste and getting involved with the Unemployed League. We had to answer questions like “Why are you stealing a bottle of milk?’ Very elementary things.

Hillary Clinton’s Muddled Legacy

On Wednesday, August 26, we turned on the tape recorder as Freddy, JoAnne and Grace were carrying on an animated discussion of playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s article “Hillary Clinton’s Muddled Legacy” in the August 25 New York Times.

FP: I said earlier to Grace that Hillary has gotten her come-uppance. She is in a funny place. But I resent Wassersteins’ likening her to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is nowhere near Eleanor Roosevelt. 

GB:. While I believe that this whole investigation and pursuit of Clinton is politically motivated by right-wing Republicans like Starr, I also believe we need to be on guard against being drawn into a defense of Clinton’s behavior. I think the discussion about who Hillary and Bill Clinton are, what kind of new political phenomenon they represent, has just begun. In the past the grooming of presidents has been done for the most part by parties and political machines  In this case Hillary and Bill came together very early and began planning to achieve the goal of Clinton becoming president and Hillary the First Lady. Therefore many of the things that Presidential strategists have done, many of the deals that have been made by others, have been made by them. So there is a lot of opportunism and expediency in their dealings and in their relationships with supporters that cannot stand the light of day. I have never been a Hillary Clinton fan myself. Even though many feminists admire her for being a strong woman, she has struck me as a Lady Macbeth, ambitious to become the First Lady and to make her man the First Man. I see her now as in a a terrible position because it appears that she has been willing to overlook or to gloss over a lot of things, not only to stand by her man but in order to achieve their common political goal of occupying the White House.  

JS: I agree that they have been groomed since they were young and that they both wanted to be groomed since they were very young. I think it is interesting that they found each other and made it. I think she wasn’t thinking of the repercussions of personal ambition. The excerpts from her l969 Commencement speech show that she used to be something more than these political ambitions. She used to have some ideas of improving society as a whole. My main criticism of her is that she has become a half-assed feminist in the process.

GB: She has taken on a lot of the dirt that goes with political ambition. Eleanor Roosevelt, by contrast, was not politically ambitious.  She wasn’t anxious to become a public figure; it was only as the situation in the country became agonizing that she felt the need to intervene on behalf of those who were suffering. She acted in accordance with her compassion.

JS: I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what happened.

FP. That is what I meant by saying that it wasn’t fair for Grace to ask you what you thought of the article. I do know about Eleanor Roosevelt’s background as does Grace. She started off as a do-gooder, a person taking a back seat. She belonged to several organizations, for example, the Henry Street Settlement. Hillary Clinton is not in that category. I resented the article even mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt in connection with Hillary Clinton. Hillary and Bill Clinton walking down Pennsylvania Ave. on Inauguration Day in l993 was such a Hollywood production that it made me ill at ease. I contrasted it with Rosalyn & Jimmy Carter doing the same walk in l976.

JS: That was a natural after Ronald Reagan. 

FP: Grace said that the two of them, Hillary and Bill, were an organization. They knew where they were going. I agree. It started out as Hoch Politik, unlike Eleanor Roosevelt who started down here and little by little as what she saw irked her began to push at FDR. Hillary was putting herself forward. That is OK if she was ready to do some good - whether I liked or didn’t like her. She was good-looking besides. That didn’t bother me. What did bother me was this constantly putting herself forward differently.

JS: It is interesting because the image I am getting is of Eleanor Roosevelt generally being a do-gooder and then getting into the forefront of the American political scene. She saw what needed to be done and took it upon herself to do it. Hillary Clinton was groomed independently all the way through. It would be frightening if it turned out that the whole marriage was a staged production, kept going for these many years to get to this point - but I don’t put it past them.

FP: You do believe in sex?

JS: At least once. It is a kind of sad comment on feminism because it seems like Hillary tried to do it on a par with men and probably realized that she couldn’t become the president herself. She jumped into these realms and got shot down - with a whole bunch of things she tried to do. It is kind of scary. What Wendy Wasserstein is saying in this article is “Stand up and take a leadership role as an independent person outside the politics because you are not the one who got elected and make a legacy for yourself.” Because right now it is like she is a feminist who tried to make it with the big boys and got shot down.  Sadly the message to the younger generation is that you can’t have it all and don’t expect too much. Grace says that it was pre-meditated maneuvering, but I am saying that the message is that she had all these accolades herself but she met Bill Clinton and got involved. Obviously they did have an agenda. And right now it seems that women are being told that you can’t get into the ring and you can’t make things happen. As for the comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt, I think the writer is saying that she is moving further away from her role model. I am sure the comparison has been made and maybe that is why Freddy resented the reference to Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was a feminist in another generation, a whole different time. Hillary Clinton’s life is being played out in a different period, the first time that women are supposed to be able to be on a par with men. She surpasses the man in so many ways but still she can’t break free and create her own identity. Why not?

GB: She hitched her wagon to Bill Clinton’s. She made the choice to do that. What is happening now is that in the course of struggling to achieve her ambition she has made a lot of compromises. And the chickens are coming home to roost. How she is going to deal with that I don’t know but I feel very sorry for her because the whole world knows that now.

JS: What are you focussing on - that she had a husband who cheated on her?

GB: I am sorry for her in the sense that I don’t think she is capable of looking back at what has happened and realizing that her “shame” at this moment is a result of choices that she herself has made in the past. She has been shamed not so much by her husband’s philandering but by her cover-up of his conduct.

JS: If we are going to move into the whole sex-scandal mode, there are two angles. That of the politically savvy married couple or people who actually have love for each other. If it is coming from love, I don’t see covering up for him as shameful. I don’t think it is shameful for Bill Clinton to lie about having an affair. That is common.

GB: It is one thing to lie about an affair out of consideration for your spouse. But as the article by Thomas Friedman on the same OP-Ed page says, we need to be thinking about the numbers of people whom the Clintons lied to and involved in their cover-up and how these people are now trying to come to grips with their involvement. They may be able to go on to other things. But Hillary Clinton is in a different place, a much more painful one.

