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Justice for Trayvon Martin

UNITE AND FIGHT RACISM

EDITORIALS

WHATS INSIDE
EDITORIALS EDITORIALS

We have to win justice for Trayvon

March 21, 2012

We have to win justice for Trayvon

Page 1 RACISM USA

Murdered by the U.S. injustice system

Page 11
MARLENE MARTIN

The killing of Trayvon Martin has crystallized for millions of people the ugly reality of racism in 21st century America.

ROUNDTABLE

RAYVON MARTIN was killed because he was a young Black man walking where someone thought he shouldnt be. He isnt unique. The long list of young men murdered for being Black in just the recent past includes many names that will be familiar to SocialistWorker.org readerssuch as Ramarley Graham, Dane Scott Jr., Stephon Watts, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant III, James Craig Anderson, Kenneth Harding and James Brisetteand others that wont be familiar. Their devastating stories are as old as the United Statesand they prove that racism is alive and well, even in 2012, as the first African American president sits in the White House. But the widespread shock and anger over what happened to Trayvon tells us something else, too: That large numbers of people are outraged by racist injustice in this and other forms. As the facts of Trayvons case circulated on the Internet and climbed into the front-page headlines in mid-March, an upsurge of protest swept across the countrystarting in Florida and spreading to dozens of cities. The marches, vigils and speakoutsmost organized on no more than a few days noticebrought together young and old, men and women, Black, white and Latino to raise their

What every Black man in America must learn

Page 3
EDITORIALS

Casualties of tough on crime

Page 12
PAUL DAMATO

Crime and capitalism

Page 13 RACISM AND THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
LEE SUSTAR

When racism is the law

Page 5
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

Black Americas economic freefall

Page 6 POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM
LEE SUSTAR

Racism and U.S. politics

Page 14
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

No, he wont for Black America

Page 16
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

The many other Trayvons

Page 9

Race, class and Marxism

Page 18

HE FACTS of Trayvons murder have made national and international headlines. On February 26, the 17-year-old went to a store in Sanford, Fla., a suburb of Orlando, where he was visiting his father and his fianc. He was walking back through the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community when he was spotted by George Zimmerman, the self-appointed head of a neighborhood watch. The 911 calls made by Zimmerman and released by police, but only after growing pressure, provide a chilling documentation of how Trayvon was racially profiled and stalked. This guy looks like hes up to no good, or hes on drugs or something, Zimmerman, who is Latino, told the police operator. In a later call, he says his victim looks Black, and he defies the operators instruction not to follow Trayvon. Trayvons girlfriend came forward to describe her cell phone conversation with him after Zimmerman started following him. She said Trayvon got away from Zimmerman at one point, but that the watch volunteer tracked him down. The call ended abruptly, around the time that Zimmerman shot Trayvon. Zimmerman claims the two got into an altercation; that Trayvon, who weighed about 100 pounds less than Zimmerman, forced him to the ground; and that he fired in self-defense. But other 911 calls from witnesses say the cries for help before the fatal gunshot came from Trayvon, not Zimmerman. Zimmerman was released after questioningbecause, police said, they had no evidence to disprove Zimmermans self-defense claim.

voices in a united demand for justice. In New York City, protester Aisha Mays summed up the sentiments of the demonstrators: Things like this happen all the time because Black men are targets. You see the worst of this here, but you also see it everywherein the schools, the workplaces. Im glad that people are here. We have to continue these speakouts and rallies, we have to continue to talk about these issues and bring them out in the open, we have to break down these racist barriers. We have to take action. Like the execution of innocent Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis last falland the prosecution of the Jena Six in rural Louisiana a few years earlierTrayvons case has crystallized for millions of people the continuing ugly reality of racism in 21st century America. But not only that. Trayvons story has also moved people to take a stand and demand change. A similar sense of outrage at racism has been at the heart of some of the most important struggles for social change throughout U.S. history struggles that transformed U.S. society, not only for African Americans, but for everyone, in ways people often take for granted today. Those who care about creating a different world need to do whatever we can to win justice for Trayvonto sharpen the anger people feel at his death, and to turn that anger into protest, against both his senseless murder and all the aspects of racism that caused it.

OCIALISTWORKER.ORG readers wont need any convincing about the depths of racism in U.S. society, but the facts bear repeating since the conventional media wisdom after the election of Barack Obama was that we were living in a post-racial America. That was always a myth, promoted mostly by right-wingers. But it is true that the conditions African Americans face today are a stark contrast to the hopes and sentiments of millions when Obama took officethe pride, and not just among African Americans, that a country founded on slavery had elected its first Black president, and also the expectation that life would get better for the have-nots in U.S. society. The grim facts prove that life hasnt gotten betterand that racism persists in even sharper forms, as the Great Recession has hit hardest

As this article was being published, more than a month after Trayvons death, George Zimmerman had still not spent a single minute in custody. Imagine if the roles were reversed, and a Black teenager not from the community had admitted to shooting in self-defense a neighborhood watch volunteer. Can anyone seriously believe that Trayvon would not be sitting in prison right now? There are countless other examples of police abuse and violence against Blacksbecause they take place every day in every city in the U.S. In New York, to take one example, one side of the story is the horrifying killing of Ramarley Graham in February, shot by police in the bathroom of his home, in the presence of his grandmother and 6-year-old brother. The other side is the harassment faced every single day by hundreds and hundreds of African Americans because of the NYPDs stop-and-frisk policy, a not-so-veiled excuse for racial profiling, whose victims are overwhelmingly Black or Latino. And the cops, of course, are just one face of a criminal injustice system infected by racism at every level. The U.S. is the leading jailer in the world, with more of its population behind barsby proportion or in absolute numbersthan any other country in the world. But the number of incarcerated African Americans is the scandal within this scandal. As of the middle of 2009, there were just under 2.3 million people in state, federal or local prisons or jails, according to federal statistics. More than 900,000 of them were Black 40 percent, or more than three times the percentage of African Americans in the population as a whole. The federal government calculates that the odds of a Black male born in 2001 or after going to prison during their lifetime is one in threecompared to a one-in-17 chance for a white male. Like the experience of police harassment, there is no other possible explanation for such statistics than that racism is pervasive and systematic in U.S. societysomething that is reflected in every aspect of life, economic, social and political, for African Americans.

among the disproportionately working-class ranks of the African American community. Not only that, but Obama has proved during his time in office that he isnt interested in challenging racism. He has avoided, in spite of the ever-worsening crisis of the Black community, every opportunity to champion programs that would provide special help to African Americans. He usually hasnt defended himself against the racist smears of Republican opponents, much less stood up against the right wing when it spews hate and stereotypes about Blacks more generally. This record tells us something important about racism and how to challenge it. The systematic discrimination against African Americans wont be changed by symbolic actions or better education or the legal system. Racism is built into capitalism as one of the primary means that a minority at the top maintains its rule. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it, societys masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. The economic component to racism dates back to the capitalisms earliest days, when the first great fortunes of the bourgeoisie were built on the backs of slave labor in the U.S. South, which produced the cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution. The ideology of racism was necessary to justify slaverya crime that was, in the words of Marxist CLR James, so shocking...that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race. Capitalism outgrew the need for slavery, but not the ideology of racism. Instead, it was continually adapted to perform the same functionof both justifying the fact that one part of the working class was being held down, and of keeping workers divided and unable to unite against their common rulers. Today, the creeps running for the Republican presidential nomination show all the time that open racism is still tolerated in U.S. politics from Newt Gingrich calling Obama the food stamp president to Rick Santorum saying he doesnt want to make Black peoples lives better by giving them somebody elses money. The Republicans aim is not only to whip up the partys base against Obama, but to invoke racist stereotypes used by politicians of both parties to justify attacks on government programs. Ronald Reagan shifted the war on the poor into high gear in the 1980s with false claims about Black welfare queens living the good life, thanks to generous government programs. Gingrich and Santorumand the Democrats who employ the same arguments, but more carefully, by talking about personal responsibilityare following in that tradition. Even the bigotry of an individual neighborhood watch volunteer must be seen as the product of a system that benefits from the demonization of African Americans. As Michelle Alexander, author of The New

HIS IS why the African American struggle against racism and for liberation has always been a decisive question for the left in the U.S. The immense wealth of U.S. capitalism and the power of the American state were founded on the basis of slave labor, and the ideology of racism has remained essential to the U.S. ruling class ever since. And so each example of African American resistance has represented a basic challenge, however small or large, to the system. When this resistance has been victorious from the abolition of slavery in the 19th century to the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation in the 20thit has provided some of the highest peaks in the struggle for freedom and liberation in the U.S. Plus, the actions of people standing up against racismwhether Blacks alone or a multiracial strugglehas again and again provided an example that inspired others to take action. The abolitionist movement in the 19th centurywhich counted many ex-slaves like Douglass among its leadersnot only contributed to transforming U.S. society with the overthrow

Jim Crow, has argued, the ideology of racism has shifted, especially in the post-civil rights era, from claiming that Blacks are inferior, to perpetuating a stereotype of criminality, especially for young African American men. For one thing, this justifies the building up of a state apparatus that can be turned not only against persecuted minorities, but anyone who challenges the status quo. And of course, the law-and-order hysteria remains an effective means of keeping working people pitted against one another. Racism is built into the fabric of capitalism, and so confronting it cant stop with racist ideasthough it is important to challenge those ideas whenever they appear. Racism has to be confronted by struggleand scapegoating by the spirit of solidarity, with the goal of building a multiracial working-class movement based upon championing the demands of all the oppressed and exploited.

the Southern slaveocracy, but its activists went on to play important roles in other struggles, like the fight for womens rights and the labor movement. A century later, the civil rights movement in the South and then the Black Power movement directly inspired protest and dissent throughout U.S. society. The first demonstrations against U.S. imperialisms war in Vietnam were organized by activists trained by the civil rights movement. Theres a reason for this crossover in the history of resistance in the U.S. The attempt to unravel one injustice in a capitalist society, where exploitation and oppression in many forms are bound together, inevitably pulls at the threads of other injustices. The struggle against racism is not only an urgent moral obligation for anyone who hates bigotry. It is also an essential part of a wider struggle. Thats why all socialists and radicals need to respond to every outrage of hate and bigotry in whatever ways we canand put the struggle against racism at the center of all our efforts to win change.

RACISM USA
ROUNDTABLE

What every Black man in America must learn

March 29, 2012

Trayvon Martin was young, Black and male that was enough for neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman to decide he was suspicious, to stalk him and eventually to pull the trigger. African American families understand that Trayvons fate could happen to their own children. Thats why so many young Black men remember the time they had the talkwhen family or friends tried to prepare them for dealing with racism in general and the police in particular. Here, SocialistWorker.org contributors Derron Thweatt, Khury Petersen-Smith and Brian Jones remember their own experiences with the talkand how the experience of racism shaped their lives.

Derron Thweatt

I, LIKE most Black males in the U.S., had the other talk, the one that wasnt related to sex. I remember my mom having the talk with me when I was a preteen. She explained why she would never let me grow my hair longer than less than half an inch, and why I wasnt allowed to hang out with anyone on the street or stoop. She told me all the things that she thought I needed to know to avoid racism as much as I could. At the time, I thought she was being a little

paranoid. I thought I was a good kid, and I would be the exception to the rule. However, a few years later, as a teenager growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Hyattsville, Md., I understood our talk within a matter of moments. I was late to my part-time job, so I started running, and within a minute, I was being followed. The cop followed me for a few blocks, and I slowed down and kept going slower and slower, until the cop stopped me. He accused me of robbing a liquor store and gave me the description of a suspect who weighed approximately 150 pounds more than I did, was about 5-foot-6-inches, and had dreadlocks. At the time, I was 5-foot-10-inches and still growing, and I barely weighed 130 pounds. I did the one thing I was told a Black man should never do: I made a snarly comment to the effect of Well, Slim-Fast doesnt work that quick. At that point, the officer threw me on the hood of his car, frisked me and then proceeded to touch me very inappropriately. Once he felt that he was finished, he told me to leave. I pretended to continue to walk to work, but the second the cop car was out of sight, I turned around and walked home, sobbing. After I recounted the story to my mother, she was upset at first because I shouldnt have been running. But after I kept screaming that I did nothing wrong and just wanted to get to work, she stopped, consoled me and talked more about racism. Prior to being stopped by that cop, I thought I could be the exception to the rule, and people would see from by my clothes or my low-cut hair that I was a good person. I decided shortly thereafter that for the rest of my life, I would do whatever I could to fight back against racism. At that time, I became involved in fighting back against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which radicalized me, and I soon became a socialist. The talk occurs because Black men arent seen as human beings under capitalism. Barack Obama rarely mentions anything about racism and mainly mentions Black men when hes admonishing them for not being in their childrens lives. However, he does not comment on the number of Black men incarcerated in the U.S., which is highly disproportionate compared to other racial groups. These discussions continue to take place in households around the country because civil rights for people of color have been scaled back by Democrats and Republicans alike. Not another parent should have to turn to their Black male preteen and have the talk. We have to fight so there isnt another case like Trayvon Martin. The only way we can make sure these things dont continue is to fight over the long haul for another world where people of all races are treated as equals, rather than some as animals.

