Black Lives Matter: Jim Crow by stealth

Police detain Ieshia Evans during a protest against police brutality in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 9, 2016, days after police shot and killed Alton Sterling. (Reuters/Jonathan Bachman.) Source

by Mark Bygrave - UK trade unionist and Labour party member.

As a result of the civil rights movement from the 1960s onwards, and the shifting cultural outlook of white Americans who had generally moved to the view that overt acts of racism were unacceptable, reforms were introduced which, for a period of time allowed for some increases in living standards for some black US citizens.

A programme of “affirmative action” was also introduced by white liberal politicians, desperate to find a solution to the anger coming out of black communities and to contain it within the capitalist system itself. Although this did bring some material benefits to a minority of black people through education, media, business and other workplaces, where positions were “reserved” for them, it also played into the hands of the right-wing, who weaponized affirmative action amongst white workers, to further sow division. They used the line that “he only got the job because he’s black”, showing that there will never be an end to the bosses trying to divide our class along race lines whilst they wield social and economic power, however much tinkering is attempted.

The ruling class thought they could socially engineer a section of their class to open it up to black and brown people who would then act as apologists and advocates of capitalism and keep the mass of blacks in check. Nowhere is this more exemplified than by people like Candace Owens who are part of the Trump media offensive to give black cover to the white ruling class and try split US blacks along class lines. Owens effectively blames African-Americans for their own predicament, and “bad choices”, all the while refusing to acknowledge the objective conditions that the vast majority of blacks are born into. In the UK we see comments along a similar vein from the likes of Labour MP David Lammy and former head of the commission for racial equality  who never once raises the issue of class and only ever talk about tinkering and reforms of a system that has racism hardwired into its DNA that will ultimately do nothing for the mass of people, but may advance the careers of a select few.

What is systemic racism?

In the US it is the system of mass incarceration that underpins racism in US capitalism. Mass incarceration effectively replaced the Jim Crow segregation laws and was begun by Nixon, using the “southern strategy” and then put into full effect by Reagan in his now infamous “war on drugs”. Billions of federal dollars were offered to state and local law enforcement, on the condition it was used in the “drug war”, which became a euphemism for terrorising and criminalising black communities.

The stealth of this system is that its supposed to be “colourblind” and only goes after “criminals” but everyone knows the colour of the person a politician is talking about when they refer to a “criminal” is the USA 

In fact, when Reagan started his drug campaign, the majority of white Americans did not even view drugs as a major issue. It was jobs and health that were the main issues for white Americans, but US capitalism was not able to address these, given the world economic situation at the time. So neo-liberal policies were introduced to transfer public money into private hands, to increase profitability for capital together with huge tax cuts for the rich to kick start a boom paid for by the poorest sections of US society mainly black and brown people. 

Supported by media depictions of black men as pimps, dealers and rapists, the ruling class set about de-humanising black people with negative stereotypes prevalent throughout white American TV, newspapers, movies and news reports.

All studies show that drug use was and remains pretty near equal amongst whites as it is blacks, but white kids had nothing to fear in the suburbs if they happened to be found in possession of small amounts of cannabis after Reagan’s declaration of war.

Moralizing and hand-wringing

In contrast, in black communities we saw young black males arrested, charged, convicted or imprisoned at alarmingly high rates and then being ripped from their families, devastating community ties and foundations.

We then had to listen to the moralising hand-wringing of white commentators in mainstream media, talking about absent fathers and the lack of moral guidance denied to black children, and suggesting that black fathers were ‘feckless’, whilst all the time ignoring the destruction of families through racist law enforcement, poverty and underfunded education.

Police were given powers to stop and search, even though the 4th Amendment was specifically written to prevent unlawful search and seizure. Various challenges were made even all the way to the Supreme Court, but a “drugs exception” is now implicit, even though it is not specifically written anywhere in the 4th Amendment. The supreme court judges have effectively given the green light to racist stop-and-search and allowed a branch of law enforcement to define the constitutional rights of citizens.

The threat of death is inherent in every police stop

Once stopped by the police, the nightmare for any black person really begins. If they question the stop, protest or resist in any way, the police will use brute force, then pile on trumped-up charges, like assaulting an officer or resisting arrest, and the pretext to be taken to jail is achieved. If this is not bad enough, the threat of death by cops is inherent in every situation when a black person is stopped. A cop only has to say he felt his life was threatened to use deadly force.

The nightmare of a criminal justice system that is so weighted against poor people is then shown in full glare. Too poor to have a lawyer and with a token public defender system so underfunded and overworked that it means anyone arrested is faced with staying in jail or trying to get bail.

The bail system is then the next hurdle where you are expected to raise surety for thousands of dollars through family or friends, which is a near impossibility. Contrast that with the case of Epstein, who was in jail arrested on suspicion of sex with minors and who was released on bail within four hours.

