ON THE CENTRALITY OF RACISM
In a book devoted to crime and punishment, why has racism been so much its centerpiece? First, because racism is this country’s key crime. And second, because racism is at the heart of the criminal justice system.
We need not revisit the horrors of the slave past. These are usually dismissed as “ancient history.” But it should be noted that slavery has existed 100 years longer than the period since its abolition. In fact, if we include the semi-slavery imposed on African-Americans following the very brief interlude of Reconstruction, it has only been two generations since Black people have managed to soar to their present status of second-class citizenship, North as well as South (Barack Obama notwithstanding). 400 years of humiliation and still counting.
One constantly hears the liberal refrain, “While much progress has been made, much remains to be done,” as opposed to the conservative one that “While much remains to be done, much progress has been made.” What is closer to the truth is that “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Yes, thanks to the Black freedom movement that peaked in the 1960s, US, apartheid is less terror-driven. Progress has been made. But what is not mentioned is that regress has been made, as well.
Though “White” and “Colored” signs have been taken down, in the area of housing, segregation is greater than ever, but now proceeding on the honor system. Jim Crow statutes and racial covenants are a thing of the past, replaced by “color-blind” zoning regulations and the knowing wink. In real life, Blacks and whites are steered “by custom” to what has been ordained as their respective neighborhoods, a scheme in which real estate agents, landlords, developers, banks and the local politicians all work hand in glove. There are now at least four million housing discrimination violations pending.
After World War II, millions of whites emigrated to the suburbs, thanks to the construction on a huge scale of tracts of inexpensive houses with white-only covenants, which in turn were made possible with government-financed white only mortgages. Then more whites took flight to the suburbs when public schools in the cities “tipped,” that is when more than a token number of Blacks began attending them. To spare these suburban whites from the nasty and frightening experience of having to drive through the ghettos on their way to work, a massive program of “urban renewal” (also known as Negro removal) projects were undertaken. Black neighborhoods were chopped up and tens of thousands of African-Americans were uprooted to areas remote from economic activity, while those who remained found themselves stranded in what became zones of economic desolation. Today the “inner city” has become desirable real estate and is being gentrified. Black and Latino dispersal is the master plan (or the master’s plan). the most efficient technique is simply blowing up the projects a la Chicago and Newark, while gentrification proceeds in more genteel fashion in Harlem, Brooklyn, and elsewhere, as rents are raised beyond affordability both in private sector housing as well as in the low-income projects.
The most dramatic example of gentrification and ethnic cleansing is New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. We are not at the stage of the Final Solution just yet. It remains just a “thought experiment” of former Secretary of Education William Bennett, among others. So while we are not at the stage of extermination, dispersal may well represent the penultimate.
A half – century after Brown v. Board of Education, schools in the South, having been (very partially) integrated, are being re-segregated, while in the North, they have become even more segregated than those in the former Confederacy. No longer do educators or politicians proclaim the need to keep Black ,”bucks” in schools separate from innocent white maidens, nor is it any longer asserted (openly) that Blacks are innately stupid. They just happen to be overwhelmingly placed in non-college tracks, in the slower classes, and in special education classes reserved for the emotionally disturbed and the intellectually crippled. No longer are African-Americans barred formally by institutions of higher learning. Their huge and growing under-representation is simply the natural outcome of the “color-blind” policy mandated by the Supreme Court. And according to right-wing ideologists, Martin Luther-King would have been delighted to see Black people sinking under the weight of “color blindness.” Color blindness here, as elsewhere, simply means blindness to 400 years of oppression based on color. To be color blind is to be history blind. Against reparations and affirmative action, the ideal is held aloft of “equal treatment under the law.” But equal treatment accorded to people in unequal circumstances is not equal treatment.
No one talks about a “white man’s job” any more. Black job applicants are now received with a gracious smile and then rejected with a smile equally gracious. While African-American unemployment rates have historically been high — usually two to three times white unemployment — the magnitude of the present disparity is unprecedented, officially covered up by the statistical sleight-of-hand to which we have previously alluded. In Chicago, for example, only one-tenth of Black teenagers find jobs, and if one doesn’t find employment by age 21, one likely never will. Black women, especially immigrants, are once again seen pushing carriages with white babies, a type of “mammy” work previously shunned for years in favor of occupations that paid a living wage and were not associated with the demeaning images of slavery. Many jobs traditionally filled by African-Americans have evaporated because of mechanization and automation, while outsourcing has decimated better-paying jobs in manufacturing, where Blacks had previously managed to secure an important foothold.
Laws which make certain types of racial discrimination illegal are generally honored in the breach. Regarding those laws one never hears the words “zero tolerance.” They are treated only as minor infractions for which it would be absurd to demand prison time. Racial oppression does not rise, you see, even to the level of the “quality-of-life offenses such as fare-beating or the spraying of graffiti.
The wealth disparity between Black and white is enormous. While Black household wealth is 10 percent of whites, after subtracting (rapidly sinking) home equity it is less than 1 percent, or a grand total of $300 compared to $36,000 for whites.