FP: I agree. She is on his doorstep, in his bed, all over the place. I can see people asking, “She is his wife, what is she going to do? He is down now. You don’t slap him when he’s down.” I don’t know why but the image of Dole’s wife keeps coming to my mind when I think of Hillary Clinton. She took whatever jobs she was offered and she will be offered more. Hillary has put herself in a position where she hasn’t said anything. How is she going to handle it? I think it is going to be her strength precisely because she hasn’t said anything and precisely because she went along - to say that I am going to support him as president of the country and as my husband. What she does later is a toss-up for me.

GB: There are feminists in political life for whom I have enormous respect - who didn’t hitch their wagons to a male star in order to get ahead.

JS: Is that what is shameful to you?

GB: What I am thinking about is the number of compromises that Hillary has made to reach her goal and therefore the price she is now paying. l am wondering what she is going to do. She is still a young woman of enormous capabilities, probably with her heart in the right place. She could achieve a great deal on her own. But in order to do that she has to make some sort of evaluation of how she has lived and how she has gotten to the place where she is now. Because when you are in political life - and I don’t only mean political life on the scale of the White House but political life as I have known it - you are making decisions and choices all the time. And you have to have some standards by which to evaluate these choices. For someone in political life, on no matter what scale, there is nothing more important than self-criticism.

JS: I think I am still stuck on the idea of her being shamed. l don’t think she actually got up there and lied on his behalf. I know she got out and said, “This is a right wing attack on my husband.” She didn’t go out and say, “There is no way he had sex with her.” I think she knew from the beginning what was happening from the time the story broke, if not before. We agreed at the beginning that it was muckraking, politically motivated.

GB:Everybody, I think, believes she knew from the beginning that he was horsing around. But for seven months she has had to interact with people, strategizing about the defense, and giving the impression that it hadn’t happened.

JS: What were her options? Have you ever known a person who had an affair and how did they act? Do you just admit it?

GB: This is not just a private affair. A lot of strategizing and organizing, involving a lot of people, has been going on for seven months!

JS: He did act stupidly. There are so many aspects - an affair with a younger woman in his position.  Do you think that in advance she condoned his having sexual relations with other women?

GB: He denied the Gennifer Flowers affair and she supported him; then he admitted it. This has all taken place in the public sphere. You can’t maintain that very sharp separation between the public and the private when all this, the denials and the admissions, have taken place publicly

 JS: and it isn’t the first time.

GB: It isn’t just an affair. Here is guy who is the president of the U.S.A. and he takes these enormous risks. He is jeopardizing more than his personal relationships by this.

JS: The “Wag the Dog” idea. He took very unwise risks.

FP. I didn’t expect her to say, “This has happened three times - so you’re out.” I don’t honestly know how she should be handling herself and at the same time give him support. You, Grace, say that it is a kind of personal-political organization that they created from the beginning - which I do think was the case, the two of them going to make it.

GB: They have strategized for more than 20 years to get to where they are.

FP: I don’t understand then, how with any decency on her part, she can say she is withdrawing her support. GB: Clinton is very good at fronting anything. I think she is a better person than he is, which means I don’t think she can front as much as he can. I think she is going through a lot of agonizing. JS: I was thinking “the first divorce.” After we have a Democrat in White House, then the divorce.

GB: In my opinion the first thing she should do is to say I need to really think things over and not brazen it out as he is doing. She should take time to reflect on her life because she is still a young woman who still has a lot to contribute. But to make this contribution she really needs to make a re-evaluation. 

FP: I think she will do it, she is very bright. GB: Maybe. I don’t know, but that is what I would recommend to her. She has a long life in front of her that could be very productive. But to do that she has to get rid of a lot of crap. JS: Quite frankly I think that is her next move. She is hanging in there to see another Democrat get the office and she is out. FP. Of course, she will do that. JS: When things are calm, she will divorce him. All I can conjure up is a whole re-incarnation of self like Diana’s, and Diana didn’t even have the background of Hillary, or the moxie, the wherewithal, the education, the contacts. I think I see that in 2001. Then she will have a very full life on her own.

FP: You have got a great scenario, a damn good scenario. JS: In 2001 as soon as he leaves office, she’s out of it. FP: I won’t be around to see it. JS: Unless there really is this true love between them. But I think there has to be all this history of his philandering and I think she reads this article in the NYT and says “I am being murdered right now.” She believes in the politics of the Democratic Party and she wants to see it elected again and she is trying to bite her lips until it is over and she can come out. I think she could have a very nice life on her own and if when she is out of the spotlight she doesn’t do that, the whole marriage must have gone through a whole other reincarnation.  “Hey, we are really in love and I am not going to do this any more” and it happens. But I can’t see her hanging on. I think she is concerned about the legacy - that is what everybody says . As soon as he is out, there can be the legacy. Nobody is going to look at what he did three and four years later. It was what he did while he was president. 

GB: One of my main concerns is that we are not sucked into the DP-RP conflict so that we are unable to make some moral-ethical judgments about Clinton. We should not be drawn into defending his conduct as I see many people doing. 

JS: I think that is because they don’t know that there are other options. They don’t focus on his not being an upstanding character. I agree he has been unthoughtful of his own legacy and of the repercussions of his personal actions. He only had to wait until he was done - eight years.

GB: What was very helpful to me in thinking about Clinton was reading about Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandanistic revolution in Nicaragua who was replaced two elections back and who is now the leader of the opposition. His stepdaughter has recently accused him of sexually molesting her since she was 11 (she is now in her 30s), and other things have come out about his living high off the hog since he was replaced, and his refusal to make any self-critical evaluation of why the Sandanistas lost the confidence of the people. I can see how it is possible to support the Sandanistas, especially against the U.S. counter-revolution, but still be critical of Ortega. I see too many people who because they are on the same political side are willing to overlook serious character defects in a leader.

JS: While the other side is all too ready to bring them out as a reason to be against the whole action.  The point you are making is interesting. You see JFK and Bill Clinton who are not upstanding moral characters and then you start to think that there are women like Eleanor Roosevelt who are upstanding moral characters. And I can see more women than men. It makes you realize that women seem more into the idea of fairness and justice than men; men keep thinking they can get around it. They can have these wonderful ideas. Maybe women also thought up these wonderful ideas but they were voicing for them. It’s strange. Right now I am thinking that men kind of fail in this regard. Women more often than not don’t. And there is a kind of Victorian standard that we have bought into.

