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Post by Admin on Aug 30, 2023 21:12:00 GMT
Racism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RacismRacism is discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems (e.g. apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often assumes that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior. Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena. While the concepts of race and ethnicity are considered to be separate in contemporary social science, the two terms have a long history of equivalence in popular usage and older social science literature. "Ethnicity" is often used in a sense close to one traditionally attributed to "race", the division of human groups based on qualities assumed to be essential or innate to the group (e.g. shared ancestry or shared behavior). Racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to the United Nations's Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, there is no distinction between the terms "racial" and "ethnic" discrimination. It further concludes that superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous. The convention also declared that there is no justification for racial discrimination, anywhere, in theory or in practice.[1] Racism is frequently described as a relatively modern concept, arising in the European age of imperialism, the subsequent growth of capitalism, and especially the Atlantic slave trade,[2][3] of which it was a major driving force.[4] It was also a major force behind racial segregation in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and of apartheid in South Africa; 19th and 20th-century racism in Western culture is particularly well documented and constitutes a reference point in studies and discourses about racism.[5] Racism has played a role in genocides such as the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, as well as colonial projects including the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the population transfer in the Soviet Union including deportations of indigenous minorities.[6] Indigenous peoples have been—and are—often subject to racist attitudes.
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Post by Admin on Sept 7, 2023 0:23:06 GMT
Reading list Walter Rodney: a Lightning Rod of Black Working Class Power Dissecting the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism, and the global meaning of Black Power. Verso Books 24 August 2023 www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5393-walter-rodney-a-lighting-rod-for-working-class-black-powerWalter Rodney described himself as a guerrilla intellectual, committed to studying the concrete realities of the working class. He believed in the centrality of education in revolutionary struggle and, alongside his work as a professor, he wrote two children’s books that challenged racial division in Guyana. As Robin D G Kelley says in this episode of The Verso Podcast, we are all Walter Rodney. Forty-three years on from his assassination, his work remains incredibly prescient. Here we present his groundbreaking works, as well as key excerpts and essays on Walter Rodney from the Verso Blog. (book list in link)
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Post by Admin on Oct 7, 2023 11:21:51 GMT
Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics by Kevin Ochieng Okoth www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2896-red-africaExcavating the history of Marxism and Black revolutionary politics Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised – instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition. Reviews Provocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures. Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome. Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire This is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination. Firoze Manji, co-editor, Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2023 1:59:23 GMT
Outrageous Reason: Madness And Race In Britain And Empire, 1780–2020 In stock soon ISBN 9781915220394 – PUBLICATION 30TH NOV 2023 Author: Peter Barham www.pccs-books.co.uk/products/outrageous-reason-madness-and-race-in-britain-and-empire-17802020With a foreword by Dwight Turner. This powerful and disturbing book draws direct comparisons between the plight and fates of African slaves, dehumanised and discarded to sanitise Britain’s trade in human lives and imperial ambitions, and the systemic ‘othering’ of people designated ‘mad’ throughout Western history. Drawing on contemporary historical records, Barham recounts, often in their own words, the stories of black people incarcerated in Kingston, Jamaica’s lunatic asylum, poor white women similarly ejected into the British psychiatric system in the early 20th century for failing to live up to class and gender norms, and most shockingly, black men who have died at the hands of the police and mental health nurses in state custody and psychiatric detention. Endemic racism, greed, cruelty, exploitation and social control are writ large across this account that demands to be read by all those concerned for human rights, mad rights, Black lives and truth-telling about Britain’s shameful colonial past and racist present.
