Dispatches Lives! Here by Permission Is the Full Text of Black Agenda Report's Thought Provoking Essay on Intersectionality

FIRST, MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO the tech support women at Typepad, my blog server, for showing me how to bypass my dead word processing system and assemble, edit and write Dispatches directly on my website at dispatchesfromdystopia.net.  Without such expert help -- especially that most recently provided by Anna D. -- I would remain but a lost child in the alien, glitch-haunted forests of Pancomputerdemonium. (The Nurdly consensus is I was not hacked; instead, attempting to run Open Office 4.1.1 in Windows 10, I was yet another of the innumerable victims in Microfuck's ongoing war against open-source software.) Hence this special, catch-up edition of Dispatches, including much of what was to have been 8 February's post but was lost in the WP demise. 

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NOW LET'S GET TO WORK.  As friends, Communist Labor Party comrades and even some kinfolk will attest, I have argued for many years we USian whites will never overthrow Capitalism until we not only join in heartfelt solidarity with our minority sisters and brothers but fully accept minority leadership and thereby take to heart the pivotal lessons, strategic and tactical, these seasoned veterans of extended class-struggle are uniquely qualified to teach us all. 

Nor is my stance unique. In the personal sense it was shaped by my late father -- ironically a skilled  teacher despite the psychological brutality and sadism that made him an abysmally unfit parent -- who fervently believed the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement would, in his words,  "force the United States to at long last live up to its democratic potential." (A few years later, I would for a time hold the same view of the Women's Liberation Movement, believing its original Marxism could save us from Capitalism's march toward fascism.) But my pivotal moment in this thinking was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Canadian media laid bare a purported Committee for State Security (KGB) estimate of U.S. revolutionary potential in the late 1960s. It concluded that amongst most USian whites, the vast majority of whom were from comfortable bourgeois or petite bourgeois backgrounds, revolution was no more than a passing fad, while within the viciously oppressed African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities, as well as within a tiny segment of the white Working Class, revolution was correctly viewed as a matter of survival. Hence while the KGB analysts evaluated the revolutionary potential of the Caucasian community as near absolute zero, it rated the revolutionary potential of the minority communities as quite high, though it simultaneously concluded these communities were of themselves too small to qualify for clandestine Soviet assistance.

(Note I write of this KGB analysis from memory; the reportage in question, which appeared in print c. 1992-1993, as I recall in Maclean's Magazine, has either never been referenced on the Internet or has been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, though I suspect it could yet be confirmed by any researcher who had access to a major Canadian library.) 

In any case, the implicit conclusion is obvious: either we whites learn to listen to our Black, Hispanic and First Nations sisters and brothers, or we remain slaves forever.  After all, is not listening the first step toward building solidarity? Thus the following, the best (i.e., most thought-provoking) essay on intersectionality I have yet read, reprinted in full with permission from its author, Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon, to whom my most sincere thanks.                           

Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2

By Bruce A. Dixon

WHEN I TOOK A swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I’m taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them.


(To read the rest, go here or here)