Racism Does Not Begin in the Home.

Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Some time ago I saw Gif or a Meme (I don’t really know the difference) on Facebook and the white woman in it was described as a racist. Needless to say, I did not believe that there was anything in that clip that couldn’t have lasted more than 30 seconds or so, that was evidence that the woman was a racist. She may have been, maybe not. I did know that I wouldn’t sign a petition to have her fired based on what I saw and heard.

Most of the comments had drawn the conclusion that she was, but what stunned me was the multitude of comments that claimed racism starts in the home.

No it does not. Racism is a social phenomenon and doesn’t start in the home or the individual. Racism starts in society and it is here that we learn it. It is the ideology of the ruling class that promotes it. We constantly hear people say that we are not born hating or we are not born racists but have to be taught it. So we know this in our gut.

In 1968, the Anglo/Welsh singer Petula Clark got her own show in the US. She was very popular when I was young and she is still alive. In the show, she was about to sing a duet with Harry Belafonte. The song was an antiwar song that they had written together. In the course of the performance Clark, touched Belafonte’s arm, took hold of it in fact. This was the first time a black man and white woman touched on US television. That says something about US society.

This caught the attention of a Chrysler representative who wanted the scene to be dumped and shot again; Chrysler Corp. sponsored the show. The corporation believed it would offend viewers and harm profits, especially in the South. The point is, a representative of a corporation was about to determine what could be shown and what can’t. It didn’t matter that he was protecting the sensitive feelings of racists. That he was protecting the delicate egos of a section of the white skinned population indoctrinated by three hundred years of racist propaganda resulting in the most barbaric and violent treatment of people of African descent and other non whites.  The Chrysler representative was defending the class interests of the faceless individuals behind the auto manufacturer. He was behaving normally; profits come first.

It turned out that he was fired. But why was he fired? That’s not difficult to figure out. There was a social revolution in the US with the victims of the ideology Chrysler was defending rising up en masse and threatening the propaganda that the US was the world’s greatest democracy full of opportunity for all people. The Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and so on was in full swing. There was growing opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam that cost some 3 million Vietnamese and 67,000 US lives. There was a huge antiwar movement led by the students.  There was a General Strike in France where ten million workers occupied the factories and a colonial revolution taking place as former European possessions gained independence and broke from direct rule. This is why Chrysler fired their representative on that set. The mood in society was changing.

And as far as sexism goes, or attitudes to women that are demeaning or seeing them merely as objects, what message is the image to the left saying to young girls or young boys? This image is plastered on the wall as I walk through one of the biggest shopping malls in my area. Parents with their toddlers and teenage boys and girls walk by it all the time. It is a clothes store named Garage but the image is extremely damaging and harmful to young girls especially and it certainly isn’t attire it is selling.  Who decided on that poster? The workers in the store? A customer survey? The mass media will always be discriminatory, will always foster division between people and the sexes rather than similarities we share, and particularly similarities with regard to work and what role we play in the production of society’s needs. In other words, our class interests. This image is an obstacle to human progress and none of us have partners, genuine partners, companions loved ones, those we travel through good and bad times with, that look like this as part of their normal everyday persona. This image in not about sexuality it is about power and exploitation for profit.

What forces in, US society wrote and passed racist laws?  The first permanent English settlement in the US was Jamestown in 1607. The Jamestown settlement was financed by the Virginia Company, merchants and capitalists looking for good returns on their investment. Being European, they had white skin. They brought with them over time English and Irish and Scottish poor people. Some had to work for years before they could be free of the grip of the ruling elite of the colony. As Theodore Allen explains in The Invention of the White Race, “The employing class as a matter of sound business practice, outlawed family life among limited term bond laborers. They were forbidden to marry without the express permission of their owners.”.  It was even forbidden for a priest or minister to perform the marriage ceremony of a bond laborer without the permission of their owner.

In the plantations of the Caribbean and the early colonial settlements, it would only be natural for people in the same conditions to form bonds with each other, to develop class solidarity. White and black ran away together to escape the horrible conditions. The plantation bourgeois passed laws that made the white escapee responsible for the black one to deter this and sow division. Unity among black and white reached a peak in the Virginia settlement with Bacon's Rebellion. Nathanial Bacon was a wealthy white landowner who had a major dispute with the colony’s ruling class of which he was a part. It was not over the rights of bondsmen and women but land. But as with all movements, they can have a life of their own. The rebellion ended up driving the colony’s ruling class from Jamestown and the colony was burned to the ground. Bacon's militia included both European and African bond laborers both desperate to free themselves form the crushing inequality and extreme brutality of bond labor.