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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2023 12:43:59 GMT
Opinion Divided: Annabel Sowemimo’s book on racism in medicine and coloniality in global health BMJ 2023; 383 doi: doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p2547 (Published 02 November 2023) Cite this as: BMJ 2023;383:p2547 www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2547Annabel Sowemimo’s timely and urgent new book exposes racism in medicine and signals a “moment of reckoning,” writes Sophie Harman Divided:Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare is a new book by Annabel Sowemimo,1 a sexual and reproductive health registrar and reproductive justice activist. Motivated by what was missing from her medical and postgraduate healthcare training and by the questions asked in her inboxes and at clinics, Sowemimo has written an accessible and urgent call to action to tackle racism and racial inequalities in the healthcare system. This timely book is published as the UK continues to wrangle with its place in the world, its imperial past, and the resulting systemic racism in healthcare and society, exemplified by appalling rates of maternal mortality in black women. The power of Divided is twofold. First, it sees and validates the experiences of racially marginalised groups. It tells anyone who’s experienced racism in the health sector—whether their pain wasn’t believed, a rash wasn’t recognised on their skin, or their partner died in childbirth—that they’re not alone. Their experiences and lives matter and make up a wider trend of racism and inequality in the health sector. Second, the evidence of the stark consequences of racism in health are so clearly explained that those in power cannot dismiss them. Divided represents more than just a book: it’s part of an anti-racist movement seeking to decolonise healthcare and demand better care for racially marginalised people. Sowemimo pitches Divided as being published at a “moment of reckoning” after covid-19 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Tim Bale, an expert on conservative politics, argues that the Tories in the UK and other mainstream conservative parties in Europe are shifting ever more towards the far right.2 As parties shift to more extreme positions, echoes of race science about “difference” and “otherness” come to the fore. For example, while the world rightly demands more of leaders to reverse climate change, “eco-fascists” wrongly attribute climate change to population growth in low and middle income countries.3Divided is vital in the current moment, as it exposes the ignorance behind race science and the real, deadly consequences of what happens when people believe it. Pushing for change The book covers many areas: the history of eugenics, the relation between global health and colonialism, technology, incarceration, and mental health. Despite its compelling style, in chapter 9, which focuses on global health, Sowemimo’s analysis of colonial power relations is deployed only in passing, when discussing contemporary vaccine trials and the power of global philanthropy. She says little on the rush towards research “partnerships” between low and middle income and high income countries that often replicate the same power imbalances, in research hierarchies and knowledge extraction, that they’re supposed to contest. A book can’t do everything, but there are contradictory changes in global health that Sowemimo’s keen eye misses. As part of a panel at the launch of Divided, the writer Jacqueline Ray emphasised the importance of white people reading the book and understanding the issues contained in it, as she says that “white readers have the power to change things.” Racially marginalised people know how they’re treated or mistreated in healthcare; white people need to know too. There’s no greater barometer of whose lives are valued in society than who lives, who dies, and who gets to live a long, healthy life. Sowemimo’s book presents us with a choice: we can ignore the clear evidence she lays out before us, or we can change. New generations of medical students and practitioners are pushing for change in what and how they’re taught and in how science and medicine engage in anti-racist practice. I know that most of my students will inhale every word of Divided. But we can’t wait for them to be in positions of power to change things. If we believe in science and medicine as a means of helping people, we need to listen to Sowemimo and learn from Divided. As she puts it, “rational people don’t think rationally about race”—and it’s time they started. Footnotes Competing interests: I declare no conflict of interest. Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned, not externally peer reviewed. References ↵Sowemimo A. Divided: Racism, medicine and why we need to decolonise healthcare. Profile Books/Wellcome Collection, 2023Google Scholar ↵Kaltwasser CR, Bale T. Mainstream right in Western Europe: challenging times; trouble ahead? UK in a Changing Europe. 22 Jan 2022. ukandeu.ac.uk/long-read/mainstream-right-western-europe/↵Rockey F. The dangers of eco-fascism and why it’s a “veneer for racist beliefs”. EuroNews 2021 Mar 21. www.euronews.com/green/2021/03/21/the-dangers-of-eco-fascism-and-why-it-s-a-veneer-for-racist-beliefs
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2023 19:48:31 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2023 21:50:31 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2023 22:20:08 GMT
