Democracy and Racism

The Black Dialectic in Post-Neocon America

by I. Langalibalele

Many people in the black community have an aversion to the class question. That is, people avoid discussing relationships between the haves and have nots in any serious way. This seems due to the lack of any real democratic rights black working class and poor people may have in America. Everywhere our issues are raised, others seem intent on drowning out our voices or speaking up for us, ultimately with the goal of diluting our message.
It is the responsibility of organizers to break thru our temerity and elevate a class analysis that penetrates the broad masses of African people and repudiates Imperialism and especially the right-wing.
A close examination of racism shows that it is an expression of the class conflict which forms the basis of capitalist social relations. Racism is an expression of colonialism, and the backwards color theory of racist confrontation bases itself upon subjugating all colonized people so that mobility can be concentrated within the oppressor nation. African people understand how racism operates. Racism places the lowest caste among the colonizers above the best of the colonized.
For instance, white racist Byron de la Beckwith felt free to assassinate NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963 because de la Beckwith knew the system would not punish him for killing a black man. Same thing with James Earl Ray. In the Tulsa riots of 1921, whites destroyed the black business district because that meant black progress and they had to stop black people from having anything more than they owned. The racist, neocon opposition to affirmative action, equal opportunity and other legal remedies — aimed at reversing the effects of 500 years of racist oppression in North America — exists because white racists view blacks as a lower caste. We are supposed to be, as Booker T Washington paraphrased from the Biblical ‘drawers of water and hewers of wood for white people in this country.’
Some people attribute violent white behavior to emotional responses such as jealousy or hatred. Yet emotions begin with the racism people get taught in church, school, at home and in other cultural and political settings. Whites have been conditioned for 500 years to think of themselves as superior to everybody else and consider the colonized niggers of the world as their do-boys.
In Vietnam, American soldiers considered the people there gooks, slopes or rice niggers. If the Arabs were whites instead of towel heads or sand niggers, the Zionists would never have any support in America. Eskimos are ice niggers in Sarah Palin’s Alaska and cowboys routinely call the American Indians prairie niggers. Every colonized group is some kind of nigger. That is all the word mean is you are a slave under capitalism and Imperialism.
Racial conflict hones the very sharp edges of the class struggle. Since politics is economics concentrated, then racism concentrates the class question. However, during the rise of monopoly sector capitalism in the Twentieth Century, it became increasingly more difficult to maintain the strict, rigid class barriers that had been defined via racism. The years foreshadowing World War II forced competing ideas within the capitalist spheres to come into direct conflict. Capitalism’s collapse during the Great Depression instigated important social movements which began the decline of strict, race-based (colonial) relationships.
In Europe, the global economic disaster flushed out the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class. Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain led the fascist movement which threatened to engulf Europe. At the 1940 Berlin Olympics, Hitler’s Aryan supermen competed against America’s nigger sons in track and boxing and came up short. This competition also caused America to seriously reevaluate its racist Jim Crow policy, tho change did not begin in earnest until the mid Fifties. Eventually, the most parasitic forces of reaction started a war the extreme right-wingers of Imperialism couldn’t finish.
Today, Imperialism — also known as international finance capitalism  (“monopoly sector capitalism”) characterized by the proliferation of powerful corporations that function like actual nation states — has reached its apex. It has totally saturated the entire globe at one level or another, and redefined the way people live. It imports and exports capital assets, it hides wealth by concentrating it into “asset-backed commercial paper,” documents which represent millions of dollars in value, which can be packed into a briefcase or a wallet and negotiated anywhere on the planet. Imperialism has become as rotten ripe as it can possibly become and Imperialism is also the highest stage of capitalism.
Now that capitalism is undergoing another economic crisis like it did in the Thirties and Forties, the forces of reaction in America have become let loose. They want a fascist dictatorship like the ones which reduced Europe to a rubble in the Forties. The neocons forget or don’t kno that fascism arose because of the economic crisis; fascism is an emergency political regime that is based upon repression. Hitler, known to the pigs as the leech who rebuilt Germany in twelve years, is also the one who employed armed managers (the Gestapo, the SS and the army) to enforce production quotas from workers. Mussolini, Franco and Salazar used similar tactics.
While the neoconservative reactionaries in this country try to stampede the masses by saying they don’t want socialism, the Keynesian capitalism upon which FDR modeled the US economic recovery still was based upon Jim Crow and colonialism. African people have walked away from slavery and Jim Crow, and we will fight to the death before we ever return to that. We refuse to submit to any system referred to as “voodoo economics” by its own neocon proponents.
We must be clear, as black workers in America, that our efforts have built this country and so we have an important voice to be raised. The interests which we seek to articulate must no longer be coopted by interpreters or middle class aspirants. Let them speak for themselves or their own class interests. We can speak for ourselves, and we have little to no relationship to the Democratic Party or the GOP.
Our interests involve economic and political control of our own community. We want the Black Panther Party program. We want the Uhuru Movement program. We demand reparations and an end to the neo-fascist prison industry built on our backs. If white people don’t want socialism, fine and good, but we want something which will move our community forward and out of dependency on Imperialism.
There is a black dialectic which differs from mainstream capitalist culture; it differs from what most preachers say in church on Sunday, and it differs from what black commentators say in black newspapers. It is something which you might read over the blogosphere or get in a conversation with somebody on the bus or on a corner. However, it is not the discussion on the radio or on BET.
And the efforts of the self-led black proletariat to distill this discussion into a political message represents a polemic against capitalism which deserves to be broadly articulated.
This is the message that has been shouted down, denied any democratic forum in American politics, and treated as tho it were a criminal or terrorist ideology. One thousand Byron de la Beckwiths exist for every African who has clarity about the role of black workers and poor people in US society. One thousand James Earl Rays rise up every time an organizer fights to advance conditions inside our community as a matter of anti-racist struggle. Our communities across this country look like the aftermath of the Tulsa riots and yet we are supposed to remain quiet, and be afraid of what the reactionaries call “socialism”. We must demand socialism, we must demand change more than we kno the capitalist system is willing to concede, but we must demand what we kno we can get if it takes sweat and blood to get it.