Diversity, Equity & Inclusion or Class Struggle, Community Control and Socialist Reconstruction? Part 2 of 3 By collectivist action
See part 1 of this series here: https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2024/05/diversity-equity-inclusion-or-class.html
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion or Class Struggle, Community Control and Socialist Reconstruction?
Part 2 of 3
By Collectivist Action
“. . .I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. I fear that I am integrating my people into a burning house”
Martin Luther King to Harry Belafonte, 1967
. .I contend that the ‘d’ in D.E.I. is virtually meaningless, especially if we’re not talking about political diversity, ie, actually integrating different political tendencies and orientations into the ruling apparatus. . .something few societies have ever voluntarily done. I’ve met very few people - outside of liberal political circles - who have ever viewed ‘diversity’ as either a burning issue or primary objective of any serious social or political struggle they were involved in.
Perhaps, they know that diversity is not the real issue. . .?
Certainly, we know that indigenous communities have always been quite diverse, consisting of at least 500 nations, aka, tribes, just in North America.
We know that the captive and enslaved humans taken from Africa came from over a hundred different diverse ‘tribes’ in Africa. The European colonists came from nations and cultures all over Europe, before and after the Civil War.
Although the indigenous population was greatly decimated by disease and warfare, hundreds of distinct indigenous communities can still be identified in the 21st century. Identifiable European and non-European cultures, subcultures and cultural hybrids continue to exist.
However, mostly self-identified Anglo-Saxon culture, forged and socially engineered by genocide and racist immigration policies, has continued to subordinate and dominated all the others; advertently or inadvertently.
Clearly, diversity is not the problem. Cultural expropriation, economic exploitation and political domination are.
More importantly, the relatively few nonwhite faces, sitting comfortably in ‘high’ and powerful places within the power structure have not fundamentally changed the power relationships. To this day, a relatively few whites, mostly males with money, continue to control the vital means of production and political power on a local, state and federal level in the USA.
Afaics, the policy of diversity, like inclusion, is a ruse; a particularly dangerous one being promoted as a path to liberation for any number of exploited and oppressed communities.
If diversity means ‘representation’, something akin to ‘representative’ government, as in small ‘r’ republican politics, how has that worked out?
The political ‘representatives’ of any given social group usually wind up PRIMARILY representing the pecuniary and political interests of those with the biggest campaign donations.
There is more than enough historical evidence to conclude that, more often than not, money and/or one’s real relationship to the means of power and production TRUMPS color, sex, religion, and a bunch of other social identities and relationships.
Otoh, if ‘d’ stands for democracy, that struggle, imo, continues and MUST continue to be waged.
One way democracy can be defined is as the highest form of self determination.
Democracy can also be defined as a system of governing society in which laws, policies, and major political decisions are ostensibly determined by a numerical majority of the people in any given political jurisdiction.
However, we’ve seen where ‘the people’ can be defined as either an empowered numerical minority, legally classified as citizens, or a numerical majority socially-engineered by a ruling class.
In colonial America, e.g., and in the nation state which succeeded it, the ruling class artificially created, over time, a numerical majority of the population classified-as-white, primarily through genocide and white supremacist immigration policies.
The U.S. is generally recognized as a ‘representative democracy’. Theoretically, laws are passed and policies and practices are implemented which, supposedly, express the will of the majority of people. In actuality they represent, more often than not, the will of the biggest benefactors, usually big corporations, wealthy families and individuals.
Major financial donors, not politicians, often write legislation in addition to threatening to cut off (and cutting off!) future campaign donations as retaliation for policies which go against their interests.
But the real antidemocratic elements of the U.S. electoral system are baked into the structure itself. . .
Paul Street, The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution, Counterpunch 11/8/2019
If we include the malapportioned Senate, the undemocratically appointed Supreme Court, the gerrymandered U.S. House of Representative, etc. and THE BIG MONEY IN POLITICS, the U.S. political system can not be accurately and honestly described as a democracy, in spite of honest and earnest efforts to make it one. . .
Nevertheless, the final analysis is a class analysis. . .
To paraphrase Malcolm X’s analogy: a few of us sitting at the master’s dinner table does NOT alleviate the hunger of the MASSES.
‘Equity’ is a term often confused with equality. Unlike the latter, which implies parity of social outcomes, equity merely means equal access. . .