Painting by Howard Pyle 1905 Source: Wikipedia

Bacon’s rebellion had a terrifying effect on the English investors and on the ruling class of the Virginia colony. It was said that he English Parliament had received news that Bacon had proclaimed, “Liberty to all servants and Negros.” It was this event, a rebellion that drew to it the poor most downtrodden members of society, European and African, that led to the concept of white skin as a racial definition by the English ruling class in the Anglo American colonies.

As Theodore Allen wrote: “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there. Nor, according to colonial records would there be for another sixty years.” There had to be a means of driving a wedge between the poor African and the poor European and the creation of the “white” race was it. No longer were they Scots and Negro’s but white and black and the poorest white now was to identify with the employing class as both members of the white race and they received certain privileges for that, This was the basis for the racial oppression in the United States and centuries of brutality end exclusion from all aspects of society for Africans and other people of color. It was not a natural human development, but a means of undermining unity among the oppressed in order to maintain social control and facilitate capital accumulation and safeguard profits.*

So my point in all of this is to drum it in to my head, and yours, that racism is not a personal problem, racism is institutionalized and is an integral part of the capitalist system. Of course it appears that way and can be very personal as individuals are the carriers of it like a virus. But we didn’t eliminate smallpox by killing every carrier of it. Humanity sought the source of it. I’m not saying here that we don’t fight individual racists but the goal must be to eliminate it, and to accomplish that we have to turn to society.

Malcolm X said that you can’t have capitalism without racism. I believe he was right about that. So the conclusion I draw is that we have to get rid of capitalism; and we can't get rid of capitalism without working class unity. And though Malcolm X never clearly stated that socialism was the answer, his comments surely put this alternative on the table and if you read his last speeches and works, he was generally moving in that direction as was Martin Luther King. Racism, like religious sectarianism being introduce by force in India at the moment, is a divide and rule tactic that the ruling class uses to undermine the unity of the oppressed, to undermine class solidarity and place racial solidarity at the fore. In Ireland religion was used by the colonial power as the population was overwhelmingly white and European. What does a white truck driver, or a white worker on a poultry farm in the South really have in common with Jeff Bezo’s or Elon Musk? Nothing of substance. It is no wonder Marx’s simple phrase "Workers of all countries unite" terrifies the global bourgeois so much.

While every ruling class or colonial power uses this tactic in one way or another as a means of undermining working class unity and maintaining its control of society, it can also be a very expensive and dangerous tactic if it gets out of their control. When the victims of racial or religious persecution get to a point where they cannot take it any more and race or religious war takes to the streets, this can disrupt profit making. So the ruling class through its control of the media and society in general, prefers to keep it always simmering, ensure there is always tension around this issue but keeping it on the back burner. But if their rule is threatened they will use it more ferociously.

As always, I cannot end commentaries very well but this is my attempt. I have faced some criticism for ignoring the race question or being a class reductionist which is a term most workers wouldn’t have heard of. I do not ignore the race question, and one can’t especially here in the US. But it is common for the petit bourgeois in particular to use racial or sexual oppression to ignore the class question. It is not in their interest to raise the class issue because they generally support capitalism and aim to advance their class position within it. Working class unity and the power that arises from that threatens their class position and chances for advancement.

This does not mean we are soft on white workers that refuse to break from the grip of white racial identity. But if our goal is to help unite the working class and undermine social divisions that hinder that, we have to approach workers form a class point of view. Millionaire film stars like Ann Hathaway, or liberal lefty white academics lecturing white workers about how great they have it and how they have to cop to their privilege and so on without making any class distinction between this group harm the struggle.  Workers are not stupid; they don’t respond to guilt trips from millionaires. The White Race argument is detrimental to the white worker also, not just psychologically, but it has held back their progress. If the ”white race” argument had any validity, the wages of the white workers in the US South would have been higher than in the north but that’s not so. The South has remained in this backward swamp because of racism and the ideology of whiteness as a race. Workers are more divided, union organization weaker and the bosses stronger.

Have a happy New Year.

*I strongly urge my class brothers and sisters to read Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race. I will not pretend it isn’t a bit of a slog but it is history and exciting history. Most importantly, it explains why racial, or more accurately color prejudice, was introduced in to the Anglo/American colonies and the slavery and the system of Apartheid arose. The first volume has about six chapters on Ireland.  We don’t have to read it as if we are being given a project. We can select parts, return to them, take out time, go to the areas we are first most interested in. The section on Bacon's Rebellion is in the second volume as is most of the stuff about the US colonial development.

You can order the two volume set of The Invention of the White Race here. 

Also, visit  Jeffrey B Perry's website for more information on this crucial subject.