FP: I think you are right in that. I think of my joining the radical movement way back. I thought in terms of good moral issues. But you are living in a day and age where you are not separated. You are not living in a hole by yourself. You are living with all this corruption that is going on and we know that the men have been doing it for ages and ages. So that even thinking back on those days there used to be awfully sloppy ways of going about things. The men did the political work and the women ran the mimeo machines to get the stuff out. All of it added up to one thing - it all has to be taken up from scratch, from the bottom up and thrown away. In a certain sense his wife didn’t say anything and Clinton was forced to say something.

GB: As I have listened to some of the discussion around Bill Clinton I have flashbacked to some of the discussions in the old days of the radical movement when a lot of excuses were made for things the leaders did. We were in effect saying “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” So a lot of things that were outrageous in a moral sense were covered up and overlooked. I see the same thing happening with the Bill Clinton affair and I don’t want to become a part of it. I am thinking of two people - Geraldine Ferraro who had to withdraw from politics for a while because of financial scandals involving her husband but is now running in the NY Democratic Primary for U.S.Senator - and Patricia Schroeder. Geraldine Ferraro made a lot of excuses for her husband. Pat Schroeder, the Congresswoman from Colorado strikes, me as a very principled person who made it on her own. She is older than Hillary Clinton. Earlier JoAnne characterized Hillary Clinton as a half-assed feminist who instead of making it on her own adopted the morals of her husband.

JS: The morals of men in general or those of her husband?

GB: The morals or lack of morals of politicians. I am hoping that the pain she is going through will cause her to make some kind of evaluation.

FP. She will make it. GB: We will see.You folks have a lot of confidence. I would like to see it happen but it would be very rare, quite an event, if she were to break with him.

JS: That would be in a way a real role model. You see some women in the public eye, not only in politics who have separated from their spouses and reinvented themselves and live a full life. It doesn’t have to be the end of your life and your identity if you decide to break away from the unhealthy partner.

GB: Her daughter is old enough to face reality on her own too. It would be very nice if it were to happen. It would be a victory.

JS: It would be inspiring to women.You don’t have to stand by. She would get away with it and be able to play a good role in the country.

GB: In order to stand by him she has had to do these flipflops. They must have been painful.

JS: It is true that you can be supportive of the politics or action and still be critical of the leader’s character, even moral character. I liked your comment that this can even be reflected back into the politics. 

FP: If you have a position of getting ahead , if that is your position, how do you set forth, what do you do, what are the angles you are looking for?

GB: Do you ever see Doris Kearns Goodwin on the NewsHour? She has writtten a wonderful book on Roosevelt years, No Ordinary Time. When I go home I want to check out her comments over the last week. 

FP:Someone ought to do a book on these men who have to have an affair in order to make it. Every damn one of them has had an affair at one time or another.

JS: Being able to be critical of the leader and still support the action or the politics. I do think we have to stop covering up things, not only in politics but in society, from molesting parents to spousal abuse. It is better to just confront it

GB: The corruption of the society that takes place goes far beyond the individual instance. The end result is kids killing kids. This morning Freddy and I were discussing the report on NPR that students at UofC-Berkeley are calling for the expulsion of David Cash because of his failure to intervene when he witnessed his friend sexually molesting and strangling a seven year old African American girl in the toilet stall of a ladies rest room in a Las Vegas casino. The assailant was his “best friend,” he said, and he didn’t know the girl.

JS: I think I want to throw up. Sometimes a person doesn’t intervene in a crisis because s/he doesn’t know what to do. But apparently that wasn’t the case.

GB: You are on a very slippery slope once you begin overlooking all kinds of character flaws in a person whom you support politically. A kind of corruption creeps into you.

FR: As I remember the newspaper accounts in L.A., they did know each other. But it doesn’t matter. JS: It’s scary to think that this person would get so excited that he would commit this crime. You can’t cover these things up. I would think there could be some way that the university could see that we can’t tolerate this sort of person. GB: On campuses we used to have Honor Committees, bodies to make ethical judgments.

JS: I wasn’t in the situation, but I certainly think that if I was witnessing something you better believe I wouldn’t be uttering words like his. I would be trying to think of some way to make up for it. FP: I might say I feel guilty, I don’t know what I can do because it’s past, do with me what you like. JS: How could I not feel somethingwhen someone has been killed? If he doesn’t have this emotion of remorse or guilt, it is really scary. because there must be others who think that way. 

GB: It goes back to one of the questions we discussed in Conversations in Maine - about the separation between ethics and politics. If you make this separation, which is what people seem ready to do in the case of Clinton, calling it the distinction between the private and the public, we are going down that slippery slope.

JS: You’re right. But then it looks Iike I’m part of the right wing.

GB: That’s the trouble. For fear of being part of the right wing people are afraid of saying what they feel deep in their hearts. That to me is scary because one of the reasons why the right wing movement has such momentum is that it is saying things about values which people think need to be said. One of the reasons we are in such a mess today is that we refuse even to think about the things about values that the right wing is saying.

JS: I put more of my trust in women than I do in men. I feel that if things were looked at differently, with less male historians writing the books, women would be able to to do a helluva lot more in the nation right now.

GB: There is no doubt about that as long as we don’t go overboard. The picture that always comes to mind when I hear that is of Jeanne Kirkpatrick who was Reagan’s Secretary of State. She was a woman too. 

FP: Someone should come along and do something about these men who have an affair to order to make it. Every damn one of them has had an affair at one time or another.

JS: What I find really important is being able to be critical of leadership and still support the action or the politics. We have to stop covering up for these characters not only in politics but in society - from molesting parents to spousal abuse, slowly peeling it back and accepting the responsibiity because you weaken the good by trying to gloss over the bad. lIt is better to just confront it, say we don’t accept it but we do want this. That is another thing that disheartens me about this article. What she says about the increase in popularity of HIllary Clinton based upon her glossing over. It has to be acknowledged; otherwise you are discrediting the good.