INTERVIEW | RACIAL JUSTICE Chicago Gangs Emerge From Deprivation. To End the Violence, End the Deprivation. Chicago won’t invest in resources to fix the root causes of violence, says Lance Williams, whose father was a Vice Lord. By Zhandarka Kurti , TRUTHOUT PublishedNovember 26, 2023 truthout.org/articles/chicago-gangs-emerge-from-deprivation-to-end-the-violence-end-the-deprivation/Chicago is the economic core of the vast hinterland that spans the United States Midwest called the Rustbelt. Unlike other major Rustbelt cities like Baltimore and Detroit, on the surface Chicago seems to have weathered the industrial decline that gave the region its nickname. Yet a closer look at the city reveals an uneven pattern of capitalist development: decades of state and private investment have developed downtown Chicago for the well-to-do, while poor Black and Brown working-class neighborhoods on the West and South Sides have been completely neglected and abandoned. This pattern can be traced to the city’s deep history of racial segregation. In fact, Chicago’s rise as an industrial metropolis in the 19th century rested on the exploitation of immigrant and Black labor, as well as the enduring color line that was reinforced on the factory floors and in the neighborhood streets. Then and now, this geography of inequality that shapes Chicago neighborhoods does not make national headlines. Instead of the decades-long history of racial segregation and contemporary policies of state abandonment that fuel the hardships of South Side residents, the focus remains on depoliticized understandings of crime and youth violence. In recent years, important scholarship and activism has challenged the constant hand-wringing about youth violence by pointing to the longstanding systemic inequalities and the policies that continue to reinforce youth marginality. One of these critical voices is that of Professor Lance Williams, the son of a former Vice Lord gang member and a professor at the Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Since the 1980s, Williams has worked closely with South Side youth in different capacities — as a mentor, an educator, an advocate and activist. As a scholar, Professor Williams remains deeply committed to documenting the history of Chicago from the perspective of its most vulnerable and marginalized residents: street-involved Black youth. He has written two separate books that explore the social histories of Chicago’s two most important and rival Black street organizations: the Black P. Stones and the Gangster Disciples.
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Post by Admin on Dec 4, 2023 21:12:18 GMT
Synergi Grantee Blog Series – The Ad’iyah Collective synergiproject.org.uk/2023/11/22/synergi-grantee-blog-series-the-adiyah-collective/by Synergi Communities and Grants Coordinator, Alaina Heath In January 2023, we launched our first grants programme, welcoming applications from groups led by and for Black and People of Colour with lived experience of mental ill health, distress and/or trauma (which you can learn more about here). This is the first of a series of blogs with Synergi grantees reflecting on the work they do and their experiences of our grants programme. Synergi reflections As a grants officer, I made collective decisions with the team about which applications progressed to the next stages. The inherent power imbalances of grant-making made this role very uncomfortable and challenging at times, especially as we were processing applications for work that is historically underfunded and under resourced. There was also a real emotional impact on the team, as applicants spoke to our own lived experiences. This process demonstrated to us the challenges of doing lived experience work within a third sector framework. We are taking our learnings into our next round of funding in 2024 (join our monthly newsletter and follow our social media to keep updated) Despite these challenges, we have been able to connect with incredible groups across the country resisting and building alternatives to the oppressive systems that harm our mental health. In September, I spoke with a representative from Ad’iyah Muslim Abortion Collective – a supportive community led by and for Muslims who have experienced abortion and pregnancy endings. She shared her reflections on Ad’iyah Collectives’ work and the Synergi grants process. Active links & rest in link.
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Post by Admin on Dec 16, 2023 3:33:35 GMT
INTERVIEW | ECONOMY & LABOR Don’t Dismiss Marx. His Critique of Colonialism Is More Relevant Than Ever. Contrary to liberal misinterpretations, Marx was a fierce critic of colonialism, says Marxist scholar Marcello Musto. By C.J. Polychroniou , TRUTHOUT PublishedDecember 14, 2023 truthout.org/articles/dont-dismiss-marx-his-critique-of-colonialism-is-more-relevant-than-ever/During the last couple of decades, we have been witnessing a resurgence of interest in the thought and work of Karl Marx, author of major philosophical, historical, political and economic works — and of course, of The Communist Manifesto, which is perhaps the most popular political manifesto in the history of the world. This resurgence is largely due to the devastating consequences of neoliberalism around the world — unprecedented levels of economic inequality, social