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Spike Lee and the Black Klansman

3/18/2019

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      I recently had the opportunity to see Spike Lee’s 2018 film, Black Klansman.  The film appeared on Espectador Crítico, a weekly Cuban television program that presents high-quality films.  The moderator of the program, Magda Rezik, precedes the viewings with fifteen-minute interviews with a specialist on the theme.  In this case, the specialist was a professor at the University of Havana, knowledgeable about the history of the Ku Klux Klan.
 
      The film provides an excellent portrayal of the black power discourse of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.  It makes clear the logic and the socio-psychological need of the black power perspective.  Responding to the systemic dehumanizing by white America, in which the most basic of human rights were denied, the black power perspective affirmed black identity and the worth of the black community; and on a political plane, it stressed unity in order to attain power, necessary for defense of black rights and interests. 
 
      In addition, the film’s accurate portrayal of black power discourse makes evident two limitations of the black power perspective.  First, the perspective tends to treat whites in general as an oppressing power.  This is a misreading of American society, past and present.  It is true that the powerful are white, except for a few blacks that adapt to the white power structure; but it is also true that most whites are not powerful. 
 
     Secondly, the black power discourse had a tendency toward violent rhetoric that was inconsistent with the actual political project of black nationalist organizations.  Spike Lee has Stokely Carmichael saying that blacks must prepare themselves for a coming race war, in which the brothers and sisters will be killing white racist cops.  This is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the black leader.  In a Mississippi march in 1966, Carmichael declared, “every courthouse in the state should be burnt down.”  In Cleveland, he asserted, “When you talk about black power, you talk about bringing this country to its knees.”  His successor as president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, H. Rap Brown, described an incident in Alabama as a “declaration of war” by “racist white America,” and he called for a “full retaliation of the black community across America.”  However, in fact, neither the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee nor the Black Panther Party developed any program of sabotage against government buildings or assassination of white police or other white officials.  These brash and ill-advised statements were in no sense promoting a program, and they functioned only to provide a pretext for repression by the government, which was unleased against black organizations and leaders in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
     The film also has an excellent portrayal of the discourse of white supremacists.  The characterization at times appears to be a caricature, but indeed there is a current of thought in white society that believes that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and that race-mixing would destroy the nation.  The facts, of course, are otherwise.  Scientific research shows that differences in skin color are a consequence of individual humans living in different geographical zones with different levels of exposure to the sun, and that differences in skin color has no relation to intelligence or other human capacities.  And the film correctly shows the post-1965 reformulation of the white supremacist views into a more socially acceptable ideology that would attain increasing influence, culminating in the election of Trump.
 
      The film had a balanced portrayal of white cops.  One cop was a racist thug, some cops were racists, some were inclined to lend their support to the black cop in his undercover investigation of the Klan, and one was committed to doing the right thing.  One suspects that this is truly the case.  There was a suggestion at the end that white folks could avoid the racial conflict and stand off to the side, if they were so inclined; whereas blacks could not possibly avoid the American racial conflict, for it continually intruded on their reality.  There is some truth to this, especially at the personal level in the short term.  But in the final analysis, no citizen of the United States can avoid the contradictions that the nation confronts, which have deep historic roots; the nation itself is in peril.
 
     No film can provide a comprehensive view of a nation for a half a century, and Lee’s film is no exception.  The black community is represented in the film by black panthers and a black cop; white society is represented by white racists and white cops.  But there are, of course, whole sectors of the black community and of white society that do not pertain to these categories. 
 
      The sectors not portrayed in the film, especially their failures, have been central to the unfolding racial dynamics of the United States since 1965.  White society in general never listened to or understood the black movement, even as it hesitantly and reluctantly conceded basic civil and political rights in 1964 and 1965.  As a result of not listening, white society never understood that the movement demanded and expected more than political and civil rights.  Since its origin in 1917, the African-American movement had protested the poverty and social and economic underdevelopment of the black community, which it understood as caused by slavery and decades of segregation and the denial of basic civil rights.  The movement thus embraced the principle of the social and economic rights of all citizens, and it called for the economic and social development of the black community.  At the same time, by virtue of its interest in its African historical and cultural connection, the African-American movement from the beginning had a global perspective from below.  It could discern the colonialist and imperialist character of U.S. foreign policy, which promoted the underdevelopment of the peoples of the world, thereby contradicting the proclaimed democratic values of the nation.  Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were eloquent in proclaiming these principles of community development, the protection of social and economic rights, and a democratic foreign policy, historic demands of the movement.  But white society was deaf to such proclamations for a more just and democratic nation and world, and it believed that the social debt was paid merely by moving to the protection of political and civil rights.  Such deafness with respect to persons of other social positions is ethnocentric, and it is common in human societies; it is different from racism, a belief in the inferiority of other so-called races.
 
      Coinciding with white deafness, the black community since 1965 has failed to promote the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement of 1917 to 1965.  It has remained trapped in a white racist frame of reference, discerning subtle forms in which white racism survives in the post-1965 era.  This is certainly true, and indeed, the common phenomenon of white ethnocentrism could be interpreted as a subtle form of racism.  But it is politically dysfunctional to focus on it.  It would be more politically effective if the focus were on the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement, that is, the issues of economic and social development, the protection of social and economic rights of all, and democratic and cooperative relations with other nations.  Such a progressive national agenda could attain political efficacy only through a popular coalition of blacks, Latinos, and whites.  Such a coalition of folks from different communities with different cultures and histories is not going to be attained by each focusing on the perceived defects of the other, but by focusing on common interests and finding common ground.  Jesse Jackson understood this, and he developed the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s.  However, the Rainbow Coalition did not have the resources and/or the commitment to develop itself into a nationwide mass organization, capable of offering a politically viable progressive alternative in the public debate. 
 
     Without the development of a progressive coalition that offers a politically viable alternative narrative on the nation to the people, we are left with confusion and polarization.  The images at the end of the film, focusing on recent conflicts in the streets, portray well this sad phenomenon.
 
    In her comments to introduce the film, Ms. Rezik asked, what are the sources of white racism?  It is a good question.  A good answer would focus on the manipulation of whites by white elites.  The phenomenon began in slavery times and continued in the age of segregation in the South.  Southern elites were always afraid of a united action by blacks and working-class whites in the creation of a different kind of social order.  So they disseminated unscientific claims about difference in skin color, confusing and dividing our people, doing so in defense of their particular interests, without concern for the consequences for the development of the society in the long term.  In the 1960s, when the age of segregation came to an end and racism became discredited, and with white society having limited understanding of the racial dynamics of the nation, politicians like Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan exploited white anxieties and confusions by turning to a subtle form of racism, talking about welfare and crime as an indirect and more socially acceptable way of talking about race.  The film alludes to this phenomenon, and correctly portrays that it culminates in Trump.  The film, however, implies that it was David Duke and Trump.  But in fact, the leadership of the Republican Party in general has moved in the direction of exploiting white anxieties since the 1960s.
 
     But Mr. Lee, what is the solution?  Can persons of your influence in U.S. society find the road toward the forging of that popular coalition that we failed to develop in the 1970s and 1980s?  A politically effective popular coalition is the remedy to white racism, even though it attains its political goals by de-emphasizing racism per se.
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Race in Cuba today

10/30/2018

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     Social movements of Afro-descendants in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have resulted in the UN declaration of the decade of Afro-descendants.  The movements have identified such problems as the persistence of racist speech, racist images, and racial prejudices, facilitated by the social reproduction of racist perceptions; disproportionate levels of poverty; inequality in employment, income, and resources; and the unpreparedness of universities to address the particular needs of Afro-descendant students.  They maintain that there is a difference between equality and equity, that is, between formal equality before the law and an equal distribution with respect to employment, income, and resources. They have lifted up demands such as the defense of culture and the providing of social services.  They see Afro-descendants in each nation as a people and as a subject. 
 
     Some Cuban academics and social activists participate in the Latin American and Caribbean social movement of Afro-descendants.  The Cuban participants maintain that the gains of the Cuban Revolution with respect to race have to be acknowledged (see “Fidel, Martin, and Malcolm” 10/26/2018).  They affirm that, because of these gains, the situation of Afro-Cubans is significantly better than that of Afro-descendants in other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and it is completely different from the situation of Afro-descendants in the United States.  However, the Cuban participants maintain, the Cuban story must not be romanticized.  The Cuban Revolution has not attained the full liberation of blacks, in that equity in employment, income, and resources has not been attained; and in addition, a certain level of racial prejudices persist in Cuba.
 