Brian Jones

IN HIS classic book Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement, Jack Bloom quotes an African American mother speaking about how, as a matter of survival, she taught her children to internalize the rules of Jim Crow segregation: Its like with cars and knives, you have to teach your children to know whats dangerous and how to stay away from it, or else they sure wont live long. White people are a real danger to us until we learn how to live with them. So if you want your kids to live long, they have to grow up scared of whites, and the way they get scared is through us; and thats why I dont let my kids get fresh about the white man even in their own house. If I do, theres liable to be trouble to pay. Theyll forget, and theyll say something outside, and thatll be it for them, and us, too. So I make them store it in the bones, way inside, and then no one sees it.

The specific rules of survival have changed in the 60 years since that mother said those words, but the strategy is essentially the same. In 2012, in the era of mass incarceration the new Jim Crow as author Michelle Alexander has called itBlack parents must not only make their children aware of the way they will be perceived by white society in general, but by the police in particular. Why? Because, as Alexander argues, criminality has become the very essence of blackness in our new racial order. The very same rights and opportunities denied to African Americans because of their color in the old Jim Crowvoting rights, employment, housing, etc.can now be denied to us again, once the label of criminal (or more specifically, felon) has been applied. Thus, for the last 40 years, America has spent untold sums of money to wage a so-called war on drugs. As a result, drug use has not declined in the least, but Black people have been successfully equated with crime. And so, when George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he was certain he was looking at a criminal. After Trayvon was murdered, the poet and former NBA player Etan Thomas wrote, Very soon, I have to ruin my sons rose-colored glasses view of the world we live in. I have to teach him that...[i]f the police stop you, make sure you stop in a well-lit area and dont make any sudden moves. Keep your hands visible. Avoid putting them in your pockets. Thomas wrote that hell have to tell his son how to preempt criminal accusations in all sorts of little ways: Always get the receipt after making a purchase, no matter how small, so no one can falsely accuse you of theft, later.

At a certain point, the cup of endurance runneth over. In the 1950s, younger African Americans began to shed their fear of whites and openly defy Jim Crow laws. This defiance was extremely dangerous, and many activists were injured for doing things such as simply sitting where they werent supposed to sit. Some even lost their lives. These were courageous individuals, but their actions werent just a product of individual courage. The movement against the old Jim Crow grew as a movement of collective, mass action. And so it will be with the new Jim Crow. I heard Trayvon Martins father speak at a rally in New York City last week. He said he was determined to make sure his son did not die in vain. His wish is already coming true. A new, mass movement is emerging in the streets nationwide to demand justice. This mass movement must find ways to challenge the new Jim Crow. Ultimately, thats the only way we wont have to raise our children to be afraid. ONE OF the most powerful lessons that I learned about being Black came from a conversation with a white person. I was talking with a white co-worker about the latest time that Id been stopped by the cops while driving. I had a tally sheet on my dashboard at the time to keep track of the number of times Id been pulled over, and I had stopped counting after 30. My co-worker, who was older than me, asked me, You know how many times Ive been pulled over? I thought for a second. Five, I guessed. Ten? He shook his head, looked down, and then looked at me. Ive never been pulled over by the police. News reports, conversations with other Black people and my daily experience teach me about the depths of racism in the U.S. But conversations like that one remind me that there is something unique about the realities of oppression that Black people face, and because this society is so segregated, many other people have no realization of them. This dynamic has been present in conversations about the murder of Trayvon Martin. While Fox News, the Sanford police and conservatives in general describe the killing of Trayvon as a tragic incident that has nothing to do with racism, many people understand that racism had everything to do with it. And it is a shock to many of them that such a thing could happenand go unpunished, at least so farin the 21st century. In President Barack Obamas statement regarding the murder of Trayvon, he suggested that we all need to do some soul-searching to figure out how such a thing could have happened. Unfortunately, horrified as I was about the murder of Trayvon, there was nothing surprising about it to me. The killing of Trayvon Martin is a tragic confirmation of the realities of racism that Black people face every day. For this reason, many Black families engage in the strange ritual of holding a serious conver-

Khury Petersen-Smith

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sation about how to behave when dealing with police. The so-called talk, which has been a topic of discussion on National Public Radio and elsewhere, involves teaching Black children to avoid the police, and defer to them when confronted. My mothers solemn warning to be careful with police, because theyll hurt you came when I was in elementary school, but it has been painfully relevant throughout the dozens of times when cops stopped me, whether I was in my car or on foot. I know activists who have asked me why there isnt more resistance among African Americans, given how bad racism is and the reality of Black America today. The level of policing that we are subjected toconstant surveillance of Black communities, harassment, arrest and violencegoes a long way to explaining why there isnt open opposition to unemployment, poverty, discrimination and other aspects of life at the bottom of society. There are 1 million of us in prison or jail today. And the fact that the policeor as George Zimmerman shows, any racistcan end our lives at any moment leads us to keep ourselves in check. The flip side of this is that Black people have the potential to rise up in an explosion of anger at the conditions we face. That has happened again and again during U.S. history, in slave revolts, struggles against poverty and racism in the 1930sand, of course, the Black struggle of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. When Black people do rebel, the struggles tend to inspire others, too, and shake up the whole of society. Thats exactly why the 1 percent invests so much into repressing Blacks in particular. So what do we do? In response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, its clear. We need to continue the rallies, marches, school walkouts and other protests in cities across the country to demand justice. Justice for Trayvon means much more than the prosecution of George Zimmerman. It means abolition of the racist Stand Your Ground law in Florida that Zimmerman has used in his defense. Justice means dismantling the war on drugs, which is the pretext for passing laws that target Black people, flooding our neighborhoods with police and incarcerating a large segment of the Black population. Justice means confronting a culture in which Blacks are viewed first and foremost as criminals. We shouldnt accept that the racism and police state conditions Black people have to endure are examples of a white privilege that Blacks and other people of color do not have access to. Its true that Black people may as well live on a different planet than the rest of the population when it comes to how we are treated by the police, mortgage lenders and employers. But the idea of white privilege resigns us to that inequality, rather than questioning and destroying it. Its a good thing that many people who arent Black are now learning about the realities that Black people face every day. It is a bitter tragedy that it took the murder of a 17-year-old for that to happen.

I can think of no greater way to honor the life of Trayvon Martin and avenge his death than by building the deepest, strongest and most relentless multiracial struggle against racism. Trayvon is the latest casualty in a war on Black America. Its time that we declare war on institutional racism.

EDITORIALS

When racism is the law

April 4, 2012

The actions of vigilantes like George Zimmerman arent an exceptionbecause racism is woven into the fabric of a system based on inequality and injustice.

HEN GEORGE Zimmerman stalked Trayvon Martin because the African American teenager looked suspicious, it was racist vigilantism, pure and simple. Even conservative politicians and pundits have been forced to concede that Zimmerman was wrong to single out Trayvon for no other reason than his hoodie and the color of his skin. But every day, in state after state and city after city, the same racist vigilantism takes place, and its perfectly legal and officially sanctionedbecause the perpetrators are representatives of the American criminal injustice system. Under the stop and frisk policy in New York City, hundreds and hundreds of police officers do each day what George Zimmerman did when he saw Trayvon Martin. Theyre under orders to target young men of color.

From the harassment and violence of police, to a prosecutors decision about who gets charged, to the judges passing sentence based on the politicians tough-on-crime laws, to the use of the ultimate punishment of deathat every stage, the U.S. criminal justice system is a machine that disproportionately victimizes African Americans and other people of color. The statistical evidence of racial discrimination is so overwhelming that youd think it must be against the law. But racism is the law. Author Michelle Alexander compares the U.S. justice system, with its systematic targeting of African Americans, to the laws that existed to preserve racial segregation in the U.S. South before the civil rights movement. We live in an era, she writes, of the new Jim Crow. Alexander is rightand its worth remembering in this context the role that segregation played in upholding the system of exploitation in the South that benefitted a tiny elite. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote a century and a half ago, the rulers of the South maintained their power over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. Racism is not just tolerated in the law, but its an indispensable part of capitalism. It is one of the most important ways that one section of the working class is kept down, economically, socially and politicallyand that the working class as a whole is kept divided, rather than united against its common enemies. Thats why it wont be enough for one vigilante in Florida to be held accountableif he ever is. The new civil rights movement that has arisen in the wake of Trayvon Martins murder must challenge the institutional racism at the core of U.S. society.

ACISM INFECTS the U.S. justice system from start to finish. Theres the question of who gets arrested

and who doesntsomething that was thrown into sharp relief by the Trayvon Martin case. Even though it was immediately clear to police that Zimmerman had killed an unarmed teenager, he wasnt charged with any crime because a racist law protected him. Floridas Stand Your Ground self-defense law allows someone to use deadly force if they reasonably believe they are being threatened with death or serious injury. After the law went into effect, the number of homicides in Florida ruled justifiable jumped, from eight in 2004 to 40 in 2010. Among those justifiable homicides: Last January, a Miami homeowner chased an alleged burglar from his home for more than a block and then stabbed him to death. That same month, a retired sheriffs deputy in Miami Lakes shot and wounded an unarmed homeless man for threatening his family in a Haagen-Dazs shopbut wasnt charged because of Stand Your Ground. Zimmerman claims Trayvon was beating him before he pulled out his gun and fired though the evidence that this is a lie is becoming overwhelming. But what if the situation were reversed? What if an African American teen from out of town claimed he was attacked by a neighborhood watch volunteer, and shot him in self-defense? Does anyone believe that the police would refuse to arrest Trayvon Martin because of the Stand Your Ground law? The truth is that what George Zimmerman did in singling out Trayvon takes place every day in cities around the country. For example, the NYPD isnt supposed to racially profile. But the statistics show its practice of stop, question and frisk does exactly that. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, out of the 576,394 people stopped under the policy in 2009, 84 percent were Black or Latino. Together, African Americans and Latinos account for around half of New York Citys population. This policy of legalized harassment and abuse is getting worse. In 2011, more than 684,000 people were stopped in New York City, 87 percent of them Black and Latino. Police across the country behave in similar fashion, as the many notorious examples of African Americans targeted for the crime of Driving (or Walking or Standing or Living) While Black prove. An ACLU report on racial profiling documented many examplesincluding in Illinois, where a drug interdiction program called Operation Valkyrie singled out Latino motorists for about 30 percent of stops, even though Latinos are just 8 percent of the states population and are less likely to have drug contraband than whites. Examples of discrimination in drug enforcement underline the racist character of the war on drugs in its entirety. The drug war was launched under Republican Richard Nixon and kicked into high gear by Ronald Reagan, but with the support of Democrats at each step. Racial profiling was central to the campaign to get tough on drugs. For example, The Common Characteristics of Drug Couriers issued to police by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles

ACISM IS the law of the land in so many other respects. Its true in the voting booths voter ID laws requiring people to present a photo identification at polling places has translated into lower African American turnouts. Its true in the classroom, where Black middleschoolers were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as their white counterparts. African Americans arent the only victims of racist laws. In the era of the U.S. governments war on terror, racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement has become an ordinary occurrence for Arabs and Muslims. Laws infringing on civil liberties that once would have been considered unconstitutional by mainstream political opinion are now supported by Democratic and Republican politicians alike. And Latino immigrants are bearing the brunt of a different racist hysteria. Laws that invite racial profilinglike Arizonas SB 1070, which authorized law enforcement to stop, detain and arrest anyone that officers had a reasonable suspicion was undocumentedhave sent a

in 1985 warned troopers to be suspicious of drivers wearing lots of gold or who dont fit the vehicle, and ethnic groups associated with the drug trade. In terms of stopping the use of illegal drugs, the war on drugs has been a dismal failure. But it has been a massive success in filling up U.S. prisons. The U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million people, more than any country in the world, in percentage terms or absolute numbers. African Americans are the overwhelming casualties of this war. According to the Sentencing Project, though Blacks comprise 13 percent of the population and around 14 percent of drug users, they account for 37 percent of drug arrests. This racism continues in the courtroom, of course. Blacks are far more likely than whites to face a felony charge, to be represented by a typically overworked public defender and to get a longer sentence. Blacks are also more likely to be excluded from juries. Of course, some victims of the biased American injustice system dont even get a chance to walk into a courtroom. They are the hundreds of victims of police killings every year, where a badge and a gun grant officers the right to be judge, jury and executioner. The numbers are hard to be sure of, because though careful records are kept of how many police officers die each year, record-keeping of how many people police kill is less careful. A 2007 investigation by ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter found that about 9,500 people nationally were killed by police during the years 1980 to 2005an average of nearly one fatal shooting per day. The report also showed that African Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications investigated. When the people who are supposed to be upholding the law can kill and brutalize Black people with impunity, is it any wonder that a racist vigilante like Zimmerman feels he can do the same?

wave of fear into immigrant communities. SB 1070 has been held up in the courts, but it inspired copycats, such as Alabamas HB 56, whose initial provisions not only empowered police to act as immigration agents, but criminalized anyone who rented to or employed suspected undocumented people. When you look at this overall picture, the truth is obvious: American justice is a contradiction in terms. Every inch of U.S. society is propped up by institutions that are racist and discriminatory to the core. Those in power depend on the suspicion and distrust that racism breeds to distract attention from the real purveyors of violence and the corporations that actually steal jobs by shutting down factories. But the massive reaction to Trayvon Martins murder and the huge demonstrations against racism in recent weeks have shown that theres an antidote to suspicion: solidarity. Tens of thousands have raised their voices in protest around the countrybecause they look like Trayvon or they know someone who looks like Trayvon, and because they see how a system that promotes bigotry and hate has to be challenged.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

Black Americas economic freefall

January 8, 2010

The economic crisis is wracking Black communitiesand political leaders, including Barack Obama, are failing to respond.

