Many people say that racism is simply an attitude or a prejudice of one people toward another people. That allowed Republican senators, during Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court, to make the ludicrous claim that she was a racist.
Racism is actually a historically developed set of practices, institutions, and beliefs that systematically subordinates racially oppressed people to an inferior status in every area of life, while at the same time, creates a major fault line of division and disunity within the community of working people and between the working class and its allies. In doing so, racism undermines democracy and social solidarity, corrodes the living conditions of the entire working class, and saps the strength of the working class and its allies.
Its genesis lies in the practical economic and political requirements of the interwoven systems of predatory colonialism, slavery, annexation, and nascent capitalism in the "new world" centuries ago.
These systems of exploitation in the Americas needed not only an unlimited supply of unpaid or underpaid labor to work in the seized mines and fields, but also a system of rationalization – racist ideology and a corresponding set of institutions – to legitimize and naturalize its theft of lands and resources, the unparalleled subjugation of tens of millions, and genocide on a nearly unimaginable scale.
Slavery and other forms of subjugation were eventually eliminated, but after a short burst of freedom, were replaced by new forms of racist and class oppression.
In the South, the old slaveowners and their reactionary coalition, defeated decisively on the battlefield, was able after a brief retreat to regroup. It seized political power, and then constructed with the use of nearly unimaginable forms of coercion, both public and private, a new system of racial oppression, ostracism, exploitation and political economy, popularly called Jim Crow.
In the Southwest and West, the forms of oppression and exploitation of Mexican, Asian, and Pacific Islander people, mutated too, but discriminated labor, extra exploitation and national and racial oppression continued.
As for the Native American Indian peoples, their racist subjugation continued on reservations as well as in urban settings where many were moving.
In other regions of the country, the forms of racist discrimination and oppression changed, adjusting to the new stage of development of U.S. capitalism in the 20th century and intensity of class and people's struggles.
Only in the sixties did the modern civil rights movement and other struggles for equality upended most of these "legal" forms and structures of racism, discrimination. But, as Martin Luther King said more than once, racism and national oppression, though not legally sanctioned, persisted in old and new forms in urban and rural settings.
Moreover, in recent decades racism has worsened in some ways, under the weight of crisis tendencies of a globalizing capitalism, the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, and the rise of the extreme right and finance capital.
Seen through this lens, Barack Obama's stunning victory, as significant and as promising as it is, doesn't eliminate in one fell swoop the structures and institutions on which racist oppression and ideology rest in the early 21st century.
Nor does it mark a withdrawal from political life by the forces of reaction and racism. Proclamations of a post-racial era are exceedingly premature.
In fact, the election of the nation's first African American president has triggered a new racist counteroffensive in much the same way as the North's victory in the Civil War set into motion a racist and restorationist counteroffensive by the former slaveholders and their allies.
The new racist counteroffensive, much like the earlier one, hopes to turn the clock back as well. It not only aims to strip away the popular support for the first African American president in ways that are both coded and crude (witness the use of the "n" word by tea party activists when Congress member John Lewis passed by them on his way to the capitol building – not to mention the "f" word upon seeing Lewis' colleague Barney Frank), but it also hopes to make invisible the democratic, class, and human bonds shared by tens of millions of American people, and trigger racial fissures in the coalition that elected the president. And in so doing, restore the power of rightwing extremism to power in 2012.
My guess is that the Republican Party, which has turned into an instrument of unabashed racism – not to mention militarist, obstructionist, anti-working class, anti-immigrant, anti-women, homophobic, anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and so forth, will not be successful. But only if its racist barrage runs into a powerful anti-racist response coming not only from people of color, but also from the white majority and white workers.
To no small degree, the success of this anti-racist struggle depends on the ability of white people to understand that racism not only impacts the dignity and life prospects of people of color (native born and immigrants), but also cuts against the material and moral wellbeing of white people. Nothing is so immobilizing of united action and so corrosive of democracy and social progress as the poison and practice of racism. If unchallenged, it could lead to disaster, to a much uglier version of the Bush-Cheney administration. That should be a sobering thought and a wake-up call for the people's movement.
To say that the Republican Party is the party of extreme reaction and racism is not to say that the Democratic Party is a consistent anti-racist force or ready to challenge the corporate power and capitalism in a basic way – far from it. But that shouldn't obscure the differences between them that are of great import at a strategic and tactical level.