GB: The corruption of society that takes place goes far beyond the individual instance.

Hi-Tech and the Quality of our Lives

After lunch one day Freddy, Shea and Grace tried to explain to JoAnne how rapidly this country has changed since the end of World War II and the impact that technology has had on our quality of life. Jo Anne then provided a moving description of how Hi-Tech affects her and others in her line of work.

JS: The stressfulness of living today is definitely related to the pace of technological change. Everything changes so quickly now that it is often a matter of months. The average work day for people in my field of work is probably ten hours minimum. At this point the pace of change doesn’t seem to be really serving the people. You have programmers who are putting together programs which are supposed to make our work easier. But what we are finding is that people like me are scrambling to learn and keep up with technology, to figure out how to make it work for us. I don’t think we have reached the point where the computer industry and technology are making life easier. We are doing so much to keep up with the machine and build up this information network. It seems that everything is so much easier and faster, but you still have to find the time to put it all together. We are being made to keep up with technology and that is leading us to a very stressful life and we are lacking in quality of life. In my job and I feel other people in jobs like mine there is enough work so that you could work 24 hours a day. Information is instantly made so available and accessible (E-mail, fax, instant messages) that people forget there has to be time for living.

What I liked about the Mexico I have known is that they have a sense of time. They are not in the technological age. You wait hours for things. In Spain also they are just entering the computer age. There are still chunks of time in the middle of the day where families go home and eat a meal together, take a nap or make love. Then you go back to the job until 7-8 p.m., go for a little drink and have dinner at ten in your home or at a cafe. It is all very social. You take a stroll, have a nap. They are still maintaining a quality of life that is lost here in the United States and possibly in other countries. 

We need to appreciate the process which living involves, take time to exchange ideas, nurture ourselves. If I were not in transition from my job at this point, I couldn’t take the time for this discussion. Even here on the island I need to go and check my E-mail and work. I am a slave to my computer, and I am not the only one. That is how life is right now for us.

SH: When Lee was here, she was protective of this as a place she could call “vacation.” Otherwise she feels she constantly has to be producing. After working all day, she goes upstairs at 7 to work at her computer.

JS: There is no Stop and Start to working even when you have a 9-5 job. My friend Tina is a cccupational therapist for children. In the evenings she has to write up her notes on her computer at home. Where does her living come in? Where is her time to exercise, to socialize, for meals, for gardening, for reading, for wriiting.

FP: The organizer isn’t your job any longer. It is carried over.

GB: I am reminded of what T.S. Eliot said in “The Rock.”

 Endless invention, endless experiment,

 Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

 Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

 Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

 All our knowledge brings us closer to our ignorance,

 All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

 But nearness to death no nearer to God.

 Where is the Life we have lost in living?

 Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

 The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

 Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Community Self-Reliance

Freddy, Shea, Michelle, Grace, September 1, l998

GB: In preparation for this discussion I have typed up some notes on Michael Shuman’s Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age (see Appendix), an important book sent me by Dennis Terry this spring. The last chapter, which originally appeared in A World That Works under the title “Ten Steps to Community Self-Reliance, was included in the l998 Detroit Summer Reader.

 Now the director of the Institute of Policy Studies, Shuman was an activist in the municipal foreign policy movement in the l980s. Together with Julia Sweig he edited the EXPRO book, Conditions of Peace, which includes an essay by Shea and myself on Community.

 Self-Reliance means local production of the basic needs for everyone in the community. It is not the same as Self-Sufficiency, e.g. every community would not produce cars. It is achieved by Import Substitution, i.e. creating businesses to meet local needs, which requires a collective approach. It won’t just happen spontaneously. One of the weaknesses of African American businesses is that they lack a collective approach. Each entrepreneur tries to do it on his or her own. 

 Shuman makes clear that the global economy is not only destructive of communities and of the environment but that it makes no sense economically. To woo transnational corporations, city and state administrations invest huge sums of tax monies, as much as $200,000 a job. Yet these corporations are free to pick up and leave when they can make more profit elsewhere. Local economies would also be much more efficient, avoiding the waste and spoilage involved in transporting food products thousands of miles.

 Shuman’s concept of local self-reliant economies is also tied to a new concept of citizenship which is extremely timely in this period when the global economy is creating such turmoil and Americans have so little confidence in national politics. It was the emergence of the global economy in the form of multinational corporations which led Jimmy to begin talking and writing about “a new concept of citizenship” in 1976.

MB: I like the part about starting collectively. In Detroit small businesses say “people won’t shop with us,” while people complain that they can’t find what they need in neighborhood stores and corporations say that they have to locate in the suburbs because of the demographics. It is a Catch 22. When you go to a neighborhood store and don’t find what you want, you drive out to the mall. Then the small businessman says “Why should I start a business in Detroit? There is no market there.” Whereas if we make a conscious effort to work collectively, we can shift the demographics. And we can also tell the big corporations that we won’t buy from them unless they put their stores where we live. They have all kinds of specialized stores in Dearborn. We don’t. The answer is thinking collectively, thinking together, not just as black people but as a community. To make our communities sustainable, we need to ask “What do we need here?” and then make the conscious decision to use our dollars to back it up.

GB: In the Casino Gambling struggle, the Community Coalition has started thinking this way by insisting that we don’t only want jobs; we want ownership. They still have a long way to go. In Detroit people are reading a book “Dirty Little Secrets” which explains how black ownership means not just selling goods made elsewhere but thinking “backward” to all the steps that go into producing, packaging, transporting these goods and then creating businesses to carry out these steps. Otherwise black businesses are little better than McDonald franchises. Out of a gross of $500,000 a year, only $50,000 stays in the community. 

MB: People who talk about bringing in Target, McDonalds, K-Marts are still keeping us beholden to the big corporations. We have to go back to basics, to growing our own food in our own gardens.

