Is it to much to ask Democratic Underground to chill out with the racist crap?

[ancianita]

176. Hell, no, it's not too much to ask. As Dr. Cornel West has said, "...the major enemy of black

survival in America has been and is neither oppression exploitation [though they are highly visible]but rather the nihilistic threat...the loss of hope and absence of meaning...as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive...

The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness...this armor constituted ways of life and struggle that embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excelllence...

These traditiions consist primarily of black religious and civic institutions that sustained familial and communal networks of support...If cultures are, in part, what human beings create (out of antecedent fragments of other cultures) in order to convince themselves not to commit suicide, then black foremothers and forefathers are to be applauded..." from "Nihilism in Black America" in Race Matters.

The least we should do is learn what the black cultural armor, black religious and civic institutions are.

What we can do -- though it's not the most we can do in DU -- is join as allies in their resistance structural forces of tokenism, market values, sexism, homophobia, willful ignorance of racial privilege in all areas of our lives in and outside of DU.

To me, to "chill with the racist stuff" means not to avoid anything racial, but to confront anything racist head on as black people would have us do. If the country's goal is to be at least "post racist" more than "post racial", then we have to listen, show care and exact accountability among ourselves in seeking stronger alliance with the true interests of black people, from community (DU community, too, if it exists) to White House and beyond.

edit: Sorry if this is overly bombastic. I've been rereading Cornel West and was kinda in that frame of mind in applying it to DU readers.