How to Get Stupid White Men out of Office: The Anti-Politics, Un-Boring Guide to Power
Soft Skull Press, 206 pages, $12.95
The number "537" figures prominently in How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. It's the number of votes by which Bush supposedly beat Gore in the year 2000, and co-editor Billy Wimsatt (Bomb the Suburbs, No More Prisons) is convinced that a single person could have organized 538 more voters. This led Wimsatt to join forces with over a dozen youth activists from across the country to form the League of Pissed Off Voters.
One result of their work is this anthology, 20,000 copies of which the League will distribute in swing states. It contains two-dozen local stories that counter the myth that the left never wins. Covering campaigns diverse in issues and geography, the contributors are predominantly women of color in their early twenties, whose war stories range from protecting renters' rights in Oakland to stemming the expansion of juvenile detention centers in NYC to fighting anti-dancing laws in Seattle.
Stupid White Men's bottom-line lesson is tenacity. Many of the essays chronicle five- or 10-year struggles and longer. Who knew that in 2000, the same Joe Smitherman who turned a peaceful 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery into a bloodbath, the man infamous for calling MLK "Martin Luther Coon" on national television, was still in office? (During the final campaign to oust him, the "Joe Gotta Go" campaign office was firebombed, as was the only black radio station in town.) Ras Baraka, the current deputy mayor of Newark, got there only after a decade of community building and learning lessons from failed campaignsvaluable lessons laid out here. Striking a balance between ideology and practicality was key. Said Baraka, "You're not running for office 'cause you just wanna have a debate about some theoretical thing. You're trying to decide who works and who doesn't You're deciding: Do we build housing or do we build recreation? Do we spend $300 million for an arena or do we put that into the school system?"
Still, the book's earnestness over electoral politics grates. Reading the chapter on Paul Wellstone, one is tempted to moan, "See what can happen when you put all your eggs in one basket?" Wimsatt justifies his conversion to electoral politics with this: "If you fend off the Republican threat, it buys you slack to move the Democrats in a more progressive direction over a period of decades..."
While Stupid White Men is a useful tool in getting the youth vote out in 2004, teeny type size and embarrassing spelling gaffes, grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes weaken the book. A more rigorous edit, warranted in many essays, could have preserved page count while allowing for a legible font size.
Kate Crane