GB: When the National Black Farmers Conference was held in Detroit in May, one of their slogans was “We can’t free ourselves until we feed ourselves.” Shuman points out the importance of community gardens. They make use of vacant land, unskilled labor, provide food for those cut off from welfare. There are over 1000 community gardens in New York City and more per capita in Philadelphia and Boston. 

SH: I wish we had a long time to talk about this book. A lot of different strands of ideas that we have discussed over the years are coming together in a way that is really exciting. I can remember the difficulty we all had in making the linguistic shift from multinational corporations to transnational corporations, trying to get a grip on what was happening in the development of capitalism. Now the strains of the global economy are everywhere. Shuman points out that the whole question of who benefits, what is wasted, etc. are now exposed in a way that was not true ten years ago. The second thing is the technology that has made this possible and how Place has become irrelevant to production. You can grow the cloth in one place, weave it in another, cut and assemble it elsewhere etc. Things get shifted all around, not to mention the whole electronic stuff. These are issues we have worked on. On the other hand, from our own practice, the things we have learned over the years from working with people and seeing that in some ways Detroit, having been abandoned as part of the global economy, has benefited because it has allowed space for people to reconstruct their lives in a really good way. A lot of that is the gardening. It is funny because gardening was originally sponsored by the city in the Farm-a-lot program.  There has been a lot of creative maneuvering in these last ten years that people didn’t see. Part of our responsibility is really understanding this new stage. What seems quite clear in the conflicts with Dennis Archer is that what has been a protected space for grassroots development is now being contested. For example, this plowing up of the “Hope Takes Roots” garden in the Briggs Community to create a parking lot for a temporary casino is so radicalizing because it is such a defilement of what people have created; in the same way the homes of people who have stayed forever in the city are now being bulldozed to make way for housing for the affluent. The line between us and the administration is becoming sharper. And it is not just about small things, even though it may seem small - just a little garden. All the things that went into the making of the garden are being assaulted. It is causing people to question what cities are for, why they matter. My own sense is that people are questioning development more than they ever did under Coleman Young, not because it is not Coleman Young but because so much of what people have created or held on to is being taken away. I think we are in for an intense time. These struggles are just going to escalate. It is now becoming a struggle to hold on to those gardens and our homes. Everybody is beginning to feel vulnerable.

 Also the ability of people to create informal collective networks is pretty impressive, especially when you look at things like Ann and Jackie’s bakery. They now get organic farm produce brought in from a farmer they have contracted with and a number of people are in on that. They get fresh fruit and vegetables and the farmers knows how much to plant. That is going on all over the place. People are creating ways to connect the city and country.

GB: Anyone who is struggling in Detroit at this time feels that a network is being created. In l982 when we published the Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party, we pointed out how multinational corporations, with no loyalty to any country, let alone to cities, were destroying communities and the nation. We put forward proposals for Community Committees of all kinds. But we weren’t thinking of community gardens. We didn’t project them until Jimmy entered the struggle against Coleman Young’s proposal of Casino Gambling to create jobs. Meanwhile, it was Coleman Young of all people who began the Farm-a-lot program which people like Gerald Hairston and Jessie Thomas took advantage of, leading to organizing the Gardening Angels. Detroit Summer put us into contact with them. Now we can see the Community Garden movement as a national movement and Detroit as taking the lead in this movement because from being the peak of the industrial city it has become one of the most de-industrialized. Also we can see the movement more clearly in Detroit because even though it is considered a big city, it is so small that everybody knows what is going on.

FP: Los Angeles is a peculiar place. We have been trying to broaden our neighborhood so that it doesn’t become just chicano. It started by our wanting different kinds of restaurants. We didn’t want a McDonald’s but then the kids wanted it so we said OK. Asians were coming in and opening stores and we asked why they didn’t become part of the community. The idea was to keep the community growing. We used to have a movie house right on Daly St. but we don’t any more. Families would bring their kids. Before they took over Chavez Ravine for the Dodgers there was a beautiful community up on the hill with sheep. It was just lovely. We had small stores, but little by little the big ones have taken over. Safeway, which is the equivalent of Farmer Jack in Detroit, came in selling second hand produce in our neighborhood. We started picketing and it worked. But then they left and Vons took over. Now we are in the same situation with Vons stocking second rate goods in our neighborhood and first class produce in Pasadena. As we left a meeting last year, one guy said that the only businesses coming in are girlie shows. I think Detroit doesn’t expand because you are still building small neighborhoods. In Los Angeles Chinatown has expanded. A large Chinese restaurant was started and the owner was killed the day before it opened. Some people are saying the Mafia was involved.

MB: When we had the Youth Dialogue at Butzel, we were talking about food and one of the young people said that the school lunch was his only meal all day. He said that if you don’t eat, you can’t think, you can’t do anything. When we talk about feeding people and the global economy, you can see that we can provide fresh produce in our area. If you can produce your own food and essentials, those dollars you take to the market are important bargaining chips. I remember when Lin and Varikon came to Detroit Summer, there was a problem with the water in the Highland Park garden and Lin showed other young people how they could solve it based on her experiences in Vietnam. People around the world are hungry but they have ideas that we can incorporate to solve the basic problems of feeding people to give them economic power. We can say to the big stores, “We don’t need you to put food on our table. We got that covered, but you need us so that you can make money.” You can do that with something as simple as a garden.

GB: There is a real basis for a new kind of internationalism in this. We can establish ties with people in Third World countries who are also struggling for Self-Reliance because they realize that corporations have been able to force them to work in their mines and factories by taking over the land they used to grow food and planting luxury crops like coffee and pineapples to export to the industrialized countries.

FP: You are trying to narrow things down to the community, while we tried to broaden towards a big city and it isn’t working very well.

MB: Most farmers think they can solve their problems with chemical fertilizers etc. In countries where they can do it they have tried to create their own methods. Lin showed us how they were able to grow diverse crops in Vietnam. It is a step back in technology but we are learning from each other.

SH: One thing I really want us to work on this winter is getting the greenhouses in the schools up and running. Detroit has one of the largest soy bean plants in Michigan. We could make and market all sorts of things that begin with soy beans. It seems to me that one of our tasks in the next few years should be to really learn to market some products that we are create and do this with some school connections so that this can be ongoing and not just in the summer.

