Never Give Up

Never Give Up 

I want to talk about racism, building a progressive movement, and the problems of loneliness.
To begin with the first two items. Obviously the struggle against racism is integral to and necessary for the emergence of a broad progressive movement. No one here has to be convinced of that. And in some ways this is a perfect time to be confronting the issues of race among those people who most need this confrontation -- meaning white people. Six months ago, the "mainstream" conservative position was that we don't need affirmative action because there is no more racism and hasn't been any for 40 years -- except of course the implicit racism of affirmative action itself. Except for that one flaw -- affirmative action -- we had achieved the perfect color-blind society.
Six months later -- after Mark Fuhrman, after the revelations about the Philadelphia Police Department, the Pittsburgh Police Department, the New Orleans Police Department -- after the emergence of an armed and for the most part, viciously racist, militia movement -- after the latest statistics on incarceration by color, showing that one-third of black men are in the grip of the criminal justice system, one way or another -- after all that, no one can deny the continuing vitality of racism as a force in American life. This is a fine time, a perfect time, to be saying to one's white neighbors or co-workers: Now do you understand why so many African-Americans cheered O.J. Simpson's acquittal? Now do you understand why a million black men would march behind even a Louis Farrakhan to be counted in Washington? To show that they still exist, that they can still stand up and be counted?
But if it's a fine time to be advancing the progressive cause by confronting racism, it is also a hard time. Because you look around and there is no morally inclusive civil rights movement -- probably nothing that should be called a civil rights movement at all. That march of a million men, for all its pride and...