Column: Black World
May 1999

Touchstone of 'American civilization'

by Lou Turner

As aware as we are that we are experiencing a violently changing world, we are much less aware that with everything we learn from that experience we are also forming a new concept of the world. World-historic events like the war in the Balkans, and events much closer to home such as the emerging anti-brutality movement sparked by the Amadou Diallo murder in New York City, and before that the NYPD torture of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, as well as the anti-death penalty movement that has grown up around cases like that of Mumia Abu-Jamal and a whole slew of wrongful convictions in the state of Illinois, are being connected in the minds of many. And then the Columbine High School murder rampage happens.

The meaning we thought we grasped of this changed world seemed almost to evaporate. This experience didn't fit in our developing concept of the world. In fact, we have only forgotten how we came to understand the meaning of such events as Kosova, on the one hand, and the racist low-intensity war on Black life in these United States, on the other. This forgetfulness marks every transition in our attempt to conceptually grasp the meaning of "American civilization."

The violence that so grips Black communities, whether of the police-state kind or the self-inflicted kind that arises from the depths of a social alienation created by a quarter century of Black economic devastation, has, as Malcolm X said at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy, "come home to roost."

Black life has never been anything but cheap in America. In the carnage of two deranged neo-fascist youth at Columbine, white America found that it was not spared such hatred, a hatred that its conservative culture the last 25 years convinced it to treat with "benign neglect."

In their Hitler's birthday attack on their classmates, Harris and Klebold, made clear their hatred for Blacks. Indeed, there is no more chilling account of the Columbine massacre than the one of the young white woman student who told of being targeted in the Columbine library by Harris and then being passed over when he saw a Black student. "I hate n--rs!", Harris screamed, and then pumped bullets into the head of Isaiah Shoels.

The media, and apparently much of white America, continue to ignore the racist handwriting on the wall, at the same time as they overindulge themselves in dime-store psychologism about our so-called "youth problem." In the same week as the Columbine massacre, there was more than enough evidence of a youth culture whose mind and spirit stays on freedom at mass youth marches in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, April 24, in support of Mumia and other political and death row prisoners.

Black, white, Latino and Asian youth have seen something in the Black dimension of "American civilization" that not only squares with their own rejection of this degenerate society but represents a radical challenge to it, in thought and in action.

And yet, as we saw at the Philadelphia Mumia demonstration, local struggles in New York and Chicago were in large part responsible for raising the struggle around Mumia to a new national level, especially when the media, at the behest of the powers-that-be, do everything in their power to "disappear" the movement.

New York, more than anywhere else at the moment, is the focal point of whether the movement will achieve a new stage or succumb to old contradictions and reformist politics. With, not one but, two high-profile police brutality trials about to begin, that of the cops in the Louima torture and in the Diallo murder, New York is where Los Angeles was seven years ago with the Rodney King trial.

The difference is, however, that the New York trials were preceded by three months of mass protests and civil disobedience. The slightest perception that the "justice" done in the New York trials comes anywhere near the racist outcome of the Rodney King trial, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's New York will take LA to the next stage. Although it took New York seven weeks to bring out white support and become "fully" multicultural, in fact, it was radically multicultural from the start. It disclosed the Marxist-Humanist concept of the Black diaspora's "triangular trade of revolutionary ideas" between Africa, the Caribbean and Black America.

These two crucial aspects of the present objective situation, namely, New York's continuity with the 1992 LA rebellion and the growing radicalization of its multicultural character, are the context in which to assess the movement and its Black political leadership. That means not only Rev. Al Sharpton, but local and national leaders who provide him the cover of legitimacy.

The stage is now set in New York to answer the question posed in Los Angeles seven years ago, namely: Was the LA rebellion the end, the last echo, of a dialectic of history set in motion in the 1950s and '60s Civil Rights and Black Power movements or the beginning of a new dialectical motion?

In the momentum of the present moment, this question is less likely to be worked out by the Left, including the Black Left, than by the Black masses themselves. The Black Radical Congress (BRC), titular heir to the Black left tradition, has ventured out on the high seas of international politics and in the Black radical tradition has even tried to connect the Kosova situation with the one at home, only to obfuscate both. The National Council of the BRC adopted a lengthy draft statement of the International Committee of the BRC on April 18 on the situation in the Balkans.

The BRC statement is pitifully abstract in its rhetorical demand to dismantle NATO and hopelessly naive regarding the UN (Lenin called its precursor a "thieves kitchen" for Western imperialism), and international law. More contradictory is that the BRC analysis of Milosevic's fascist history of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosova is vitiated by its abstract demand to end NATO bombing without troubling itself about the 40,000 Serbian troops that have carried out the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Kosovar Albanians.

The one fact of the changed world that the BRC statement does recognize is that "The struggle for democracy in multiethnic and multiracial societies is a totally new terrain where the present leaders of the USA [and Europe] have no experience." Unfortunately, the BRC is at sea when it comes to this new reality too. (The April 17 fascist bombing in the Black Brixton neighborhood in London, and two subsequent bombings in an Asian neighborhood and at a gay bar, still finds the Tony Blair government in a state of denial about the depth and extent of racism in Britain.)

The revolutionary struggle for radical multiethnic democracy is in no way separable from condemning genocidal ethnic cleansing wherever it occurs and supporting national self-determination, from East Timor and Palestine to Kurdistan and Kosova. That radical tradition, more than anything in today's changed world, continues to disclose the Black dimension as the "touchstone of American civilization."

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