HE AMERICAN economy has gone through what has been called the Great Recession. But the crisis in Black communities across the U.S. constitutes an outright depressionspurring desperate conditions that have gone largely unreported because of the racist indifference of the government and mass media. Unemployment has reached catastrophic levels in Black communities. The numbers are staggering. Official African American unemployment was 15.6 percent in November 2009, compared to an overall national rate 10 percentand those statistics leave out workers who have been forced into part-time jobs because they couldnt find full-time work, or who have been pushed out of the workforce altogether. For young African Americans, male and female, aged 16 to 29, joblessness is as high as 30 percent, according to the Washington Post. According to one report, between 2006 and 2009, more than 6 percent of Black men have lost their jobsin real numbers, that adds up to the disappearance of more than 489,000 jobs. Unemployment among Black women 20

and older has risen by more than 4 percentage points since the beginning of the recession, bringing their total unemployment rate up to more than 11 percentwhich 75 percent higher than for white women in the same age range. The overview of unemployment doesnt begin to convey the extent of the jobs crisis in Black America. Officially, the nations highest unemployment rate is in Detroit, which is 83 percent Blackjoblessness is a staggering 28 percent. Unemployment on the mostly Black South and West Sides of Chicago comes in second at 22 percent. The top 10 areas in the country where unemployment is concentrated include Black neighborhoods in Toledo, Ohio; Atlanta; and St. Louis. But a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee shows that the jobs desert for African Americans is more severe than the official figures show. The study found Black male unemployment for men aged 16 to 64 to be unprecedented and overwhelming. Buffalo had the highest percentage of Black men either unemployed or permanently out of the labor force at 52 percent. That was followed by Milwaukee at 47 percent and Chicago at 43 percent. Among 35 major metropolitan areas, African Americans had the lowest unemployment in Washington, D.C. at 27 percent. In most of those 35 cities, Black unemployment hovered somewhere between 30 and 35 percent. The problem is not just an issue of not having a job. The loss of jobs in Black communities is exacerbating social disparities that have historically caused a lesser quality of life for African Americans. For example, the rapid loss of jobs means that greater numbers of African Americans are losing their health care, which will only worsen disparities around health care between Blacks and whites that already exist. In 2007, when Black unemployment was approximately 10 percent, 20 percent of Blacks were without heath insurance. With Black unemployment

growing steadily today, the numbers of the Black uninsured are sure to rise, too. Unemployment also impacts rising levels of poverty in Black communities. A recent report found that 90 percent of Black children are part of families that will use food stamps by the time they are 20 years old. All told, 40 percent of Black children live in poverty, according the governments official statistics. According to the census, a full quarter of African Americans were living in poverty in 2007two years before the unemployment crisis in Black America. Rising unemployment is also exacerbating the foreclosure crisis in Black neighborhoods across the country. While foreclosures are not tracked by race, the number of Black homeowners who face the threat of losing their homes is believed to be twice that of whites. A study conducted by the Woodstock Institute in Chicago found an 18 percent jump in foreclosures across the city in 2008, but most were concentrated in African American neighborhoods like Englewood and West Englewood. In these two neighborhoods alone, there were 725 foreclosures in a ninemonth period. The Woodstock Institute has found that for every one home foreclosure on a given block. the value of the remaining homes decrease by 1 percent. Thus, the heavy concentration of home foreclosures in African American neighborhoods is rapidly destroying the value and worth of the remaining homes in the neighborhood. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, 53 percent of African Americans who bought homes in 2006 have already lost or will lose their homes to foreclosure in the next few years, compared to 22 percent of white borrowers facing foreclosure.

HERE HAVE been many explanations offered for the job disparities between African Americans and whites during this recession. Some focus on education and training as the

main problem with the employability of African Americans. Others point to the jobs that African Americans have been concentrated in, like manufacturingthese are the sectors that have experienced the greatest job losses. There are certainly elements of both explanations that are true. But the larger issue in the overwhelming way the recession is impacting Black America has to do with racism. Its amazing the lengths to which politicians, Black and white alike, will go to avoid mentioning race and racism as factors in the ever swelling number of Black employed. For example, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) received extensive news coverage for confronting President Barack Obama about Black unemployment and prodding him to do more about it. But when asked at a press conference why Obama should do more for Blacks when everyone is suffering, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) defensively said, Were not talking about race. Were talking about hardest hit, where their unemployment rates are the greatest...Were talking about qualified areas of economic hardship, where 20 percent or more of the population is at or below the poverty line, and we want at least 10 percent of the resources targeted. In case anyone was confused, Lees colleague, Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) reiterated that the CBCs concern isnt based on the foundation of race, but rather focused on the foundation of need. Despite the tepid urging of the CBC, Barack Obamawho won a whopping 95 percent of the votes of African Americans in the 2008 election and benefited from an unprecedented Black turnoutpersisted in ignoring the particular ways that the crisis is devastating Black communities. While Obama has proven himself to be an expert in singling out African American men and parents in general by highlighting what he feels to be their deficiencies in child rearing, the Black president lacks the same initiative in identifying the crisis in Black unemployment. In an interview with USA Today, Obama responded to a question about Black joblessness, saying, I will tell you that I think the most important thing I can do for the African American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, periodand that is get the economy going again and get people hiring again...I think its a mistake to start thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States, rather than to think that we are all in this together, and we are all going to get out of this together. But why not talk about race? Its not that some Blacksfor example, undereducated African Americansare losing all the jobs while others are doing well. According to the New York Times, college-educated African Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as college-educated whites. In every head-to-head comparison between Black and white workersworkers without high school diplomas, male workers, female workers or teenage workersAfrican

TS TRUE that the recession is having a devastating impact on all workersBlack, white and Latino. Its also true that while the U.S. government has the resources to create new jobs through work programs and infuse hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy to lift up all workers, the Obama administration instead chose to give away a trillion dollars to the bankers that crashed the economy in the first place. The result has been millions of dollars in bonuses for Wall Street bosses and peanuts for the working class, in the form of a few extra dollars here to expand unemployment benefits and a few extra dollars there for more food stamp usage. Despite this general picture, though, the re-

American workers consistently do worse. Several studies conducted over the last decade confirm that race remains a factor in whether or not employers hire African American workers. A report several years ago in the American Economic Review, titled Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? found that applicants with Black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names. Sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western found that white men with a criminal record were more likely to be called back for a job than Black men with no criminal record at all. In a study conducted last year by the Journal of Labor Economics found that Latino, Asian and white managers are more likely to hire white workers than African American workers. The study, which was based on hiring patterns at a national department store chain, found that when Black managers were replaced with a non-Black, the number of new Black hires declined from 21 percent to 17 percent, and the number of white hires increased from 60 to 64 percent. In a typical Southern store, the numbers were even more starkthe removal of Black managers resulted in new Black hires dropping from 29 percent to 21 percent. These studies suggest that racism, pure and simple, is a major factor in the disproportionate numbers of Black workers being laid off in the U.S. economy. This does not mean that other factors arent also involved, but neither are those factors separate from the influence of racism either. If politicians and pundits are going to blame education and training for part of the unemployment disparities, then they should admit that those factors also reflect racism in American society. To take one example, schools that cater to mostly African American students have worse resources and funding, which results in educational disparities.

cessions impact in African American communities is catastrophic and demands special attentionif only because employers left to their own devices will rehire Black workers last, if at all. The only way to ensure that African American workers are employed or receive additional benefits to tide them over while the jobs crisis persists is to create special programs to those ends. This, historically, has been the basis of affirmative action. When it was first introduced in the mid-1960s as a remedy to centuries-long racism and discrimination, President Lyndon Johnson famously explained: Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American societyto vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, You are free to compete with all the others, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus, it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Without recognizing the way in which racism factors into the current crisis, and thus the need for particular programs to create more job opportunities for African Americans, politicians and Black community leaders inevitably put the onus on African American individuals to come up with their own solutions. So while the CBC recognizes that more Blacks are losing their jobs and the devastation this is having in their districts, some of the solutions being pondered by CBC members border on the ridiculous. For example, well-known African American Rep. Maxine Waters from South Central Los Angeles recognizes that racism is at play in unemployment disparities, saying, We dont like to talk about it, but theres still discrimination in our society...Black college graduates cant get professional jobs as easily as whites. We have Blacks disguising their voices on the telephone or trying to hide their blackness in responding to job announcements. Its real. On the other hand, Waters puts the onus on Black individuals, arguing that Blacks should work for less money to make them more attractive to employers or move to a new area if there are no jobs in the city they are inthough she

HE ECONOMIC gains that African Americans made in the 1990s began to erode in the recession of 2000-2001, resulting in almost 10 percent unemployment in 2006, as the 2000s economic expansion was nearing its height and the rapid increase in home foreclosures in 2006 and after. These factors combined with the genuine excitement that arose with the possibility of electing the first African American president in American history resulted in an unprecedented turnout of African American voters in the 2008 election. New studies confirm that it was the Black vote, fueled by a historic turnout from Black women and Black youth, that was decisive in putting Obama over the top in the election. Despite this historic level of support in the election, Obama continues to treat African Americans as political strangers, if not a political afterthought. Black male unemployment is the highest it has been since the Second World War, Black poverty is on the rise, African Americans are losing their homes at breakneck speedand meanwhile, the first African American president fiddles while Romeor in this case, Harlem, Englewood, Lawndale and Detroit, among othersburns. Obama has already made clear on a whole number of issuesfrom LGBT equality to abortion rights to immigrant rights and beyondthat he will do absolutely nothing until a grassroots movement makes his silence and inaction impossible. During the campaign, he promised to do even less for African Americans, fearing to be painted as the Black presidentthe result is that he is now going out of his way to ignore the particular problems in African American communities resulting from the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis. Independent Black politics is in a devolving crisis, stuck between giving Obama time and defending him against the disgusting racist attacks from the right. In the meantime, Black America is being devastated. Until there are political mobilizations that demand more resources for jobs, housing, schools, welfare and a new social safety net for the working class in general, but specifically for Black workers and Black communities, things are going to get worse before they get better.

does not suggest where African American men or women should move in order to find a job.

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POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE U.S. INJUSTICE SYSTEM

LEE SUSTAR

The many other Trayvons

April 5, 2012

The U.S. has a long history of violence against African Americans, committed by racists and policebut as Lee Sustar explains, there is also a history of resistance.

