Of Davis and Double Standards

A reader who cloaks him/herself in anonymity writes of my posting "Angela Davis, Moral Idiot":

Is your intention to delegitimize the black liberation struggles of the 60s/70s, or is it to emphasize the failures and injustices of the Soviet government?

I would hope that you aren't suggesting much of a relationship. I would be interested to hear that relationship argued, though. It would certainly be a stretch to base much on a single quote of unverifiable attribution, especially given that the quote is sufficiently contradicted by a lifetime of the professor's writings and lectures. You might inquire into Davis' general stance on incarceration.

My intentions are manifold, but they do not include delegitimizing black liberation. There is no inherent link between black liberation and Soviet oppression, obviously. Insofar as that movement advocated racial separatism and courted dictators like Fidel Castro, it delegitimized itself. To be morally consistent on the two points, one would have supported black liberation, if understood as legal equality of the races, and opposed Soviet tyranny. Though he is not the object of faddish adulation on the left (like Davis is), Bayard Rustin is a chief example of moral consistency, having been a civil rights pioneer and a socialist while managing not to fawn over the Soviet Union. He organized the March on Washington in 1963, just one of his many credits in a lifetime of fighting for human rights, and, though now dead, I wish his story was more appreciated, especially by those who fetishize fellow-travellers.

I have in fact inquired into "Davis' general stance on incarceration," which is why I find her views on arbitrary imprisonment of political dissidents in Warsaw Pact countries to be so ironic and so devastating to her own cause, or at least her own credibility. (Really, how could the irony of a woman who wants to abolish prisons in a democratic country while glibly endorsing the jailing of political activists in a dictatorship escape even the most obtuse of minds?)

Her indignation at racial oppression in this country became hysteria, and this led her to be willfully blind to the enslavement of several hundred million people in the Eastern Bloc. Such a glaring moral blind spot should, I think, cause us to regard her political proclamations with vigilant dubiety.