But beyond large segments of the Black community having to cope with their growing obsolescence in this “information age,” their
shrinking place in the nation’s economy;
– beyond being pushed out of the country’s major cities through gentrification, beyond disproportionately losing their homes as a result of the sub-prime racket;
– beyond the growing crisis in health care that is wreaking particular havoc on African-Americans, with vast racial disparities in infant mortality, cancer outcomes, and premature death caused-by high blood pressure, diabetes and AIDS, striking African-American women with particular vengeance;
-beyond the growing geneial insecurity which¬ through the shredding of the social safety net has been particularly devastating for the Black community;
– beyond the prospect of a bleak future for an increasing number of Black children due, among other things, to an educational system over which hangs the traditional pall of racist contempt and low expectations, the transformation of teachers into drill sergeants, and the crushing of creativity and the desire to learn;
– beyond all the material privations and inequities, there, are always the daily “small” humiliations, the habitual stabs of racist insult, the ever-present harassment and brutality of the police, the media’s insulting portrayals, the hidden and not so hidden signifying of the politicians, and the condescension of well-meaning liberals.
That racism is described here not simply as misguided and shameful but criminal will certainly puzzle many, so routine is it, so institutionalized, so taken for granted, oozing out of every pore of US society. And if there is still little appreciation by the great majority of white people of the suffering and humiliation associated with 400 years of being Black in America, there is absolutely no understanding of how they themselves have been victimized by the system of white supremacy.
Why is racism the key crime of this society? Because racist ideology was constructed to justify the theft of this continent from the native peoples and the genocidal wars against them, became part and parcel of the kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples whose labor was whipped out of them by a plantation elite, a plunder shared in the North by the manufacturer, merchant, ship-builder and banker. The foundation of the American economy was laid through the colossal crimes against native and African peoples.
Throughout US history, racism has been enormously profitable in every economic sector, dividing white worker from Black, indispensable to strike-breaking and union busting. Institutional racism enriched and continues to enrich merchants who charge African-Americans inflated prices for inferior products, enriched and continues to enrich landlords charging extortionate rents to Blacks trapped by residential apartheid and at the same time collecting a premium from those living in “good” lily-white neighborhoods. Racism is a great source of super-profit to banks and finance companies charging African-Americans discriminatory interest rates.
Racism is central to the criminal justice system which, in turn, is the elite’s most powerful tool of social control. The mass incarceration of African-Americans, the criminalization of Black youth, the relentless police sweeps in the ghettos, stop-and-frisks, brutality and harassment, are indispensable measures of control over a population viewed as dangerous by the oligarchy — not dangerous in the sense of being a menace to life and property, but politically dangerous. For far beyond their numbers, the African-American people have demonstrated their power to alter history. Such power was shown during the Civil War when in the darkest days of the Union the tide was turned by a quarter of a million Black soldiers, reluctantly allowed to put on uniforms after a long delay. (Incidentally, Lincoln did not free the slaves; the slaves liberated themselves, as large numbers first escaped to Northern lines, then played a crucial role in freeing those still in chains. As a matter of fact, it was the former slaves who freed Lincoln — freed him from a likely southern noose. And it was the Union victory to which Blacks had contributed so decisively that freed the North to surge ahead in economic development and enable the United States to become a world power.)
The power of African-Americans-to advance progressive change was shown again during Reconstruction, when African-Americans were for the first time given a modest voice in government, making it possible for poor whites as well as Blacks to win some battles against the plantation and merchant aristocracy, including, as previously mentioned, the creation for the first time in southern history of a public school system, a system that was gutted as soon as the white supremacists returned to power.
That power was again displayed during the era of the Black mass movement for freedom whose progressive consequences for the entire nation we have already discussed. Conversely, the backlash against that movement in the past several decades has witnessed a deterioration of the standard of living of most whites, as well as Blacks, increasing concentration of power in the hands of an ever more arrogant elite, a growing assault on our liberties, acceleration of the destruction of our environment, and unleashing of wars of aggression, along with the open proclamation of Washington’s intention to rule the world.
We say that racism is central to the maintenance of this criminal social system. And what makes it central is not that it oppresses people of color alone, but is damaging to the masses of the people, whatever their national or ethnic background. We pointed out, for example, that slavery not only oppressed Blacks but impoverished millions of southern white farmers who, unable to compete with slave labor, were driven into barren hills and destitution. The terrible price poor whites paid for slavery was nowhere more clearly laid out than in Hinton Helper’s devastating pamphlet, The Impending Crisis. A white farmer himself, no friend of the slave, he was perhaps the first to suggest that Blacks were entitled to reparations.
It was racism which broke up the Black-poor white alliance and destroyed Reconstruction, plunging the South, Black and white, into a century of poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness, making it a region which led the nation in all the indices of social misery, a region which racism ensured was kept free of labor unions.