OLICE AND racist killings of African Americans are horrifyingly familiar. So why the protest movement around the case of Trayvon Martinand why now? Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking at a March 30 press conference with Black family members of young people recently shot and killed by police in the Chicago area, put his finger on the issue. The media has adjusted to the routine deaths of African Americans at the hands of copsbut their family members havent. The traditional media did not break this story, Jackson said. It was Facebook and Twitter that really broke the story. Here, when young brother Watts is killed, its a one-night story, and we move on and wait for the next one. Jackson was referring to the police murder of Stephon Watts, the young Black man with autism shot by police in Calumet City outside Chicago in February. Stephons father, Steven Watts, also spoke: My son has autism, and he just wanted to get out of the house. He saw the police. Hes afraid of the police, and he just wanted to get past them. He had a butter knife in his hand, and just because he had a butter knife in his hand, the officers

Y NEARLY 30 years as a reporter for Socialist Worker spans much of the law and order era that today has put more African American men in prison than were enslaved in 1850. Over the years, Ive witnessed the agony of the parents and family members of African Ameri-

Also at the press conference was Angela Helton, mother of Rekia Boyd, killed by an offduty Chicago police officer who opened fire at an unarmed young Black man in Chicagos Douglas Park neighborhood. Helton was shocked at the killing of Trayvon, but angry that the death of her daughter barely made the nightly news in Chicago. My daughter was murdered for no reason at all, she said. I just want justice for my daughter, and I want the person who murdered her prosecuted to the fullest extent. Trayvon Martin, Stephon Watts and Rekia Boyd have joined the uncounted numbers of African Americans murdered by racists or law enforcement in the nearly 150 years since the end of the Civil War. A century ago, such killings were commonplace in the Southlynchings aimed at terrorizing a Black population denied basic and political rights under the Jim Crow system, Americas version of apartheid. These days, the majority of such racist killings are carried out by policesometimes even African American onesas part of a system of social control that author and activist Michelle Alexander calls the new Jim Crow.

came to the conclusion that it was okay to use deadly force. They shot him once. He fell. He tried to get up, and they shot him again. They did not try to wound him. They did not try to shoot him in his arms or legs. They did not try to hold him or Taser him. They shot him in the torso. They meant to kill my son. And now hes gone, and I have no answers. I feel compassion for Trayvon. I really do. But what about my son? I feel pain and anger inside of me. I see my son getting shot every night before I go to sleep. I see the same thing over and over. I see smoke coming out of the gun. Thats how close I was.

cans killed not only by police, but by racists who took their cue from the cops and pulled the trigger themselves. In October 1984, a few weeks after I moved to New York City, police officer Stephen Sullivan shot and killed Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66year-old African American grandmother, in her apartment after she allegedly brandished a kitchen knife. Somehow, Sullivan and the other five cops on the scene couldnt manage to subdue Bumpurs without firing two shotgun blasts into her. And if the murder of Bumpurs wasnt shocking enough, there was the demonstration of 10,000 NYPD officersthe force numbered 25,000 at the timein support of Sullivan when he was indicted for second-degree manslaughter. A judge ultimately acquitted Sullivan of all wrongdoing in a nonjury trial. Racist vigilante justice is nothing new, either. The police coddling of George Zimmerman and support for him in the conservative press reminded me of the media embrace of Bernhard Goetz, the New York City subway vigilante, who in December 1984 shot four African American youths after they asked him for $5. When a wounded 19-year-old Darrell Cabey tried to get away, Goetz followed him. You dont look so bad, heres another, Goetz said as he shot Cabey in the side at point-blank range. In Goetzs statement to the police, he justified his action by describing the young men as savages and said he was prepared to murder them. Goetz ultimately did just eight months in prison for unlawful possession of a firearm but was acquitted of attempted murder. Meanwhile, Cabeys injury put him in a coma that left him brain damaged, with the mental capacity of a third grader. Cabeys mother won a $43 million lawsuit against Goetz, but was unable to collect. Of course, police account for far more shootings and murders of unarmed African Americans than vigilantes like Goetz. Meeting Rekia Boyds mother in Chicago brought back memories of Veronica Perry, the mother of Edmund Perry, a 17-year-old Phillips Exeter Academy graduate who was bound for Stanford University when he was shot and killed by a New York City police officer in upper Manhattan in 1985.

HE RACIST police shootings in New York City from the 1980s onincluding, more recently, Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006stand out for their brazenness. Even the mainstream media had a hard time ignoring the fact that police fired 41 bullets at Diallo and fired 50 rounds at Bell. Yet the fact is that police carry out racial profiling of Blacks and Latinos in every city in the U.S.and that members of these groups are vastly more likely to end up dead in encounters with police then whites. Thats certainly the case in Chicago, where I moved in 1997. In June 1999, Robert Russ and LaTonya Haggertytwo young African Americans, both unarmedwere killed in separate police shootings within a 24-hour period. Those killings highlighted the role of police as the primary enforcers of institutional racismthe cops who fired the shots that killed Russ and Haggerty are themselves African

The cop who shot him, Lee Van Houten, claimed that Perry and another African American youth had tried to mug him. But Perrys body had no cuts, bruises or powder burns indicative of a strugglejust like there was no evidence that Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman. Like the Martin murder, the police tended to the killer, not the victim. As I wrote then: Why did Van Houtens fellow cops take him to St. Lukes Hospital for cuts and bruises and leave Perry bleeding on the sidewalk, just 100 yards from the hospital door? Veronica Perry, died just six years later at the age of 44, reportedly as a result of a heart condition. The anguish of Steven Watts, the father of Stephon Watts in Chicago, reminded me of the horror on the face of Jean Griffith Sandiford, the mother of 23-year-old Michael Griffith, who was chased by white racists onto a Queens highway, where he was struck by a car and killed in 1986. Griffiths car had broken down near Howard Beach, a white neighborhood where he and his friends walked to try to get help. They found a lynch mob instead. The NYPDs 106th Pre cinctwhich months earlier had been exposed for torturing Black prisoners with electric cattle prodsfailed to respond to three emergency calls about the attack on Griffith and two companions. It took a series of protests in Howard Beach to force Gov. Mario Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the murders. It was racists again who took the life of 16year-old Yusef Hawkins for daring to visit another white neighborhood, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, to buy a car in 1989. Ill never forget the hatred and threats hurled at those of us in the multiracial weekly marches in Bensonhurstor the courage of the African Americans who led that struggle to bring Yusefs killers to justice. Rev. Al Sharpton, who usually headed the weekly marches, was stabbed in the chest while preparing for one Saturday protest.

Americans. Its the social function of police not simply the racial identity of individual copsthat leads them to regard all Blacks, especially young Black men, as dangerous suspects, whether they are armed or not. But its the white cops who cultivate a culture of racism and a code of silence that allows police to kill African Americans with impunity. In my hometown of Cincinnati, the police brass and Fraternal Order of Police were for decades dominated by men from the historically white west side of town, where I grew up. A series of police killings and beatings of unarmed African Americans over several years finally boiled over in April 2001, when a white cop killed 19-year-old Timothy Thomas in a downtown alley in a neighborhood targeted for gentrification. When several hundred African Americans protested at City Hall, the police attacked them, sparking several days of riots. As I wrote about the police crackdown that followed: For Cincinnati cops, every African American was a target. One 53-year-old Black man was shot by beanbags 10 timesfor simply walking down the street in daylight. Another womans scalp was partially torn off by one of the projectiles. Hundreds of peoplealmost exclusively Black, many of them homelesswere arrested by the cops for curfew violations.

DECADE later, its the murder of Trayvon Martin that has once again put a spotlight on the reality racist murder in the U.S. While the police didnt pull the trigger this time, they certainly conspired with George Zimmerman to promote his claim that he killed Trayvon in self-defense. Tellingly, both protesters and the media have put the murder of Trayvon in the context of racist police violence nationally, rather than dismiss it as the isolated act of a white vigilante. Every day that Zimmerman walks free highlights the racist character of the criminal justice system. Everyone understands that if the shooter in the Sanford case were Black and the victim white, arrest and prosecution would have followed immediately. As Jesse Jackson pointed out, it was grassroots activism that made the murder of Trayvon Martin national news and sparked a movement to demand justice. And the outrage over

I arrived in town amid the curfew and watched police in military gear swarming through African American neighborhoods, peering down riflescopes and kicking in doorways. I could witness this firsthand because my white skin gave me a passport onto streets that were off-limits to anyone Black. A major riot in sleepy and conservative Cincinnati got national attention, as worried politicians and pundits weighed the implications of such a rebellion. It was one thing for Los Angeles to erupt in 1992 following the acquittal of the cops who beat Black motorist Rodney King, and were caught on videotape doing it. But if Cincinnati could explode over racist police killings, it could happen anywhere.

Trayvon is amplified by the growing discontent over the mass incarceration of African American men, which author Michelle Alexander has described as a new racial caste system. After all, even African American men who survive their encounter with law enforcement find themselves facing trumped-up charges and are compelled to plea bargain in order to limit time in prison, resulting in felony convictions that often strip them of voting rights and severely limit their employment prospects. Another factor sparking activism around Trayvon is the Occupy movement, which put grassroots protest onto the political map and won the sympathy of millions of people fed up with rising inequality and corporate-dominated politics. Crucially, the massive outpouring of support for Trayvon has brought the question of racial justice to the fore for a new generation of activists who themselves got a taste of police repression when cops cracked heads to clear Occupy encampments last fall. The challenge now is to give the movement against racist and police killings some local focus and staying power. Whether or not George Zimmerman is arrested, prosecuted and convicted, in every city, racist police brutality should become a focal point for activism. Speak-outs and panel discussions featuring those targeted by policeor their surviving family memberscan be a starting point for campaigns against racial profiling and police harassment of people of color. Its the duty of activists to cast a spotlight on the bitter experiences of African American and Latino youth at the hands of police and racists because if they dont, no one else will. Since the great African American journalist Ida B. Wells undertook dangerous journeys to the South a century ago to document lynching, its always been the Black, socialist and radical press that has taken the lead in exposing racist violence. The racist murder of Trayvon Martin is, as many have pointed out, our contemporary version of lynching. Wells words from her 1895 pamphlet, The Red Record, still ring true: In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

The groundswell of protest demanding justice for Trayvon shows that, once again, people are prepared to take up Wells legacy of fighting to put an end to these racist atrocities.

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EDITORIALS

Murdered by the American injustice system

September 22, 2011

The state of Georgia has succeeded in killing Troy Davisbut his struggle for justice will never be forgotten by those who stood in solidarity with him.

HROUGHOUT THE night, Troys supporters kept up the fight, with hundreds of people holding vigil on the grounds of the Jackson prison that houses Georgias death row, as police dressed in riot gear looked on and helicopters flew overhead. In Washington, D.C., protesters marched from the White House, where they had gathered to call on Barack Obama to speak out, to the Supreme Court buildingthe spirited protest drew hundreds. Their vigil was matched around the U.S. and internationallyin France, Britain

N INNOCENT man was tortured for hours and then murdered in cold blood. Thats the only way to describe the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last night. For over two decades, Troy endured a nightmare at the hands of police, prosecutors and the court system at every levelfrom his arrest during a frenzied hunt to arrest a Black man for the murder of a white Savannah, Ga., police officer; to the travesty of a trial in which he was found guilty and sentenced to death; to the years he spent pleading for one judge after another to consider the evidence that proves hes innocent. But the American system of injustice had a final sickening twist in store for Troy. Shortly before his scheduled execution, the U.S. Supreme Court took up his lawyers lastminute appeal for a stay of execution. The 7 p.m. deadline came and went, and Georgia officials announced they would delay the execution until the justices finished their review. Troys family and supportersgathered outside the prison in Georgia, and at meetings, protests and vigils around the countrycelebrated what seemed to be a reprieve, until it sank in that the delay was temporary, and could end at any moment with a decision from the high court. Thousands of people who desperately wanted Troy to live spent the next three hours in agony. Then came the decisiona one-sentence order that the Supreme Court would not grant a stay. The state of Georgia moved ahead with its murder quickly. It happened fast because, according to reports, Troy had remained strapped to the execution gurney the entire time.

and Hong Kong, to name just a few countries. In the days right before the execution, Troys case finally received the attention it deserved. One measure was the parade of well-known figures, spanning the political spectrum from left to right, who lent their voices to Troys cause among them was former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and even former FBI Director William Sessions. A former warden in Georgia called for prison employees to be able to choose not to take part in the execution. The day before Troys execution date, the New York Times editorial page weighed in with an article that criticized the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and its refusal to grant clemency: The boards failure to commute Mr. Daviss death sentence to life without parole was a tragic miscarriage of justice. But before this, there was a long campaign, built over many years, which organized support for Troy. That campaign gathered more than a million signatures on petitions and statements calling for Troy to be spared. Without those who pointed a spotlight on the case when the media mainly ignored it, Troys calls for justice might have gone unnoticed. But Troy fought for his freedom from on death row, and his supporters joined the protests on the outside. The state of Georgia did everything it could to silence Troyofficials refused to let him be interviewed or have his voice recordedso it was up to supporters to carry that voice far and wide. Troys message on Wednesday to those who organized and demonstrated for him was the same as it has always been: The struggle for justice doesnt end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. Im in good spirits, and Im prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until Ive taken my last breath. Georgia is prepared to snuff out the life of an innocent man.

