02-20-06,10:00am
African American History Month: Club Educational Discussion Guide (excerpts)
February presents us once again with an opportunity to strengthen our basic understanding of the fight for democracy and social progress in our country. One decisive question is the relationship of the struggle of the working class to the struggle of the African American people. The core forces of the forward motion for social progress in our country consist of the working class and its organized form, the labor movement, in association with the movements of the nationally and racially oppressed, the movements of women, and the movements of youth. Decisive is the relationship of the working class and organized labor to the African American people.
This educational has the goal of upgrading our understanding of the national question, the fight against racism, and the fight for African American equality. The suggested readings, which are attached, include excerpts from the 2005 October report to the National Committee meeting, the 28th National Convention Keynote Report, the Draft Program, and a few other articles. The supplementary readings include classic writings based on a theoretical foundation which is still sound even if the statistical data have changed.
At least an hour should be devoted to the full educational discussion.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why is the national question still important in the USA? Why are African Americans important as a segment of the working class and as a whole people? Why is the unity of the whole of the African people important? Why is the internal unity of the working class important, and why is the unity of the whole of the working class with the whole of the African American people decisive? Why is the relationship of all of the nationally oppressed peoples to each other, but particularly to the African American people important?
2. How is racism today similar to and different from racism of the past? What does it mean to struggle against racism? How do we answer those who claim white workers cannot be won to support full equality and oppose racism because of 'white skin privilege'? How does the struggle against racism unfold in your club's area of concentration or district? Why is the fight against racism decisive to the movement of the working class and the fight for social progress in this country?
3. What is the relationship between the struggle for more advanced democracy and the struggle against inequality? What is the role of the Party in the struggle against racism and for equality? How can these struggles contribute to the ability of the Party to grow? What can your club do to strengthen its understanding of the fight against racism and for equality and its role in productively waging that struggle in your area of concentration and district?
CPUSA Education Department
Recommended Readings:
1) Excerpts from the October 2005 National Committee Main Report by Sam Webb
KATRINA & ITS AFTERMATH
While the precipitous decline in the political fortunes of this administration is the result of a cumulative process, not everything has the same causal significance. Some things carry more causal weight in the chain of events that account for the sinking status of the Bush administration.
Herein lies the significance of hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
More than anything else, Katrina and its aftermath left a deep imprint on the public imagination of an administration that is morally indifferent, administratively incompetent, and politically self-serving.
It brought into full view the mistaken priorities that favor war and corporate profits over people's needs. It gave sharp definition to the fault lines of race and class? aggravated to the extreme by the race-conscious policies of the Bush administration and its extreme right wing counterparts in Congress, corporate boardrooms and think tanks.
Katrina helped millions of people to see the connections between issues, such as war spending and infrastructure repair, as well as to reconsider the assumptions that frame and legitimize the administration's policies, such as smaller government is better than bigger government.
Finally, Katrina punctured the artfully constructed myth that Bush is the best guardian of our nation's security.
Since the 1960s the conservative movement has bristled at what it calls the 'rights revolution' that began with the great civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.
The passage of civil rights legislation set in train the enactment of a string of judicial decisions by the Warren Court that expanded democratic rights for millions of people who had been reduced to second and third class citizenship.
For conservatives these decisions were at loggerheads with a strict constructionist reading of the constitution and cut into the authority of the legislative branch of government. Indeed they wrapped their objections in constitutionalist language and derided what they call 'judicial activism from the bench.'
But their interpretation of the constitution and the intentions of the framers of that document is specious according to respected historians.
Still another field of struggle is the economy where stagnant wages, eroding benefits, deteriorating health care, low wage jobs, pensions erosion, rising housing costs, and now skyrocketing energy prices are roiling working people.
It's true that if you look at some of the gross measurements of economic performance you can with some plausibility make the case that things aren't that bad. But if you look closer at statistics that measure economic conditions and well being of those who have nothing to sell but their labor power a far less promising picture comes into focus and it is precisely this that we have to be concerned about.