decay and popular discontent, as well as intensifying environmental degradation bringing the planet ever closer to a climate precipice — and the inability of the formal institutions of liberal democracy to solve this growing list of societal problems. But is Marx still relevant to the socio-economic and political landscape that characterizes today’s capitalist world? And what about the argument that Marx was Eurocentric and had little or nothing to say about colonialism? Marcello Musto, a leading Marxist scholar, and professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada, who has been a part of the revival of interest in Marx, contends in an exclusive interview for Truthout that Marx is still very much relevant today and debunks the claim that he was Eurocentric. In the interview that follows, Musto argues that Marx was, in fact, intensely critical of the impact of colonialism. C.J. Polychroniou: In the last decade or so there has been renewed interest in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism among leftist public intellectuals. Yet, capitalism has changed dramatically since Marx’s time and the idea that capitalism is fated to self-destruct because of contradictions that arise from the workings of its own logic no longer commands intellectual credibility. Moreover, the working class today is not only much more complex and diverse than the working class of the industrial revolution but has also not fulfilled the worldwide historical mission envisioned by Marx. In fact, it was such considerations that gave rise to post-Marxism, a fashionable intellectual posture from the 1970s to the 1990s, which attacks the Marxist notion of class analysis and underplays the material causes for radical political action. But now, it seems, there is a return once again to the fundamental ideas of Marx. How should we explain the renewed interest in Marx? Indeed, is Marx still relevant today? Marcello Musto: The fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by two decades of conspiracy of silence on Marx’s work. In the 1990s and 2000s, the attention toward Marx was extremely scarce and the same can be said for the publication, and discussion, of his writing. Marx’s work — no longer identified with the odious function of instrumentum regni of the Soviet Union — became the focus of a renewed global interest in 2008, after one of the biggest economic crises in the history of capitalism. Prestigious newspapers, as well as journals with wide readerships, described the author of Capital as a farsighted theorist, whose topicality received confirmation one more time. Marx became, almost everywhere, the theme of university courses and international conferences. His writings reappeared on bookshop shelves, and his interpretation of capitalism gathered increasing momentum. In the last few years, there has also been a reconsideration of Marx as a political theorist and many authors with progressive views maintain that his ideas continue to be indispensable for anyone who believes it is necessary to build an alternative to the society in which we live. The contemporary “Marx revival” is not confined only to Marx’s critique of political economy, but also open to rediscovering his political ideas and sociological interpretations. In the meantime, many post-Marxist theories have demonstrated all their fallacies and ended up accepting the foundations of the existing society — even though the inequalities that tear it apart and thoroughly undermine its democratic coexistence are growing in increasingly dramatic forms.
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Post by Admin on Jan 16, 2024 20:14:33 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 28, 2024 22:42:41 GMT
ARGUMENT Institutionalising Islamophobia & What is Extremism? ‘The UK’s Immigration System is Islamophobic and Racist. Expanding Prevent into it Will Re-traumatise Refugees’ The extension of the controversial counter-extremism program into immigration and asylum processes risks embedding racism at our borders Julia Tinsley-Kent 26 January 2024 bylinetimes.com/2024/01/26/the-uks-immigration-system-is-islamophobic-and-racist-expanding-prevent-into-it-will-re-traumatise-refugees/Migration is not an isolated issue. It is intertwined with political party agendas, geopolitics, conflict or global labour demands, while systems of oppression like homophobia, racism or sexism form the basis of who is considered to be welcome in the West. The exclusionary and discriminatory nature of migration policies is often overlooked.
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Post by Admin on Feb 3, 2024 1:20:29 GMT