N A sense, what happened to Troy Davis isnt a miscarriage of justice at allbecause this is exactly what justice looks like in the U.S. if you are poor or working class, and especially if you are Black. Troy always pointed out in interviews that if he was the white son of a wealthy senator, he not only wouldnt be on death rowhe wouldnt have been arrested in the first place. The physical evidence tying him to the crime certainly wasnt enough to justify his arrestthere wasnt any. Troys conviction was based on the word of nine people, seven of whom have recanted their testimony. A former jury member at the trial came forward to say that if she knew then what she knows now, the verdict would have been not guilty.

So many of the factors in Troys case are commonplace throughout the criminal justice system. Like the pattern of naked racism: Blacks are around 12 percent of the U.S. population, yet they make up 41 percent of the people who sit on death row. Someone accused of killing a white person is five times more likely to be executed than someone accused of killing a Black person, according to a report from the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The state of Georgias determination to prevent Troy from getting a new trial shows how far those in charge will goeven murdering a man who millions of people recognized was innocentrather than admit the flaws in their system. Because when these flaws are acknowledgedthe racism and discrimination that runs through the machinery of death, the arbitrary character of who goes to death row, the weakness of what passes for evidencethen the whole case for the death penalty unravels. Thats what happened in Illinois, where a Republican governor declared a moratorium on executions and eventually cleared death row because he couldnt be sure an innocent man wouldnt be put to death. For many thousands of people around the world, Troy Davis has put a face on a justice system that dehumanizes people, criminalizes them and locks them awayor worse. They realize that the political leaders and public institutions in the worlds greatest democracy werent just asleep at the wheel in the Troy Davis casethey were complicit. The police, the prosecutors, the courts, the parole board, the politicians, the mediathey all failed Troy Davis. So it was up to Troy and people organizing on his behalf to take a stand and give confidence for others to stand up, too. Compare their determination and commitment to the behavior of the president of the United Stateswho didnt say a word as Troy Davis was about to suffer a modern-day lynching. As Edward Dubose, president of the NAACPs Georgia chapter, said, The president is the president. If he chose to intervene, he could. Troy Daviss case has exposed everything thats wrong with the death penalty and the criminal justice system as a wholeits racism, it capricious character, its punishment of the poorand it moved thousands of people into action, people who see their own struggles in Troys and who have found a voice of their own. We who rallied for Troy Davis will never forget him. For all the people who took action for him, Troys suffering exposed the true awfulness of the system. The shock and outrage at an injustice like this one will last a lifetime for those who stood

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vigil as he was put to death. What was done to Troyand what we did to try to stop itwill shape our ideas, our understanding and our actions as we continue the fight to the end the death penalty once and for all, and build a new world where such atrocities never happen again. We will always remember Troy Davis. As Martina Correia, Troys sister and a tireless, dedicated fighter in his case, said on the day her brother was murdered: Troy Davis has impacted the world. They say, I am Troy Davis, in languages he cant speak. When we say, I am Troy Davis, they know what that means.

MARLENE MARTIN

Casualties of tough on crime

March 21, 2008

THE NUMBER of people behind bars in the land of the free is grown as large as the combined populations of Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Pittsburgh. Thats the shocking fact in a Pew Center on the States report showing that one in 100 adults in the U.S. are in prison or jailmore than 2.3 million people. When it comes to locking up its people, the country that claims to be the worlds greatest democracy is far ahead of every other nationahead of China, ahead of Russia, ahead of all the tyrannies that the U.S. government supports around the worldboth in absolute numbers of prisoners and the rate of incarceration. As has always been the case in a country founded on slavery, the inmates of Americas prisons are disproportionately people of color. Among African American men over 18, one in 15 are in prisonbetween the ages of 20 and 34, fully one in nine Black men are behind bars. When those on parole, probation or otherwise involved in the criminal justice system are included, that statistic rises to one in three. As staggering as these facts are, the stories of the individual human beings behind these statisticsmen and women whose lives have been destroyed by the criminal justice systemare even more horrifying. Mark Clements is one of them. Mark was 16 years old when Chicago police officers and detectives picked him up on suspicion of setting a fire that killed four people. The white cops worked for Jon BurgeMark became one of the hundreds of African American suspects tortured until the confessed by Chicago police under Burges command.

Marlene Martin of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty looks at a study showing that the U.S. has reached a terrible new milestone in its incarceration boom.

OR THE past two decades, crime rates have been in long-term decline, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the prison population has exploded during this same time. To put this into proportion, between 2005 and 2006, the U.S. prison population rose by more than 65,000, an increase of almost 3 percent, which is on the low side for annual figures over the past 25 years. By contrast, in 1972, the total U.S. prison population was 196,092. Who accounts for the vast number of people warehoused in Americas jails and prisons? According to Justice Department statistics, more than half the people in the federal prison system and one in five inmates in state prisons were drug offendersalmost half a million in total. Many of these prisoners were convicted of nonviolent offenses. More than a quarter of drug offenders in state prison are serving time for nothing more than possession. According to the Sentencing Project, arrests for marijuana possession accounted for 79 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990sdespite the fact that not a single death has been attributed specifically to marijuana use, unlike such legal drugs as alcohol and tobacco. David Ciglar pled guilty to growing marijuana seedlings in his garage in Oakland, Calif. and received the states mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. My family is devastated, says David in the book Shattered Lives: Portraits from Americas Drug War. My wife is living every day wondering if she can make it financially and mentally. My kids dont know why their dad was taken away for such a long time. I have not even bonded with my youngest daughter. She was 2 when I left her. Richard Nixon officially declared the U.S. governments war on drugs in 1971, but the drug war didnt really get under way until Ronald Reagans presidency in the 1980s. The casualties have been mounting ever since. One of the drug wars chief weapons has been the 100-to-1 rule that governs sentencing in convictions for possession and distribution of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Under the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and another law passed in 1988, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine (about the weight of two pennies) results in a mandatory sentence of five years, while it takes 500 grams of the powder form of cocaine to yield the same sentence. Behind the disparity is an openly racist dou-

Mark was kept in lockup for a year until he was old enough to stand trial as an adult. During his sentencing, Mark pleaded before the judge for more than two hours that he didnt commit the crimethat the police had beaten him into confessing. The judge sat with folded arms, staring straight aheadand after Mark was done, he imposed the mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Mark is 45 today. He has spent two-thirds of his life in prison. And if the state of Illinois gets his way, he will die there.

HE TERRIBLE impact of the tough-oncrime crusade can be seen in another disturbing statistic disclosed by the Pew report: More than half of all released offenders end up back behind bars within three years. Some commit another crime, but others are guilty of minor violations of the terms of their releaseaccording to federal statistics, more than a third of people who entered prison in 2005 were arrested for parole violations. This reality isnt altogether surprising given the 20-year trend of dramatic cuts to education programs for prisoners, which have been shown to be the single-most important factor in reducing recidivism. Such programs grew widely as a result of the Attica prison uprising in 1971as of 1995, there were still 350 programs that allowed prisoners to earn college degrees. But thanks to law-and-order measures passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton, they began to disappear. Only 12 of these programs exist today. There are finally some cracks appearing in the lock em up and throw away the key mentality of lawmakers. Sadly, however, many of the proposals under consideration now arent driven by a change of heart, but by the financial crisis caused by states facing the burden of paying for incarcerating ever-growing

ble standard: African Americans account for most of those convicted and sent to prison for offenses related to crack cocaineincluding 82 percent of those prosecuted and jailed at the federal leveleven though they are a minority of users. Those ensnared in the drug war arent typically high-level dealers, either, according to Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project. By and large, these defendants are not the kingpins of the drug trade, Mauer wrote. Data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission document 73 percent of the crack defendants had only low-level involvement in drug activity, such as streetlevel deals, couriers or lookouts. The drug warriors justification for the 100to-1 rule was that crack was so highly addictive, and that its users became super-violent. Many of these stereotypes have been proven untrue, yet the bias in sentencing remains. According to Carol Brook, deputy director of the federal defender program for the Northern District of Illinois, These disparities exist, even though we know that the physiological and psychoactive effects of crack and powder cocaine are virtually identical. They exist even though the effects of prenatal exposure to crack and powder cocaine are identical. They exist even though the epidemic of violence and rapid spread to youth that crack was suppose to create never happened. Despite the countless reports and studies, and the pleas from drug-war victims, their families and activists, Congress to this day has failed to change the 100-to-1 rulethough the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted last year to modify penalties for crack cocaine offenses.

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numbers of people. According to the Pew study, five states spend more of their budget on prisons than they do on higher education. Overall, between 1987 and 2007, state spending on higher education has increased 21 percent, while corrections spending had more than doubled, increasing 127 percent, the Economic Policy Institute reported. This economic burden is forcing some welcome policy changes. In Texas, for example, some drug offenders are being put into treatment programs instead of prison. Other states are also considering early release programs, and the guidelines on crack cocaine offenses accepted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission are being applied retroactively. This is a move in the right direction, but it is taking place too slowlyand the lives of 2.3 million people are wasting away in the meantime. Earlier in March, the writers of the HBO drama The Wire spoke for them in an essay in Time magazine. If asked to serve on a jury in a drug case, they would vote to acquit, the writers said. No longer, they concluded, can we collaborate with a government that uses non-violent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

PAUL DAMATO

Crime and punishment under capitalism

August 5, 2010

What if there was a three strikes law for Corporate Americas repeat offenders?

motion. Bill Clinton imposed sanctions on Iraq that were responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. To date, no one has arrested him for this crime. Kidnapping is a serious crime for which you can spend years in prison. But when the United States kidnaps people and sends them to foreign countries to be imprisoned and torturedextraordinary rendition, as it is calledthis is merely a useful tool in the war on terror. It is a crime to trespass on anothers land, and a worse one to steal it. Yet the formation of the U.S. was based on the outright theft, by force and fraud, of the land of Native Americans and of Mexico. We know that it is a crime punishable by death or life in prison to walk into a grocery store and gun down the owner. Killing someone while driving drunk is severely punished. But it is apparently not murderand certainly not a crime punishable by death, let alone long prison sentenceswhen companies engage in practices that boost profitability at the expense of human life. Last April, 29 workers died in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The mine owner, Massey Energy, showed, according to a federal mine inspector, a reckless disregard for mine safety. Surviving workers at the nonunion mine described it as a ticking time bomb, where corners were cut and safety sacrificed for profit. Prior to the explosion, Massey was hit with over 1,300 safety violations at the Upper Big Branch Mine. Yet it is highly unlikely that Massey CEO Don Blankenship will be prosecuted for reckless homicide or even manslaughter. The last time a corporation was put on trial for homicide was in 1980, when three teenagers burned to death after their Ford Pinto exploded following a mild rear-end collision. Though it was conclusively established that the Pinto had a rear gas tank that had the potential to explode in such circumstances, Ford hired a top-notch attorney who was a personal friend of the judge,

N 1994, California voters approved a ballot proposition mandating a 25-year-to-life-inprison sentences for being convicted of a third felony. Twenty-two other states followed suit. There are now thousands of people serving life sentences for things like stealing videos or food. In one notorious case, a homeless ex-convict was given a life sentence for attempting to break into a church kitchen, where he had been fed in the past, to get food. Imagine if a three-strikes law was passed for corporate offenders who engage in criminal negligence regarding the safety of the environment and their employees? For example, the British-based oil company BP has paid out $484 million in fines since 2005. In 2009, it paid almost $90 million to OSHA for negligence at a Texas oil refinery it owns, which led to the deaths of 15 workers in a refinery explosion. At the time of the explosion, the workers had been working 12-hour shifts for more than a month. Additionally, BP recently paid $3 million for 42 violations of workplace safety at a refinery in Ohio. Surely, the death of 11 workers at Deepwater Horizon and the worst oil spill in history caused, we now know, by BPs efforts to work quickly, cut corners and skimp on safety measurescounts as a third strike that should lead to life imprisonment for BP top executives. Regulatory agencies such as the Minerals Management Services, which is supposed to

and won an acquittal. In financial terms, corporate theft dwarfs what we call street crime. Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, notes that burglary and robbery cost about $3.8 billion a year, according to the FBI, whereas health care fraud alone costs somewhere between $100 and $400 billion per year. Yet you will find many street burglars in prison, but very few of the wealthier, more respectable sorteven though they are by far the bigger criminals.