In a capitalist-dominated culture where MONEY RULES EVERYTHING, what can accessibility possibly mean? Just because the iron curtain of American apartheid has been, for the most part, pulled down, and we’ve attained the unfettered, equal freedom (?) to CONSUME does not mean liberation. Much of it merely means more equal opportunity DEBT.
WW2 is generally considered the beginning of another profound upsurge of the Black Liberation Movement, aka, ‘Civil/Human Rights Movement, influenced by world events after another world-wide conflict ostensibly triggered by the rise of fascism in Europe and Japan. Of course many on the left realized that the underlying reason for war was the same one that instigated the 1st world war: the struggle between the ruling classes of major nations to redivide the world’s vital, and profitable, resources among themselves. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) was, more than anything else, the excuse the U.S. rulers needed to officially intervene in the war, NOT fascism.
Nevertheless, fascism was rearing its ugly head on the U.S. domestic front. An anti-communist witch hunt emerged again with the stated aim of purging the country of all social justice movements, esp., if they promoted socialism. Movement leaders who were fortunate to avoid imprisonment on trumped-up charges of “advocating the overthrow of the government”, experienced what artists/activists like Paul Robeson did: total censorship and/or their reputations and careers ruined.
In spite of this, by the mid-1960s/ early 1970s a new radicalism had developed among the working class and student contingents of the Movement.
I was one of those radical, working class high school students swept into that Movement.
I recall several primary concerns at that time:
The struggle for social integration, or INCLUSION, as a path to liberation, was not only perceived as unattainable (given the intractability of white supremacy/nationalism) but also, had become UNDESIRABLE, for many people.. What were we integrating into?
If the goal was EQUALITY, how was that to be measured?
If the goal was EQUITY, i.e., equal access, how was that to be measured?
The U.S. ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ and liberals in general have historically obscured even erased the black nationalistic tendencies, among others, which have always been part of the Black Liberation Movement.
The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), for example, established before the 1920s by Marcus Garvey, advocated for an international black state; what he defined as African fundamentalism. (The African Peoples Socialist Party, established in 1972 under the leadership of former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, Student Omali Yeshitela, promotes much of this tendency today)
Garvey’s organization eventually became the largest black organization that has ever existed so far, anywhere. The appeal of the UNIA, was highly understandable. With white supremacy codified by the Supreme Court, and unmitigated white domestic terrorism normalized , the hope or vision of a nonracial, democratic country ever materializing was arguably at its lowest point. Although this disillusionment was widespread, the Garvey movement was able to inspire African Americans by positing a kind of universal, black nationalism, or pan-africanism.
An overlooked, for too long, factor in the UNIA’s appeal is that the organized, white left in the U.S. during the 1920s either openly upheld white supremacy or were ‘indifferent’ to it. (There’s almost no record of white, left-led demonstrations against white supremacy nor nationalism at that time or since.)
Black nationalism, as a social, political and economic response to white nationalism, can be discerned in the U.S. as early as the antebellum period. More than a few escaped slaves and nominally free Blacks advocated for a national homeland for African Americans, in or outside of the U.S., as refuge from both chattel slavery, in the South, and segregation in the North.
Emerging about a decade after the UNIA was a religious-nationalist organization called the Nation of Islam. Although the latter’s actual origins are shrouded in much mystery and urban legends, by the 1950s it had become significant enough to be featured on major commercial mainstream media. Under the leadership of its founder, Elijah Muhammad (formerly Elijah Poole of Georgia) the NOI created a network of temples and small businesses in major urban areas and by the 1960s had recruited tens of thousands of members, two of the most influential being Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan.
In addition to the UNIA and the NOI, scores of other formations emerged in the 20th century, such as the African Blood Brotherhood, Moorish Science Temple, US (United Slaves), the Congress of African (CAP) People, etc. Recently, there has been a resurgence of the panafrican orientation advocated by Kwame Toure, aka, Stokely Carmichael (also a former SNCC leader.)
Operating concurrently with all of the nationalist groups were liberal and conservative formations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others. Their stated political strategies, if not their end goals, can be defined as: integration into the dominant political, economic and social systems. . .as the path to liberation.
Ironically, MOST of these groups faced periodic, virulent opposition, repression and terrorism from state and nonstate forces, even if OR BECAUSE they promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
. . .By the late 1960s many conscious and conscientious and politically active African Americans of my generation identified our struggles, at the very least, as a fight for:
the power to control our communities and ALL of the vital resources within them
an end to police repression
Black history
reparations
self respect. . . self determination. . .self defense. . . NOT D.E.I. . .
(To be continued)
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