EXCERPT | RACIAL JUSTICE The Red Scare Overlapped With Another State-Sanctioned Panic: The Black Scare Rooted in white people’s fear of Black Nationalism, the Black Scare was conjoined with the anti-communist Red Scare. By Charisse Burden-Stelly , UNIVERSITYOFCHICAGOPRESS/TRUTHOUT PublishedFebruary 2, 2024 truthout.org/articles/the-red-scare-overlapped-with-another-state-sanctioned-panic-the-black-scare/Editor’s Note: As Black History Month begins, we invite our readers to reflect on two panics that emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In her new book, Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Beginning her account in 1917, Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes U.S. Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, as one base of the Black Scare / Red Scare. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This adapted excerpt — from the book’s third chapter, which lays out the three genres of radical Blackness that were targeted by the U.S. government — details the case of Angelo Herndon, a Southern Black communist who was a victim of the Black and Red Scares. His portrait appears on the book’s cover. The case of Angelo Herndon illuminates the Red Black / Black Red as the most hated genre of Radical Blackness. The child of a coal miner and a domestic servant, he was galvanized by his position at the absolute bottom of U.S. Capitalist Racist Society. His Radical Blackness sprang from his experiences as a Southern Black worker who endured superexploitation, expropriation, dispossession, violence, and surveillance starting at the age of thirteen. Though the 1920s were the “prosperity era” when “wages were high,” Herndon and his brother Leo could only find “piece-work” jobs that came with countless deductions for amenities Herndon and other Black workers were barred from accessing. Herndon discussed this predicament in his book, Let Me Live, writing, “They robbed us with an undisguised brazenness . . . the company rob[bed] us of the fruits of our labor which we earned by the sweat of our brows and the ache of our limbs.” Company housing became a means of expropriation by domination: the rent for his shack was fifty dollars a month — almost three-fourths of his paycheck — even though it had no electricity or private toilet and was in the segregated section next to a putrid garbage dump. He paid more rent than the white workers despite exponentially worse conditions. To add insult to injury — or domination to expropriation — the shacks were patrolled by armed gunmen to make sure the workers did not steal the company’s property. Such surveillance and repression were perpetual features of subproletarian Black toil. During Herndon’s work on a dam in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, he was watched over by a “whole army” of “floor walkers” who lorded over the laborers day and night, ensuring that they did not escape. Workers were bound to this abysmal situation through indebtedness, which meant that “miners . . . were irretrievably mortgaged to these heartless ghouls [disreputable loan sharks and credit stores]” who preyed upon them systematically. This ongoing primed the development of Herndon’s Radical Black political consciousness — and prepared him for the violence that accrued to the Red Black / Black Red. One day during a trolley ride, a white man attempted to force Herndon to vacate his seat. He shouted, “You white people are so civilized that you seem to think that you can afford to behave worse than savages towards us defenseless Negroes. I know you hate us, but it strikes me awfully funny that you are ready to accept money from a black hand as well as from a white. Now understand me clearly, I’ve paid my fare to ride this car and I won’t give up my seat to any white man until hell freezes over!” Here, Herndon rejected the contradictions of U.S. Capitalist Racist Society: white savagery amid claims of civilization, white violence legitimated as law and order, and Black defenselessness obfuscated as danger. Likewise, Herndon conveyed that if dollar equality was possible, so too was racial equality. The latter, after all, was perversely conveyed when workers rose up, insofar as Black cops beat white women and white cops attacked Black women; race prejudice was not a factor when it came to brutalizing workers. The Black Scare and the Red Scare meant that, especially in the South, the only thing worse than Blackness was Radical Blackness, and worst of all was to be a Red Black / Black Red. As historian Gerald Horne put it, “Reds were persecuted and black Reds were virtually flagellated.” In 1930, Herndon joined the Unemployed Council, and that same year he was locked up by Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad guards in the Big Rock Jail for associating with communists. When he went to court after his arrest, townspeople gathered to gawk at the “Negro Red” freak with “cruel and depraved” curiosity. The prosecutor did not hide his hatred of the Red Black / Black Red, and the Black Scare and the Red Scare stood in for any semblance of fact in the case. According to Herndon, this officer of the court talked vaguely and bitterly about bewhiskered devils that carried bombs in their pockets and threatened the virtue of every white woman. He referred to Communists and Bolsheviks as if they were two separate kinds of radicals and talked about Russians as if they were all Jews. . . . [He] demanded that society protect itself against such horrible creatures by giving us the fullest punishment under the law. A police chief in Birmingham, Alabama, made a similar statement when Herndon was later arrested alongside two white communists: Too bad I can’t make a public example of you Reds, Russians, Jews, and niggers. . . . That God-damn Legislature of ours — it won’t enact the criminal-anarchy law I recommended against you bastards! If it were up to me alone I wouldn’t be treating you as leniently as the courts do. Trials should be only for Americans and not for such Red trash as you. You’ve been agitating far too much and stirring up trouble among our steel workers and miners. If I had my own way about it I’d line you all up against the wall and shoot you down like dogs. The Red