Most immediately, the rising costs of energy are turning into a crisis for millions of people. People are angry and will get angrier as home heating oil and gas bills begin to arrive. For many who are deep in consumer indebtedness the added costs of energy will be a budget breaker. Some will be unable to pay their energy bills, thus facing the danger of shutoff.
We have to join with others demanding both immediate relief and longer-term solutions to the energy crisis, while opposing new legislative measures made in the aftermath of Katrina to lift the remaining regulations on the energy industries and open up new formerly protected lands and waters to drilling.
Still another field of struggle is the cleanup and reconstruction of the Gulf States. As the water has receded, as the rebuilding has begun, and as public attention has turned elsewhere, it has become clear that the Republican Party would like to turn the whole region into a giant field of unregulated, crony capitalism. Right now there is no comprehensive plan or oversight committee that is comprised of prominent representatives of labor, racially oppressed, women, clergy, youth, seniors, elected officials, and so forth to monitor the reconstruction process.
Moreover, Bush says that he has no interest in such a plan or committee.
Bush joined Habitat for Humanity for a photo op, but is doing little to rebuild the housing stock in the Gulf States and New Orleans for Katrina's victims. Bush said that human services will be provided to all the evacuees, but his Congressional operatives are trying to nix Medicaid assistance to the displaced residents of the storm. Bush asserted that a racial divide still exists in our country, but then lifted Davis-Bacon and affirmative action provisions. Bush claimed that money will be appropriated for Gulf reconstruction, but Congressional Republicans are reducing the deficit under the ruse of paying for Katrina.
The Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress, the labor movement, the NAACP, and Rev. Jesse Jackson of Rainbow/PUSH among others are battling this callous attempt on the part of the White House and Republican House leadership to exploit the hardship and misery of hundreds of thousands in the Gulf to their own advantage. The broader movement and, of course, our Party, have to join them and give support to every positive Congressional initiative.
Another field of struggle is the fight against racism and poverty. If Katrina had a salutary effect it was to reintroduce the fault lines of racism and poverty into the nation consciousness and conversation. For the past quarter century right wing ideologues have been saying, with some assist from centrist democrats, that we live in a post-civil rights era in which rough equality of condition among peoples has been either achieved or, where it hasn't, is explained by other factors than race and racial discrimination.
But Katrina and its after shocks challenged this myth. It brought to the nation's consciousness that millions of African American people and other people of color are locked into conditions of poverty, attend understaffed and under-funded schools, live in substandard housing and hyper-segregated neighborhoods, receive inadequate health care, experience long bouts of unemployment, work overwhelmingly in low wage jobs, and are denied dignity.
Or to put it differently, thanks to the Katrina, the American people have a greater awareness that racism is not simply a prejudice and little more than that. They now see that it decisively shapes the material and spiritual conditions in which tens of millions of racially oppressed people live.
As images from Katrina cascaded across their television screens, millions of people were shocked and asked themselves 'Why'?
Why do so many racially oppressed people live in poverty? Why are so many young African American men unemployed? Why are so many African American men and increasingly women filling our jails? Why hasn't the high school drop rate of young people of color changed appreciably in decades? Why are high schools that are named in honor of our nation's great civil rights leaders more segregated now than they were thirty years ago?
These questions still await an answer, but the important thing is that they were asked and that millions are disposed to consider a different narrative that explains the conditions and persistence of racial inequality in our country.
But as we know windows of opportunity don?t stay open forever, thanks in no small measure to the ability of ruling elites to change the subject of conversation. It is easy for people to return to old explanations and understandings rather than confront new narratives that lead in a different direction, even where it is in their interests to do so.
I don't think that the window has closed yet, but leaders of the progressive movement have to take initiatives on an ideological and practical level, beginning with the rebuilding of New Orleans and the rest of the region...full text click here
Tomorrow, 'The Fight Against Racism'