     The Cuban participants in the Latin American and Caribbean movement of Afro-descendants would like to increase their visibility in Cuba.  However, they recognize that they confront various difficulties in doing so.  First, the movement in Cuba consists of a few academics and social activists, and it has not attained an institutionalized participation in public discourse; nor does it have a high level of recognition in Cuban society, from the Party and the government; or among the people, including Cuban Afro-descendants.  Secondly, the movement has not been able to establish clearly that it has a revolutionary discourse that seeks to improve the revolution; and not a counterrevolutionary discourse that seeks to undermine the revolution.  This is in part a consequence of the fact that counterrevolutionary strategies emerging from the United States include claims that there are in Cuba systemic forms of racial discrimination and racial inequality.  Thirdly, in Cuba, there has been considerable race mixing, such some that persons that appear to be white are Afro-descendants.  It could be argued that the great majority of Cubans are Afro-descendants, taking into account race mixing on the island and the prior Moorish colonization of Spain.  Fourthly, systemic equality of educational and employment opportunity has been attained in Cuba, as a result of its historic revolutionary strategy of overcoming racial discrimination through free, universal, and integrated education (see “The teachings of Fidel on race” 10/22/2018).  The Cuban situation of structural equality of opportunity is very different from the situations found in the other countries of the Americas, and especially the United States, in which there is unequal funding of public schools as well as an invidious distinction between private and public schools.  The Cuban situation of systemic equality of opportunity limits the reach of the movement, because racial inequality in social status and income it is often perceived as occurring as a result of class differences that are rooted in historic pre-revolutionary racial discrimination and exclusion, and not as consequence of racial inequality of opportunity in the current political and social context.  Fifthly, Cubans today are far more concerned with inequality in general, and especially with the fact that some persons have difficulty purchasing necessities with respect to nutrition, housing, and clothing.  The present prevailing political will, among the people and in the Party and the government, is to provide greater support for people in need, be they black, white, or mixed race.  Sixthly, perhaps as a reflection of these five difficulties, the movement has not been able to formulate specific proposals and demands to the party, the government, or the organizations of civil society.
 
     So where do we go from here in Cuba?  I imagine that the movement of Afro-descendants will continue to evolve, and that it will eventually find an institutionalized place in socialist Cuba.  The development of academic centers dedicated to the theme seems to be a logical next step in its evolution, so that social scientific research can identify the causes of the remaining socioeconomic inequities, and practical strategies and programs could be proposed on this foundation. 
 
     The Cuban counterrevolution, based in Miami, has sought to fabricate a race problem with respect to Cuba.  This is a clever maneuver, because it is able to exploit the actual situation, in which racial equity has not been fully attained, and remnants of racial prejudice remain.  Thus, it is able to obscure the fact that, although Cuba has not attained perfection, it has registered exemplary gains, as a consequence of the formulation and implementation of revolutionary teachings and programs in 1959.  Cuba has established systemic equality of opportunity, on the basis of universal, free, public, and racially integrated education, in which there is equal investment, in money and human resources, in the education of every Cuban child, regardless of that child’s race or social class; and for all schools, whether they are located in the city or the country.  In addition, it has established the unambiguous message, disseminated in all institutions, that racism and racial prejudice have no place in the socialist society that the people and the Party are seeking to construct.  On this foundation, Cuba has established a society that in its fundamentals is different from the other societies of the Americas with respect to race, even though its people are human, subject to all the imperfections that are known to the human condition.
 
     A few Cubans give support to this counterrevolutionary conversion of the issue of race into a social problem.  Some do so as counterrevolutionaries of the Right; others as ultra-leftist critics of the Revolution (see “The Party and the Parliament in Cuba” 6/19/2018).  I have observed that some U.S. academics and activists, both whites and blacks, have been confused by the distortions and exaggerations of this ideological campaign with respect to race in Cuba. 
 
      In seeking to understand what is true, we always should endeavor to keep the fundamentals clearly and consistently in mind.  The issue of race remains in Cuba, but it expresses itself in a social context structurally different from Latin America and especially the United States.  Reflection on the theme of race in Cuba best proceeds with consciousness of the alternative social and political context that the Cuban Revolution has forged for the past six decades.  In Cuba today, race is an issue but not a social problem, thanks to the decades-long commitment of the Cuban Revolution to the needs of the people.
 
      For posts on the issue of race in Cuba written in 2016, see “Black political organizations in Cuba” 4/18/2016; “Using race to discredit Cuba” 4/19/2016; “Racial inequality in Cuba” 4/21/2016.
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Fidel, Martin, and Malcolm

10/28/2018

1 Comment

 
     As we have seen, Fidel Castro gave emphasis to seeking popular unity in the necessary struggle against international capital and its subordinate allies in the national bourgeoisie; he avoided giving unnecessary emphasis to race in calling the people to support the revolutionary platform (see “The teachings of Fidel on race” 10/22/2018).  The approach was politically successful.  The Movement that was launched on July 26, 1953 attained widespread popular support, such that it was able to take political power in less than six years.  Once in power, the Revolution that he directed for five decades was able to register significant and important gains with respect to race.  To be sure, racial prejudices were not entirely erased, and some level of social and economic inequality on the basis of race remains, a legacy of pre-revolutionary structures of discrimination and exclusion.  Nevertheless, Cuba has broken new ground in the Americas in establishing a norm of social integration, in enormously expanding social and economic opportunities for Afro-descendant Cubans of all classes, and in forging an unchallenged political will in support of the concept that racism in all its forms is an irrational legacy of a colonial past that must be fully overcome.
 
     As the Cuban Revolution took power and consolidated itself, the black revolution was raging in the United States.  At first glance, it would appear that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the apostle of non-violence, and Fidel Castro, the commander-in-chief of a guerrilla army, would have little in common.  However, this obvious difference between these two exceptional personalities is to a considerable extent a reflection of the different social and political contexts of the movements that they led.  In Cuba, armed struggle was a politically intelligent and effective strategy for the popular taking of political power, but such a strategy would never be politically effective in the United States, for various reasons.  Moreover, the U.S. ideological context gave emphasis to reform, the pressuring of elites for change; rather than popular revolution, the taking of political power by the people.  During the 1960s, Dr. King evolved to become a Third World revolutionary in every respect, except for one: he did not arrive to the conclusion that the movement must seek to take political power.  King’s reformist approach was a reflection of his social context, yet he was continually evolving, deepening his understanding of the structures of domination and of the possibilities for the movement.  I believe that, had his life not been tragically cut short at the age of 39, Dr. King would have arrived to understand the need for him to lead a multiracial popular movement that sought to take political power. 
 
      So there were evident differences between Martin and Fidel, reflecting their different social contexts.  However, this being acknowledged, we also should be aware that Martin’s proposals in the period 1966-1968 concerning race and poverty were similar to the revolutionary project forged and led by Fidel.  By that time, the movement had attained, on the basis of the mass struggle of 1955 to 1965, legal and political recognition of fundamental civil and political rights and the elimination of de jure segregation.  But Martin was aware of the limitations of the movement and its gains.  The support of white allies in those achievements had been equivocating, and they for the most part were not prepared to support the movement in its next stage of struggle, which King understood as a quest for the protection of social and economic rights of blacks.  This required a more fundamental structural transformation, inasmuch as the continuing denial of social and economic rights was rooted in social structures established in the previous era of blatant discrimination, segregation, and exclusion.   
 
      In this context, Martin advocated integrated education, and with respect to large cities, he proposed the development of “educational parks” to bring pupils together from various sections of the city.  As we have seen, this was the approach of revolutionary Cuba, which, in addition to developing universal, integrated public education, also developed in some zones educational parks, which it called “school cities.”  Martin, of course, could only propose; his movement had not brought revolutionary leadership to power.  Revolutionary Cuba, in contrast, could implement its vision in practice.  And political events would enable it to go even further than initially planned.  Taking advantage of the fact that the Cuban Catholic Church discredited itself by its association with counterrevolutionary, unpatriotic, and terrorist activities, the Cuban Revolution was able to eliminate the structurally racist distinction between public and private schools by nationalizing the private schools and incorporating their personnel and their physical plants into the system of public education.
 
