Saturday, August 04, 2007

The Long Memory

This is the Long Memory and historical consciousness that the Giuliani's of the world really fear:

An anonymous Irish-American longshoreman, quoted in David Roediger's article on the history of black-white labor collaboration:

“I wasn’t always a n****-lover. I fought in every strike to keep Black labor off the dock. I fought until in the white-supremacy strike your white-supremacy governor sent his white-supremacy militia and shot us white-supremacy strikers full of holes…[T]there was a time when I wouldn’t even work beside a n****…You made me work with n****s, eat with n****s, sleep with n****s, drink out of the same water bucket with n****s, and finally got me to the point where if one of them…blubbers something about more pay, I say, ‘Come on, n****, let’s go after the white bastards.’” [Quoted in David Roediger, “’Labor in White Skin’: Race and Working-Class History.” In Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s. Ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker, 287-308. London: Verso, 1986.]

Be afraid, you racist right-wing oligarchs and "Minutemen" and politicians and hate-radio talking-heads and cowardly leafletting skinheads. That cross-ethnicity intra-class unity is coming, and then your kind will fall.

Be very afraid.



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Now playing: Bob and Earl - Harlem Shuffle

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