Why is the DSA so white? Does working for Bernie make it harder to change this?

My friend and comrade, the chair of our Atlanta DSA chapter, just caused a shitstorm on twitter with by saying that the DSA focusing on the Bernie campaign is not good for a lot of chapters, especially in the South, where it gets in the way of important work we needed to be doing to change the group's composition.

I'm not sure I agree with saying that it is getting in the way but I absolutely agree that it does not get us one flea-hop closer to changing the DSA's composition.

And a big part of the reason I don't think it gets in the way is that I don't think the Bernie work is making us look like a Bernie organization. It is a confirmation that we are in fact a Bernie organization. Our saving grace is that we are not just a Bernie organization.

The reality is that the DSA’s composition is disproportionately white, male, millennial and college-educated. Therefore, both comrades and critics say, we must be doing something grievously wrong and must extirpate the toxic white supremacist and patriarchal atmosphere that has led to this result. 

But the DSA’s spectacular growth over the past three years should give us new insight. We say we “recruited” tens of thousands of people, but that’s not true. They joined, and they joined through no fault or merit of our own. 

Their joining had nothing to do with the tenor and culture of the DSA Local in their area. And they are precisely disproportionately college educated white male millennials. That is the composition that social processes much broader than our own internal culture imposed on us.

You might say that makes perfect sense. Bernie is white, male, conforms to gender norms and so we get Bernie Boys. But last June a young Puerto Rican woman, a member of the DSA, pulled the biggest political upset in many a season. A thousand people joined the DSA the next day. Another 9,000 in the month after her victory. Was it a flood from the Latinx community? Not in Atlanta.

Since then the face of democratic socialism has also been the one that graced the cover of TIME magazine a few weeks ago. She has higher name recognition than most of the Democratic presidential candidates. I don’t believe that in recent decades, there has been a political figure from our Latino community that is as well known and popular as she is among us.

Has that made a difference in the composition of those joining?  I think if it were so, we would have certainly heard.

The starting point of our discussion has to be the fact that the composition of the DSA is about American society, not just the DSA.

You might go “Pfew, that’s a relief!” But you shouldn’t.

The problem is exactly the same as if it were completely about the DSA. Only now we know two things.

Thing one: It is mostly not our "fault" because of what we do or don't do. It is much worse than that. We are much more a reflection of our white supremacist, patriarchal, and class-exploitative society than we think. Our current composition has been imposed on us from the outside by powerful social forces over which we have no control.

Thing two: we have to overcome this just the same. Otherwise there is no point to the DSA. And I believe it will be much harder and more painful than we think.

For the DSA convention: Resolution on orienting to Latinx communities

[I drafted the following resolution for submission to the convention of the Democratic Socialists of America to be held in Atlanta Aug. 2-4. DSA convention rules require 50 signatures from members  for the resolution to be considered, so I urge DSA members who agree with it to sign it. The links to the signature form can be found here on the DSA's members-only discussion board.]  

Whereas: The Latinx community is now the largest oppressed minority in the country, with 18% of the country’s population, some 60 million people, and concentrated among young people. One in five millennials is classified as “Hispanic” by the census bureau; among post-millennials, one in four.

Whereas: The United States has the second largest number of Spanish-speaking people in the world after Mexico, some 55 million people over the age of five. Some 41 million are considered native speakers as that is the main language used in their homes, a number comparable to native speakers in Colombia, Argentina and Spain  itself.

Whereas: Due to a common oppression and modern communications and media, as well as language and common cultural elements, this community has developed a common identity as shown by the immigrant rights protests in the spring of 2006. It was the most massive wave of sustained protests ever, anywhere.

Whereas: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial Puerto Rican woman and democratic socialist, has become by far the single most prominent Latinx political figure in the community and media, which presents extraordinary opportunities to increase the presence and influence of our movement in that community.

Whereas: Addressing the Latinx community in the language most people of Latin American origin or descent use at home is not  just a needed practical measure, but a political statement of utmost importance given the size of the DSA and its presence in national politics.

Whereas: A socialist transformation of the United States is impossible without the massive, militant participation of Latinx working people.