      For both Martin and Fidel, integrated education was strategy for uprooting racial prejudices.  However, it also was a strategy for expanding educational and occupational opportunities and raising the socioeconomic status of African descendants.  Moreover, both conceived this goal of protecting the social and economic rights of blacks as a dimension of a larger vision of social and economic transformation, which was proposed in universal terms.  Martin developed the “Poor People’s Campaign,” forged by the poor, including blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites; seeking programs for all who were poor, regardless of race or ethnicity.  Similarly, revolutionary Cuba, as we have seen, developed programs, strategies, and laws that sought to benefit all whose social and economic rights were denied, without reference to race, even though the majority of the beneficiaries were black and mixed race. 
 
     There was, to be sure, a difference between reformist context in the USA and revolutionary context of Cuba.  The “Poor People’s Campaign” was designed to apply political pressure on the government with respect to its “War on Poverty;” whereas Fidel, before the taking of power, promised that the programs would be implemented when the Movement takes power, and once in power, the he led the government in delivering on the promises.  Nonetheless, both Martin and Fidel were formulating a program of social and economic transformation that would involve the protection of the social and economic rights of all, regardless of race and ethnicity, and that would disproportionately benefit Afro-descendants.
 
      Even though both Martin and Fidel wanted to attend to the social and economic needs of blacks, both wanted to downplay the racial character of the proposal, not wanting to undermine necessary white support.  Martin, for example, considered the slogan “black power” to be politically unwise, even though he viewed it as an important concept, pointing to the need for black empowerment.  But he considered the slogan frightening and confusing to whites, with whom a popular movement must be formed.    Fidel, as we have seen, made his proposals for economic and social transformation with minimal mentioning of race, not wanting to inflame racist sentiments that he knew were beneath the surface among the white population, including humble persons of modest means who had economic interests in supporting progressive change. 
 
      So we see, then, important parallels between Martin and Fidel: integration education; attention to social and economic rights of all, regardless of race and ethnicity; and politically intelligent sensitivity to the anxieties that change is bound to produce among whites. 
 
     Malcolm X proposed in a different direction, reflecting Malcolm’s social base in the urban North, where there existed large segregated black communities.  Rather than integration, Malcolm called for black community control.  The problem, for Malcolm, was not that blacks and whites were separated, but that whites controlled the institutions of the black community.  Malcolm’s central concept in 1964-1965 was black control of the institutions of the black community.  Declaring himself a Black Nationalist, he proclaimed that “Black nationalism only means that you will control the politics and the economic and social institutions of your community.  Black nationalism only means that all the institutions of your community will be under your control.”
 
     Malcolm’s formulation was aggressive.  It reflected the bitter experience of a family victimized by white violence and callousness.  But Malcolm, like Martin, was evolving.  He increasingly came to appreciate the global context of the African-American experience, and he increasingly reflected on the universal implications of his understanding, with respect to Africa and the Third World, with which he identified; and with respect to white society, with which he more and more was oriented toward dialogue.
 
      The different visions of Malcolm and Martin were not contradictory.  Rather, they reflected different social bases, and as such, they were complementary.  Indeed, the concept of integrated education, so central to the transforming visions of Martin and Fidel, confronted various practical problems in the context of the de facto housing segregation of the urban North.  Malcom’s vision of black community control made good practical sense in the urban North.
 
      The concept of black community control need not be formulated in a hostile way that implies rejection of the larger society or its values, even though it necessarily would include critique of the negative consequences of white intervention in the black community.  It could be developed as universal proposal for greater local control of schools, with less state bureaucratic interference, always with the provision that all schools must educate with respect to the fundamental values of the nation, including the rejection of racial prejudices.  The idea of local control has had historic resonance among whites, and it would give space for black control of black schools (as well as police). 
 
       Thus, Malcolm and Martin formulated complementary proposals, which could be synthesized into a comprehensive vision.  Local community control of schools, with integrated schooling in zones characterized by integrated housing, or adjacent segregated housing.  National commitment to extensive funding for education in all zones, seeking to expand opportunities for all.  Programs for the protection of the social and economic rights of all, regardless of race.  And projections of a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations of the Third World, seeking to overcome underdevelopment and poverty in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, in order to expand world commerce and to develop a more politically stable world.
 
     The Martin/Malcom vision had the basis for universal appeal, that is, the possibility of obtaining support among whites, because it promised benefits to whites, including greater protection of their social and economic rights, greater control over the education of their children, and greater possibilities economic development and for a more stable world.  White majority support for such a project is politically attainable, even as whites continue to be prejudiced. 
 
     There can be no doubt that during the 1960s, the great majority of whites continued to have racial prejudices.  This is evident in their reluctant and ambivalent embracement of the laws for the protection of political and civil rights, their tolerance of violence against black movement leaders, and their refusal to engage the next stage of the movement, announced by Dr. King, toward the protection of the social and economic rights of all, regardless of race.  This parallels the situation that Fidel faced in 1959, at the time of the triumph of the Revolution, in that significant numbers of white Cubans continued to have racial prejudices.  Fidel’s approach was, in the short run, to work around the problem, by presenting programs as benefitting all Cubans in need, regardless of race; and in the long run, through integrated universal public education and political education.
 
     But things developed differently in the United States, in a context in which the two exceptional African-American leaders had been assassinated, Malcom in 1965, and Dr. King in 1968.  With white resistance to the new stage of struggle announced by Dr. King, and angry with the unreliability and inconsistency of white allies in the struggle for political and civil rights, the African-American movement turned to black power. 
 
     Without question, there were many positive aspects of black power and Black Nationalism.  They invoked Malcolm’s concept of black control of the black community.  They discerned the colonial foundation of the modern global order, thus conceiving the U.S. black movement as part of a global movement, allied with anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America.
 
      However, in strategic terms, the turn to black power as a slogan was a political error. Martin was right, it was a slogan that frightened and confused whites.  It undermined the attaining of the popular unity necessary for the taking of political power by the people.  In contrast, the complementary Martin-Malcolm vision, if reasonably and intelligently developed and explained, could have provided the theoretical foundation for popular unity, working around and eventually undermining surviving white racism, eventually culminating in a scientifically informed and politically mature formulation.  But the black power slogan had an exclusionist messages with respect to whites, and it could only deepen the already deep divide between whites and blacks.
 
     Ultimately, black power and Black Nationalism waned, to considerable extent brought to an end by the combined repression of national and local law enforcement agencies.  The focus in the 1970s turned to black political participation, taking advantage of the gains of the previous decade with respect to political and civil rights.  Inasmuch as this political activity was not based on an alternative vision and was developed within the context of established, elite dominated structures, it involved an implicit accommodation to the established political-economic order.
 
     In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson synthesized the insights of King’s Poor People’s Campaign and Black Nationalism, thus forging the politically intelligent concept of the Rainbow Coalition.  Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 had important political gains.  But more work needed to be done after 1988.  To wit, the development of the Rainbow Coalition as a mass organization in cities and towns throughout the nation, with candidates for local offices and for the federal congress.  But the Rainbow Coalition lack the capacity and the political will to assume a leadership role in the next necessary stage of struggle.
 
      Meanwhile, black academics have focused on what Fidel called “subjective discrimination,” that is, the survival of prejudicial attitudes among whites, even though mainstream political discourse and civil rights law affirm the formal political and civil rights of all, regardless of race.  Concepts like institutional discrimination and laissez-faire racism emerged.  This focus has relatively limited implications, in that it does not propose programs for the protection of social and economic rights, for local control of community institutions, or for an anti-imperialist projection in foreign policy.  It focuses on the unfortunate fact that many whites have racist perceptions and assumptions, without formulating a program for a new stage of struggle for structural change and subjective transformation.  In the final analysis, the focus of black academics on surviving forms of racism is a retreat from the complementary Martin-Malcolm vision for a more just world; it implicitly embraces a narrow program in defense of the interests of the black middle class, which fits in well with the turn in progressive political discourse to identity politics.
 
     With the retreat from the vision of the charismatic leaders of the 1960s, black socioeconomic gains have been minimal.   The basic national indicators of socioeconomic inequalities with respect to race are essentially the same today as they were in 1965, even as some black individuals have attained prominence and celebrity status in politics, entertainment, and news broadcasting.  This reflects that fact that, except for the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s, which failed to develop itself as a mass organization, the focus of black leaders and intellectuals has been on diversity, surviving forms of racism, and affirmative action, thus promoting a project of particular interest to the black middle class.
 
