Race and class in the US: Why racism matters
BY MALIK MIAH
SAN FRANCISCO — The historic half-million march across Sydney Harbour Bridge on May 28 in solidarity with the Aboriginal people showed why race and racism remains an important issue for all people who support human rights and equality. And it reminds me of my first racist experience in Australia.
After attending a political conference in Sydney in early 1995, I took a brief holiday in the Northern Territory. I had read about Australia's racist past and its treatment of the Aboriginal people. I was also aware of the country's "whites only" immigration policy that was ended only in the 1970s. But I didn't anticipate the blatant racism directed at the indigenous people by white Australians, nor the racism directed at me on a flight to Sydney from Alice Springs.
Aboriginal people were treated as though they didn't exist. Young Aborigines were chased from a local store at the resort we were staying at and a park ranger spoke about Aborigines in derogatory terms. It reminded me of the Jim Crow-segregated US south and some of my racist run-ins with cops while growing up in Detroit in the 1960s.
On my flight back to Sydney I was seated next to a white child whose parents were in another row. Before the plane departed, the flight attendant and the parents were whispering about moving me away from their child. I ignored the insult (since I was flying standby) and was finally moved to another seat. I've been stopped before for being the "wrong" colour, so wasn't surprised by the slight for "flying while black".
I was reminded of this experience when Green Left Weekly agreed to a fortnightly column on race and class relations in the US being added to the paper. Our experiences in the US, while unique, obviously occur in Australia and other capitalist countries. Racism is as ever-present under capitalism in the imperialist epoch, as is class exploitation.
Racism is primarily a social-political construct. It is based on physical features, skin colour in particular. As biological science proves, the differences between two people of the same race can be greater than between two people of different races.
Because of the dominance of European (white-skinned) people under capitalism, people of darker colour have been portrayed as inferior in order to justify their super-exploitation and outright genocide so that the conquerors can take land and natural resources.
Racism has a special, rotten, smell to it. In the US, Native Americans (Indians) were nearly exterminated by the European colonists. Africans were brought here as slaves. Asian immigrants and darker-skinned Latin American immigrants were lumped together as inferior to Caucasians, including those from Latin America.
(A recent New York Times feature showed how the worlds of two Cubans — one white, one black — who had been best friends on the island, changed in Miami. The white Cuban fitted right in and quickly picked up the racist attitudes of US whites. The black Cuban became an outcast among white Cuban emigres, who saw him first as a black man. He went to live on the African-American side of town.)
Racism under US capitalism turns all dark-skinned people into hyphenated people: African- or Asian- or Latino- or Native-Americans. A dark-skinned person in the US can't hide from it; assumptions are made. It is no wonder that African Americans have the highest hypertension levels in the country!
Whites, on the other hand, including new arrivals from Ireland, Russia or Cuba, instantaneously join the white majority. How this racism plays out in life — between racial groups, in the unions — will be a topic I'll discuss in future columns.
The column will also discuss class exploitation and its relationship to racism. African Americans are overwhelmingly poor and working-class. The black working class suffers from both discrimination and class exploitation, exacerbated by racism.
People may think class exploitation is colour-blind. This isn't true. While all workers are paid the lowest wage the employers can get away with, workers of colour, because of racism, consistently receive less.
Even as incomes have grown, the colour-based wage disparity and wealth gap has remained constant. No wonder you can't find a white who would ever say, "I wish I was black".
Most white workers don't understand this fact. The bosses' propaganda persuades them to look down on those below them on the economic ladder and to falsely believe that black workers are in the position we are because of our own actions. ("Why else", a white co-worker once told me, "are more blacks in prisons? They must commit the crimes.")
At the same time, white workers as a whole are less racist today than their parents were. That's because of victories won by a mass civil rights movement, which ended US-style apartheid in the 1960s. The problem is that the ruling families don't let up in trying to reverse positive changes in mass consciousness; racism creates too much wealth for them.
This two steps forward, one step backward process is permanent for so long as institutionalised discrimination isn't overturned. The ability of the rulers to tap the false (racist) consciousness of white workers is a central reason why the working class remains politically weak, unable to unite against the common capitalist enemy.
Finally, a brief biographical note. I'm of mixed heritage, my father being an immigrant from Bangladesh and my mother African American. I experience anti-Asian as well as anti-black racism.
My first political consciousness was against British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. That led me, in the late 1960s, to read the Communist Manifesto and become a socialist. I actively supported local civil rights protests and became an activist against the war in Vietnam while still in high school.
Presently, I'm a union activist, employed as an airline mechanic by United Airlines, which is why I've been to Australia many times and learned how similar the US and Australia happen to be.