Study: Internet Racism Has Strong Affect on Black Teens

Black teens experience numerous racial assaults daily. Source: Rutgers

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I was talking with a friend in Ireland recently and she was telling me about the image that is perpetuated about the working class Irish male; the drinker, the failed family man pumping out the kids. A hard worker sure, but a failure, even consciously or not a failure in ones own mind. Up until the early 1960’s when I was a young teenager, Ireland was basically an economically backward country, its development held back like most of the former British colonies, and Ireland was the first. The six northern counties Britain kept after partition in 1921 as industry, particularly shipbuilding, was there as well as the majority of the country’s Protestant population. 

“This greater failure, to save Ireland from British domination weighed heavily on the conscience of the Irish male” my friend told me, as family, responsibility, country are all woven in to one. I have written before that the racist assault on the Irish included the women who I remember hearing on more than one occasion that they were either “Nuns or whores.” There is much similarity between the Irish in relation to England and the Mexicans and other immigrants from the US south. The Irish did most of the building of the roads and infrastructure in the UK and many great songs were written about that.

What we think of ourselves is not just some individual whim. It is not something independent of the world around us, of society. When I flip through the few channels I have, I sometimes stop for a second or two at some old cowboy movie just in time to capture the dialogue between two cowboys, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” says one white man to the other. “What would I think about that if I were a Native American?”, I ask myself. Rage? Sadness? Surely a sense of despair for many of them, as they too were not able to save their land and way of life from the invaders and many of them died trying  All workers are victims of class oppression, but capitalism doesn’t stop there, the dominant ruling class must rest on some section of society at the expense of others.

If you watch the Beatles when they came to the US and all the young girls screaming and crying at them, I see that they are all white girls, daughters of European immigrants. Black folks weren’t listening to that music were they? Even if they liked it, racism would have kept them from venues. Look what happened to Allan Freed. He may well have been guilty in the Payola Scandal but the real threat he posed was that the music he was playing, the mixture of blues, R&B and jazz brought Black and white youth in to the same halls. They came by the thousands. Ben Fong Torres wrote of him:

“He did it by way of his show, and by concerts he staged in New York and elsewhere, events that began to draw white as well as Black youth. For this, he was called a race-mixer and worse. The recording industry’s establishment feared his championing of the independent labels that dominated rhythm & blues, blues, and jazz music. Freed began making enemies.

Soon, parents groups, church leaders, and the press who deemed much of the music obscene and got much of it banned from radio.

The New York Daily News called the music “an inciter of juvenile delinquency” and pointed to Freed as a chief offender.”

More proof that, Racism Does Not Begin in the Home or the Individual

Like Martin Luther King but in a different way, Freed was uniting Blacks and whites. “In 1958, Freed faced controversy in Boston when he told the audience, ‘It looks like the Boston police don't want you to have a good time.’ As a result, Freed was arrested and charged with inciting to riot, and was fired from his job at WINS.”  Wikipedia. He was right. The police, as an arm of the state, didn’t want Blacks and whites mixing. The whole basis of white skin privilege and the total exclusion of Black people from all aspects of society (not even citizens) was the boat that kept US capitalism afloat and the masters at the helm.

Imagine you are a part of a section of society, a distinct group, Catholic, Muslim, Black, Indian, Asian, gay and so on, and in film, art, mainstream music, you never see people that look like you that have your experience or express it. You produce you own, but it is outside of society as a whole. I am thankful people like Freed were instrumental in ensuring Blues, the music of Black America came to the UK. Like Peter Norman, who supported Carlos and Smith in the 1968 Olympics and was shut out of sport for it, Freed was destroyed for his actions. They were both alcoholics when they died young.

When I go downtown, or especially when I go to Oakland, the vast majority of the people that are homeless and sleeping rough or in tents are Black folks. What do young Black kids think when they walk around in their neighborhoods or elsewhere and pretty much everyone living like that is Black like them? It has to have an impact. That is why the election of Barack Obama as US president was so important for Black Americans. I know friends that voted for him though they had no illusions in his politics or the idea that he would do much if anything at all about the economic crises that affect Black working class communities. “I just want my son to see a cultured, educated Black family in a powerful position in America and who is not a gangster.” a woman friend told me.

I believe that Jesse Jackson’s tears at that huge rally in Chicago as Obama became the Democratic candidate for the highest office in the land, were real. Like Jackson or not, he was next to Martin Luther King on that balcony in 1968 supporting a strike of Janitors, members of my former union. Compared to Trump, George W Bush or Obama, Jesse Jackson deserves some respect.

Black Teens Face Racial Discrimination Multiple Times Daily, Suffer Depressive Symptoms as a Result

I thought about this because a friend In Kentucky brought to my attention the effect racism has on Black teenagers. He has experience working with them and understands them as he was one of them.  He shared a new Rutgers University Study the title above, that found, “The rise in hate crimes against Black U.S. American youth since the 2016 presidential election (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2018) provides a stark indicator that anti-Blackness continues to be deeply woven into the U.S. societal fabric.” Those white workers that support Trump, the ones who have some semblance of critical thinking, should reflect on that rise in racist attacks on blacks and immigrants when they justify their support on the basis he's added a few bucks to their 401K.

The study concludes that the Internet is a “major” source of discrimination directed at Black youth and one of the causes of the frequency of this racial discrimination is that the Internet is anonymous. We all experience that; people who call all sorts of vile names, make all sorts of ridiculous claims and so on because they’re safe behind a computer screen.

This is particularly harmful for Black youth, according to the study, as they spend more time on the Internet than,”…. kids of other races and ethnicities.” Consequently, these microaggressions occur on a daily basis and many times throughout the day. Hair, skin tone, and physical appearances are aspects of mockery and teasing. “…discrimination happens, whether it is being teased by peers, asked to speak for their racial group in class or seeing a racist post on social media,”says the author of the study.

“Racial teasing is important….” The study claims, “… because it is one of the most common ways adolescents communicate about race,” The study is published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

For young children, coupled with all the other social aspects of institutionalized racism that I touch on above, the damage can be significant. It is not just Black children of course, we are all sickened by this system in which everything is a commodity, including our bodies and our life activity (labor power).  But there is no doubt that in the history of the United States it is this division, this use of color to undermine solidarity between the oppressed, throwing the exploited white worker a bone while excluding an entire race of people from even the most rudimentary benefits of class society that has been the dominant means of social control and the maintenance of the capitalist system of production and the class that governs it.

In his introduction to volume one of Theodore W Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, Jeffrey B Perry details the four “defining characteristics” of racial oppression as Allen saw it. These are: “a) declassing legislation, directed at property holding members of the oppressed group; b) the depravation of civil rights; c) the outlawing of literacy; and d) the displacement of family rights and authorities.”

Studies like the one quoted here are useful, but tell the victims of racial discrimination nothing they don’t already know; the same with the oppression of women or of labor in general. The reason official government panels on poverty are dominated by academics and others committed to capitalism and in its pay, rather than poor folk, is that poor people know more about poverty than academics and also are very clear about what policies would solve it. It's not rocket science.

Poverty, racism, sexism, war, environmental catastrophe, are an integral aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Recognizing this reality is a first major step to eradicating them.