     There is need today to recapture and reformulate the complementary vision of Martin and Malcolm, our lost charismatic leaders.  We need to forge a popular coalition, in which all actively participate as a united revolutionary subject, in spite of cultural differences.  A popular coalition that seeks to take political power on the basis of a program for the protection of social and economic rights of all; and for a foreign policy that cooperates with the peoples and nations of the world in the quest for a just and sustainable world-system.
 
      As black progress and the progressive movement in the United States stagnated after 1972, revolutionary Cuba moved forward, registering significant gains with respect to the social integration of the races, forging a single united people, whose unity enabled the people to resist the multiple efforts of the global powers to derail its revolution.  Revolutionary Cuba was able to significantly reduce racial inequality, and to enormously expand the educational and occupational opportunities for all, such that the children and grandchildren of sugar workers, dockworkers, and maids would become professionals in a variety of fields.  In no small measure, these gains were made possible by the constant political presence and insights of a charismatic leader.  We should appreciate the universal value of his teachings, and study them.  And we should study as well the teachings of Martin and Malcolm.  It might help us to rediscover our lost road.
Sources
 
Castro, Fidel.  2006.  Cien Horas con Fidel: Conversaciones con Ignacio Ramonet.  La Habana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado.  [English translation: Ramonet, Ignacio.  2009.  Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography.  Scribner. 
 
__________.  2007. Fidel Castro: Selección de documentos, entrevistas y artículos (1952-56).  La Habana: Editora Política. 
 
__________.  2014.  History Will Absolve Me: Speech at the Court of Appeals of Santiago de Cuba, October 16, 1953.  La Habana: Editora Política.
 
__________.  2016. Un Objetivo, Un Pensamiento, Tomo I.  La Habana: Editora Política.
 
Clarke, John Henrik. Ed.  1969.  Malcolm X: The Man and His Times.  Toronto: Collier.
 
King, Martin Luther, Jr.  1958.  Stride toward Freedom.  New York:  Harper & Row.
 
__________.  1964.  Why We Can’t Wait.  New York:  Harper & Row. 
 
__________.  1967.  “Beyond Vietnam.”  Speech to Clergy and Laity Concerned About the War in Vietnam, Riverside Church, April 4.  The King Papers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Non-Violent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia.
 
__________.  1968.  Where Do We Go from Here?  New York:  Bantan Books.
 
Malcolm X.  1965.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  With the assistance of Alex Haley.  New York:  Grove Press.
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Race, colonialism, and neocolonialism

10/24/2018

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       We are in a position to understand today that racism was not the historic cause of colonialism, but the reverse.  European colonial domination of the world did not originate as a racist impulse.  It began in the sixteenth century as a modern manifestation of the historic tendency of empires, kingdoms, and civilizations to build themselves on a foundation of conquest.  When the European conquest of the world began with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the indigenous empires, nations, and societies of America, the justification was not on racial grounds, but on religious grounds, with labels of peoples that were not Christian as “heathen.”  But the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century undermined justification of domination on the basis of religious beliefs.  The bourgeoisie, in its struggle with the nobility, which whom the Church was allied, found it politically necessary to unify and strengthen its forces through the secularization of society, the separation of Church and State, and the principle of freedom of religion.  
 
     In addition, the bourgeois revolution, standing against the privileges of the nobility, proclaimed the principle of the equality of all citizens as a new philosophical foundation for society, and as a political strategy to obtain the support of the popular sectors.  It was necessary, however, to exclude from citizenship those whose inclusion was not convenient for bourgeois interests.  Such inconvenient persons included slaves of African descent in the Americas, the indigenous peoples beyond the territories of the English and French settlements in North America, the peoples of the Spanish and Portuguese American colonies, and the soon to be conquered peoples of Africa and Asia.   Their exclusion on religious grounds was no longer ideological functional, in light of the new principal of separation of religion and state.  However, the ideological basis for the exclusion of these peoples was found.  Taking advantage of the fact that the peoples of Northern and Western Europe had light skin coloring, as consequence of less exposure to sunlight, scientists invented racial classifications within the human species, portraying the “white race” as superior with respect to important human qualities, such as intelligence.  So racism emerged as a justification for the unfolding European global conquest, which itself was a reflection of the ancient human impulse toward conquest for economic gain.
 
     The anti-colonial movements forged by peoples of color were able to discredit racism during the course of the twentieth century.  But racism remained ideologically necessary, in order to justify European domination in the neocolonial stage.  Racism thus took a more subtle form, in which the basic political and civil rights of all persons and the sovereign equality of all nations are recognized, but it takes as given that the underdevelopment and poverty of the peoples of color is the normal state of affairs.  It recognizes that some persons of the world of color have high capacities, but it assumes that most people of color, in general, for cultural and/or genetic reasons, are less intelligent and hardworking, which explains their condition of underdevelopment and poverty.
 
      From this perspective of subtle racism, it could not be imagined that exceptional leaders and intellectuals of the world of color would have insight from which all of humanity could learn.  Subtle racism therefore is blind to the emergence of exceptional Third World leaders, whose capacities were formed by their vantage point from below and their moral commitment of justice for their peoples, and were demonstrated by their abilities to mobilize their peoples in social movements.  Thus, subtle racist assumptions prevent the peoples of the North from discerning a duty to study the speeches and writings of exceptional leaders of the Third World, in which are explained the colonial structural foundation of the present-day neocolonial world-system.  Unable to understand the true historical and social the sources of the underdevelopment and poverty of vast regions of the world, the peoples of North are content to assume that it is the natural order of things.
 
      Thus, both racism and colonialism are alive today in a new form.  Neocolonialism is an objective economic and political reality, in which the colonial peripheral economic role is preserved in the neocolony, ensuring its deepening underdevelopment and impoverishment; and in which the global powers adopt various policies and strategies to effectively deny the true sovereignty of supposedly independent nations.  Subtle racism is the subjective expression of this neocolonial reality.  It is subtle from of racism, in that everyone denies begin racist, that is, being someone who would argue that people should be denied rights on the basis of their color.  But everyone has racist assumptions, which permit them to tolerate underdevelopment and poverty in vast regions of the world; and to accept ideological, economic, and military attacks on those governments and movements of the world of color that seek to challenge and transform the neocolonial world order.
 
      In seeking to transform the neocolonial republic of Cuba, Fidel Castro’s strategy was to call to revolution all of the humble people, and all who did not pertain to the national bourgeoisie, whether they be black, white, or mulatto.  He called the people to an anti-neocolonial revolution, seeking to transform structures established on a foundation of white conquest of peoples of color.  Fidel forged a revolution that was profoundly anti-racist, because it sought to dismantle the structural sources of racism in both its blatant and subtle forms; yet it minimized mention of race, discerning the need to avoid arousing racist passions (see “The teachings of Fidel on race” 10/22/2018).  Here we have an example of the exceptional political intelligence of Fidel. 
 
     Perhaps those of us from societies in which racism is on the rise have something to learn from such political wisdom that has emerged in the revolutions from below, from the Third World.  I will discuss this theme further in the following post.
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The teachings of Fidel on race

10/22/2018

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     In our last post, we saw that the Republican Party, from Nixon to Trump, has invoked a subtle form of racism in order to tap white resentment and insecurity; and that the Democratic Party has done the inverse, emphasizing identity politics.  The political strategies of the two parties deepen racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions among the people, undermining the popular unity necessary for a governing consensus of support for a social and economic program that has the backing of a strong majority.  See “The white strategy” 10/19/2018.
 
      As we struggle to respond to this situation, it might be helpful to reflect on the teachings of Fidel Castro, arguably the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century, with respect to the question of race and politics.  The teachings of Fidel, on race and other matters, have guided the Cuban Revolution since 1953.  Study of his teachings has emerged as a significant activity among Cuban academics and intellectuals in recent years, and academic centers dedicated to his thought are being established.
 
     Fidel persistently taught that discrimination against persons for motive of race has no place in a truly revolutionary process.  As merely one example, at a press conference on January 22, 1959, three weeks following the triumph of the revolution, Fidel stated:  “In our revolutionary struggle, we have shown total identification and brotherhood among persons of different skin colors.  In this sense, we are followers of the thought of Martí, the apostle of our independence.  We would not be revolutionaries, and we would not be democratic, if we were not divested of all forms of discrimination” (Castro 2016:73).
 
