This is a comment by Gerald Horne.
Charles B.
(((((((((((
Certainly, Jesse, et.al., are Dems but, as I'm sure you know, the
leadership of this party rests with Gore, Ed Rendell (former Mayor of
Philadelphia), and--ultimately--a wing of capital heavily concentrated in
capital intensive (as opposed to labor intensive) industries,
e.g. investment banking, trial lawyering, etc. With regard to the latter
and their press organs,
there is meager Black representation and this is what I'm talking about
when I suggest that the Dems are reluctant to frame this matter in Fla. in
racial terms. This is why mainstream Black leaders are howling about why
a Democratic led Justice Dept. has not intervened on the basis of clear
violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In other words, there is a
struggle within this party
and we of the left have a few choices: we can ignore this struggle as
irrelevant, we can echo the words of investment bankers and rich trial
lawyers and their media mouthpieces or we can--in the midst of building
our independent forms--lend our voices to those who are struggling against
racism within the Democratic Party. I choose the latter. There was
serious racism imbedded in the Fla. election--it was not exclusively of a
class character--and if the left ignores this or downplays it because we
have difficulty in framing it in class terms that elide racism, we are
doing a disservice to our community and ourselves.
The subjective intentions of Jesse
and
others in terms of why they are protesting in Fla. (i.e. whether they are
doing Clinton's bidding, whether they are doing Gore's bidding,
etc.,etc.),
I will leave to those who are more competent than myself in being able to
"divine" intent. I prefer to examine the situation *objectively* as a
massive deprivation of the democratic right to vote, executed with a heavy
racial bias, and support those and join those who protest this kind of
racism.
