by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 2/17/14

By One Pissed Off Liberal, Daily Kos

The victory represented by the election of Barack Obama was also a tragedy, as it turns out. The sellout was predictable, perhaps inevitable but was surprising in its swiftness and completeness. From day one it was clear that we’d been had. The 1% neocon/neoliberal cabal wasted no time asserting itself through their new spokesperson. President Obama, as presidents do, made his loyalty to the empire evident.

By Barry Grey, wsws.org

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, the “neighborhood watch” volunteer who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February of 2012, has provoked popular outrage. The wanton slaying of an unarmed African American youth, who posed no danger to his assailant, and the judicial travesty of the killer’s exoneration have become a focus of broader opposition to the injustices that pervade American society.

Both the tragic death of Martin and the outrage of Zimmerman’s acquittal can be understood only within the context of decades of political reaction in the United States, in which the ruling class has relentlessly sought to promote social backwardness, militarism and an atmosphere of vigilantism.

As was the case after the death of Trayvon Martin, the focus of the response of the media, the political establishment and the various middle-class pseudo-left groups to Zimmerman’s acquittal has been to frame the case in exclusively racial terms.

The general call—yet one more time—is for a “national discussion on race.” This is an evasion of the more fundamental social, political and historical issues raised by the Trayvon Martin case.

Typical was the editorial in the New York Times, which declared that Zimmerman’s acquittal “certainly is about race,” and went on to describe the United States as “a country plagued by racism.” More hysterical variations on the same theme were provided by the International Socialist Organization’s SocialistWorker.org and the Nation magazine. The latter published a piece (“White Supremacy Acquits Zimmerman”) that denounced Zimmerman’s defense lawyers for citing “slave-owning rapist Thomas Jefferson.”

Was race an issue in the Trayvon Martin story and does it play a role in American life? Of course. But it cannot be understood as a thing-in-itself, ripped out of its real material, economic, social and historical roots in the development of American and world capitalism. To do so is to obscure the more fundamental source of oppression of workers and youth of all races, colors, religions, etc.—the exploitation of the working class—and the real driving force of history: the class struggle.

More than 40 years have passed since the civil rights movement, which played such an important role in American political life. At that time, the question of race was understood to be bound up with class questions. It was widely accepted that the conditions facing African Americans—Jim Crow segregation, violence, lynchings in the South; poverty, police brutality, discrimination in the North—were embedded in capitalist society, and that racism was one of the most noxious tools used by the American ruling class to divide the working class.

In the great class movement for industrial unions that had preceded the civil rights movement, a critical issue had been combating racism and uniting the workers of all races and nationalities. Henry Ford worked to foment racial divisions, importing African American workers from the South to serve as scabs in the 1941 strike called by the United Auto Workers. His scheme failed mainly due to the efforts of socialist-minded auto workers who opposed all forms of racism and fought to unite the workers in a common struggle against industrial despotism.

The civil rights movement of the succeeding decades increasingly came to be embedded in the broader class struggle, including a series of militant strikes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was becoming ever more clear that the struggle for civil rights was bound up with the struggle of the working class as a whole.

The civil rights movement came under the influence of socialists, a development that was bitterly opposed by more conservative leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, though they remained reformist in terms of their program, were influenced by socialist thought and saw the liberation of African Americans as inseparably linked to the struggle for social as well as legal equality. They were not, in contrast to Barack Obama, supporters of “free enterprise.”

In response to the social upheavals of the 1960s, the American ruling class adopted a policy of cultivating a section of the civil rights leadership and African American upper-middle class and integrating them into the system of economic and political power via the Democratic Party and through the medium of affirmative action and identity politics. This process coincided with the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any policy of social reform.

For more than four decades, the American ruling class has worked by such means to disconnect the question of race from the question of class. This has served the interests of a wealthy African American establishment, but the impact on the broad masses has been catastrophic. The conditions of the majority of African Americans today are worse than they were 40 years ago.

It is for the privileged layers of the upper-middle class that have benefited from affirmative action that the proponents of racial and other forms of identity politics speak.

There is a huge element of hypocrisy and self-interest in the attempt to utilize the Trayvon Martin case to promote racial politics. Political charlatans such as Al Sharpton, leaders of the official civil rights organizations, affluent African American media pundits and academics, fake-left groups such as the International Socialist Organization—all of them tied to the Democratic Party—have a vested interest in keeping the identity politics industry going.

These groups have no desire to address the broader social and political context of the Trayvon Martin case. Their position was summed up by Obama, who posted a stunningly hypocritical statement on the White House web site declaring, “We are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.”

It is virtually never mentioned that the “gated community” in Sanford, Florida where Trayvon Martin was murdered was riddled with foreclosed homes. In the nonstop media commentary on the Martin case, there is barely a mention of mass unemployment, rising poverty and the devastating impact of corporate wage-cutting and government austerity.

Instead of a “national conversation on race,” what is needed is a “national conversation” on the horrific conditions produced by the collapse of the industrial infrastructure of the United States, the rise of a predatory financial aristocracy, the militarization and brutalization of American society, and the growth of social inequality.

These are conditions that can be overcome only through the unification of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program that opposes the capitalist system and the class exploitation at its heart.

Barry Grey is a senior political analyst with the wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“The government would have to prove that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus.”

When Trayvon Martin was murdered by a “creepy cracker” in February, 2012, an outraged Black America mobilized to force the State of Florida to put the perpetrator on trial. Seventeen months later, in the words of President Obama, “a jury has spoken,” affirming Florida’s original contention that Trayvon’s death was not a criminal act.