       Fidel considered that it ought not be necessary to dictate a law defining the rights of blacks, because the revolution is based on the principle that all persons have rights, by virtue of their being human and members of the society.  He considered it impossible to fight prejudices with laws, because you could not impose penal sanctions on anyone for having them; you are not going to eliminate erroneous thinking with a law. Rather, he called for the public condemnation of all persons that possess the absurd prejudices of the past.  Sadly, he observed, there are humble persons, such as workers and tenant farmers, who have prejudices and discriminate.  You have you have to speak to them, he taught, persuading and demonstrating, with faith that the people are intelligent, reasonable, and capable of listening.  
 
      Persuasion was not the only strategy.  Fidel maintained that one of the historic sources of prejudice in Cuba is racial separation in schools.  Beginning in 1959, he called for the development of free, public, and integrated schools, not only as a strategy to universalize access to higher levels of education and to open economic opportunity, but also to provide an atmosphere in which children of different colors will study and play together, and they therefore will develop unprejudiced attitudes.  (Fidel himself, as a child, began his schooling in such an environment).  He promised that the revolution would create public schools for all, with all the necessary funding for the schools, including clothes and meals, where necessary.  And the schools will develop recreation centers, providing an atmosphere of play with adult supervision.    
 
      Analyzing the issue in 1959, Fidel considered that the most serious problem that blacks confront is the denial of employment and discrimination in employment.  He noted that in colonial times, slaves had been forced to work fifteen hours a day.  After the abolition of slavery and during the neocolonial republic, blacks were liberated from forced work, but they were denied the opportunity to work and to earn a decent standard of living. As a result, Afro-Cubans were disproportionately represented among the 700,000 unemployed Cubans in 1959.  The Revolution pronounced the need to find employment for those without a work, and everyone is in agreement, Fidel observed.  “And when everyone says that employment must be found for 700,000 Cubans without work, no one is saying that employment must be found for the whites only, or for such-and-such only; we are speaking of the need to find employment for the 700,000 without work, be they black or white” (Castro 2016:76).
 
      Let us reflect on what Fidel said here from the point of view of a political strategy.  First, we should note that what Fidel was saying in 1959 was consistent with what Fidel had proclaimed in his 1953 trial, in a speech that was subsequently printed and distributed clandestinely as “History Will Absolve Me.”  He spoke at that time of the problem of unemployment, without mentioning the racial distribution of unemployment.  Similarly, he spoke of the problems of inadequate land for peasants, woefully inadequate rural and urban housing, insufficiently and highly priced electricity, and the lack of health care, without mentioning their impact by race; and he proposed specific policies for the resolution of each these problems, without regard for race.  That is, his strategy was a political discourse of commitment to the providing of land, housing, electricity, and health for all those who need it, be they black or white.
 
     Fidel was aware, as we have noted, that among the people with modest means are those with the absurd racial prejudices of the past.  The revolution intended to overcome such prejudices in time, through persuading and educating the adults and providing high quality, free, and integrated education for the children.  But for the moment, Fidel saw the political necessity of including persons with absurd racial prejudices in the emerging revolutionary subject.  He anticipated that decisive revolutionary steps in defense of the rights of the people would provoke an aggressive reaction by powerful actors; and accordingly, he discerned that a unifying consensus among the majority of the humble was indispensable.  So his political strategy was to call both blacks and whites to revolutionary action by committing to resolve the common problems that both had, without mentioning the racial distribution of these common problems. 
 
     Fidel could have pointed out that the plan would benefit more blacks than whites.  But he did not do so.  Why did he not?  Because politically, it made no sense to do so.  What would be the advantage of doing so?  Everybody knew it to be true, but to mention it, or even worse, to give emphasis to it, would risk inflaming the racist passions of the whites with modest means, which could provoke serious divisions between whites and blacks, undermining the necessary unity of the revolution.  The trick was to keep the racist passions from boiling over, not by compromising with a racist mentality, but by attending to the problems that all had, without unnecessarily mentioning racism as one of the sources of these problems.  The unity of the people must be forged and maintained.
 
     And the necessary unity of the people was indeed a theme to which Fidel turned in a speech on March 29, 1959.  “We, who are one people, in which are included persons of all colors and of no color; we, who are one people constituted by different racial components; how are we going to commit the stupidity and the absurdity of giving shelter to the virus of discrimination?  Here in this multitude I see whites and I see blacks, because that is the people, the people is integrated by whites, by blacks, by mulattos, and by persons of all colors!”
 
     In 1959, Fidel viewed racial prejudice as an absurd legacy of the past.  He considered it especially absurd in the case of Cuba, inasmuch as few in “whites” in Cuba could claim to belong to a “pure race,” as a result of the Moorish colonization of Spain prior to the Spanish colonization of Cuba.  However, even though absurd, Fidel discerned that racism could not be eliminated easily, and he considered racial discrimination to be one of the most complex problems that the revolution had to confront.
 
     On the basis of this understanding, Fidel led the revolution to a program of comprehensive action involving universal, free, fully funded, and integrated public education; patient and persistent persuasion and reasoning; and condemnation of racial discrimination in employment as counterrevolutionary.  The comprehensive program of action was combined with a discourse that stressed the necessary unity of the people and that gave emphasis to the universal benefits of the program of action. 
 
     Fidel emerged to a position of charismatic authority by proclaiming fundamental truths to the people, standing in contrast to the politicians of the past, who had to speak in half-truths and distortions in order to represent covertly the interests of the powerful and the wealthy.  Fidel’s capacity to proclaim fundamental truths reflected an ability to understand social dynamics and a moral commitment to social justice and to the humble.  But Fidel also possessed the political intelligence to understand that some truths should not be stated too frequently, not until the people are more politically mature.
 
     In an extensive interview in 2006 with Ignacio Ramonet, a well-known French intellectual of the Left, Fidel reflected on the gains and limitations of the Revolution with respect to race since 1959.  First, he noted that scientific investigation since 1959 has shown irrefutably that the differences among ethnic groups are minimal, and they have absolutely nothing to do with ability or intelligence.  However, in spite of the fact that science now has come to the aid of the struggle against racism, discrimination survives.
 
     The persistence of discrimination is found even in a society like Cuba, in which the struggle against racial discrimination has been a sacred principle of the Revolution.  In analyzing this situation, Fidel distinguishes between the subjective dimension, pertaining to the attitudes of the people; and the objective dimension, having to do with social and economic conditions.  He maintains that, because of the revolutionary education of the people, what he calls “subjective discrimination,” rooted in absurd ideas of the unequal abilities of ethnic groups, has been eliminated in great part.  However, discrimination still exists today in the form of “objective discrimination,” which is a phenomenon associated with poverty and with the unequal distribution of knowledge.  Accordingly, even though the Revolution has attained full rights and guarantees for citizens of all ethnic groups, it has not had the same level of success in eradicating the differences in social and economic status between blacks and whites.  Blacks do not live in the best houses, they are disproportionately represented in the poorer neighborhoods, and they receive less than their white compatriots in remittances sent by family members resident in other countries.  These are racial inequalities in social status that are a consequence of historic discrimination, in that they have historic roots in the slavery of the colonial era and in other forms of exclusion and discrimination of the neocolonial Republic.
 
      Although the Revolution has been able for the most part to eliminate subjective discrimination, prejudicial attitudes persist among the people.  Fidel cited an example of a Cuban television program that wanted to promote confidence in the efficiency of the police.  In the first place, the program focused on the street crimes of the poor rather than the white-collar crimes of the managers.  In addition, the great majority of the delinquents were blacks and mixed race, with very few whites.  To associate crime with a particular ethnic group serves no purpose, Fidel maintained, and it functions to enflame the population.  But in spite of the survival a level of prejudicial attitudes and assumptions among the people, Fidel maintains that the Revolution has attained much with respect to race, and there remains very little subjective discrimination.  What exists in Cuba today is objective discrimination, in Fidel’s terminology, rooted in historic and systematic patterns of exclusion and denial of rights during the colonial period and the pre-revolutionary neocolonial Republic.
 
     Fidel observed in 2006 that he and the other revolutionary leaders were naïve back in 1959 to have believed that the total and absolute equality before the law would end discrimination.  Since that time, we have learned that prejudicial attitudes can be eliminated for the most part, through integrated public schools and political education.  But the elimination of socio-economic inequality, reflecting the historic association between race and poverty and between race and education, is a more complex challenge.
 