HAT CONSTITUTES a crime? We are encouraged to see crime as something quite simple: Laws are made so that society can function smoothly. Steal or kill, and you are punished; disobey these laws, and you pay a price. This superficial view fails to explain some glaring contradictions in the law and its application, or the social context in which crime is defined. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, bourgeois justice is like a net, which allowed the voracious sharks to escape, while the little sardines were caught. Laws and the violation of those laws (crime) reflect the interests of the dominant classboth what is defined as crime, and how the law, which gives the appearance of fairness, is applied in practice. We know that murder is a crime, punishable in some states by death (state murder). But to murder large numbers of people in the service of ones country can get you a medal and a pro-

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HE CRIME and drug hysteria not only disproportionately targets the poor and oppressed. It serves an important ideological functionof creating a sense of social solidarity, using racially charged stereotypes about Black men, immigrants and so on, that diverts attention away from the crimes of the powerful and acts as a brake on class solidarity. The last three decades have witnessed a massive increase in incarceration, backed by a host of increasingly draconian laws, particularly related to drugs. Writes Phil Gasper, As the 1960s progressed, law and order became the rallying cry of right-wingers opposed to the civil rights, antiwar and student movements, as well as a convenient way to make coded appeals to racists, particularly in the South. Richard Nixonwho later lost the presidency for authorizing an illegal break-in to spy on his Democratic rivalsran his 1968 presidential campaign linking crime with the social movements sweeping the country. He wrote in an in Readers Digest that America was the most lawless and violent [nation] in the history of free peoples, blaming this on the growing tolerance of lawlessness by civil rights organ-

oversee oil companies like BP, are complicit in the whole affair. According to James Baker, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a former Commerce Department undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere, MMS is in bed with industry. Quite literally. The American Prospect reports that the MMS was a cesspool of drug use, sexual harassment, and personal, financial and sexual intermingling between the regulators and the regulated. The process whereby government regulatory agencies become pawns of the industries they are set up to regulate now has a nameregulatory capture. Regulatory capture should really be called government capture. The last two presidential administrations and Congresses have enthusiastically supported offshore drilling to the neglect of well-documented safety concerns. Oil companies have taken advantage of a friendly business climate that permits them to evade taxes while reaping large subsidies. For example, according to the New York Times, BP used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began. Oil companies save $4 billion a year in tax breaks. They have also evaded paying billions in taxes by creating foreign tax havens. Meanwhile, the moral panic whipped up by politicians and the media is reserved for lowlevel street crime, even though the 56,000 people who die every year from occupational diseases dwarfs the number of murders 16,000each year. In cities across the country, police are found to be involved in systematic corruption, drug dealing, brutality and murder. But rarely do police officers find their way into a prison cell.

izations and the increasing public acceptance of civil disobedience. This tough on crime (but not on corporate crime) environment has had disastrous effects on the most oppressed people in our society. Take the question of drugs. Though Blacks and whites commit drug offenses at comparable rates, a 2009 Human Rights Watch report found that in every year from 1980 to 2007, Blacks were arrested nationwide on drug charges at rates relative to population that were 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white arrest rates. One in three drug arrestees in this period were Black, though they make up only 13 percent of the population in the United States. Human Rights Watch concluded from its analysis of data from 2003 that Blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses. Today, politicians are creating a moral panic around immigration by linking crime, drugs and terrorism with the southern U.S. border. Amid claims that the border has an out-ofcontrol and rising crime rate, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently claimed, Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded. There is not a grain of truth to her claim. Moreover, FBI statistics show that crime has been flat on the border for a decade. Why dont companies that kill thousands get the same punishment as a man who kills one? What constitutes a crime in our society cannot contradict the nature of that society. A nation built on continental conquest, foreign expansion and corporate dominance cannot create a legal system that punishes murder impartially. If it did, every major president would have been in jail before he finished his first term. The relative ease with which organized crime operates is also explained by the nature of capitalism. Organized crime is merely the production and sale of illegal goods and services for which there is a strong demandby and large, it follows the same logic of accumulation as legitimate capitalist enterprises. Then theres the record of the CIA and U.S. Army utilizing criminal gangs to further U.S. foreign policy interests in Europe, Vietnam, South and Central America, and elsewherea subject I have no time to develop here. So the economic and political system creates a fairly wide berth for illegal profiteering, even as it declares wars on drugs and crime. Our political system, to quote one sociologist, is little more than an arena for squabbles over the distribution of spoils between rival factions of the ruling class. So it isnt really surprising that the minnows are caught and most of the whales go free. Companies may get a slap on the wrist some executives may even get some prison timeto show that our justice system is fair, without jeopardizing the essential functioning of capitalism, which by its nature involves playing with the lives of workers in the pursuit of financial gain. Seriously pursuing corporate crime would beg the question: Where does legitimate business practice end and crime begin?
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RACISM, CAPITALISM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM

LEE SUSTAR

Racism and politics in America

January 25, 2008

Race and racism were at the center of the 2008 presidentical campaign. But as Lee Sustar explains, this issue has been a central factor in U.S. politics for many decades.

HE ISSUE of race and racism emerged openly at the heart of U.S. politics in the Democratic presidential campaign in January. But as any serious student of U.S. history knows, racism is always beneath the surface of U.S. politics. The trigger for the current debate was a comment by Sen. Hillary Clinton that Dr. [Martin Luther] Kings dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done. This was taken by many African American politicians and longtime activists as denigrating the entire Black liberation movement. Certainly, Obamas campaign owes its existence to that movement. The fact that an African American is today a serious contender for the presidency is part of the legacy of those who defied the violence and humiliation of American apartheid in the Deep South. But as Martin Luther King Day approached, Obama chose to highlight the historic impact of another figure in U.S. politicsRonald Reagan. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not, Obama told journalists. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasnt much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think...he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was [that] we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing. Why would the countrys most prominent African American politician praise the supposed political genius of Reagan, who played the race

card all the way to the White House? Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where the Ku Klux Klan had murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. In his speech, Reagan declared, I believe in states rightsthe euphemism used by white racists in the 1960s to defend Jim Crow segregation in the South. Reagan frequently resorted to racially charged stereotypesthe welfare queen driving a Cadillac and the young buck buying steak with food stamps. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 that ended legal racial discrimination in voting, was, according to Reagan, humiliating to the South. In the Reaganite worldview, the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s cited by Obama included the struggle to end legalized racism, not to mention other social movementsagainst the Vietnam War, and for womens rights, and gay and lesbian liberation. Certainly, this cant be news to Obama. His public appreciation of Reagan is part of a calculated attempt to appeal to swing voters Republicans fed up over the economy, the war, White House incompetence and corruption. This overture to the right is typical of Obamas political career. He has positioned himself to the right of the generation of African American politicians that emerged from the civil rights and Black Power movements. The product of an interracial marriage, Obama has been deemed by some pundits as a post-racial politician. The fact, is, however, that no African American in the U.S. can completely avoid the legacy of 500 years of slavery, racism and oppression. Nevertheless, the relationship between race, class and politics in the U.S. has been transformed in the 40 years between the assassination of Martin Luther King and Obamas candidacy. Understanding those changes helps provide a framework for understanding both the

HE PASSAGE of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the transition from a civil rights movement centered on the South to a Black Power revolt in U.S. cities. The act was signed into law five months after Martin Luther Kings famous march in Selma, Ala., and five days before the Los Angeles Black ghetto of Watts exploded over an incident of police brutality. With segregation now outlawed, the movement had to reorient on economic and social demands. As a leader of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X had criticized Martin Luther Kings moderation at various points. But in the last year of his life before he was assassinated, Malcolm went further, embracing revolutionary politics and identifying the African American movement with Third World liberation struggles. Malcolms development in turn influenced the Black Panther Party and other groups who saw revolutionary socialism as the means to achieve Black liberation in the United States. Black Power became a popular slogan in the movement. But just what Black Power meant depended on who was talking. While the slogan implied socialism to the Black Panther Party, it meant economic opportunity for the Black middle class that had long been limited by legal segregation in the South and racial discrimination everywhere in terms of employment, housing, obtaining loans for business and much else. The Democratic Party establishment sought to harness the Black Power demand to its own ends. In 1967, Louis Martin, an African American deputy chair of the Democratic Party, recommended that the Johnson administration try to achieve Black Power in a constitu-

powerful appeal of Obamas campaign to millions of people, as well as his moderate politics and the very limited horizons of his call for change.

tional, orderly manner. Martin wanted Black Democrats to take a more active role in community leadership and not leave the kind of vacuum which is usually filled by civil rights kooks. He hoped that Black elected officials would provide the Democratic Johnson administration with a link to the Negro community and...effectively bypass the Rap Browns and Stokely Carmichaels [both radical leaders] and even the Martin Luther Kings (none of whom have been elected to anything). However cynical, Johnsons overture to Southern Blacks was intolerable to the partys Southern wing. Most white Southern Democrats backed George Wallaces segregationist presidential campaign of 1968, which received 8 million votes. Richard Nixons Republican administration deepened the split within Democratic ranks by attempting to block civil rights legislation, and white Southerners overwhelmingly voted for Nixon in his landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972. This was the origins of the Republicans Southern strategyappealing to white conservatives in a backlash against the civil rights movement. Instead of openly defending segregation and white supremacy, the racists repackaged their message around issues of crime, welfare fraud and affirmative action as reverse discrimination. Its been effective ever since, giving the Republicans an electoral lock on much of the South since then. Meanwhile, Louis Martins strategy of expanding the base of African American officeholders quickly bore fruit. The number of Black elected officials increased fourfold to 1,860 between 1967 and 1971. In many cases, Black activists werent intentionally co-opted by the Democratic Party. They had to fight their way in, challenging racist Democratic political machines in Northern cities. The perspectives of the new radicals and the Black Democrats coexisted uneasily at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., on March 10-12, 1972. Attended by over 8,000 people, the convention marked the first large-scale gathering of the various currents in Black politics: radical nationalists, cultural nationalists, socialists, Maoists and Black Democratic elected officials, including the host, Mayor Richard Hatcher. The preamble to the National Black Political Agenda written for the convention was radical. It read in part: The profound crises of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men, nor will they be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and of cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituenciescan solve our problems or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.

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ACKSONS APPROACH prevailed as the movement dissipated in the 1970s. By the 1980s, African Americans had captured City Hall in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and other cities, and had held senior positions in key congressional committees. This represented an advance for the Black middle class, which could use the dismantling of Jim Crow and new laws against discrimination in order to advance in politics and business and, often, escape segregated neighborhoods as well. But the advance within the system for a minority of African Americans was a retreat from the radical goals of the 1960s movements. Jacksons presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 highlighted these contradictions of the Black political establishment even as it showed that growing numbers of white working-class voters were prepared to support Black candidates. In 1984, Jackson tapped African Americans anger at Ronald Reagan, and he swept the Black vote despite the opposition of most prominent African American politicians. By 1988, Jackson had forged an alliance with key Black politicians, who, even if they didnt care for Jacksons approach, concluded that if they couldnt beat him, theyd have to join him. The Super Tuesday primary of March 8, 1988, dominated by Southern states and designed to favor a conservative candidate, mobilized the Black vote for Jackson. Of 21 primaries, Jackson placed first or second in 16, and became the frontrunner in terms of delegates. This was followed by a victory in the Michigan party caucuses, with 55 percent of the vote. He ended the race with 7 million votes, 30 percent of the total. Jacksons success rattled the Democratic establishment. Yet on the other hand, the Jackson campaigns marked the final stage in the transition of African American politics from being dominated by social struggles to becomingin the view of party leadersjust another Democratic voting bloc. A voting bloc that needed to know its place, that is. Democratic powerbrokers reacted to Jacksons success by forming the Democratic Leadership Caucus (DLC), a group dominated by Southerners who wanted the party to distance itself from Blacks, organized labor and womens groups and develop closer ties to Corporate America. A former DLC co-chair, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, implemented a Southern strategy of his own to win over white conservatives in his 1992 bid for the White House and in his re-election. Clintons tactics included denouncing the rap artist Sistah Souljah at an event sponsored by Jesse Jackson; presiding over the execution

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, then director of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), went on record in support of a future break with the Democrats, but said the Black political movement was too young for such a move, and instead urged Blacks to seek delegate power at the Democratic National Convention that summer.