So the pressure to get out of a stinking jail is applied by the prosecutor's office, where the DA has so much power to intimidate and extract a confession or plea deal it becomes clear that the pursuit of ‘justice’ is non-existent. If you try to plead ‘not guilty’ and want to go to court, the DA can effectively threaten to escalate and add more charges, without any evidence. So you can enter the system on a charge that carries, say, 3 months prison and end up being faced with more serious charges that carry 20 years, if found guilty. Is it any surprise that most people cave in and take a plea deal, especially if faced with legal fees they cannot afford and continued incarceration?

Vast majority of charges never go to court

In around 97% of convictions, the person charged never sees the inside of a courtroom, except to agree to the deal with a judge. It is openly acknowledged by both defence and prosecutors in the US that if every person arrested actually demanded a court appearance to fight their charges, then the system would collapse, such is the number of people charged at any one time.

It is clear that the legal system, in terms of the experiences of poor people and especially black and brown caught up in it, is not the ‘pursuit of justice’. The aim is to get a conviction and for the arrestee to be criminalised for life and then to be excluded from mainstream society. What is this, if not segregation or Jim Crow by the back door?

Another step taken by Republicans and Democrats was to introduce mandatory sentencing, effectively removing the discretion of judges to look at the individual circumstances of the perpetrator and the crime itself and decide on sentencing. Now it became possible to receive a sentence for minor drug offences that was longer than for violent crimes. It was not unheard-of to be sentenced to life for a first-time offence.

In 1982, a Supreme Court ruling upheld forty years of imprisonment for possession in a case involving an attempt to sell 9 ounces of cannabis, and several years later the same Supreme Court upheld a sentence of life for defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 23 ounces of cocaine. The 8th Amendment is supposed to protect citizens from “cruel and unusual” punishments, but once again ,there appears to be an exception for black people.

Is it any wonder that the vast majority of black people feel alienated, disconnected and unwelcome in the country of their birth? The constitution and the American dream are entirely meaningless to them.

Weapons, vehicles and surveillance equipment

The “war on drugs” allowed federal money to be showered on police  to purchase weapons, vehicles, surveillance equipment and anything else the police wanted. Within a few years police became completely dependent upon this funding which was only renewed if convictions and arrests continued to rise, so a perpetual cycle of mass arrests whilst cuts to social programmes were continued causing immense pain to families who were nearly all just trying to get by in some of the toughest neighbourhoods in the world. And so began the school to prison pipeline - a deliberate and constructed system to criminalise as many black youth as possible creating a cycle of deprivation and self fulfilling crime stats justifying further budget increases for the police.

New laws were also introduced, whereby police could seize assets and property, even if they only suspected it was from the proceeds of the drug trade. It wasn't long before law enforcement had a perpetual motivation to keep the war on drugs going to provide an ever-expanding flow of money into their departments.

In most US cities, the police budgets are more than all of those provided for social services put together, only emphasising the priorities of the capitalist class towards the black population.

This means that simultaneously there were police round-ups mass arrests alongside the defunding of schools, cuts to social services and other welfare programmes. A harsh collateral punishment was introduced where tenants could be evicted from public housing if a family member was convicted, so the damage and terror was not confined to just the arrestee and widened out to catch even more innocent poor people.

Prison system a multi-billion dollar business

The USA has 5% of the world's population, yet holds 25% of the world's prison population. Black males make up 4% of the US population but are around 40% of that prison population.  The prison system itself is now a multi-billion dollar business, where private companies have monetised every aspect of incarceration to profit off the backs of inmates, including forced labour for many well-known product brands, meals and phone calls for inmates, along with ancillary services and other profitable revenue streams.

Mass incarceration is making billions for the largest corporations in America whilst impoverishing black people.

Let us also not forget that once convicted of a felony in the USA and prison time is served, this is not, as one would expect, the end of the sentence. A convicted felon enters a parallel universe in which discrimination and stigma are legal. This also applies to people who accepted a plea deal and a felony conviction in return for not going to prison. In fact, the majority of convicted felons have not served prison time.

A 2008 study showed there were a shocking 2.3 million people in prisons and jails but a staggering 5.1 million under some form of “community correctional supervision”. Every single job application in the US requires the applicant to tick a box if they are a convicted felon. This all but excludes most people from obtaining even a basic minimum wage job and ever returning to society; it also prevents rehabilitation, so the cycle of petty crime – just to survive – is repeated, ultimately resulting, in many cases, in a return to prison.

In the 80s and 90s, both the Republican and to their shame, that ‘friend of the workers’ the Democratic Party, in efforts to outdo each other on being “tough on crime” agreed ever-more draconian post-felony release sanctions.

In almost all states a convicted felon cannot even get food stamps, cannot get public housing and with parole officers who provide no support and are just used as a force for social control. A convicted felon will be discriminated against quite legally by private landlords and forever denied licences for a wide range of professional bodies, resulting forever being locked out of mainstream society.