The White House also wanted Trayvon to be forgotten. Three weeks after the shooting, speaking through his press secretary, the president declared, “obviously we’re not going to wade into a local law-enforcement matter.” A few days later, Obama sought to placate Black public opinion with a statement of physical fact: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the wake of the acquittal, Obama’s press people have announced he’ll stay out of the case while Attorney General Eric Holder pretends to explore the possibility of pursuing civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Holder told the sorority sisters [11] of Delta Sigma Theta that Martin’s death was “tragic” and “unnecessary,” but a federal prosecution of Zimmerman is highly unlikely. The government would have to prove that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus – a fact that is as obvious to Black America as a mob lynching at high noon at Times Square. However, except for the fact that he murdered a teenager, George Zimmerman is no more provably racist in a U.S. court than most white Americans – which is why the Florida cops and prosecutors initially refused to arrest him, why the jury acquitted him, and why the bulk of the corporate media empathized with the defense.

“Zimmerman was acting on the same racist assumption that motivates police across the country.”

The white public at-large shares with Zimmerman the belief – a received wisdom, embedded in their worldview – that young Black males are inherently dangerous. From this “fact” flows a reflex of behaviors that, to most whites, are simply commonsensical. If young Black males are inherently dangerous, they must be watched, relentlessly. Black hyper-surveillance is the great intake mechanism for mass Black Incarceration. Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman, was acting on the same racist assumption that motivates police across the country, which is why the cops in Zimmerman’s trial were more valuable to the defense than to the prosecution. The same goes for the prosecutors and judge, much of whose daily lives are organized around the inherent dangerousness of young Black men.

Naturally, the cops testified that they saw no racial animus in Zimmerman’s actions – just as they would deny that their own hyper-surveillance of Black communities is motivated by animus. The jury, like the vast majority of white Americans, approves of the Black surveillance regime, and of those civilians that also keep an eye out for “crime” – which is synonymous with “Black males.” As juror B37 [12] put it, Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” – meaning, she saw Zimmerman’s profiling and pursuit of Trayvon as well-intentioned and civic-minded; clearly, not malicious. Something “just went terribly wrong” – an unfortunate turn of events, but not a crime. The unanimous verdict shows the other jurors also perceived no malice – no racial motivation – by Zimmerman.

In fact, white folks in general do not think it is racist or evidence of malice to believe that Black males are a prima facie threat; it’s just a fact. Therefore, it is “reasonable” that civilians, as well as cops, be prepared to use deadly force in confrontations with Black males.

“The white public at-large shares with Zimmerman the belief that young Black males are inherently dangerous.”

The answer to the question: What would a reasonable person do? is essential to American law. Police, prosecutors, judges and jurors base their decisions on their own subjective perception of the state of mind of people who harm or kill, and the reasonableness of their actions. To most white people, it is reasonable to reflexively suspect young Black males of having criminal intent, and reasonable to fear for one’s life in a confrontation with such a person. “Not guilty” is reasonable, when everyone that counts shares the same assumptions as the perpetrator.

Black people cannot fix that. We cannot change white people’s warped perceptions of the world, although, Lord knows, we’ve tried. It has been 45 years since passage of the last major civil rights bill, the Fair Housing Act, yet housing segregation remains general, overwhelmingly due to white people’s decisions in the housing market, based on their racial assumptions. So powerful is the general white racist belief in Black criminality and inferiority, the mere presence of African Americans on or near property devalues the land. This is racism with the practical force of economic law. The same “law” has locked Black unemployment at roughly twice that of whites for more than two generations – an outcome so consistent over time it must be a product of the political culture (racism) rather than the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

The Brown Supreme Court decision is nearly 60 years old, yet school segregation is, in some ways, more entrenched than ever – again, because of white peoples decisions. Not only is school segregation on the rise, but charterization is creating an alternative public-financed system designed primarily for Black and brown kids. In many cities, whites can only be retained in the public schools by offering them the best facilities and programs. School desegregation has largely been abandoned as a lost cause, because of the whites’ “intransigence” – a euphemism for enduring racism: a refusal to share space with Black people.

But, the criminal justice system is white supremacy’s playground, where racial hatreds, fears and suspicions are given free rein. One out of eight prison inmates on the planet are African American, proof of the general white urge to purge Blacks from the national landscape. Trayvon Martin fell victim to the extrajudicial component of the Black-erasure machine.

“Racism is a form of mental illness, in which the afflicted perceive things that are not there, and are blind to that which is right in front of their eyes.”

White people don’t think they are malicious and racist; rather, they are simply defending themselves (quite reasonably, they believe) from Black evildoing. That whites perceive themselves as under collective attack is evident in the results of a Harvard and Tufts University study [13], which shows majorities of whites are convinced they are the primary victims of racial discrimination in America. Such mass madness is incomprehensible to sane people, but racism is a form of mental illness, in which the afflicted perceive things that are not there, and are blind to that which is right in front of their eyes.

To live under the sway of such people is a nightmare. Most of African American history has been a struggle to mollify or tame the racist beast, to find a way to coexist with white insanity, possibly to cure it, or to make ourselves powerful and independent enough that the madness cannot harm us too badly. George Zimmerman’s acquittal is so painful to Black America because it signals that our ancient enemy – white supremacy – is alive and raging, virtually impervious to any legal levers we can pull. The feeling of impotence is heightened by the growing realization that the Black president – a man who, in his noxious “Philadelphia [14]” speech, denied that racism had ever been endemic to America – cannot and will not make anyone atone for Trayvon.

We have been in this spot before – or, rather, we have always been in this spot, but have for the last 40 years been urged to imagine that something fundamental had changed among white Americans. Trayvon smacks us awake.

We must organize for self-defense, in every meaning of the term, and create a Black political dynamic – a Movement – that will make our enemies fear the consequences of their actions.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.