HE BLACK political establishments drift to the right isnt a question of personal failings, however. Its part of a trend towards greater class divisions among African Americans over the past 20 years. Enter Obama. As a member of the post-civil rights generation, the one-time community organizer tailored his politics to fit the new political reality. As he said of his days as a college activist in his (second) autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagans worldview. I couldnt be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. Thus, Obamas first high-profile campaign was an attempt to unseat Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, from his seat in Congress in the 2000 elections. Part of what we are talking about is a transition from a politics of protest to a politics of progress, Obama said then. He lost badly, but won new and influential backers. After winning his U.S. Senate seat in 2004, he regularly took pro-business positions, including voting for a bill that caps jury awards in wrongful injury lawsuits used to hold big business accountable for faulty products. Meanwhile, Obama quickly became adept at raising campaign cash for othersand himself. Hes been able to match the vaunted Clin-

of mentally disabled Black man, Ricky Ray Rector; and staging a photo op at a Georgia penitentiary work gang of hundreds of Black men. Once in office, he presided over anticrime legislation that left more African American men in prison than in college. He also collaborated with the Republican Congress to abolish the federal welfare system, something Ronald Reagan could never have gotten away with. At the same time, however, Clinton cultivated allies in the Black political establishment, which was ever more distant from the struggles that had propelled it to prominence. Clintons race-baiting politics were part of an overall turn to the right by the Democrats. While they remained to the left of the Republicans, the Democrats have embraced the postReagan formula of free market economics, a dramatically reduced welfare state and the projection of U.S. military power abroad. To be sure, Black elected officials tend to be more liberal than the average Democrat, reflecting the preferences of their voting base. But most are completely caught up in politics as usual. As journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman point out, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation receives big donations from auto, oil, tobacco, alcohol and junk food companies, which has effectively silenced the caucus on issues ranging from public health to alternative energy.

ton fundraising machine, thanks in part to big money from hedge-fund managers and key players across Corporate America. Yet for all his efforts to locate himself in the mainstream, Obama inevitably must contend with the question of race and racism in his personal and political life. And the prospect of an African American president in a country built on slavery and racism is exciting for millions of peoplenot just African Americans, but others who see a vote for Obama as a vote to put the U.S.s sordid history of racism behind us once and for all. But the symbolism of an Obama presidency, however powerful, wouldnt uproot racisms legacy. The commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson put it his way: An Obama presidency would be a racial step forward in the sense that it shows that enough whites can and will look past race to make a Black, especially an exceptional Black, their leader. It would not, however, show that they are willing to do the same for the millions of Blacks that cram Americas jails and prisons, suffer housing and job discrimination, and are trapped in failing public schools in Americas poor, crime ridden inner cities. Their plight and how they are viewed and treated will remain the same after Obama takes office. A President Obama wont change that.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

No, he wont for Black America

September 29, 2011

A new round of attacks from Barack Obamas defenders is aimed at anyone who expresses criticism of the administrations record after two and a half years.

S GEORGIA death row prisoner Troy Davis approached execution on September 21, a growing chorus of voices began to wonder aloud whether the nations first Black president would intervene to stop a legal lynching. Davis had already been strapped to the gurney in Georgias death chamberand the Supreme Court had begun its hours-long haggling over his appeal for a stay of execution when White House Press Secretary Jay Carney issued a statement explaining that it was inappropriate for the president to say anything about the case because it was a state execution. It was a sobering display of cowardice. Were supposed to believe that the most powerful political office in the most powerful nation in the worldone that led a war on Libya, that illegally bombs Pakistan with unmanned drones, and that is responsible for assaults in Afghanistan that slaughter wedding parties

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HE STATISTICS are truly startling. The official Black unemployment rate, at a 27-year high of 16.7 percent, is only the tip of the iceberg. For African American men, joblessness is even higher, at 19.1 percent. For Black youth, it is 46 percent. The impact of these catastrophic levels of unemployment cant be understated. They underline the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis in Black communities across the country. While the news media claim that the U.S. has been out of recession for more than two years according to official standards, Black America is suffering an all-out economic depression. From spiking unemployment, to rising poverty levels, to a historic collapse of homeownership, any economic gains made by African Americans in the last two decades is being wiped out. In 2010, the median annual income for Black households was $32,068, down 3.2 percent over the year beforecompared to an overall median income of $49,445 across the U.S. The proportion of African Americans who lack health insurance rose to 20.8 percent last year. Some 27.4 percent of Blacks were living in poverty in 2010, according to Census Bureau, more than twice the figure for whites. Earlier this summer, a study was released

and unarmed childrenwas powerless to intervene to stop the murder of an innocent man. Then again, in those rare moments when Barack Obama addresses Black America these days, he always manages to find his tough side. Whether its blaming Black fathers for not being men or blaming Black mothers for feeding their children fried chicken for breakfast, Obama never misses an opportunity to blame Black America for the state of Black America. This past weekend was no different. In an embarrassing show of arrogance, Obama launched into an attack on his Black critics three days after Davis execution and before his body was even in the ground. At a speech in front of the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama chastised the crowd, telling listeners: Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. Thats an unbelievable statement from a man who hid in the White House while demonstrators around the world had their marching shoes on trying to save Troy Davis life. Moreover, if theres grumbling and crying among the section of the U.S. population that was most enthusiastic in supporting Obamas campaign for the presidency, its because the combination of his policies and inaction has fueled a deepening economic and social disaster throughout Black America.

that charted the collapse of African American wealth. In 2009, the median net work of Black households fell to $5,677 compared to $113,149 for whites. For African Americans, this was a 55 percent drop from 2005, when Black wealth was still an anemic $12,124. The wave of foreclosures sweeping Black communities is mostly to blame for this decline in Black wealth. The sub-prime lending mania of the 2000s resulted in Black homeowners being steered toward expensive, predatory home loans, regardless of income levels or credit standing. And now, declining income and unemployment are leaving homeowners that made it so far unable to make mortgage payments that are excessively high because of the sub-prime loans. And as a consequence, the epidemic of foreclosures in Black neighborhoods is driving down the value of remaining houses. Yet even as the crisis for Black America grows worse, an increasingly vocal group of prominent African American supporters of Obama are denouncing any expectation that the president should be accountable to the Black population that put him in the White House. When Black media personality Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West organized a 16-city tour to highlight the crisis of poverty growing across the U.S., they were pilloried in the African American media. In a country with the highest total number of poor people since the government began keeping statistics 51 years ago, and where a record 45 million people survive on food stamps, a poverty tour should have been uncontroversial. As Tavis Smiley said of the intention for the tour: We have to make poor people a priority. When we prioritize something in Washington, they do get done. We prioritize bailing out Wall Street, and it gets done. We prioritize funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it gets done...Its time for the president to do something about it.

trip that hes on in the United States now, hes not in any Black community. We dont know that.

UT INSTEAD of decrying these conditions and pressuring the administration to act, Obamas apologists have been on the attack. In the last few weeks, three prominent commentaries accused Obama critics of being everything from communists to racists to being out of touch with most Blacks. For example, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, in an article written for CNN titled Why Obamas Black critics are wrong, claims that the Black rank-and-file, by contrast, understands the pressures Obama is under, including: the limits of his authority and the power of the forces arrayed against him, including a large, albeit amorphous, strain of racial resentment. Pained by the economic recession, they refrain from blaming Obama and instead direct their ire at those who not only saddled the first Black chief executive with such a harrowing task of cleanup, but also obstruct him relentlessly and often with barely disguised contempt.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, blames Team Commie for the relentless and unfair criticism of Obama: [B]eing taken seriously involves actual work. It means a poverty tour that doesnt just bark (Obama the black mascot) but bites (voter registration in swing districts.) If you dont like the current iteration of America, you need to remember that you are America. The failure to build a more progressive America isnt merely a testimony to dastardly evil, its a testimony to the failure of progressives.

Black liberals should have been lining up to participate in the poverty tour. Instead, West and Smiley were denounced as everything from being jealous and spiteful to being gay lovers for daring to speak out against the inaction of the Obama administration. By the late summer, even the Congressional Black Caucus was speaking out as Obama set out on a Midwest tour to discuss his proposals for job creation and reviving the economy and neglected to stop in a single Black community, skipping Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland to name just three of the cities with large populations of jobless Blacks. As Rep. Maxine Waters put it, The unemployment is unconscionable. We dont know what the strategy is. We dont know why on this

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Apparently in Coates and Kennedys world, the American presidency is the least powerful position in the world, clearly trumped by the power of progressives. There is no accountability demanded of an administration that dithered in the face of the worst economic crisis in three generationsincluding during the two years when Democrats controlled both houses of Congresses with a super-majority in each. Not to be outdone, Nation columnist and former Princeton Professor Melissa HarrisPerry claims that the growing skepticism about the sinking Obama administration is rooted in racismnot of reactionary Republicans, but of white liberals who supported Obama in 2008. In an article titled Black president, double standard: Why white liberals are abandoning Obama, Harris-Perry compares white electoral support for former President Bill Clinton in his second term to Obamas in the lead-up to his reelection campaign. As Harris explains the weakening support for Obama: I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that

HE CRUMBLING support for Obama isnt difficult to understandin fact, its easy. Obama ran for the presidency with the slogan Yes, we can. But the unspoken slogan of his presidency has been, No, we wont. It was the Obama administration that has doggedly continued occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of more than $2 billion a weekwhile never admitting that ending those wars could curtail the U.S. governments budget woes. It was the Obama administration that preemptively offered up cuts in Social Security and Medicare during the debt-ceiling debate this summer as part of a plan to reduce the deficit by as much as $4 trillion. It was the Obama administration that proposed a budget which cut heating aid for the poor during one of the most brutal winters in

Of course, racism is a constant feature of American politics. Continuing African American support for Obama in spite of his refusal to address the economic unraveling of Black America is in large part the result of the brazen racism of the Republican Party and its commitment to see his administration fail. From one lawmaker calling Obama a liar during a State of the Union address to another referring to the president as a tar baby, the racism of the Republicans is out in the open. But the claim that weakening support for Obama is the result of racism among his base supporters in 2008 is dishonest at best.

choosing a Black man for president did not prove to be salvific for [whites] or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically reelected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

memory. And it was the Obama administration that imposed a wage freeze on a federal workforce that is disproportionately made up of Blacks and women. Obama abandoned his campaign promise to end the Bush-era tax breaks for the super-rich to make a deal with Republicans last December. And his administration is strong-arming state attorney generals into accepting a settlement with the five largest mortgage lenders over their illegal robo-signing procedures that have led to millions of illegal foreclosures. These are just a few of the bitter pills that people have choked down in the last two and a half years that raise the question: Is this what we voted for? There are other questions that ought to be asked. Is it really unrealistic to expect the first African American president of the United States who during his campaign regularly invoked the legacy of the abolitionist movement against slavery and the Southern civil rights movementto take a stand against the racism, discrimination and injustice that contorts Black life in the U.S.? Is it just utopian to believe that a Black president could at least make a statement about Troy Davis when almost 1 million people signed petitions to save his life, when a Republican former head of the FBI and a former president spoke out, and when tens of thousands of people around the world rallied and demonstrated to save his life? If that is utopian and too much to ask, then we must all ask ourselves another question: What is the point of having elected him in the first place? If Obama is as politically impotent as his supporters claim he is, then what was the point of expending time, money and energy on electing him in the first place? And why expend it again in 2012? Despite the attempts of Kennedy and Harris-Perry to paint criticism of Obama as coming from either liberal white racists or a sliver of Blacks, a Washington Post poll found that while overall African American support for the administration remains at 86 percent, Blacks who have strongly favorable views of Obama have fallen from 83 percent five months ago to 54 percent today. Similarly, only 54 percent of Blacks think favorably of Obamas economic policies, compared to 77 percent a year ago. The Obama administration and its defenders are worried that struggling Blacks wont come out in the historic numbers as they did for his first election. But ordinary African Americans will have to fight for their own Black agendasince whoever represents the two parties in the next election will have little to say about the conditions in Black America.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

Race, class and Marxism

January 4, 2011

Marxism has been accused by its critics of misunderstanding race and downplaying the struggle against racism. KeeangaYamahtta Taylor sets the record straight.

