The anti-diversity war rages not only in academia but in the whole society. Like the anti-affirmative action… — Elizabeth Martínez
The anti-diversity war rages not only in academia but in the whole society. Like the anti-affirmative action campaign, it is profoundly racist and sexist. Both represent much more than a backlash: they are tactics for solidifying a rightist ideology to sustain the Right's political hegemony, to guarantee that a racist, sexist and capitalist agenda holds the center of U.S. political culture. This in turn calls for demonizing progressive ideas and people that might impede right-wing domination over ideological space. It calls for blocking the study of U.S. history as a history of racism, sexism and imperialism at work. The U.S. political culture must be kept ahistorical, even anti-historical. The war on multiculturalism parallels the way in which reactionaries sought to use the Gulf War to regenerate patriotism and thereby annul the Vietnam War syndrome with its national self-doubt.
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White radicals of the 1960s-many of them called "the New Left"-learned tactics from African Americans, who had learned some of theirs from Asians (Gandhi) and who also adopted tactics from white workers of an earlier era. Native Americans took tactics from Blacks. Asian-American youths were inspired by young Puerto Rican activists. Chicano organizations copied from the Black Panther Party, as in their breakfast program. Yet the "New Left" is usually staked out with Eurocentric boundaries in our books on the 1960s. Even many people of color define the New Left as white, and would deny that their activism had anything to do with a new, old or any other kind of Left. The New Left was indeed born primarily white. But its vision of a society in which the exploited and oppressed become an empowered collectivity did inspire people across racial and national lines. That vision generated an international political culture that stirred youth from Paris to Mexico to Tokyo and lives on today. Who cannot be reminded of that New Left ideal, "participatory democracy" (a phrase used by Students for a Democratic Society), when hearing of how 3,000 Chinese students voted on every major decision in Tiananmen Square in May 1989?
the contradiction of encountering male-supremacist practices within a movement supposedly fighting for social justice spurred many Chicanas to new consciousness.
it's vital to avoid a longtime error of leftist politics, starting with Marxism: failure to understand the powerful role in human society of subjective forces such as spirituality. That failure has opened the door wide to right-wing manipulation of spiritual hunger. That failure undermines the possibility of mobilizing masses of Latinos/as for whom faith has been an affirmation of heart in a heartless world. The bottom line in any organizing for social justice needs to be respect for others' needs, including spiritual needs.
