December 4, 2002

talkback...

Unbearable whiteness

Blaming progressive activists for Tom Ammiano's political setbacks, as Debra Walker, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club stated in "Beyond the Bad News" (11/13/02), speaks volumes as to why bitter defeats will multiply, harvesting bitter fruit for thousands of San Franciscans – namely, immigrants, working people, and communities of color. Contrary to Walker's and Ammiano's assertions, a painful commitment must be made – (requiring fearless scrutiny) – to unravel the poignant failures of the predominant white male progressive leadership in the city.

Diverse, progressive activists have spent decades in the city's neighborhood trenches fighting urban displacement, institutional racism, and anti-immigrant and homophobic attacks; struggling for living-wage jobs and protecting rent control – essentially sweating bullets in the battle to save the soul of the city. The critique begins with who holds power, not at the "feet" of the shoeless.

Finally, it is my hope that the Bay Guardian will consult next time with activists of color regarding lessons learned from progressive electoral defeats. At last count, in "Beyond the Bad News," your reporters quoted eight white men in addition to Walker, a white female. No wonder progressives of color feel shunted, shut out, and silenced in the white progressive scheme of things – and in a "majority-minority" city?

Now it's time to differentiate between the "shit" and the "shallow" water – if not, by November 2003 we'll be up to our asses in alligators, swimming upstream in Newsomian waters.

Richard Marquez San Francisco

Long road ahead for antiwar movement

Pratap Chatterjee's op-ed "Afghanistan to Iraq" [11/20/02] is pretty astonishing in its ability to steamroll over the needs and wants of the people who actually live in oppressed Arab countries in favor of the needs and wants of an informed progressive like himself. In what seems to be the most counterproductive antiwar call-to-action imaginable, he succeeds only in showing how very few of the oppressed peoples he's supposedly helping want or need his support.

That the vast majority of Afghans, including the ones he personally interacted with, supported U.S. action against the Taliban seems hard for him to swallow. Even those here in the United States ("when we rallied at ... Dolores Park ... I expected to find at least a few enraged Afghans") seemed in favor of the action. Apparently the Afghan people are too naive to realize what's good for them, Chatterjee thinks, and the Iraqis too, including those close to him: "unfortunately my Iraqi friends ... have already told me they ... will rejoice if Saddam is overthrown." Unfortunately? He'd rather see Iraqis unhappy than undermine his own worldview?

Chatterjee ends with a sober assessment: "we ... still have a ways to go to win the hearts and minds of the communities we want to save from United States imperialism." Easily the truest statement in the column: the progressive left indeed has a long way to go if it wants to convince people that "poor and free" is somehow worse than "poor and oppressed." I'm ready to be convinced of the wrongheadedness of going to war with Iraq, but editorials like this demonstrate that the antiwar movement has a long, long road ahead of it if it intends to gain significant momentum.

Greg Maletic San Francisco

Get your war on

I enjoyed Paul Reidinger's recent column in Lit [Flapdoodle, 11/27/02]. While I am generally in sympathy with his observations, I think one point may need adjustment. Reidinger credits to contemporary science the suggestion that human nature may not after all be capable of being entirely rid of violent, warlike traits. He assumes that this possibility is a threat to religion, particularly Protestant Christianity, which he characterizes as defending the possibility of infinite melioration. I am not a member of any sect, but based on the examples of Christian theology I read in graduate school, the notion of an inherent, incorrigible impulse to mischief in human nature, far from a contradiction of Christian doctrine, is an affirmation of its core! The idea that left to himself "the natural man" is naturally destructive and violent is exactly what Christianity expects: it is what "original sin" means. The fact that Reidinger could honestly assume that Christianity teaches the possibility of wiping out evil through "individualism" is a sign of how far the popular notion, and apparently the widespread teaching, of Christianity has in fact diverged from the technical doctrines – a sign, too, it may be, of an inconsistency from the start with the Protestant formulation. The position that human beings are capable of infinite improvement through education is a position associated with the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Jefferson et al), which was actually quite hostile to Christianity but selective about which scientific fields it favored (i.e., the natural, not the life, sciences, the fields to which Reidinger points as calling human perfectability into question).

As a liberal, I'm supposed to put my faith in the Uplifting Power of Social Progress to alter the collective bad habits of humanity, so I shouldn't be bothered by a few sordid facts of science (genes do influence behavior, evolution happens, we don't have as much free will as we would like to think).