FOR REVOLUTIONARY Marxists, there is an inextricable link between racism and capitalism. Capitalism is dependant on racism as both a source of profiteering, but more importantly as a means to divide and rule. Racism is necessary to drive a wedge between workers who otherwise have everything in common and every reason to ally and organize together, but who are perpetually driven apart to the benefit of the ruling class. Thus, any serious discussion about Black liberation has to take up not only a critique of capitalism, but also a credible strategy for ending it. For Marxists, that strategy hinges on the revolutionary potential of a unified, multiracial and multi-ethnic working-class upheaval against capitalism. Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against racism, workingclass unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades, Marxism has been maligned as, at best, blind to combating racism and, at worst, incapable of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described anti-racist Tim Wise summarized the critique of left activists that he later defines as Marxists. He writes: [L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the real issue is class, not race, that the only color that matters is green, and that issues like racism are mere identity politics, which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as well see, it ignores

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Here, Wise accuses Marxism of: extreme class reductionism, meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more important than race; reducing struggles against racism to mere identity politics; and requiring that struggles against racism should take a back seat to struggles over economic issues. Wise also accuses socalled left activists of reinforcing white denial and dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of colorwhich, of course, presumes Left activists and Marxists to all be white. Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majorityracism and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and explain unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majoritys labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africansbecause they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and ruleto pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as classism. What people are really referring to as classism is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about

perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to workbe they social democrats or Marxistsor even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly.

various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race under capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

volvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained? If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised that slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away. W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International Workingmens Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War: The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world Slavery on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained slavery to be a beneficial institution...and cynically proclaimed property in man the cornerstone of the new edifice...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.

He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.

What do Marxists actually say?

Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But what about race? Despite the dearth of Marxs own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marxs correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and in19

Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant race discrimination that flowed from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the threat of losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves most of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective factors when he wrote in Capital, In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded. Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as wellas a means by which workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American situation between Black and white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided

Out of this quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first, that capitalism promotes economic competition between workers; second, that the ruling class uses racist ideology to divide workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of workers suffer oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class. These questions get to the heart of Marxism and really begin to address whether Marxism subsumes political questions to economic ones. Heres how Marx described the issue of ideas themselves: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the material intercourse of men appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior...Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc....Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process.

into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the poor whites to the niggers in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.

of material conditions and consciousness. It is undeniable that some in the socialist and Marxist traditionsprimarily in the 19th and early 20th centuryassumed that because African Americans were overrepresented as workers, simply focusing on the class struggle would by itself liberate Black workers and the poor from their oppression. But Marxist theory on the Black question has certainly evolved since then. Marxism should not be conceived of as an unchanging dogma. It is a guide to social revolution and political action, and has been built upon by successive generations of Marxists. But theory doesnt precede material and social conditionsit flows from them. In the mid1920s, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans made their way to the urban North, socialists and communists were forced to theorize how they would relate to Black workers on a mass scalesomething that had never been an issue before. Black revolutionary Claude McKay reported as a delegate to the Communist International in 1922: In associating with the comrades of America, I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions when the white and black comrades had to get together, and this is the greatest obstacle that the Communists of America have got to overcomethe fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertained toward Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda.

By the early 1940s, thousands of Blacks had joined the Communist Party. The politics of communism became the dominant political framework for most of the nonwhite world as hundreds of millions of people of color across the globe were inspired by the writings of Lenin on the rights of oppressed nations to fight for their own freedom. Lenin wrote: The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state...The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by their own nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words; neither confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations... On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed nation must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organizational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries.

union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our common enemy.

How the Marxist theory of racism developed

The Russian revolutionary Lenin directly intervened in the American Communist Party (CP) and directed it to immediately begin political agitation among African Americans. Thus, the founding convention of the Communist Party in 1919 stated merely that the racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other. By 1921, after Lenins involvement on the question, the stated approach of the CP had shifted, with its program stating: The Negro workers in American are exploited and oppressed more ruthlessly than any other group. The history of the Southern Negro is the history of a reign of terrorof persecution, rape and murder...Because of the anti-Negro policies of organized labor, the Negro has despaired of aid from this source, and he has either been driven into the camp of labors enemies, or has been compelled to develop purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims. The Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic, political and social equality...Its task will be to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep apart the Black and white workers, and bind them into a solid
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So it is an odd charge that Marxism is incapable of comprehending the racialized nature of capitalism, while simultaneously becoming the politics that led the vast majority of non-white national liberation movements in the 20th century. The critique of Marxism also minimizes the extent to which Black revolutionaries and the Black struggle itself shaped and impacted the trajectory of Marxist thought. Thus, C.L.R. James, the Black revolutionary from the Caribbean and collaborator with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, advanced Marxist theory when he wrotepresciently in 1948, years before the emergence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. South: We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with great speed and vigor. We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party. We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary

This does not mean that humans are only automatons with no thought, creativity, ideas or agency, and that life is a linear and determined existence. Human action or inaction constantly impacts and changes the environment and the world around us. But human activity is shaped by the material world. Racism is ideological, but it has tangible implications in the real world. Stating that racism is ideological does not somehow, then, render it less important, but distinguishes the difference between a question

proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. In this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights. That is our position. It was the position of Lenin 30 years ago. It was the position of Trotsky which he fought for during many years. It has been concretized by the general class struggle in the United States, and the tremendous struggles of the Negro people. Much of the controversy about Marxism and race is over whether Marxist theory appropriately comprehends the centrality of race in U.S. society and beyond. But what is really at the heart of the debate is the view of revolutionary Marxists that: one, white workers do not have a privileged status in this country; two, white workers can gain revolutionary consciousness; and three, therefore a multiracial and united working-class revolution is possible. Marxists start with the premise that all workers under capitalism are oppressed, but some workers face further oppression because of additional discrimination like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant ideas, religious oppression, etc. Thus, in the United States, white workers are oppressed, but not to the same degree as non-white workers. Oppression is not just an ideological tool to divide groups of workers, but has real material consequences as well. Because of racism, for example, the median household income for white families as of 2006 was over $50,000 a year. For Blacks, it was just under $32,000. By every measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are on the top and Blacks are on the bottom. Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of the differences. Are the disparities the result of white workers benefiting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average because Black workers make less? To accept this explanation means to ignore the biggest beneficiary in the disparity in wagesemployers and bosses. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying Black workers less brings the wages of all workers downthe employers enjoy the difference. This is not to deny that white workers receive some advantages in U.S. society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantageand with it, the illusion that the system works for themthen racism would not be effective in dividing Black and white workers. The distinctions and differences among workers function to create a distorted view of

The question of white workers

reality that turns the traits attributed to the oppressed into a kind of common sense, which in turn deepens those divisions. African Americans are poorer, have worse housing, go to worse schools, have a shorter life span and generally live in worse conditions, which helps to perpetuate the image in the minds of white workers that African Americans are inferior. But the problem with so-called common sense is that it is based on surface appearances and information, and does not reach deeper to give a systemic explanation for the disparities that exist in society. Instead, it creates what Frederick Engels was the first to call false consciousness. False consciousness is simply ruling-class ideology that is used to explain away or cover up material reality. The point is that white workers, to the extent that they accept white supremacy, contribute to capitalisms ability to exploit them more effectively. The purely psychological advantage obscures the very real material deficit that racist oppression helps reinforce. Du Bois explained how false consciousness worked in the South and why a labor movement never developed there in the aftermath of slavery: The race element was emphasized in order that property holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But the race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.

For Du Bois, racism wasnt metaphysical, nor did it exist autonomously from class. Its development is a result of one class efforts to keep
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power away from another. Du Bois did come up with a famous formulation of poor whites gaining a psychological wageas opposed to a material wagefrom racism. But the psychological wage was to make the white worker feel superior because he wasnt Black, even though he would have nothing material to show for it. This leads to the question: If it isnt in the interest of white workers to be racist, then why do they accept racist ideas? But the same question could be asked of any group of workers. Why do men accept sexist ideas? Why do Black workers accept racist anti-immigrant ideas? Why do many Black Caribbean and African immigrant workers think that Black Americans are lazy? Why do American workers of all races accept many racist ideas about Arabs and Muslims? If most people agree that it would be in the interest of any group of workers to be more united than divided, then why do workers accept reactionary ideas? There are two primary reasons. The first is competition. Capitalism operates under the laws of false scarcity, which simply means that we are all told there isnt enough to go around, so we must compete with each other for housing, education, jobs and anything else valued in society. While the scarcity is false, the competition is real, and workers fighting over these items to better themselves or their families are often willing to believe the worst about other workers to justify why they should have something and others should not. The other reason is, as Marx wrote in the German Ideology, that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. We live in a racist society, and therefore people hold racist ideas. The more important question is whether or not those ideas can change. The consciousness of workers is both fluid and contradictory because of the clash between the ruling ideas in society and peoples lived experience. So, for example, while the media inundates people with constant images of Blacks as criminals

or on welfare, peoples experience with Blacks at work completely contradicts the stereotype. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explained the phenomenon of mixed consciousness this way: The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can...be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. The person is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.

upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions. Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest. Today, the need for a revolutionary alternative to the failures of capitalism has never been greater. The election of Barack Obama came 40 years after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the last piece of civil rights legislation from the civil rights era of the 1960s. Despite the enormous shift in racial attitudes symbolized by the election of a Black president in a country built in large part on the enslavement of Black people, the condition of the vast majority of African Americans today is perilous. For almost two years, Black unemployment has fluctuated between 15 and 17 percent. Almost 20 percent of African Americans under the age of 65 are without health insurance compared to 15 percent for the rest of the population. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, a home owned by an African American or Latino family is 76 percent more likely to be foreclosed upon than a white-owned home. The wipeout of home ownership among African Americans threatens to widen even more the gap in median family net worth. In 2007, the average white family had a net worth of more than $171,000 compared to less than $29,000 for African American and Latino families. More than 25 percent of Blacks and Latinos languish below the official poverty line, and more than a third of Black and Latino children live in poverty. The distressing numbers that document the full impact of racism and discrimination in the United States have no end. But while conditions across Black America threaten to wipe out the economic gains made possible by the civil rights

Whether or not a group of workers has reactionary, mixed or even revolutionary consciousness does not change their objective and real function as exploited and oppressed labor. The question of consciousness affects whether or not workers are in a position to fundamentally alter that function through collective action. Just because white workers, to take a specific example, may at different times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of the poor in the U.S. are white, the majority of people without health insurance are white and the majority of the homeless are white. While Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately affected by the economic reality of the U.S. today, in a country that is more than 65 percent white, it is a reality they share with the majority of white workers. This shared reality shows the potential for a united struggle to better the conditions of all workers. But by the same token, losing the battle against racism undermines the overall project of working-class revolution. As Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction about the defeat of the post-Civil War Reconstruction policies that briefly put the power of the federal government behind equal rights for the freed slaves: The political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far exceeded by its astonishing economic results. The theory of laboring class unity rests

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movement, millions of white workers are meeting their Black brothers and sisters on the way down. Tens of millions of white workers are stuck in long-term joblessness, without health insurance and waiting for their homes to be foreclosed upon. Thus, the question of Black, Latino and white unity is not abstract or academic, but must be a concrete discussion about how to collectively go forward. For most of the 20th century, legal racism both North and South created a tension-filled cross-class alliance in the African American community that was focused on freedom and equal treatment. The legislative fruition of that in the form of legal civil rights removed the barriers to advance for a small section of Black America. To be sure, the Black middle class is tenuous, fragile and, for many, a paycheck or two away from oblivion, but a more stable and ambitious Black elite most definitely exists, and their objectives and aspirations are anathema to the future of the mass of Black people. No serious Marxist organization demands that Black and Latino workers put their struggles on the backburner while some mythical class struggle is waged beforehand. This impossible formulation rests on the ridiculous notion that the working class is white and male, and thus incapable of taking up issues of race, class and gender. In fact, the American working class is female, immigrant, Black and white. Immigrant issues, gender issues and anti-racism are working-class issues and to miss this is to be operating with a completely anachronistic idea of the working class. Genuine Marxist organizations understand that the only way of achieving unity in the working class over time is to fight for unity today and every day. Workers will never unite to fight for state power if they cannot unite to fight for workplace demands today. If white workers are not won to anti-racism today, they will never unite with Black workers for a revolution tomorrow. If Black workers are not won to being against anti-immigrant racism today, they will never unite with Latino workers for a revolution tomorrow. This is why Lenin said that a revolutionary party based on Marxism must be a tribune of the oppressed, willing to fight against the oppression of any group of people, regardless of the class of those affected. And this is why, despite the anti-Marxist slurs from academics and even some who consider themselves part of the left, the idea that Marxism has been on the outside of the struggle against racism in the U.S. and around the world defies history and the legacy of Black revolutionaries who understood Marxism as a strategy for emancipation and liberation. The challenge today it to make revolutionary Marxism, once again, a part of the discussion of how to end the social catastrophe that is unfolding in Black communities across the United States.

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