GB: Detroit Summer is going to be used as a model in the University of Detroit-Mercy class this year. We have to assess what we have done. Detroit Summer also needs to work more closely with the Detroit Agricultural Network and Green Zones Initiative. Last year Green Zones visited a high school where the Science teacher had a functioning greenhouse and enthusiastic students working in it.

MB: Detroit Summer also involves people in Visioning workshops and intergenerational discussions so that they gain a broader appreciation of what they are doing. We have a lot of people who are generations away from closeness to the Land. We have to raise the level of the discussion so that they can see more than a garden. “You are not free until you can feed yourself. Growing your own food can empower you.” Without the vision and the discussions you are not going to impact people and make things happen. You need both. That is why people feel disempowered. You can show them ways that they don’t have to be at the mercy of Chrysler. People have been so disempowered and disenchanted. It is as if my opinion doesn’t matter. Casinos and sports stadiums are not going to affect your community positively. We must come up with our own solutions. When you are not dependent on someone else you don’t have to take crap.

FP: Going back to the point I made before. I don’t see this happening in other cities. Small groups started gardening in L.A. but their land was bought up. When small stores are broken into, the rumor is that it is not just a gang thing. I still hunger for what we used to have. GB: A lot of the future has be based on restoring what was good in the past.

MB: In Detroit there are places that nobody cared about before. But now with the two stadiums and the Casinos, developers are buying up these lots and houses in the hope that future development will make them very valuable. And the administration is taking them over by eminent domain. The land grab is very scary.

GB: We need to be sharpening the difference between the two roads: Economic Development vs. Community Development. FP: The Vietnamese in our neighborhood started gardens and it went on for about five years. Now there is less because the property is being bought up.

GB: What is important about Detroit Summer is that we are developing a younger generation that can at least appreciate this perspective because a lot of the older folks from the South are dying out. I like the way that Michelle emphasizes that it is only by providing for our own basic needs that we are empowered to make our own choices. Otherwise we are living a form of enslavement.

Race Today: Beyond Black and White

Freddy, Grace, Shea, Michelle. September 1, l998

GB: I’m glad we’re having this discussion at this time which I see as a critical period in the development of the struggle around racism in this country. As we all know, Clinton established a Commission to create dialogue around Race. On July 9, Clinton’s dialogue with a number of well-known individuals was telecast on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer and I was able to take it off the Internet ((pbs.org/newshour). Discussants included essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service, columnists Clarence Page and Cynthia Tucker; Kay James, Elaine Chao, former head of United Way of America; and Sherman Alexie, Native American novelist, poet and screenwriter. I was struck by how little each of the participants - except for Rodriguez - had to contribute. Rodriguez’s essays are available online. I especially recommend “The Browning of America,” 2/18/98. He started off the discussion with these words:

 “I think, Mr. President, that America is growing more and more complicated, and it seems to me that our conversation is not keeping up with that complexity. This year of dialogue began with John Hope Franklin, the head of the race commission saying that the unfinished business of America is black and white, but it strikes me that after this year that what we really need to do is to understand how complex this country is, with Samoan rap groups and Filipinos and Pakistani cab drivers, and the racial relationships now in America are so complex and so rich that it seems to me that we don’t have a language even to keep up with that complexity.” 

I especially like Rodriguez’s comments because they help us to see how easy it is to get stuck in the language of the past (what Hegel called “fixed concepts”) so that we are unable to conceive reality as it is developing. The black/white struggle has played such a critical role in the development of U.S. society that people are still trying to fit today’s changing reality into the concepts that have come out of that struggle. Today there are not only Samoan rap groups and Pakistani cab drivers but racist and anti-racist skinheads, and interracial marriages have resulted in so many individuals of bi-racial or tri-racial ancestry that the next U.S.census has become almost as problematic as readying our computers for the turn of the century. I hope our conversation this year will help create the language to capture this new complexity.

SH: Three summers ago Detroit Summer youth held a discussion on Race. In the group were two Latinos (Cesar and Henry) and three Asians (Anthony, Samantha and Sandy), but the conversation very quickly became framed as black and white. The young people wanted a more broadly conceived discussion of Identity and Culture. So the next summer we did a Multicultural evening which came out of their desire to go beyond the black-white framing. At school this young woman who identifies as bi-racial has created more turmoil among faculty who identified as African American than I have seen in a long time. She is about 26, separated from them by roughly twenty years, and her view of life is very different and very unsettling to people of my generation, especially those who identify as African American and were part of the struggle. One thing I have found helpful is to talk about the struggle of the 60s as a struggle for citizenship rather than a struggle for Identity which is how it is portrayed in the media. When people talk about citizenship, it opens up the question of Race very differently. One of the things we have to look at is Age in terms of when people have struggled and how they identify themselves.

MB: Most black people do realize that we have different races in us. But I identify myself as black rather than as a person of color because most of my history has been identified with the black struggle. So I don’t know these other parts of me. But today young people do know. They are dating other people. So it is easy to see why they don’t want to identify themselves as either black or white. My father’s mother was not black - she was half Indian and half white - but it was a big secret. They don’t even have a picture of her. When his parents broke up, she just disappeared. To be light back then was either something very special or it meant something in your background that you didn’t talk about. Now we see young people coming from interracial marriages but our language is still black and white. For example, Koreans are sometimes called the “niggers” of Asia and in Latino groups they use black and white terminology. It is hard to get beyond the old black and white thing. I don’t see how people of my generation and up can do it because it has mattered so much in our whole history.

FP: I am glad we are going beyond just black and white. In my neighborhood I see the divisions among Spanish-speaking people. When I was thinking of hiring this Guatemalan woman, another woman said, “you don’t want her.” What I like very much is that the small shopkeepers will hire their own. A young man who started off as a bus boy now has his own restaurant and will only hire Spanish-speaking people. We cannot get any Asian people in our neighborhood to join anything. I was told that there is a fear. It is sad because we can’t get them to work in the community. Since I don’t go to demonstrations now, I do the phoning and I know this. What I would like to know more about is the term “People of Color.”

