FW: Farley - Did the Green Party Betray Black America?

>>>>> "sharon" == Sharon Stade <[email protected]> writes:


  sharon> " ... I didn’t think much of the Greens.  They seemed to be just
  sharon> another group of alienated white hippies primarily concerned with
  sharon> the environment, but ignorant (perhaps willfully so) of the issues
  sharon> that affected black people specifically...  That was before the
  sharon> party in Nashville...  ...I was the only African-American in the
  sharon> house, and I figured that, since everyone there was a liberal, I
  sharon> wouldn’t hear anything shocking.  I was dead wrong.  This is what I
  sharon> heard—and when I did hear it, I had to sit up and take notice:  “The
  sharon> Green Party,” someone said, in another conversation, “is the first
  sharon> party since the Black Panthers to support reparations for slavery.”
  sharon> I was floored.

I know a bit about this. I was at the platform committee meeting in Denver in
the summer of 2000, as the platform representative from Texas, when this was
voted on.

To say the Green Party "supports reparations" is a bit misleading. First, as I
think I've written somewhere before, there were more people on the committee
who *had no idea what reparations are* than who voted for them to pass. As I
recall, the vote was 3 yays, 1 nay, and 12 abstensions, or something like
that. I remember explaining to a very important national GP leader -- an older
white woman from Missouri -- that, no, reparations did not mean, as she had
asked, "giving checks to black people without jobs", though I'm still unsure
what would be wrong with *that*. 

So, yes, it's in the platform, but the GP platform is a complete disaster;
*everything* is in the platform. It's there because it was the hobby horse of
one member of the platform committee, and no one else cared enough about it
either way to kill it. I wouldn't call that a sign of deep support.

As for rank and file support for reparations, judging by the Greens I've
encountered, it's also pretty thin, at least in the Southwest. More to the
point, I encountered heavy resistance from Greens every time I proposed an
antiracist agenda or specific antiracist policy ideas.

I was asked to leave -- and eventually left -- the Greens in Texas for
refusing to stop asking the Dallas Greens to confront one of its leaders who
used the n-word and was openly racist.

But probably I'm just bitter. Or something.

Kendall Clark