One Michael Moore is worth a hundred cult-crit professors.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)

Dear Editor:

David Leonard's article in ColorLines (Fall 2004) on "white populists" in the mass media left me wondering whether he actually reads or watches the very people he attempts to critique. Say what you want about Michael Moore, but he's a genuine progressive who doesn't deserve to be lumped with not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is libertarian Bill Maher or conventional Clinton liberal Al Franken.

Professor Leonard didn't see the same Bowling for Columbine that I did. Moore's tone in that film may have been flippant and light-hearted--he always is--but I did notice that he located the origins of U.S. gun culture in the slave patrols of the Old South and in the white-settler roots of the country as a whole. That's no "passing reference" to racism, that's a fundamental critique of white supremacy as the central fact of U.S. political culture.

Professor Leonard further ponders whether the latest incarnation of white populists will be like earlier populists who paid lip service to anti-racism only to "secure political power on the back of black voters," or whether they "reflect a history of white intellectuals who have joined people of color in an effort to dream America anew." Now that's quite a dichotomy. It's fine and good to be wary of romanticizing earlier generations of populists or supposedly "multiracial" movements that elided ...