       There is some tendency for leftists in the United States to castigate Cuba, or to consider its revolutionary example tarnished, because it has not completely eliminated what Fidel calls “objective discrimination,” or racial inequalities with respect to socio-economic status resulting from previous historical patterns of domination and discrimination.  The International Socialist Review, for example, argues that the colorblind strategy of the Revolution, in which the revolution addressed the social problems that the people confronted without consideration of their race, is to blame for the persistence of a level, although much reduced from pre-revolutionary levels, of racial inequality in income and status.
 
       I think the U.S. Left should approach Cuba with more humility.  Revolutionary practice is the basis of our understanding, and we all learn from the ongoing practical experiences of revolutionary projects.  And revolutionary practice is far more advanced in Cuba than in the United States, with respect to race as well as other issues pertaining to revolutionary social transformation.  We in the United States have not been able to develop a sustained popular movement that has influence in our society, even less have we been able to take political power and to test our ideas in practice.  The social foundation of our thought is limited, and therefore we have a less developed revolutionary understanding.  This should give us humility with respect to Cuba, guiding us to a listening mode, trying to understand how Cuban leftists were able to get the support of their people and take political power, thus providing the political foundation for beginning the socialist transformation in practice in accordance with their ideas.  We should not be criticizing from our more limited social base; we should be listening to what Cubans are learning, so that we can improve our own revolutionary thought, practice, and strategies.
 
      From a more humble vantage point, listening rather than opinionating, we could not fail to observe the significant achievements of the “colorblind” strategy of attending to the social and economic rights of all, regardless of race.  It was central to the taking of political power and subsequent significant reduction in socio-economic inequality and in prejudicial attitudes.  The colorblind strategy was certainly the right road, taking into account all that it has attained.  At the same time, it can be seen today that the colorblind strategy has not accomplished the complete elimination of racial prejudice or of a structural discrimination that is intertwined with class.  This invites reflection on what steps should be taken now, and such reflection appropriately occurs in each national context, taking into account particular historical, political, and social conditions.  There is an international dimension to this conversation, but such international dialogue must be based on recognition of the particularity of each context and on respect for the achievements of revolutionary projects in lands beyond one’s own nation.
 
      In the next three posts, I will be reflecting further on race, with respect to the world, the USA, and Cuba.
References
 
Castro, Fidel.  2006.  Cien Horas con Fidel: Conversaciones con Ignacio Ramonet.  La Habana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado.  [English translation: Ramonet, Ignacio.  2009.  Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography.  Scribner. 
 
__________.  2014.  History Will Absolve Me: Speech at the Court of Appeals of Santiago de Cuba, October 16, 1953.  La Habana: Editora Política.
 
__________.  2016. Un Objetivo, Un Pensamiento, Tomo I.  La Habana: Editora Política.
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Black political organizations in Cuba

4/22/2016

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Posted April 18, 2016

​     In the aftermath of the visit of US President Barack Obama to Cuba, the moderator of the discussion list of the Association of Black Sociologists, Rodney Coates, posted on the list a number of articles dealing with the issue of race in Cuba.  Coates is Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies and Director of Black World Studies at the Miami University of Ohio.

     One of the posted articles was “Sankofa Cuba: Racism and Revolution in the Afro-Cuban Experience” by Abdul Alkalimat.  The article was published in the Fall 2013 issue of The Black Activist.  

      As the article observes, “every society has a master narrative,” a prevailing consensus that selectively identifies and interprets important events in the history of the society, and that frames contemporary issues.  In the case of the United States, the master narrative has been shaped by the white power elite, and it is full of distortions and omissions.  Indeed, this is unavoidable, because the narrative functions to manipulate the people into support of policies that promote elite interests.  It proclaims the nation to be the most democratic in human history, and thus it must omit or minimize undemocratic components in US history.  Especially important in this regard is the omission of the fundamental truth that the US economic ascent was based on the aggressive acquisition of territory, the commercial connection to slavery in the Caribbean, the development of slavery as a system within its own borders, and the imperialist penetration of all regions of the planet.  Pretending to defend democracy throughout the world, the nation is in fact a global imperial power.

     In contrast, the dominant narrative in socialist Cuba has been created by a multiracial movement formed by professionals, workers, farmers, students and women, which took power from a political class that represented the interests of a subordinate national bourgeoisie, international capital, and US imperialism.  Once it took political power, the leadership of the popular movement took decisive steps in defense of the interest of the popular sectors, thus provoking the hostility powerful actors.  Its best defense against them was the unified support of the people, which required popular understanding of the necessity of the decisive steps as well as the unavoidable hostile reaction.  The Cuban Revolution has had an interest in forging a narrative that educates rather than manipulates the people, and thus it has developed a narrative that is grounded in an advanced integral philosophical historical social science, forged with the active participation of intellectuals and academics.

       Alkalimat describes the formation of autonomous Afro-Cuban political organizations from 1812 to 1912, a phenomenon that is recognized in the dominant Cuban narrative.  He also notes that from 1912 to 1959 autonomous black organization was not the pattern. Rather, there was significant Afro-Cuban leadership and participation in multiracial organizations, which included important organizations that were successful in mobilizing the people and in attaining popular support.  However, the article does not fully appreciate the significance of this experience for the Cuban interpretation of its struggle.

       In popular movements, there are competing strategies being proposed, with internal debates among the leadership concerning what strategies are going to be most effective.  Often, these debates are resolved by the success of some strategies.  This occurred with respect to the internal debates in the Cuban popular revolution concerning whether the guerrilla war in the countryside or strikes and sabotage in the cities would bring down the dictator.  The debate was settled by events.  The military advances by the rebel army in the countryside caused the dictator to flee the country, even though it is of course recognized that the contributions and sacrifices of the urban underground must be appreciated and honored. 

     Something like this occurred with respect to the issue of autonomous black organizations.  The revolution triumphed with multiracial organizations that represented various popular sectors, who were organized according to occupation or function (in the rebel army and in organizations formed by urban professionals, urban workers, agricultural workers, and students) rather than by race or color.  This experience led to the interpretation that multiracial popular organization is ultimately the necessary strategy for prevailing against powerful forces, accompanied by recognition that separate black organizations in some cases constituted a progressive dynamic that in a particular historical moment contributed to the advance of the Cuban project of national liberation.  

     This interpretation shaped the organization of the triumphant revolution, as it faced powerful counterrevolutionary forces.  The people were organized as urban workers (including professionals), agricultural workers, small farmers, students, women and neighborhoods; but not according to race or color.  The dominant revolutionary narrative maintained that to organize the people according to race or color would ignore the lessons learned in the long popular struggle, and it would undermine the necessary unity of the people.  The revolutionary narrative was so overwhelming and so compelling that the renewed formation of separate black political organizations had very few advocates among Afro-Cubans following the triumph of the revolution.

        In the Cuban popular revolutionary struggle of 1868 to the present, something significant occurred, namely, the Cuban peoples became a single people.  Whether African or European blood flowed in their veins, all were actors in an historically and universally significant social process that dislodged from power those who were indifferent to the human needs of the people and who violated the dignity and sovereignty of the nation.  Cubans became, above all, Cuban, determined to defend at any price what they had sacrificed to attain.

       The contrasts of the Cuban experience with the United States are striking.  In reflecting on the contrasts, we ought to perhaps begin with the position of white Cubans, whose historic position was fundamentally different from that of whites in the United States.  Whites in the United States formed a settler society, and the great majority of whites economically benefitted, at least indirectly, from conquest, slavery, and the imperialist penetration of other lands.  But in Cuba, only the national bourgeoisie benefitted from neocolonial economic structures.  The white petit bourgeoisie and white workers and farmers found that the colonial and neocolonial situations restricted possibilities for the protection of their fundamental social and economic rights.  The great majority of Cuban whites, like Cuban blacks, had an economic interest in bringing colonialism and neocolonialism to an end.  Some members of the white middle class were confused by the ideological distortions; they cast their lot with the national bourgeoisie, allied with neocolonialism and international capital.  Some would become infamous as counterrevolutionaries in Miami, greatly influencing the US image of the triumphant Cuban Revolution.  But the colonial and neocolonial conditions of Cuba created something not seen in the United States, namely, a committed and informed radical petit bourgeoisie, which played an important role in leading a multiracial popular revolution against the (white controlled) neocolonial republic. In the United States during the period 1955 to 1972, white allies of the African-American movement turned out to be unreliable; in Cuba, by contrast, white students, professionals, workers and peasants became committed, reliable and even heroic allies of Afro-Cubans.  