GB: The last article Jimmy wrote was called “Beyond Black and White.” It was a letter to the Detroit Free Press published June 23, l993.  I agree with Michelle that it will be very hard for African Americans to give up thinking of the national struggle in terms of black and white because the history of this country and their own lives have been shaped so much by this polarization. Even though Native Americans and Latinos have been here as long as African Americans and have been exploited by Euro-Americans, and many African Americans have Indians as well as EuroAmericans in their ancestry, it is the black-white struggle which has shaped and dominated the history of this country. I am reminded of Marx’s point that the Civil War became inevitable because the North-South economic axis was supplanted by the East-West economic axis when cities in the northeast became industrialized and needed food from Western farmers. We are undergoing a similar transition now with the growing importance of Asia and of the West Coast where Latinos and Asians are now the majority in many areas. When I go to L.A. I am amazed at the number of places where “To rent” signs are only in Chinese. The whole country is changing so rapidly that we can’t change our language (i.e. our ideas) fast enough. African Americans are having the hardest time catching up. For example, even though Cornel West and the NAACP welcome other people of color to the struggle. they see these others as being incorporated into the pattern of struggle that has been created by blacks.

SH: There is something about where whites fit into this, which is why I am glad that Clinton has introduced this dialogue. It is important that whites have an anti-racist politics because of the black/white dynamic. Most progressive whites would rather engage with Latinos or Asians or Indians than with blacks because blacks raise the question of power and privilege through a movement in a way that the other groups don’t. So for progressive whites it was easier to organize in relation to the homeless in Central America than the homeless in Detroit. There is a sense in which whites, in the absence of dealing with race, particularly in the progressive community, make it very hard to break out of the black/white dynamic because it is a continuation of that dynamic in a certain sense.

MB: Often when a colonizing group comes in, the indigenous people who have a culture are either wiped out or sent to reservations and forgotten. So then they say the culture of this country is European. Black people are always saying that the reason we don’t stick together like the Asians or the Mexicans is because we don’t have a history like the Koreans and we are still looking for a culture to latch on to which isn’t ours. So we are developing our own traditions (e.g. Kwanzaa) to draw strength from rather than mirroring European culture (e.g. the church). On NPR they told the story of the Korean dry cleaner who was refused a loan by the local bank. So the Koreans went together to the bank and threatened to take out all their deposits. They had clout. We don’t have that common bond. In our minds black banks and black stores are inferior. So we are really hard on each other.  Shea might not have what I have but she knows her culture as opposed to me who doesn’t know what I am bringing to the table that is different. I am not bringing a language.

GB: Over and over again blacks explain the lack of black unity as Michelle has just done and say that is why we have to fight harder for black unity. But despite enormous efforts over the years black unity hasn’t been created that way and it is even less likely to be created now that, as a result of the movement, a black middle class has been created and there are sharper divisions of class among black people than there have ever been. When do you learn that strength and unity has to come from other sources, from other relationships? We all know that in unity there is strength. But to keep insisting that the unity has to be in terms of race when the objective basis for disunity among blacks is growing doesn’t make sense if you really want to win and to improve the conditions of your people. The unity has to be for a purpose. You can’t be for unity just for the sake of unity. What I hear is a kind of complaining about the lack of unity, when what we need to do is to think imaginatively about how to create new forms of unity. This is what Lani Guinier was trying to do when she proposed giving people three votes, so that you can vote your ethnic, your class and your gender interest. Added together, the result would mirror our complexity. One of the things I hold most against Clinton was that he withdrew her nomination without even allowing a discussion of her proposals. It is that kind of imaginative thinking that we now need instead of continuing to use the past to explain why we lack unity.

MB: That is one of the things I like about Detroit Summer. The young people and those of us who are involved are thinking beyond black unity. I identify as a black person but I am not waiting for black people to get together. I think that we can get to another plateau only by forming coalitions and working with like-minded people. When I talk with the young people I tell them to recognize your history of being black but you don’t have to wait for that ship to come in before you do things. I think that is real. I agree with you, Grace. You have to look at where we are today. And although I identify as African American and don’t call myself a person of color, I have to recognize that this is a brown world and we are all facing the same kinds of problems and we can have the same kind of solutions, and if we are going to have real empowerment we have to find different levels of working together and looking at our communities and bringing together the people who have the best strengths in each of these groups and learn from them and share what we have. You are you. What strengths are you bringing to this pie of people of color which is in fact the majority? If we could bring that together we could do something. You have to accept your heritage, accept where you came from and then build towards the future. The future is multicultural.

GB: I am glad we have that on tape. I hope that you will write and say it in many places.

FP: What kinds of groups do you have working together in Detroit? I don’t like the expression “People of Color.”

MB: We had a mixed group from Antioch working with Detroit Summer this year. The Detroit kids who are primarily black did things together with them. We always make a conscious effort to work with the Arab-American youth . They are primarily Muslim and many of them come to meetings covered up. It would appear that there is no way in the world that black kids would hang out with them, but they were able to identify common problems and goals and solutions and at the same time respect where each was coming from.

GB: To know and respect each other’s history and at the same time work together based on the unity of problems and solutions - that is how unity is being created today.

FP: The term “People of Color” is so negative. MB: We don’t call ourselves “People of Color.” The media does that.

GB: The term “Multicultural” is useful to contrast ourselves with the “English only “ people who see getting to know your own history and identity as dismantling the country. SH: I think “Multicultural” came from people wanting to break out of the laundry list of all the different groups. GB: The language comes out of the struggle.

SH: It is like the discussion we had the other night about the term “Queer.” Terms like that emerge out of efforts to resolve real problems in a movement. Sometimes they get picked up and some times they just fade away. “Multicultural” has been picked up mainly because it was targeted by the opposition.

MB: I don’t like “People of Color” because I think it is important to know who you are. But I don’t have a problem with it. When Autumn was with Detroit Summer, she had a whole laundry list of her ancestry - black, Indian, French. It is great that she knew. Sometimes people of color sounds like you’re ashamed of who you are, while I’m proud.

