Save Sixth Street

District Attorney Kamala Harris must not clean up Sixth Street! The last time someone did that about 20 years ago, the ne'er-do-wells all moved down to 16th and Mission and ruined a poor but honest neighborhood. There has to be a place in the city where your ordinary practicing felon and speed freak can lay his sleepy head and Sixth Street seems to have selected itself as that place.

James Keefer
San Francisco

Mandel and Stanford

When a man is 86, as I am, he can only be grateful that someone writes about what he did half a century ago ("We Will Not Obey," 3/24/04), and that Camille T. Taiara closed with my prescription for today.

There was one error. The academic goons at Stanford's Hoover Institution will make the most of it, which I know because their predecessors there did their share in forcing me off Channel 9 in 1960.

The article says that my 1953 McCarthy testimony cost me my post at the Hoover Institution. I was there only in 1947, doing a one-man encyclopedia of the USSR, unpublished because of the cold war, which Human Rights Watch recognized 42 years later by awarding me a grant as a writer persecuted for his views. Stanford got rid of me because I publicly denounced Truman's declaration of cold war against the Soviet Union, which has cost the American people several hundred trillion dollars and a hundred thousand lives in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

What my dismemberment of McCarthy live on national TV, front-paged in the New York Times, did at Stanford was to enable them to replace its liberal Republican head, H.H. Fisher, with reactionaries.

The Bay Guardian paid me honor by running my picture with that of Harry Bridges, one of the greatest labor leaders in American history. I confess to pride that, then a New Yorker, my testimony was of national significance. It enabled me to look my friends who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the eye, because I hadn't had the guts to join them, but promised myself that if my country ever faced what they had gone to Spain to combat, I would stand up to it.

People may want to read my autobiography. It's titled Saying No to Power. I can be reached at wmmm@earthlink.net.

William Mandel
San Francisco

Marriage and assimilation

Thank you for publishing Mattilda's opinion piece (3/24/04) revealing Gavin Newsom's nefarious plot to co-opt queers into the rich-straight-white-male power structure by giving us marriage licenses. I don't agree (I believe that this is a basic issue of equal rights and equal protection under law) but I'm proud that while the rest of the country is fighting over whether people in same-gender relationships should have access to the same legal rights as heterosexuals, here in San Francisco we have the luxury of listening to our avant-garde use phrases like "assimilation into the imperialist, bloodthirsty status quo." Thanks for confirming all my stereotypes about more-radical-than-thou self-appointed queer activists.

Anthony Barreiro
San Francisco

Global justice

Thank you very much Camille T. Taiara for your article on the antiwar movement ["Connecting the Dots," 3/17/04]. I agree that over the past four years, with the successful mass actions in Seattle against the WTO and then Sept. 11, there has been a growing sense amongst racial justice and global justice activists of needing each other. However, I think something much more profound has been happening.

White supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism shape the society we live in. Suzanne Pharr, a white, working-class, antiracist, lesbian, says, "While the right wing is united by their racism, sexism, and homophobia, the left is torn apart by theirs." I'm a white, middle-class organizer in the global justice-antiwar movement and what I hear is far more than another "we need to come together," but a growing commitment to dealing with how power, privilege, and oppression have kept us not only apart but structurally unequal.

White, middle-class global justice activists are looking more and more at how white privilege and class privilege operate and actively learning about and supporting struggles in working-class communities and communities of color led by groups like the Day Labor Program, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, the Coalition on Homelessness, and so many others. This looks like global justice activists providing child care for the families of immigrant and working-class families, families who in turn bring their analysis to the table and help define a movement fighting war at home and abroad. It also looks like white antiwar activists putting racial justice at the forefront of their work. While we have always needed to come together and so rarely been able to, working to build relationships based on dignity, accountability, and trust is the foundation for movements that win.

Chris Crass, Organizer, Challenging White Supremacy Workshops and the Heads Up Collective
San Francisco

For the record