Some thoughts about racism

I was thinking about racism today and how much it effects all our lives. I was in a store and had to ask an employee to direct me to a particular department. I saw two women standing together talking, one was a youngish white woman and another an older black woman. I stopped and asked where I could find what I was looking for.

As I did so I found myself conscious of making sure I addressed both women. I looked them both in the eye and when the white woman answered (it seemed she knew where to point me) I asked more and looked in the direction of the other woman. I didn't want the black woman to feel that I was ignoring her.

As I headed on to my destination I thought about what I was doing and it reminded me about how that played out many times at work. I worked on a crew that most of the time consisted of five people. We repaired water lines for consumers in an urban setting. There was an equipment operator that dug the holes (me), a truck driver that took away the dirt and brought back what we called clean fill; a foreperson and two plumbers.

On many occasions I was the only white guy on the crew. My foreperson might be a Japanese America, a Latino or a black dude. One time I remember my foreperson was Latino, one plumber was Samoan and the other Mexican American; the truck driver was black.

We had a hole open in the street and were standing around discussing some aspect of the job and, as was often the case, a consumer came out of his house and wanted to know how long we'd have the water off and other details. He walked right up to me and asked me these questions. I immediately said I wasn't in charge and pointed toward my buddy, the Latino foreman.

This happened quite often. If there was no clear way of seeing the person of color was the boss, they always approached me. The foreman said it happened many many times over the years. It happened to others too. And it wasn't just white people asking. In this instance it was a black guy, but he too assumed the white guy was in charge.

I'm sure it happens a lot less today than it did 20 years ago, and beyond that, the person in charge was always white and always male.

Those who rule society try to convince us that racism, or other divisive issues like religious sectarianism, are personal issues. People of the same race or color all stick together and that's just the way it is. But racism is a social issue not a personal one. There is a much stronger tendency for people to find commonality along class lines as opposed to color or religion. Class unity is dangerous. And it's pretty obvious that the 10% or so that control 90% of the wealth in society are well aware that the rest of us outnumber them and are always trying to get a greater share of that wealth from the 10%. One way we know we can do that is class unity and the 10% undermine that process any way they can.

They undermine this powerful tendency by consciously introducing racist and other divisive ideas in to society and obviously class unity can break down or be almost impossible under certain conditions. Those that rule society control the means by which we manufacture the commodities we need for everyday life. But they also own the means that manufacture and distribute ideas, their ideas. They control the schools, the universities, the television and mass media. In other words, they control the means of communication. They also have the pulpit on their ideological side and the leaders of worker's organizations.

We don't have to look far to see what group of people wrote and introduced laws in to society forbidding interracial marriage and segregated communities. Who decided to pay women less than men? Poor people instinctly bond with other poor people. There has to be a conscious strategy introduced by those that would benefit least from such unity. When white indentured servants ran away with black slaves, the plantation owners made the white indentured servant responsible for the escape , for the African slave; very clever. It is easy to show that this division is not a natural one. In feudal society the dominant ideology expressed the view that the King was King by God's will, by divine right. It's obvious who thought that one up and it wasn't the peasant.

It is important for us to recognize that something like racism is not a personal problem but a social one. The capitalist class may put racism on the back burner during relative calm, but when working people move in to struggle there is a strong and historic tendency to overcome these divisions and look for our class allies; it is then that they will in one way or another, using all the weapons at their disposal, inject racist ideas making immigrants,the poor and those on welfare or workers in other countries the skapegoats for our ills.

I know I haven't always understood that racism is a social and not a personal problem; that it is a tactic in the armory of those who get rich off of those that work. Seeing it for what it really is makes it easier for us to fight it.