    In the black experience in the United States, white racism is always present, either in a blatant or subtle form.  On the basis of this experience, one could look at Cuba with a model of racism, seeing racial inequality and white prejudice.  As with any social scientific model, there is an element of truth in this, and one can see signs of white prejudice and racial inequality, although much less than previously, and much less than in other nations.  But models shape what we see, and they can sometimes cause us to overlook profound truths.  In the black power period of 1966 to 1972 in the United States, black nationalist intellectuals formulated a colonial model, which sees racism as one dimension of colonial and neocolonial structures of domination, characterized by white control of the political, economic and cultural institutions of the communities and nations of the colonized.  The colonial model provides a more multidimensional and global vision of race relations in the United States and the neocolonial situation of Third World nations.  Seen from this colonial perspective, the Cuban Revolution, arriving to power through multiracial organization, and the African-American movement are allies in a common struggle.  Indeed, all of the colonized peoples of the world, including Latin Americans of various colors as well as the people of Ireland, are allies in a common anti-colonial struggle, and they all have formed movements that seek a more just, democratic and sustainable world. 

      The United States government discerns that revolutionary Cuba is a dangerous example and a threat to the neocolonial world-system.  It seeks to undermine the Cuban Revolution with various strategies, including seeking to discredit it with a model of white racism.  The white racist model is a useful tool for the declining hegemonic neocolonial power, for it represents white liberal reformism, as against the revolutionary transformation of fundamental structures of the European-dominated neocolonial world-system, which provides sustenance for racism in its various forms. 

​Key words:  race, Cuba, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism, Black Nationalism, colonial model, political organization
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Using race to discredit Cuba

4/21/2016

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Posted April 19, 2016

     Socialist Cuba has many friends in the world, but it also has powerful enemies.  One of the strategies of Cuba’s enemies is to try to discredit Cuba with claims that the revolution denies the rights of Afro-Cubans or continues to be a racist or white-dominated society.  It is hard for me to imagine that such a campaign could sow division between blacks and whites in Cuba, because Cubans understand and appreciate the full commitment of the revolution to the full rights of Afro-Cubans, African-Americans, and the peoples and nations of Africa.  But it seems to me that the campaign is having some success in sowing doubts about the Cuban Revolution among African-Americans in the United States, who of course are not intimately familiar with the Cuban situation, and who may have a tendency to look at Cuba from the lens of their experiences in the United States and the model of white racism (see “Black political organizations in Cuba” 4/18/2016).

      The discrediting campaign focuses on two issues.  The first is that of independent black agency in the form of separate black institutions. This issue is not debated in Cuba.  It was debated at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, as Abdul Alkalimat observes (see “Black political organizations in Cuba” 4/18/2016).  But it is by now a resolved issue, because the Cuban popular revolution accomplished the taking of power through a strategy of multiracial organizations (see “Black political organizations in Cuba” 4/18/2016).  But one of the strengths of the Cuban Revolution is its ability to listen to the voices of the people.  Accordingly, if this issue were to reemerge in the breast of the people, or of Afro-Cubans, the revolution would certainly seek to address it.  It would do so in a form that would ensure the unity of the people, for it is widely believed in Cuba that the unity of the people is necessary for the continued survival of the revolution.

     The second issue of the discrediting campaign is that of racial inequality, both income inequality and inequality in political power.  In Cuba today, it is well-understood that socialism is a process, and its goals cannot be fully attained overnight.  And there are some goals that are still not attained, fifty-seven years after the triumph of the revolution.  No one in Cuba thinks that socialist Cuba is, or can be, heaven on earth.

      There can be no reasonable doubt that the Cuban Revolution has taken decisive steps in support of the rights of Afro-Cubans.  The education of each Cuban child proceeds on basis of equal funding for all, regardless of race, class or gender; regardless of which urban neighborhood the child lives in; or whether he or she lives in the city or the country.  The historic invidious distinction between private and public education was abolished when the revolutionary government nationalized the Catholic schools, overwhelmingly white upper and middle class, and incorporated them into the public school system. Moreover, the difference that exists in the United States between poorly funded central city schools and suburban schools with higher tax bases does not exist in socialist Cuba.  I repeat, the Cuban revolution invests the same amount in the education of every Cuban child, from pre-school day care center to university graduate programs.  In addition, its system of education at the higher levels is integrally connected to structures of employment, so that as young Cubans earn diplomas and degrees, they can proceed to translate their education into professions and occupations.  And since 1959, there has been a full-fledged campaign calling upon employment without racial or gender discrimination.  No one thinks that old prejudices have completely disappeared, so this may not be fully realized in practice.  But to the extent that discrimination occurs, it is not systemic. 

     With respect to home ownership, the revolution nationalized privately-owned income-generating buildings and converted renters into property owners, allowing payments for the property at low prices and low rates of interest and with favorable terms.  Today, more than 90% of Cubans are home owners.  Some enemies of the revolution have tried to make an issue of the fact that, until recently, Cubans were prohibited from buying and selling property, omitting that most Cubans were homeowners as a result of a home distribution program, and the program was not undertaken with the intention that the beneficiaries sell the properties, thus facilitating the accumulation of property by a few.

      With respect to political power, the entire country is organized into voting districts, and the people nominate and elect candidates for the municipal assemblies, which in turn elect the deputies of the national assembly, which elects the executive branch.  The people also are organized in mass organizations of urban workers and professionals, agricultural workers, students, women and neighborhoods, the leadership of which is elected by the people.  To be sure, there is no black caucusing in this process.  Blacks, whites and mixed-race all participate with one another in this overlapping process of popular organization.  The mass organizations were organized on a multiracial basis in the 1960s, as a result of the overwhelming popular sentiment that this is the most effective strategy for empowering the people.

        All of these decisive revolutionary measures were “color blind.”  They were undertaken to benefit the people, without consideration of the race or color of the beneficiaries.  They clearly benefitted Afro-Cubans more than whites, since at the time of the triumph of the revolution, blacks were disproportionately represented among the poor, the marginally employed, the illiterate and the powerless.

      Fifty-seven years later, the success of this emancipatory educational-economic-political program is clear.  Exactly how successful is hard to measure, in part because racial classification is complex in Cuba, as a result of a high level of biological and cultural mixing.  But some have noted that the revolution perhaps has been more successful with respect to women than with respect to blacks.  As a result, there is beginning to emerge a discussion of the issue of racial inequality.  It may lead to an analysis of the reasons why the approach has not been more successful, and the identification of steps that should be taken to improve the situation.  Such analysis could possibly include reflection on appropriate pedagogical strategies for Afro-Cuban children and youth, perhaps giving even more emphasis to the role of Afro-Cubans in the revolutionary struggles and greater emphasis to African history and culture.  

        But such discussion of racial inequality has not attained a high priority among the Cuban people.  They are more concerned with bread and butter issues, and they do not tend to see these issues in racial terms.  Certain adjustment policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union have created more racial inequality, but it is also the case that they have created more inequality across the board, and that is how Cubans tend to perceive the problem.  Cubans speak of the need to ensure that the state continues to act decisively to protect the social and economic rights of all, and not permit that anyone be abandoned to his or her fate, as occurs in capitalist societies.  My sense is that any social program that supports blacks in need, but excludes whites equally in need, would be perceived in Cuba as unfair, and as therefore undermining the legitimacy of the revolution.

     The survival of the Cuban Revolution is in no sense guaranteed.  It continues to be under attack by powerful forces, including the Obama administration, which is undertaking a strategy of undermining the Cuban Revolution by creating a Cuban middle class with an interest in political change (see “Obama seeks to expand Cuban middle class” 3/24/2016).  The Obama administration also is attacking, using “soft power” imperialist strategies, Latin American revolutionary governments that have come to power in recent years and that have proclaimed “socialism for the twenty-first century” (see various posts in the category Venezuela and the new imperialist strategy).

