Political Crossover: The Troubling Emergence of Black Reaganism

[struggle4progress]

24. Jenkins set up a website "Hampton Institute" and declared himself chair

of the "Social Economics Department" there

He then sought to give himself "academic" credentials by "publishing" with AV Akademikerverlag, an outfit that does no editorial work, pays authors no royalties, prints individual book copies only on demand, and is known primarily for having irritated many folk by selling them bound hard copies of bundled Wikipedia articles under misleading titles

Jenkins' babble about "black Reaganites" is entirely uniformed by data: it is a tiny fringe group. Blacks voting for Reagan in 1980 amounted to about 1.4% of the electorate in 1980 and 0.9% of the electorate in 1984; blacks voting for Bush I amounted to about about 1.1% of the electorate in 1988 and about 0.8% of the electorate in 1992. One reason for this low level of support was that Reagan's dog-whistles to America's racists were utterly transparent to anyone paying attention -- as when he wooed Neshoba county (where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner hade been killed in 1964) with a 1980 speech on "state's rights" (the old code language for segregation). And Reagan's constant apologetics for the right-wing nationalist apartheid government in South Africa didn't help create "black Reaganites." That Jenkins counts the current President among "black Reaganites" merely underscores his ignorance

Your bourgeois political notion, that we can somehow proceed by first getting one's ideas right and then moves into action, stands reality on its head; and it is guaranteed to produce disillusionment and burnout. Instead, ideas must originate from concrete action; and then must be continually formed and re-formed, based on the actual results of action