3-21-08, 9:12 am
I am grateful to Joe Sims, Dee Myles, Jarvis Tyner and others for their thoughtful recent pieces on race and racism (Sims “The Anti-Racist Majority Comes of Age,” Myles “Humbled by Magnificence: The Fruit of the African-American Experience” and Tyner’s Keynote comments to the meeting of the African American Equality Commission of the CPUSA, June 2007). They inspire me to the following reaction:
We are faced by a seeming paradox, in that, even as at the level of mass consciousness, racism recedes, at the level of institutions, it may be getting worse.
The statistics cited by the above commentators and many others show that racial prejudice among white residents of the United States has in many respects declined markedly in the past 20, 30 or 40 years. This accords with my own experience as a social scientist, activist and resident of a series of working class neighborhoods in Chicago and suburbs from 1966 to 2004. In 1966, African Americans had reason to be afraid to venture into a great many 'white' working class neighborhoods; today there are only a few true racist bastions holding out. In 1996, the sight of public affection on the part of an inter-racial couple in a park would have sparked violence; today it does not get a second glance. The agitational and educational work undertaken with whites and especially young white people during this period has paid off handsomely. Not only are millions of young white people from blue and white collar sections of the working class no longer in the thrall of the vicious ideology of racism, they are shocked when they see it manifested in others, and open to participating in anti-racist action. So racism “from below,” from the mass social base of our society, and especially within the white sector of the working class, is definitely receding. The Civil Rights Movement, the left and the CPUSA can take credit from, and comfort in, this historic development.
On the other hand, there are many, many indications of a vicious and deliberate intensification of racism “from above.” This comes from the ruling class, as well as from the Republican Party and some conservative sections of the Democratic Party, and has the purpose of intimidating and even terrorizing minorities, while winning back white working class and mass consciousness to racist positions, that, in the past, have served ruling class interests so well. Here are some examples:
*The swift-boating campaign against presidential candidate Barack Obama, which is now hitting its stride. It has begun with attacks on his wife, then on his pastor, and is now more and more openly seeking to portray Obama as a dangerously militant Black man, too subversive and crazy to be entrusted with the presidency. It started with people “accidentally” calling him “Osama” instead of Obama, and then harping on his middle name “Hussein,” evidently to create frightening subliminal associations with Bin Ladin and Saddam. Then a photo surfaced of Obama wearing Somali robes at some village event in Kenya, and a campaign was begun to depict Obama as a potentially terroristic “Muslim.” Then the right wing found out that Obama’s family Pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, holds radical anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-imperialist views, and a whole new field of attack was opened up. Republican strategists are using the word “Mau Mau” in relation to Obama (whose father was born in Kenya, so this is not just careless use of language, it is a deliberate effort to present threatening images and associations to the public so as to discredit a man who might well turn out to be the first African American President). Similar tactics were used against Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota, who is an African American and a Muslim, including a whispering campaign that he was sworn in on a Koran, whereas in fact it was a Bible that had been formerly owned by Thomas Jefferson, no less. This is nothing more or less that a continuation of the old “Willie Horton” strategy that the Republicans used against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, 10 years ago.
*There is a huge racist content in the anti-immigrant movement, which is promoted by ultra-right foundations and politicians. It is not merely that people are more scared of dark skinned immigrants than of light skinned ones; rather it is that there is a deliberate targeting of Mexican and Latino immigrants by racist ideologues who hide behind a concern for upholding public safety and “the rule of law.” Latino people in the United States are being heaped with vicious racist abuse as lazy subversives, job thieves and diseased terroristic criminals who want to break up the United States on behalf of the Mexican government. Some of the stuff that is said about Latinos lately on talk radio and TV and on the internet has to be heard or seen to be believed.
*The proliferation of racial threats and actual attacks on African Americans on college campuses, worksites and community settings, including an epidemic of noose-hanging incidents is cause for alarm. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
*The propaganda against affirmative action and non-discrimination laws is intense, and has the purpose of convincing working class whites that they are the victims of black racism, instead of Blacks being the victims of white racism. The idea that there may have been racism at one time, but that it's a thing of the past, so African American people now have nobody but themselves to blame if they can’t get ahead in life, is prevalent even among whites who consider themselves anti-racist and would be shocked by people who use the “n” word or participated in noose-hanging.
*Joe Sims in his article eloquently lays out the many economic institutional areas in which African Americans find themselves disadvantaged. I would only add that the repressive institutions of the state, in the form of the police and criminal justice system, also are areas of surviving overt racism of the most brutal kind imaginable. What goes on in some of our state and federal prisons can only be described as crimes against humanity, and it is mostly done to Black and Latino people. The Jena 6 situation in its essentials is replicated all the time, all over the country, in the way our criminal justice system works. The efforts to stop minorities from voting, and the whole situation of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, are also examples of the state acting overtly to keep African American and other minorities down.
The seeming paradox between improving racial attitudes among the mass of working class whites, and a stagnated or worsening, but in any case completely intolerable, situation of institutional racism and racism “from above,” is explained by the class nature of our society.
The ruling class of multi-billionaires of finance capital needs racism to stay in power. The slogan “the people united will never be defeated” applies to the racial divisions of the US working class. Once African American, Latino, white and others understand that they have a common enemy, and learn how to act together based on that understanding, the ruling class and the whole capitalist system is in trouble. So from before the independence of this country, the ruling class has been concerned to keep the working class divided and stratified by race. Not coincidentally, this also assures them extra profits by allowing them to get away with paying non-white workers less. And finally, since our ruling class is an imperialist ruling class that battens on the blood and sweat of working people all over the world, fomenting racial, ethnic and religious prejudice (e.g. against Arabs and Muslims), blunts mass opposition at home against policies, economic, diplomatic and military, which victimize millions of people in other countries.
So when the ruling class and its henchmen perceive that racist consciousness is receding among working class and other whites in the United States, it is bound to see this as a threat to its own position – which it is. It is only natural, then, that the ruling class would use the instrumentalities over which it has control – the state, the media, the universities etc. – to try and counter the improvement of racial attitudes, by organizing new racist agitation and propaganda. The most prestigious and visible representatives of the ruling class know very well by now how to get marginal individuals and institutions to do their dirty work for them, and thus maintain their image as enlightened people.
This suggests that anti-racist struggle cannot let up as long as there is a ruling class, which is to say as long as capitalism exists, and, as the experience of socialist countries demonstrations, for a long time thereafter. So even though it is gratifying that an anti-racist majority is emerging in this country, we can’t let our guard down, or convince ourselves that the job is done.