A felony sentence means permanent exclusion

Once on parole, you are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring and you may be stopped and searched, without consent, at any time. Is it any wonder that once somebody enters this world where the normal rules of citizenship do not apply there is a high rate of return to prison?

The US bureau of statistics shows that 30% of released prisoners were re-arrested within six months of release. Within three years, nearly 68% were rearrested for at least one offence.

This is the aim of mass incarceration and the criminalisation of the black community and is Jim Crow by stealth, reinvented and rebranded to hide its nature from white America because it is acknowledged that in 21st century even amongst whites, the idea of living in a racist society is abhorrent. So the ruling class have had to develop, evolve and rebrand their system of control of the black population and made it “colourblind” and pretend its only aim is to go after “criminals” to fool middle class white America.

More African-Americans adults are under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

In contemporary USA, it is not an exaggeration to describe the vast majority of black neighbourhoods as similar to the ‘Bantustans’ of Apartheid South Africa. The murder of the jogger Ahmaud Abery by white men who planned a lynching because a black man dared to run through “their” neighbourhood, gives an insight into how African Americans are forced to stay only where whites decide they should belong.

It's generally viewed that one of the roles of the police is to act as border guards, keeping black people in their zones and enforcing an unofficial travel ban to white neighbourhoods.

Systemic racism highlights that as important as it is to draw attention to the appalling bias in jobs, income and financial standing, it extends beyond the basic economic indices. African Americans live with the knowledge that there are some white citizens, especially the police, who would have no hesitation in killing them, because they know the justice system will almost always find a way to get them off.

This is clearly an attempt to divide workers in a “culture war” where if you are white you are expected to take the side of one ‘your own’ tribe. This must be resisted by all activists and by the Labour and trade union leaders. Quite rightly, the vast majority of our class are appalled by racism, but at the same time, very few are aware of what institutional or systemic racism actually consists of.

Heroism of youth on the streets

Important discussions about the role of the police have begun amongst the radicalised youth taking part in the uprisings in the US and as socialists we must intervene in these discussions. The role of the police in society has been exposed as a force for social control, not fighting crime.

In the US, even the police themselves acknowledge that they have been used as the “go to” organisation for the consequences of social issues, deprivation, underfunding of services and poverty that are not policing matters; from stray dogs and minor disagreements, through to far more serious social and health issues like drugs, unemployment, overcrowded housing. For too long, the stock answer has been “call the cops” and white America has been happy to go along with it.

The funding of the police must be subject to far more scrutiny where the workload of police could actually be reduced significantly if money was spent on services like mental health and drug rehabilitation programmes. Investment could be diverted to youth training and education programmes, but most of all, the so called “war on drugs” must end and be replaced with policing by consent with full democratic accountability at state, city and local level by means of elected democratic organs, where citizens can determine policy, operational guidelines and fully direct the work of the police.

We must listen to the youth and workers and encourage establishment of socialist education groups where the gap between unorganised workers and trade unions can be bridged.

The workers in the mighty US trade union movement must take inspiration from the heroism of those youth on the streets and be at the forefront of some bridge-building, by making links at grassroots level, inviting speakers to their local meetings for example. 

We have already seen examples of how unionised workers can support the struggle e.g. bus drivers in NYC refusing to assist transporting arrested demonstrators.

Union members must look at their own leaderships, who have continually sought conciliation and collaboration with the same people who support mass incarceration and they must break with any illusions that the Democrat Party or the capitalist system can provide social peace, economic prosperity or stability for any worker black or white.

We will fight for and will welcome any minor reforms this uprising may bring the workers of the US. But the capitalist will try to take any concessions back again sometime in the future. In the U.S, we are seeing a movement of the working class developing that is confronting racism and the murder of the black population by the police. It is inevitable that the capitalist system itself will come under fire as well. In this ongoing struggle a major goal must be the creation of a political alternative to the two capitalist parties, a workers’ party based on the unions and working class communities. This will give us a place to fight for our own class interests and strengthen the struggle for permanent change which will allow African Americans, Latinos and all POC to determine their own destiny. 

The ruling class are now relying on the Democratic Party to absorb this new wave of anger, with Obama and Pelosi both exploiting the situation to get Biden into power. The ‘lesser of two evils’ raises its head again in US politics, so we must agitate for a workers’ party, which, if established and armed with a socialist programme, would be unstoppable in a challenge for power and become a beacon to the world working class.

The US in 2020 has entered the world stage as one the opening episodes of the unfolding world revolution inspiring outpourings of solidarity in Paris, Berlin London and other cities around the globe. The internationalism of workers to the plight of our black brothers and sister is real and concrete and should fill us with optimism for the struggle that is about to unfold in the coming period

No Justice No peace!

For a Socialist USA, a socialist American continent and a Socialist World!

Postscript: This is an excerpt from the book, The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness by Michelle Alexander 

“Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.”

June 6, 2020