Black / Black Red, appended to the Russian and the Jew, was a foreign/foreign-inspired subversive, a criminal-anarchist, an agitator, and a piece of trash to be disposed of. No law or punishment was too harsh for this bastard, troublemaker, dog. Herndon’s Radical Blackness, coupled with his interracial organizing activities, made him an abomination to U.S. Capitalist Racist Society generally, and in the Southern Black Belt particularly, because he challenged the trifecta of class domination, racist oppression, and dehumanizing poverty as the capitalist system was being called into question during the Great Depression. While working in a coal mine in Birmingham, Alabama, Herndon saw a handbill advertising a meeting at which the dire situation of the city’s workers would be discussed. He was drawn as much to the CPUSA’s staunch reproach of Jim Crow and emphasis on interracial cooperation as he was to the class analysis the Party offered. The very first meeting he attended was raided by police because of these very factors, and from then on Herndon became a persistent target of police harassment. “Time and again I was now picked up on the street and arrested,” he wrote. “I became reconciled to the idea of being arrested. . . . Inevitably I would walk straight into the dragnet the police set for me. It got to be such a habit that every time I looked at a policeman I knew ‘it’ was coming.” Herndon’s experience of repression combined public and private deployment of the Black Scare and the Red Scare. When he was arrested for “vagrancy” in Birmingham on the way to a Labor Day rally coordinated by the CPUSA and other organizations, he was held in jail for eleven days and put in the “dog house” for mentally insane prisoners. This was because any “nigger” who chose to be a communist must be crazy — and dangerous. Then, after hearing the case, the judge attempted to have him murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. In New Orleans, Louisiana, he was arrested for participating in a longshoreman’s strike and charged with “violation of the Federal Injunction, inciting to riot, dangerous and suspicious, distributing circulars without a permit, and having no visible means of support.” The “inciting to riot” charge no doubt had to do with the fact that he was a Red Black / Black Red supporting workers’ militancy. Herndon was policed and harassed further when he attended the All-Southern Conference for the Scottsboro Defense in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 31, 1931. The police had gathered in a show of extraordinary force against interracialism and against the Northern communists who would be speaking. Moreover, authorities had no problem creating trumped-up charges to frame the Red Black / Black Red — a process organizations like the International Labor Defense called “legal lynching.” Then, on August 3, 1931, Herndon was accused of murdering three white girls in an all-white suburb of Birmingham. After beating him in an interrogation room, several officers took him out to the woods and brutalized him with a rubber hose. When he wouldn’t confess to the crime, they returned him to the Birmingham County Jail and threw him in solitary confinement with no medical attention. When the murder charge did not stick, Herndon was convicted of vagrancy along with two other comrades. This dragnet of unmitigated torment conveyed that no punishment was too harsh, no violence was too brutal, no rationalization was too outlandish, and no crime was beyond the realm of possibility for the Red Black / Black Red. Because of the incessant threat of arrest, lynching, and police assassination, in 1932 the party reassigned Herndon to Atlanta, Georgia, where he would continue his organizing work — and face the fight of, and for, his life. Herndon’s arrest and conviction under Georgia’s anti-insurrection law was the archetypal punishment for being a Red Black / Black Red. The law was a manifestation of an earlier confluence of the Black and Red Scares, namely, fear surrounding the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831 and hostility to increased abolitionist militancy. These laws sanctioned the full use of the state to suppress actual and suspected slave revolts and conspiracies and aimed to criminalize any public opposition to the slave system. After the Civil War, references to slaves were removed, but the definition and harsh penalization of insurrection remained. The Georgia Penal Code was updated to read: “Attempt, by persuasion or otherwise, to induce others to join in any combined resistance to the lawful authority of the State, shall constitute an attempt to incite insurrection.” Unless the jury recommended mercy, insurrection was a capital crime. Leading up to his arrest, Herndon, now a leader in the Atlanta Unemployed Council, called for an interracial demonstration at the Fulton County Courthouse after the city of Atlanta, in the throes of the Great Depression, closed all relief stations and attempted to drop twenty-three thousand families from the relief rolls and send them back to the farms, where there was no work — effectively a death sentence for the impoverished masses. Herndon and his comrades drafted a list of demands and organized a protest. More than one thousand Black and white, male and female, workers participated, striking fear into the hearts of authorities because a gathering of that size of Black and white workers had never