SH: I am glad for all the confusion because what is coming out is what a fake notion “race” was all along. Finally we are getting to the point when we realize that it was a term of political control. That was what it was all about. The ‘one drop of blood’ stuff is weird. The present confusion is because we are trying to break free from a form of colonial domination which existed for 400 years. So we are not going to jump out of it easily. It is hard.

GB: In one sense the idea of being “Asian” is ridiculous.  There is no “Asian” language. The Asian continent is made up of many very diverse nations with very different histories. But the concept of being Asian American came out of the struggle when Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Filipino Americans were inspired and challenged by the black power movement to stand up and refuse to accept “the model minority” stereotype.  Asian Americans are still very few relative to Latinos and African Americans, and Detroit is so overwhelmingly African American that it is important to project multicultural programs in Detroit. That is the great strength of Detroit Summer - that it is so openly intergenerational and multicultural. 

This has been a good discussion and I am especially glad that Michelle spoke so powerfully.

APPENDIX

Michael H.Shuman: Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age.The Free Press, l997.

Shuman is director of the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C. In the l980s he was involved in the Municipal Foreign Policy movement which created links between city councils in U.S. cities and people in Third World cities. This led him to wonder whether sister cities programs were helping to destroy local communities in the South by promoting free trade and moderinization and to begin investigating the meaning of sustainable development.

This book owes a lot to previous writings by E.F.Shumacher,Wendell Berry, Hazel Henderson, Paul Ekins, Kirkpatrick Sale, Herman Daly, John Cobb, Thomas M.Power et al. But because of Shuman’s activist background, it is more movement-oriented. Like David Korten and Jerry Mander he is concerned with “people-centred development” and projects strategies by which communities can develop businesses to make this possible. He also envisages a new democratic citizenship.

Most city administrations in the U.S. see economic development in terms of luring big

multinational corporations to construct local plants, casinos, etc. - corporations which have no loyalty to the local community and will get up and leave if they see a chance to make more profit elsewhere. Thus the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore.By contrast, the Green Bay Packers are owned by a local non-profit corporation in which approximately 2000 local citizens hold shares, whose mission is to create a competitive team which will remain in this small Wisconsin community forever. The GBP are an example of how “Prosperity follows when ownership, production and consumption become intimately connected with Place.”

MOBILITY is the dominant characteristic of the modern world economy. To get corporations to “park,” local governments pay all kinds of multi-million dollar bribes - often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per job - e.g to Mercedes-Benz (ALA) or BMW (South Carolina) - as well as promising low wages, non-union conditions, lax environmental regulations. At the same time these corporations continue to move jobs to nations in the South to take advantage of lower wages and fewer environmental restrictions, Meanwhile departing businesses produce growing unemployment and higher rates of suicides, crime, mental illnesses etc. 

Neither the DP or the RP challenges this trend. Critiques have come only from the marginal candidates for president - Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Ralph Nader. Most business schools accept the global economy as inevitable and progressive.

In recent years a counter-movement has been emerging around the concept of Sustainable Development , representing the interests of workers, producers, consumers, communities and the environment , as contrased with Economic Development, based on free-market eonomics. Previous social movements have struggled to change the HOW of production. The Sustainable Development movement also focuses on the WHERE or the PLACE of production. (Clinton has formed a President’s Council on Sustainable Development which includes the top brass of GM,Dow Chemical et al. Naturally the Council’s report includes no critique of corporate mobility. The Council is in the process of organizing a National Conference in Detroit in May 1999. Bunyan Bryant and Donele Wilkins are on the National Planning Committee. Grace is on the Local Planning Committee).

“Clearly there is much ferment throughout American society aimed at rethinking economics and business.”

PLACE MATTERS

There is widespread recognition that loss of community is the source of much of our current problems. A thriving local economy is the key to a strong community.Without a thriving local economy it is difficult to develop healthy families, strong work ethic, cut down crime. Without social networks and a climate of civil responsibility it is difficult to develop economically (Robert Putnam’s How Democracy Develops ).

HOW ABOUT EFFICIENCY?

Conventional Economists believe that Free Trade is most efficient, that we need international division of labor based on national specialization 

In fact, free trade has resulted in the destruction of communities, greater gaps between the rich and the poor,and between rich and poor nations and communiities.

Difference between Self-Reliance and Self-Sufficiency. “A Self-Reliant Community seeks to increase control over its own economy as far as practicable.”  Practicable means achieving a positive rate of return on investment as contrasted with the maximum rate of return.

BASIC STRATEGIES

1. Nurture businesses that reduce imports for basic needs. A sound local economy is one

that provides everyone with the necessities of life and trades surplus production for less essential      goods and services.

2. Keep ownership of business local.

3. Channel local savings and investment capital into the building of the local economy.

1, 2, 3 strengthen the economic multiplier. The expenditure of a Dollar generates more than a dollar’s worth of activity. The main goal is not efficiency or equity but overall quality of life. It may mean paying more for some things as well as refusing certain federal grants and loans which would stymie income redistribution.

IMPORT SUBSTITUTION/NEEDS DRIVEN INDUSTRIES

For most of human history communities were S-R. Produced own food, used local resources for buildings, clothing, energy. Today typical food item travels 1300 miles to consumer.

Import-Substitution facilitates diversification of skills, businesses, rounds out economies.

Dependent economies become monocultural,  hostage to remote disasters, export their negativities (wastes). Large scale economies can’t fine-tune, create enomous waste, spoilage. 1 out of 4 fruits and vegetables spoils during shipment or storage today.

Today NYC has over one thousand community gardens on public land; more per capita in Philadelphia and Boston. In cities these gardens use vacant land, energies of inner city people, provide food to needy

Local skills can be usedto conserve energy. Local resources can be used to produce it (solar, wind, geomass)

“ALL MEANINGFUL POLITICS IS LOCAL”

10 Steps to Community Self-Reliance

1. A Community Bill of Rights

2. A State of the City Report

3. Anchor Corporations

4. Community-Friendly Business Schools

5. Community Finance

6. Community Currency

7. A Community Friendly City Hall

8. Political Reform

9. A Lobby for Localis

10. Interlocalism - Regional,Continental, International