[Peace-discuss] The seduction of Neoliberal "anti-racism"

[C. G. Estabrook]

Champaign-Urbana's local anti-war group, AWARE, has been from its founding a dozen years ago concerned with racism (AWARE = Anti-war Anti-racism Effort), principally for three reasons:

[1] the overt and covert employment of racism - anti-Arab, anti-Iranian, and anti-Muslim [sic] - by the Bush-Obama administration in order to build support within the US public for imperial war in the 'Greater Middle East'; 

[2] US support for Israel, a state based on racism, as its "cop on the beat" in the generations-long American attempt to dominate Mideast energy resources; and 

[3] the US economic draft ("volunteer army") - instituted after the revolt of the US conscript army in Vietnam - which coerces into a criminal war a disproportionate number of non-white Americans.

But the rise in the 1970s of 'Identity Politics' - parallel to and connected with Neoliberalism, the counter-attack by the 1% on social progress in the US from the New Deal to 'the Sixties' - has led today to a reactionary anti-racism. Here John Halle anatomizes a few of its practitioners - race-fakers who might be compared to the labor-fakers of the Great Depression:

<http://lbo-news.com/2013/07/12/1938/#comment-9643>.

With thanks to Doug Henwood's LBO News. --CGE