Racism and politics

by John Alan

Editor's note: As John Alan is ill, we are reprinting his column on "Racism in politics" from October 2000, which speaks to today's new reality of an African-American president.

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During this presidential election year, both the Republican and the Democratic parties have claimed that they are "ethnically inclusive and diverse." The Republican Party had on the stage of its convention hall an unusual number of African Americans, and Colin Powell, a retired African-American general, opened its convention with an inspiring speech. The Democratic Party, with its large number of African-American delegates, gave Jesse Jackson prime time to extol the liberalism of the Democratic Party and denounce the conservatism of the Republican Party.

Now, what does all the apparent racial integration of those two capitalist parties actually mean for the masses of African Americans and other people of color, like Latinos? Very little. To imply that the racial and ethnic composition of a capitalist political party will resolve today's dire economic and social problems and the practices of racism is deceptive and false.

POLITICS PROTECTS CAPITALISM

It is false, because the essential reason for the existence of today's political parties is to preserve and to protect the interests of capitalism, that is, the accumulation of capital, which creates at the same time wealth and its opposite, poverty, classism and racism. U.S. capitalism has cultivated racism since its very beginnings, when the early settlers claimed lifelong slavery for those indentured servants who were Black.

Thus, racism has long played a role in U.S. politics, and at times that role has been crucial in determining the direction of U.S. history. We need not go very far back in history to find the connection between U.S. politics and racism. Many contentious social issues, such as welfare "reform," building larger and tougher prisons, mandatory minimum prison sentences, "three strikes" laws, prosecuting youth as adults and putting them in adult prisons (see "Efren Paredes update,"), and the extension of the death penalty to more offenses are all motivated by an ideology of racism.

Beginning with President Ronald Reagan, every administration, including the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, has acted politically to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and to destroy the very idea of such a movement. Clinton, the "New Democrat," attempted only morally to separate himself from reactionaries like Reagan and Bush.

Clinton went to an African-American church in Memphis, Tenn., to tell African-American religious leaders that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would not like the way African-American youth were killing each other and having babies out of wedlock. He went on to say: "We will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and neighborhoods and the communities."

We know this kind of political evangelism is a sham. What African-American youth got during the eight years of Clinton's administration was welfare "reform," new prisons and longer prison terms. According to recent reports there are over two million Americans in federal and state prisons and local jails in this country. More than half are African-American men and women. Thus, one out of every 35 African Americans is behind bars, representing the racial segregation of capitalism's permanently unemployed Black so-called underclass.

AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

The post-Civil Rights Movement era is an ongoing era of an unfinished revolution. The social conditions created by racism and poverty are still deep in this American civilization. In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and addressed one quarter of a million people. He told them that, 100 years after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans were still not free. He said, "The Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and chains of discrimination, [he still lives] on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Martin Luther King III stood on the same spot and said, "The day my father had dreamed about has not yet been realized." Clearly, African-American freedom cannot be gained through bourgeois politics. A new wave of struggle will have to break through this barrier, not by avoiding politics, but by transcending political alienation through full confidence in the masses' own social power. New leaders cannot be mere politicians, but have to enhance this social power and help it coalesce with others in the fight against globalized capital. Only through this social power can we reach a humanism that transcends capitalism and the racism it continually re-creates.

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