taken place in the South. Despite the efforts of authorities to foment racial animosity among protesters by only negotiating with whites and excluding Blacks, the protest was a success: the twenty-three thousand families remained on the relief rolls and $6,000 of additional funds were appropriated for relief. As a direct result of this interracial, militant protest, Herndon was arrested on July 11, 1932, and incarcerated for eleven days under “suspicion” without being formally charged. He was eventually indicted for three counts under Section 56 of the Georgia Penal Code, which criminalized “any attempt by persuasion or otherwise, to induce others to join in any combined resistance to the lawful authority of the State.” Such action constituted “an attempt to incite insurrection.” As a Red Black / Black Red, Herndon’s contravention of racial hierarchy through interracialism, challenge to the ruling elite by organizing workers, and rejection of capitalist racism by demanding economic relief for Black and white families were not expressions of freedom of speech and assembly, but rather dangerous rioting aimed at overthrowing the government. His membership in and organizing on behalf of the CPUSA amounted to foreign-inspired subversion and an attempt to undermine democracy with dictatorship, upend property relations, and foment revolution. Further, for circulating radical ideas, the Red Black / Black Red was guilty of insurrection because his analysis threatened the Jim Crow regime that obfuscated Georgia’s capitalist exploitation of Black and white workers alike—albeit at different levels of intensity. Not unlike enslaved Africans gaining literacy, the circulation of revolutionary ideas was considered dangerous and unlawful such that one Radical Black possessing “subversive” literature, like an enslaved African possessing a book, menaced the whole system. The Black Scare and Red Scare were activated throughout Herndon’s trial to underscore the danger of the Red Black / Black Red, with the racial position of the CPUSA targeted as much as its economic program. The prosecutor argued: “The defendant claims to be interested in the unemployed, but that is just a disguise. He is only trying to stir up the races, to foment and create trouble that will bring about an industrial revolution so he and his Communist friends can set up a godless dictatorship in this country based on the style of the Bolsheviki dictatorship in Soviet Russia.” Here, the Red Black / Black Red was accused of using Depression conditions to manipulate the unemployed, stir up race hatred, overthrow the economic order, and subject the United States to foreign domination. The prosecutor also asserted that because Herndon was an admitted member of the CPUSA, he should legally be sent to the electric chair, along with “other Reds who might plan to invade” the state of Georgia. In less than two hours, Herndon was found guilty, but, in act of Southern “mercy,” the jury recommended twenty years on the chain gang instead of the electric chair. After almost six months, the International Labor Defense fund paid Herndon’s bail and appealed his case. The United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1937. Through the logic and discourse of the Black Scare and the Red Scare, the West Indian, the Outside Agitator, and the Red Black / Black Red posed acute threats to the life and limb of superior whites, the racial order, the capitalist system of private property, Wall Street Imperialism, and European colonialism. In addition to their attempt to subvert the extant order, all three genres of Radical Blackness were linked through their promotion of a dire threat to U.S. Capitalist Racist Society: Black self-determination. Adapted and excerpted from Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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Post by Admin on Feb 7, 2024 23:11:21 GMT
The Very Idea of 'Race' Is Pseudoscience, But It Persists to Keep Workers Divided As we enter Black History Month, it is important to understand how management race science was developed to divide and conquer the workforce as it struggled against long odds to form labor unions. www.commondreams.org/opinion/managed-control-race-scienceIn 1919, more than 350,000 steelworkers went on strike to secure an eight-hour work day. They were crushed by employers who used thugs, government injunctions, and troops to defeat them. The industry also relied heavily on ethnic divisions to undermine the union, a tactic that worked for the next 25 years. (The United Steelworkers of America, launched in 1942, was able to overcome those divisions to form a powerful union that still thrives today.) As we enter Black History Month, it is important to understand how management race science was developed to divide and conquer the workforce as it struggled against long odds to form labor unions. Within a few years of the 1919 steel strike, race pseudoscientists had developed racial hierarchies to delineate who was fit, by birth, to do different kinds of jobs. The goal was to isolate individual workers from the larger group of workers in order to undermine solidarity. The chart below, produced in 1926 for the Central Tube Company in Pittsburgh, shows how the workforce was carved up into an intricate hierarchy of talents based on supposedly innate racial or ethnic talents. Who would have guessed that Slovaks were innately good at track cleaning?
