Hello, this is Dr. Harriet Fraad on Capitalism
Hits Home: An Interpersonal Update.
This is a show about the intersection of capitalism,
class, and our personal lives.
I'm going to talk about the disadvantaged
position of African Americans in our society,
how it happened, and what can be done about
it in a relatively parallel fashion.
I'm doing this because of a comment that our
listeners sent me, and I will read to you
that comment: “I think your analysis is
on point, but it's missing a massive intersection.
The intersection of race goes hand in hand
with class and capitalism.
When we ignore that, we miss a huge connection
into the behavior of modern American men”—I
think of women too but—"Black men have had
some of the lowest wages and employment for
decades, and black women have always had to
work unlike white women before the 1970s.
This decline affects races of men in completely
different ways.”
And I agree and would like to say that white
supremacy is certainly as strong a tradition
as male supremacy in the United States.
There are very many similarities between gender
and race in the United States; though they're
hardly identical.
On January 31st, 1865, the U.S. ratified the
13th amendment which abolished slavery in
the United States.
It provides that and I quote, “Neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for a crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist in the United
States…”
That's interesting: “except as a punishment
for a crime” Black men are six times more
likely to be incarcerated in jails and prisons
than white men.
Black women are put in jail twice as much
time and twice as often as white women.
Their sentences are about 20% longer as well
which allow them to be used as slaves.
Just as a civil rights movement was enacted,
prison brought people back to slavery, and
black people are disproportionately those
enslaved people.
Now first of all, there was formal slavery.
In order to enslave other human beings, to
rip him off, to take them out of their homes,
send them overseas, remove their languages,
put them up to back-breaking labor and rape
them at will.
The good Christians needed an ideology that
rationalized such terrible crimes just like
men needed a rationalization for keeping women
imprisoned in the home.
From there—from that need for ideologies—black
inferiority was born.
You have to really rationalize the crime of
enslaving other people with a strong rationalization,
and that rationalization was “whites were
designated by God to be superior, and blacks
were fortunate to be protected because as
weak minds and inferior people they couldn't
take care of themselves.”
Anyway, you had to point to something, so
you pointed to what are really very small,
exterior differences, because on the inside
we’re all the same.
You had to point to things like skin color,
the shape of the nose, the shape of lips,
the curl in hair on which to pin a judgment
that these humans were inferior, and we were
justified in enslaving them.
Just as the ideology of male supremacy can't
always last uninterrupted in the face of outrageous
injustice, neither can the ideology of white
supremacy.
Sometimes it is fought in its oppressive hideousness.
How did it get this way?
Well, the slaves were freed—unless they
were found guilty of a crime—way back in
1865.
And way back then, those people from the north
who were enlightened and had some morality
and those southerners who had some moral sense
of obligation to the people that they enslaved
and many what were then African Americans
or black people created rules and laws of
reconstruction to help former enslaved people
function in our advanced society as equals.
Programs of education, political empowerment,
and support were accompanied by federal protection
of troops against the vigilantes who would
keep black people from voting or working through
intimidation and violence.
However, as happened with Trump and his ilk
and has been happening since the New Deal,
right-wing white supremacists in north and
south were unsatisfied with this—with reconstruction.
They united and promised one of the candidates—Hayes,
President Hayes—that if he would end reconstruction
and protections for black people and call
off reconstruction, he would get their votes;
much as many Republicans in a quieter more
dog-whistle policy let whites know that they
will not protect black people if they're elected.
The main method of control wasn't the violence—which
was of course also used—but to deny black
people of decently paid employment.
Black men were never paid the family wages
of white men, so they couldn't support their
families.
Black women were economically forced into
the lowest paid work as maids or nannies,
as servants or in the lowliest jobs.
Black men were employed either not at all—were
unemployed—or in jobs that did not earn
money.
They couldn't support their families.
Black women had to often neglect their own
children while they took care of white people's
children and homes.
They were denied the mothering they needed.
Their families were denied the support that
they needed.
And then in 1965, the Moynihan Report came
out that said that the problem with the black
family is that blacks are inherently pathological,
and their men are lazy too lazy to support
their families.
This is very interesting because within the
last 10 years, a right-wing author called
Charles Murray wrote a book that said the
white working-class—which now is not paid
enough to support a family—was also morally
inferior and their men were lazy and that's
why white families are falling apart.
Black men who wanted to make money had to
circumvent the law and then they were incarcerated
where they could be used as slave labor.
It's interesting that the incarceration rates
used to zoom in the south at around cotton-picking
time because then if you were incarcerated
you could be enslaved to pick cotton.
Blacks were the last hired and the first fired
which prevent them just like women who take
time out to take care of homes and children
and elders, they didn't accumulate the seniority
and the promotions and the wealth.
Black wealth in America is seven times less
than white wealth.
Also, once you had the rule that involuntary
servitude and slavery were okay as a punishment
for crime—this is after the Civil Rights
Movement—black men were 400 times more likely
to be put in prison than they had previously.
So, what you had was the reenslavement of
a population made even more severe by private
for-profit capitalist prisons that required
a certain number of prisoners and judges who
were actually—some were—exposed of getting
big kickbacks from private prisons for sending
people to prison.
The tradition of white supremacy is a powerful
one.
It took a civil rights movement to end formal
segregation, formal pushing down of black
people.
The two great leaders of the civil rights
movement and the greatest leaders America
has had since were Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X.
They both realized shortly before their deaths
that the U.S. needed class transformation
as well as race transformation.
They needed class and race transformation
together.
They needed a unity of blacks and whites together
against war profiteering and capitalism.
Martin Luther King spoke powerfully with that
message in 1967 and 1968.
King was assassinated in 1968.
It wasn't so hard to find a white racist to
murder.
Dr. King.
When Malcolm X traveled abroad, he changed
his ideas of the importance of racial segregation
to empower blacks.
He noticed the people following him and monitoring
him were not the usual southern racists.
They seemed to be from the State Department.
And of course, he too was murdered when he
came back and advocated race and class unity
to transform America.
And naturally, it wasn't very hard to find
someone within the divisions in the black
community to murder Malcolm X.
We have to understand that the trajectories
of white supremacy and also male supremacy
are quite parallel, and that doesn't mean
that there aren't black men who are happy
to exploit and dominate black women because
that's a privilege that men have just like
poor whites are often ready to discriminate
against black people because at least they
could feel superior to someone.
And that's why white bosses often try to segregate
and antagonize whites and blacks and men and
women from one another because working-class
unity is needed to make change and raise salaries
and benefits.
White supremacy and male supremacy are fed
by Donald Trump who represents the interests
of the 1% against the 99%.
And although white supremacy and male supremacy
have slightly different histories, and black
women have different histories from white
women in that they were particularly sexually
exploited and also economically exploited—but
also independent, much more independent because
they had to earn their own money—those kinds
of bias against one another allow the 1% to
continue and the 99% to be divided and not
fight together for the kind of class, race,
and gender transformation that America needs
to be a truly egalitarian country where everyone
does have a chance, where we are equal beings;
not equals within a system of increasing inequality,
but equals.
So, we need to unite—women and men, blacks,
whites, browns—to understand one another
and create a powerful movement because that
alone can transform America.
Thank you for listening.
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