In the 1880s and ’90s, Populism swept the South, a movement of resistance to the oligarchy. For a brief, moment, poor whites joined hands with poor Blacks against their common enemy. But once more, racism torpedoed that alliance, ensuring that the region would remain mired in backwardness.
It was racism that kept the main organization of labor, the AFL, weak. Because it would organize only skilled, white, native-born craftsmen, it proved helpless to deal with emerging modern industries such as steel, automobiles, and rubber. Only with the creation of the CIO, which actively combated racism and embraced all workers, was a breakthrough made, paving the way for a surge in union membership, higher wages and improved working-conditions. And it was the political muscle of the CIO that was responsible for the flood of progressive social and economic legislation known as the New Deal, and which put a leash on the rapacity of Big Business, bringing hope and relief to tens of millions of white working people, as well as Black — in fact, to white even more than Black.
The central role of African-Americans in US history was revealed again in the 1960s when the Black freedom movement was beginning to shake the underpinnings of elite rule, transforming the political landscape of the nation, serving as a catalyst for the other movements for social justice inspired by its example — the women’s movement, the movement of other oppressed national and ethnic groups — Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, native peoples — movements on behalf of children, the elderly, the disabled, the environment, and defending and expanding civil liberties, including the rights of the accused and the imprisoned. Many leaders in the anti-Vietnam War movement were first roused to political activity and became trained in the civil rights movement.
The era of the great social upheavals of the 1960s, with the Black freedom movement in the lead, also alarmed the Establishment because it inspired masses of disaffected youth to adopt what became known as the counter-culture, ripping off the straitjacket of cultural as well as political conformity and challenging the older generation’s narrow-minded values.
That progressive upsurge was brought to an end with the Nixon Administration, backed by a “silent majority,” followed by Ronald Reagan and an openly vengeful one. A thirty-year period followed of demonization and rollback of everything progressive brought by the great upsurge of the 60s, including, above all, demonization of African-American and reversal of their gains.
It is racism which has been responsible for the reactionary political attitudes of so many whites who equate poverty with African-Americans and who therefore can be counted on to oppose efforts to improve the conditions of the poor, even though whites make up the poors’ majority. It is that same racism that has left the United States with the most close-fisted social protections among all the industrialized nations. For the elite has been able to convince large numbers of those of European descent, who themselves are in need of such protections, that they constitute only giveaways to African-American parasites.
It is racism which has contributed to the broad approval among European- Americans of police state measures, often aimed against African-Americans, but paving the way for a Fascism in which those with white skins will not be spared.
In sum; it is racism which continues to blind the masses of whites to their community of interests with African-Americans, preventing them from joining forces in the struggle against a common enemy.
The problem of racism can never be solved as long as its very presentation is itself racist. As conventionally laid out, it is not racism that is the issue but “race relations,” a problem existing between the white and Black communities involving mutual suspicion, mutual-misunderstanding, both sides having legitimate grievances. (See Barack Obama’s “brilliant” and enthusiastically received speech on race during his run for the presidential nomination. Of course, if he hoped to be elected president he could speak no other way.)
Racism, institutional racism, is not mindless, not pathological, as some liberals suggest, but a rational strategy that pays huge economic dividends to the elite. Racism is spawned automatically by an economic system based on ruthless competition, permanent insecurity, and a hierarchical system that by its very nature promotes and enforces inequality But the elite does not rely simply on the system’s inherent tendencies. The “permanent government” knows it must engage in systematic racist indoctrination. For the bigotry of those of European descent is extraordinarily useful in diverting legitimate anger toward those even more victimized and away from those of their own “race” who are truly responsible for their problems. .It is vital that the masses of whites be convinced,(as so many are) that more for African-Americans means less for themselves, that any advance by Black people is obtained at white expense.
There is no greater proof of the depth of racism in this country than the widespread belief that it is basically a thing of the past, magically erased by this or that civil rights law or court decision. Pointing to the existence of an expanding Black middle class (most of whom are only a couple of paychecks from bankruptcy), and the success of a few Black high-profile personalities, many whites are convinced that any further Black demands for equality are nothing but “special pleading,” a con game aimed at cashing in on “white liberal guilt.”
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
One of the most successful strategies of the Right has been the stirring up of white resentment against affirmative action which is, after all, only a very modest tool to redress historic inequities. Nevertheless, affirmative action for African-Americans is condemned as reverse discrimination, a grab by unqualified and undeserving Blacks who have shamelessly repudiated Martin Luther King’s dream of the day when everyone “will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Apparently, that glorious day has arrived, so the ever rightward moving. Supreme Court has in one arena after another ruled affirmative action unnecessary and therefore unconstitutional.
But the informal networks of family connections, social connections, business connections, school connections, fraternity connections, and political connections, all giving whites an inside track thanks to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and hundreds of years of white advantage, constitute an unending affirmative action program. The huge racial disparities in wealth and income from which many white children benefit; including from inheritance, although they have done nothing to earn that benefit, is another affirmative action program which, like all the other forms of affirmative action for whites, is deemed natural, just, and so very constitutional.