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Post by Admin on Feb 9, 2024 1:30:51 GMT
The Agonizing Reality Confronting the Post-Civil Rights Generation Reflecting on the systems that maintain racism and separatism in America. www.truthdig.com/articles/black-history-and-me/The youngest child of Martin Luther King Jr. died last month. Like me, Dexter King was 62, part of what I call the 1.5 generation. Born into a world of legal segregation, the last formal vestige of slavery, we came of age in a world without it. One-point-five is a term usually used to describe first-generation immigrants, but Black people fit the definition of internal immigrants. They spent the last century moving out of the South to seek places more hospitable to their presence; my people moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles for that reason. I always felt more fortunate than my forebears, whose stories about life in the old country fascinated and horrified me. How wonderful, I thought, that I had been spared the South and the racial madness that routinely separated my father and grandmother by skin color on New Orleans streetcars. My parents cautiously expected my generation, equipped with hard-won new freedoms, to continue changing the country for the better. I felt the same. My brave new life would redeem the old. I was wrong. The 1.5 generation now carries the same grievances as previous generations, which remain valid even as they become harder to define amid a shifting new-century context. It turned out that the seismic change from segregation to a Jim Crow-free country benefited us less than white folks who were eager to drop the subject of racial justice as much as possible, preferably altogether. After the tumult of the ’60s, they were exhausted and not especially interested in fulfilling the promise of American democracy that MLK stood for. In this vacuum, the old conservatism and caste-ism that had defined the country for so much of its history reasserted itself, formalized in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Those of us invested in the promise of democracy have been fighting headwinds ever since. It’s not that the 1.5-ers didn’t experience transformation. We solidified the foundation of a Black middle class, one with unprecedented levels of education and agency. Disco democratized the dance floor. I attended an integrated public high school and made white friends, something practically forbidden to my parents. I felt part of the whole American zeitgeist of individualism and self-improvement; an illusion, to be sure, but to feel fully participant in the illusion seemed like progress. Previous generations of Black people were told they didn’t belong. I assumed I belonged, and those who didn’t think so were marginalized. I understood that racism and the grievances of the ’60s persisted, of course, but I understood them from my new position in the social and cultural order. The “we” that James Baldwin used defiantly and sometimes bitterly in his famous critiques of American morality now had meaning. We might argue over the details of racial justice, but we agreed that racism itself was fundamentally unworkable. Surely, we would not have to argue about that ever again. This illusion has only recently begun to collapse. In the last few months I’ve had to acknowledge to myself what MAGA is doing: reviving racism and separatism as the true American way of life. Much of the country — including those I believed had gotten over that hump in the ’60s — is embracing the revival with gusto. This is emotionally devastating. Younger Black folk raised on the Black Lives Matter movement, Gen Y and Gen Z, are less naïve and better equipped to deal with ubiquitous inequality. For my cohort, MLK’s dream was not a speech but a directive that we took seriously; we were the first beneficiaries of a country reconfigured by the formal death of Jim Crow. It’s no accident that Obama, a 1.5-er born in 1961, believed he was uniquely qualified to bridge that gap between old racial fears and a new multiracial consciousness that propelled him into the White House. This was the basis of his Hope-in-America campaign that, for a moment, thrust our pioneering generation into the spotlight. But far from creating a genuinely post-racial society, Obama’s presidency produced Donald Trump and Trumpism. It’s been agonizing to watch. The truth is that the Black repositioning post-civil rights was always precarious, subject to downgrading at any moment. In the ’70s, before I attended that high school (which has since resegregated) I went to a predominantly white elementary school that was integrated, briefly, before white folks abandoned it in droves. In college, I was baselessly accused of plagiarizing a term paper because, the very liberal professor insisted, people like me were constitutionally incapable of intellectual and literary competence. I remember feeling astonished, and then at a loss; my lifelong confidence in inclusion was shattered in an instant, with nothing to replace it. My generation never achieved economic stability, to say nothing of prosperity, the middle class notwithstanding. Those with good public sector jobs got through a kind of wormhole that closed up years ago. Today’s reenergized union movement reminds me that Black people never got a foothold anywhere in the private sector. Nor have we recovered from the monumental housing crash of 2009, when Black households lost more than half of their wealth, if it can be called that. And it’s looking grim for our children. On my block of aging Black folk who bought their homes back when homes were affordable on moderate incomes, young Black families simply can’t break into ownership, or even rentership. That leaves us ever more vulnerable to gentrification. At this late date, none of us have arrived. Whether we’re 26 or 62, the Dexter generation or the alpha generation, we all remain in flux, still in the process of becoming. There is at least the familiar comfort of community in all this. Across generations, Black people struggle to maintain reasonable, sometimes radical expectations of change while continuing to perfect the increasingly fine art of survival. It may not be the dream we had in mind, but history once again requires nothing less.
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