Therefore be it resolved:

1. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to devote all necessary resources and attention to guaranteeing that a Spanish-language web site of our organization is launched within 90 days after the close of this convention.
2. The web site will have both translations and material directly generated for it under the leadership of an editorial board.
3. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to initiate the organization of this editorial board.
4. The board should include not just Latinx comrades, but as diverse a group as possible of other comrades, especially those who have a working command of the language, even if not fluency, but not precluding the inclusion of others.
5. In collaboration with the National Political Committee, this editorial board shall also have the additional responsibilities of promoting the development of our work with Latinx communities, establishing relations with organizations based in the community, and promoting collaboration and the exchange of information between Locals involved in this work. 
6. These additional responsibilities are not permanent but a transitional step to the creation by the NPC of a working group or other body focused  on work in the Latinx communities and its issues, or some other modality for promoting and coordinating this activity. 

Black and Latino "identity politics" are working class politics

[The Democratic Socialists of America are holding their national convention in  Atlanta in August, and in connection with the event I've been publishing on my blog various posts related to issues in the DSA.

[This one is from the DSA's national discussion forum. A comrade who described himself as unorthodox in the NYC DSA Afro-socialist caucus and in his branch noted that in a recent election Zephyr Teachout lost the race for attorney general of the state of New York to a less progressive candidate who was Black.

[He said he had posted in response to that outcome that Blacks and Latinos needed to be taught what progressive means. I think some people objected to the wording, but I put that aside to focus on what was behind that phenomenon of Blacks and Latinos preferring a Black candidate over a more progressive Anglo woman, and what it means for the political approach of socialists in the United States.]

I think all socialists and progressives need to wrap their heads around the democratic right of oppressed minorities to political inclusion and representation.

I was born in 1951 and the battles for the right to vote when I was a teenager are seared into my memory. And perhaps because I have lived in the Atlanta for more than 30 years, the blood that was shed and the lives that were lost are very much alive for me. And at bottom, the fight was not just for the right to vote but most of all it was about the right to vote for one of your own.

And I know this very well because my community, the Latino community, faces the same problem. We are 10 percent of the state population. We have two of the 180 members of the state House of Representatives. We have no Latinos in the state Senate. We have all-white apartheid regimes in places like Dalton, which are half Latino, more when you include Blacks and Asians, and in the world’s chicken processing capital Gainesville, just an hour from Atlanta. And two of the four large counties in the core Atlanta metro area with about a million people each are both majority-minority but have all-white governments and until 2018, white Republican-dominated legislative delegations (that changed in one of them, Gwinnett, in 2018).

The Latino adults in Georgia have been overwhelmingly undocumented and that has turned the Latino community as a whole into the victim of a new system of de jure discrimination, the same idea as Jim Crow although the details are different. For a quarter century we have been used as a punching bag and scapegoats by white politicians. Now the U.S.-born children of the undocumented are coming of age. And just like the Blacks vote Black, sometimes with an assist from us, Latinos are going to vote Latino, and get help from our African-American sisters and brothers.

And you might say, but your Black and Latino politicians are just as bad as the white ones. And I’d respond, first, so what? Our people have as much of a right to fuck things up as white people have done. And second, it’s not true. There are no whites getting lynched, no white churches getting bombed, no white people being deported back to Europe, not even are white people being disproportionately incarcerated. Nor are we going to exclude them from any political representation, like they did to us.

And suppose you were to run a white DSA member against one of the two Latinos in the state legislature, Pedro “Pete” Marín, a moderate democrat (he describes himself as pro-business and a fiscal conservative, although socially liberal). I’d vote for Pete Marín, and I don’t care if it was Eugene V. Debs himself who was the DSA candidate. Because Pedro stood up and fought for our community against every single anti-immigrant bill that has been proposed in our state legislature.

And when the big wave of Latino immigrant rights protests took place in 2006 Pedro was there – not just at the demonstration for the photo-op but at the planning meetings where no reporters were allowed (well, except for two: me and a Chicana sister who worked for the AJC).

And if endorsing Debs came up at my DSA chapter I’d oppose it, explaining his would be a racist campaign. – not because Debs was a racist, which he was not, but because politics is not about speeches or programs but about the clash of social forces. And in that District a white candidate running against Pedro would simply be a re-assertion of white supremacy. If Debs won, it would be a demoralizing blow to the Latino community and would encourage the racists.

You might say “you’re letting identity politics overwhelm class politics.” But what I’m telling you is this: the movements of Blacks and Latinos in the United States are the most acute expression of class politics.

You say you lived in France, then study Frantz Fanon; you’re in the Afro-socialist caucus in New York, learn from Malcolm X; you read Spanish, read Che and Fidel.

And if that doesn't convince you, find Engels’s fight with the English in defense of the rights of the Irish in the First International, or Lenin’s report to the Second Comintern Congress on the national and colonial question.