Gendering Civil Rights

Watching a well-educated spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement on Melissa Harris-Perry's TV show, I noticed that he was wearing a T-shirt that read, "This Is Not Your Mother's Civil Rights Movement." The spokesman, in his talk, mentioned his pride in wearing the cap on his head backwards. He was rejecting the civil rights movement of the 1960s--which he saw as the soft womanly efforts of MLK and John Lewis--but taking fierce pride in the retro male headgear of the 1980s. Imagine thinking that wearing your cap backwards is still a statement in 2015.  Testosterone abounded. He dimly assigned gender to the two civil rights movements. Melissa had no problem with that.

I can say this out loud because I'm so damned old. 

The basic issue is white privilege and structural racism. When that problem comes to our attention, male privilege and structural paternalism count for nothing at all, as Anita Hill once found out.

In California if you gather together everyone held back by structural racism (the Latinos, the African-Americans, the Filipinos, the Japanese and Chinese, the Pomo Indians and so on), you have a majority. The Black Lives Matter movement, though, rejects with open scorn the idea of including brown ethnic groups in their demand for black justice. They call their natural allies, the political left, "liberal white supremacists." They are going it alone. They will grow smaller and even purer. They aren't after Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton. They attack Bernie Sanders, a socialist invested in supporting the entire working class. That's safe in America. What could be safer? There's little that pleases the swanky class more than seeing the Left split up into small groups and go at one another in a quest for purity.