"The shutdown of Flint’s auto industry and the economic devastation visited on the city as a consequence was part of a wholesale assault on the working class as a whole." Absolutely true!
"Structural racism played no role". Absolutely false!
Prof. Hammer covers up the former, wsws covers up the latter. God only knows why.
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On the small chance that it will do any good, I will repeat the following for the umpteenth time. Your claim that black people are incapable of implementing racist policies is so indefensible (not to mention worn out and predictable) that it puts you in the same category as a colonial apologist.
I can prove that the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia has nothing to do with European domination, because it's all done by African soldiers!
I can prove that the police cannot be agents of the capitalists, because they all come from the working class!
Can't you see the inanity of this sort of "proof"?
What you should have -- and so easily could have -- written in this article is: It requires a political struggle to unify all sections of the working class, of all races, in a common fight against unemployment, poverty, inequality, RACISM, IMPERIALISM, and the capitalist profit system. But I guess you would have choked on those words. Instead you wrote: "it is clear that broader issues are involved—bound up NOT with racial divisions".... Oy gewalt. Queue the mindless attacks from the usual suspects.... I don't intend to answer them any more.
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Jon Geene • 16 days ago
Racism cannot be separated from class rule in the United States. American society, despite the enormous gains made in the Civil War and the Civil Right movement, of historical necessity, drags the chains of history behind it. This manifests itself in ongoing racial inequalities.
The epidemic of police violence in the US - far in excess of what we see in any other advanced country - is a product of the crisis of the particular form of the crisis bourgeois rule. As US history is marred by especially violent and repressive forms of racism, the contemporary expressions of class conflict cannot help but have a racial component.
The collective "white guilt" suggested by some bourgeois commentators is an attempt to disguise the responsibility of the growth of US capitalism, as an entire socio-economic system, for the racist outrages of American history. No-one outwith the Fox News studios would claim that this racism does not linger in many facets of contemporary American life. This history and legacy of racism must be contextualized within the glaringly obvious fact that US capitalism today is responsible for a generalized impoverishment and brutalization of broad swathes of society of all races.
There are certain facts about police violence in America that must be examined, including facts relating to race. Attention to such phenomena does necessarily box one into the category of "identity politics" - a phrase that I have problems with, as being black or a woman or disabled, for examples, is not just an "identity" but an objective fact that often brings with it very real problems with discrimination.
Almost all the victims of police killings in the US are poor or low-income. This is class war, make no mistake. Black people are more likely to be poor than white people, another unavoidable legacy of US history that is perpetuated by ongoing (albeit less egregious) racial discrimination today. About 25% of African Americans are poor - a shockingly high level (just slightly higher than the percentage of Hispanics who are poor, though this figure may underrepresent the problem due to non-reporting by undocumented immigrants.) About 10% of non-Hispanic whites are classed as poor, which should also be an affront to any decency society.
African Americans make up about 13% of the US population. White people, around 64%. Now, look at the police killing stats (which are incomplete due to the deliberate refusal of authorities to document and analyze these killings). According the the Washington Post's police killings tracker, 1500 people have been killed by the police so far this year. An utterly disgusting figure in and of itself. Just less than half of those killed by the police this year were recorded as being white and just less than a quarter of those killed were identified as black. This means that an "average" black person is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than an "average" white person.
But it is not a statical average that's being gunned down by cops. It's poor/low-income people. And we can see from the poverty figures is that African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be poor than white people.
Therein might lie, in large part, the racial difference in police killings.
As I said, the disproportionate percentage of black people who are poor is itself a legacy of the peculiar racial brutality of class rule in the US. This increased prevalence of poverty among African Americans must surely be buttressed in countless ways today. And there are of course racist cops, as well as general racial biases - including biases among African American officers.
I don't claim to have any special knowledge - all these stats are readily available. But it seems that one must first acknowledge: 1. that the legacy of racism is real; 2. that this manifests itself in particular in poverty for black people; 3. that the poor are way more likely to be killed by cops, and therefore black people are disproportionately likely to be killed; 4. that while there must be many examples of black people being targeted and then killed by cops because of present day racism/bias in police forces, this does not appear to have a major impact on the statistical correlation between poverty and police violence.
What conclusions to draw from this? Police violence is the sharpest expression of class war in America. That black people get the rawest deal in terms of both poverty and police violence is a tragic but unsurprising product of hundreds of years of American history. A fightback against this bourgeois class warfare must unite people across racial lines, focusing on a war on poverty and inequality from below (as opposed to the LBJ version that quickly floundered, though not without certain gains for the poor). There can be no effective fight against poverty and social inequality for one race but not another, a fact recognized by Dr King.
Finally, please let's avoid any counterposing of "All Lives Matter" against "Black Lives Matter", something I saw in an editorial a while ago. It seems like an obvious statement: well, all lives matter, don't they? But that's a rather sterile argument. And the phrase is associated with attacks on Black Lives Matter from the right. Grey is theory, and we must theorize based on the evidence. Nonetheless, millions of black people vividly experience police violence in their neighborhoods, where both poverty and state brutality are more likely to be concentrated. Therefore appropriate language to address that living experience needs to be developed.
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