[Peace-discuss] [Aware] Meetings on Sundays? (AWARE and other local activist groups)

[C. G. Estabrook]

AWARE was founded after the attacks of 9-11-2001 by people in C-U who saw that the US government would use those crimes as an excuse to continue to kill people in the Mideast, in continuation of America’s longstanding demand to control the energy resources of the region, for the benefit of the US 1%.

AWARE’s goal was to help people in C-U become ‘aware’ of the real nature of the US government’s murderous policies in the Mideast, and their attendant racism. That racism was particularly anti-Arabism and Islamophobia - propaganda used more or less covertly by the US government, in spite of the fact that its principal ally in the region (after Israel) was - and remains - the most repressive Arab/Muslim state in the world, Saudi Arabia.   

At least some members of AWARE are nevertheless properly skeptical of the sort of 'anti-racism’ that forms part of ‘identity politics.’ Forty years ago, under the assault of the American business class on the reforms of the New Deal/Great Society period, US liberals in a rather cowardly fashion abandoned the class politics that animated those reforms, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Desperately casting around for a cause that would restore their bona fides as reformers, US liberals seized upon discrimination (racial and otherwise) - surely an evil, just not the one that the US 1% was particularly concerned to perpetuate.    

For an account of this Great Refusal, see Walter Benn Michaels’ 2006 book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality."

The result is described by Adolph Reed, Jr.:

"...race politics [= identity politics] is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do ... within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.”

AWARE actually split on this issue ten years ago, and many concerned AWAREists left the organizations because they thought other members (who stayed) did not sufficiently appreciate that Barack Obama (because of his racial background?) was an anti-war candidate. Of course he wasn’t, but he did mendaciously mobilize antiwar sentiment and identity politics to get elected.

—CGE

> On Aug 28, 2015, at 9:42 AM, Stuart Levy via Aware <aware at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> ...anti-racism is in AWARE's name, but we don't do much about it...
> 

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