America the land of the free for the 1% -The Balitmore riots in May 2015 show that racism, poverty and police violence are an integral part of U.S. Society
On May 23 2016 the American legal system kept up its consistent record of denying justice to black Americans by the acquittal of police officer Edward M.Nero. Nero was involved in the arrest of Freddie Grey on April 19 2015 that was shortly followed by his death in police custody. Not one police officer has been convicted of the death of Freddie Grey in police custody. This confirms, if any confirmation was needed, of the deeply racist justice system that exists in the United States.
It is quite ironic that we have had the first black President in American history who has presided over an epidemic of police shootings of black Americans. As president Obama gallivanted around the world interfering in democractic elections and demonizing Russia as a threat to the peace and stability in Europe.
The death of Freddie Grey on April 19 2015 and the subsequent uprising of young black Americans in Baltimore was an outpouring of rage and anger at the shoot to kill policies of the local police force. However, it represented much more than that. It briefly forced the corporate media and the political elite to deal with the issues affecting the black community in America such as: endemic poverty, low pay, poor housing, lack of funding for schools, systematic racist discrimination of the criminal justice system that puts tens of thousands of young black men into the prison-industrial system every year.
Above all else, it revealed how absurd are the self righteous proclamations of corporate politicians such as Obama and Trump about American exceptionalism and how the good old US of A is a bastion of freedom and democracy. The systemic racism and attendant violence that has been inflicted upon the black population for the last two hundred years reveals how the United States is a country that has been ruled over by a capitalist elite that will maintain its undemocratic rule by any means necessary. An examination of U.S. history over the last 300 years reveals how racism and state violence against the oppressed are part and parcel of American capitalism.
During the 17th and 18th centuries white colonists from Britain started stealing large tracts of the land from the native American Indians and set up thousands of farms/plantations all over the eastern and southern parts of the country. At first, the white colonists used working class children and other poverty stricken people to work on their farms in the United States. Eventually the colonists realised that if their farms were to be more profitable they needed a cheaper source of labour to work on their plantations that grew cotton, sugar and tobacco. They turned to slavery as the solution to their need for supplies of cheap labour for their plantations.
During the 18th century the so called slave triangle developed. This involved slave ships from London, Liverpool and Bristol sailing to the West coast of Africa to kidnap and trade manufactured goods for slaves. During the 200 year history of the slave trade at least 20 million people were forced into the slave trade from West Africa.
The slave ships once full up would make the 3 month voyage across the Atlantic taking slaves to auctions where plantation owners bought them. The development of the slave trade played a a huge part in the development of the capitalist economic system in America during the 18 and 19th centuries.
There were many slave rebellions and uprisings during this time period that show how it was possible to fight back even under the most difficult of circumstances.
The end of the American civil war in 1865 brought an end to formal slavery in America and every former slave was promised 40 acres of land a mule. They were given the same legal rights as the white population.
However, in the souther sates of America known as the deep south a form of racist apartheid was set up called Jim Crow. Black Americans faced formal discrimination in every aspect of their lives.
Black children went to separate schools. Trains, shops, restaurants, water fountains, were racially segregated. Even park benches were had signs saying for whites or coloureds only.
This racist segregation was accompanied by the most terrible poverty for the black populations and the most horrendous violence with thousands of black people being lynched in public every year.
The end of World War Two brought a new mood of resistance within the black community. Over a million black men had fought against fascism in the war and now came home determined not to continue suffering discrimination back home. The development of revolutions in Africa and Asia during the 40s and 50s also contributed to a mood of defiance within the black community.
In 1956 in Montgomery Alabama a black woman called Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white person. She was arrested and put in jail. Her solitary protest triggered the civil rights movement that mobilised hundreds of thousands of black Americans in the struggle for equal rights and a an end to the racist segregation that existed in the deep south.
By 1964 the mass mobilisation of the black population forced President Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act that formally abolished all overt forms of racist discrimination in the southern states and guaranteed the right to vote for all black Americans.
By the mid 1960s the leading figure in the civil rights movement Martin Luther King began to speak out against America's involvement in the Vietnam war. He pointed out the hypocrisy of the USA fighting in Vietnam to preserve democracy against communism meanwhile millions of its citizens were living in poverty and subject to systematic discrimination. The black civil rights movement began to merge with the anti-war movement which mobilised millions of young white and black Americans.
By the late 1960s there were uprisings in scores of big cities. The national guard was mobilised on to the streets to crush these uprisings which saw hundreds of black Americans getting killed by those state forces which are meant to defend U.S. Citizens from their countries enemies.
The FBI pursued a policy of assassination of the leading figures in the civil rights movement such as King, Malcolm X and many of leading figures in the Black Panthers. The capitalist state began to feel threatened by the possibility of the black rebellion and the anti-war movement creating a revolutionary challenge to their system.
Positive discrimination policies were introduced to try and create a black middle class in an effort to derail the civil rights movement. The 1970s saw black neighbourhoods flooded with hard drugs such as heroin while the capitalist sate began to construct the prison-industrial system whose objective was the mass imprisonment of young black people to stop another civil rights movement developing.
The uprisings in Baltimore in 2015 and in Ferguson in 2014 helped bring the issues of racism back into the public spotlight. Despite having had its first black president America is a racist nightmare for millions of black Americans.
Figures showing systematic racist discrimination against black Americans
- African-Americans comprise only 13% of the U.S. population and 14% of the monthly drug users, but are 37% of the people arrested for drug-related offences in America.
- In a 2009 report, 2/3 of the criminals receiving life sentences were non-whites. In New York, it is 83%.
- African Americans make up 57% of the people in state prisons for drug offences.
- The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded that an African American male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of going to jail in his lifetime, while a Latino male has a 17% chance, and a white male only has a 6% chance.
- Unemployment: In 2013, African-Americans were nearly twice as likely to be unemployed (13%) as their white, non-Hispanic counterparts (7%)
- Food Insecurity:
One in four (26%) African American households are food insecure as compared with one in 10 (11%) of Caucasian households and one in seven (14%) households overall. - More than one in three African American children (36%) live in food-insecure households as compared to one in seven (15%) Caucasian children
- Poverty:
African American households experience disproportionate levels of poverty and have lower household income than their white, non-Hispanic counterparts.
Median income for African American households ($34,600) is significantly lower than their non-Hispanic White counterparts ($58,300).
Poverty rates for African Americans (27%) in 2013 were nearly triple that of non-Hispanic whites (10%).
Twelve percent of African Americans live in deep poverty (less than 50 percent of the federal poverty threshold), compared to six percent of all people in the United States.
The problems of racism, poverty, homelessness and police brutality are interlinked and are integral aspects of capitalist society in the United States.
Working class and middle class people in America have a common enemy: the 1% of the population who have become fantastically rich over the last few years while living standards have fallen dramatically for every one else. The American ruling class have militarised police forces all over the country in preparation for big battles to come against a population that will not accept the coming decimation of their living standards.
Ultimately, it is only the united struggle of all working and middle class people to overthrow capitalism that will lead to the end of racism in America and all forms of state oppression.
Sources:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/obamas-brexit-overreach-is-typical-of-his-arrogance/
http://english.khamenei.ir/news/4440/Demography-of-Blacks-in-the-U-S-What-do-statistics-tell-us
http://blackdemographics.com/households/poverty/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/205059/percentage-of-poor-black-families--in-the-us/
G.Novack, America's Revolutionary Heritage, Pathfinder Press, 1976
G.Novack, Genocide against the Indians: its role in the rise of US capitalism, Pathfinder Press, 1981.
H.Zinn, A People's History Of The United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
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