     The social movements of the various peoples of the United States should be in solidarity with socialist Cuba and with progressive and socialist governments of Latin America and in opposition to US imperialist policies, as an important dimension of a struggle to create of a more just, democratic and sustainable world.  It seems to me that our solidarity could be more effective if, instead of focusing on the imperfections of these revolutions in the South, we were to seek to learn from them, appreciating that the peoples of Latin America are doing something that we in the United States have never been able to do, in that they have taken political power from the elite and have formed governments committed to the protection of the rights and needs of the people.  Inspired by their example, perhaps we could envision a popular coalition in the United States that takes political power and that adopts decisive steps in defense of our peoples, who have been exploited and abused in different ways, but whose dehumanization, in one form or another, is a generalized phenomenon.


Key words: race, Cuba, racism, racial inequality, socialism, imperialism
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Racial inequality in Cuba

4/19/2016

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Posted April 21, 2016

​      Paul D’Amato, Editor of the International Socialist Review, in a 2007 article on “Race and Sex in Cuba,” maintains that Cuba does not represent true socialism (see “Who defines socialism?” 4/20/2016).  In accordance with this point of view, he focuses on the imperfections of Cuban society.

     D’Amato presents a portrait of a Cuba as far whiter and far more racist than the Cuba that I know.  He cites the 1981 Cuban census, indicating that the nation at that time was 66% white, 22% mestizo, and 12% black.  These figures are so inconsistent with visual scrutiny that one would think that there was an error, that the figures for whites and mulattos had been inverted.  Regardless of the figures, there is also the fact of the pervasive influence of African culture on the island, as is indicated by the significant extent to which persons of all colors indulge, somewhat superficially, in African religious practices; and by an historical consciousness that identifies slave rebellions (as well as indigenous resistance to the Spanish conquest) as precursors to a revolutionary process that was launched in 1868 when a slaveholder freed his slaves and called upon them to take up arms with him in opposition to Spanish colonialism.  I recall that on one occasion a Cuban leader, who looked more or less white, introduced his nation to my students, who were white, by referring to Cuba as an African-American nation. 

     Even more surprising was a 1995 study of three Havana neighborhoods, cited by D’Amato, that found racist attitudes among whites: 58% believed blacks to be less intelligent; and 68% were opposed to interracial marriage.  I have never heard anyone express such attitudes, and they are completely inconsistent with the prevailing consciousness among the people.  When on rare occasions people made comments that could be interpreted as prejudiced, they were casual cultural and social observations that were not offered as a justification for inequality or as implying that social investments that benefit Afro-Cubans should be eliminated.  In Cuba, it is assumed that the state has a moral obligation to act decisively to protect the social and economic rights of all, regardless of race or color. 

      In the United States, whites repeatedly are saying that their opinions on the role of government and on social issues have nothing to do with race, a denial that comes across as a ploy, conscience or not, for racism in a subtle form.  Cubans, however, truly do not think in racial terms, except as a skin color that is useful for descriptive purposes, similar to height or weight.  Currently there is, for example, public discussion of a lack of discipline at the workplace as well as a lack of revolutionary consciousness and work ethic among some youth.  These issues are not seen in terms of race.  They are understood as issues of popular culture, involving the daily habits and practices of people of all colors, and of the need for revolutionary transformation of certain characteristics of popular culture.

     D’Amato maintains that the Cuban Revolution argues that the issue of race has been completely resolved.  This is not the case.  The 1962 Second Declaration of Havana, which he cites in support of this claim, asserted that racial and gender discrimination in Cuba have been abolished.  The document did not intend to assert that all issues of race and gender had been fully resolved.  Indeed, it would have been absurd to maintain that a declaration could eliminate problems that were centuries in the making.  Let us recall the context of the time.  In the United States, the battles of Birmingham and Selma as well as the rebellions of Watts and Newark lay ahead, and the issue of gender equality was not included in public discourse.  In a world in conflict over these issues, Cuba was proclaiming its political will to fully implement civil, political, social and economic rights for all, regardless of race or gender.  The 1962 Declaration of Havana was not a propaganda ploy or a clever maneuver by a white leadership to bury reflection on the problem of race, as D’Amato implies.  The Declaration was a clear proclamation of commitment to fundamental principles, nothing more and nothing less, an affirmation enthusiastically and proudly supported by the people of all colors.  To treat it otherwise is to indulge in cynicism and to not see the simplicity and decency of the Cuban people; it is to attribute to them a capacity for cynical political manipulation that they do not possess.

    The concepts of institutional discrimination, symbolic racism and laissez-faire racism were developed in the United States in the post-1965 period, after the attainment of significant gains with respect to civil and political rights.  These concepts reflect the US racial context. White society had made concessions, but the great majority of whites did not arrive to understand and appreciate the African-American perspective on the American experience, the meaning of democracy, or the global structures of white domination.  As a result, most whites, although moving away from blatant forms of racism, continued to be racist in subtler ways, as was reflected in the unequivocal rejection by white society of black demands for decisive state action to protect the social and economic rights of all US citizens and for a more democratic foreign policy.  And it is reflected in the fact that the economic inequalities between blacks and whites are roughly the same today as they were prior to the civil rights gains of the 1960s.  But concepts formed in the US context should not be applied to Cuba, which in the same post-1960s era had a fundamentally different experience with respect to race.  

     In revolutionary Cuba, there was full commitment by the government and the people for the protection of the civil, political, social and economic rights of all; and blacks, mulattos and whites were participating together in the development of a national anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-racist project.  No one thought that the issues of race were fully resolved, and no one used a false claim to this effect as a pretext for rejecting separate black organizations, as D’Amato claims.  Separate black organizations were rejected as a strategy because the Cuban experience of struggle had shown that interracial organizations were more effective, inasmuch as interracial organizations, and not separate black organizations, had brought down the dictator and had put power in the hands of the people (see “Black political organizations in Cuba” 4/18/2016); because the separate black organizations that existed at the time of the triumph of the revolution were reactionary rather than progressive, and they did not participate in the overthrow of the dictator; because it seemed unnecessary to have black organizations, given full black participation in the popular organizations and popular power, and given that the revolution already possessed the political will to fully implement the rights of blacks; and because there was concern that separate black organizations would undermine the unity of the people, especially in a context in which powerful external enemies were prepared to exploit any possible division to bring the Cuban Revolution down.

      D’Amato argues that, with hindsight, the “color-blind” approach of the revolution and its emphasis on the unity of the people were erroneous, because problems of race still exist.  But such a claim is reasonable only if it were to be expected that a revolution after fifty years ought to have fully resolved a complex economic and cultural problem that had been centuries in the making.  The Cuban Revolution should be credited for its significant reductions in racial inequality with respect to income, education, and political empowerment.  Complete racial equality has not been attained, and this invites reflection on how a level of racial inequality could persist in the context of a society that is fully committed to the elimination of racial discrimination.  Such reflection is indeed beginning today, although other issues have a higher priority among the people, such as the satisfaction of material needs and the new imperialist strategy of the United States to finally bring the Cuban Revolution to an end.

     D’Amato’s highly selective discussion of race is rooted in his belief that Cuba is not socialist and that the Cuban Revolution does not have the characteristics that a socialist revolution ought to have.  But what should a socialist revolution in a neocolonized underdeveloped Caribbean nation look like?  This will be the subject of our next post.


Key words: race, Cuba, racism, prejudice, racial inequality, socialism
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Black community control

2/10/2016

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Posted on May 10, 2015, following a wave of incidents in US cities involving the killing of black youth by police, followed by popular rebellion in protest.


     In responding to the murder of black youth by local police, outrage and protest, peaceful and violent, are understandable.  But they are not enough.  The solution to this systemic problem is the development of structures of popular control of police and criminal justice institutions.

     The concept of black control of the institutions of the black community, or black community control, was proposed by Malcolm X.  In various speeches to black audiences in 1964 in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, he preached:  “The politics, the economy, and all the institutions of the community should be under your control.”

     Malcolm lived most of his life in Boston and New York, where large black sections of the cities constituted a de facto separation between black and white societies.  Formed by this experience, Malcolm was not in agreement with the emphasis of the civil rights movement of 1955 to 1965 on civil and political rights.  He of course understood that the civil and political rights of all should be protected.  But he believed that the strategic emphasis on civil and political rights implied an ultimate goal of the integration of blacks and whites.  For Malcolm, the physical separation of blacks and whites was not the issue; the problem, as he saw it, was that white men controlled the institutions of the black community.

     Following his assassination of February 21, 1965, Malcolm became a revered figure in the African-American movement as it evolved to its black power and black nationalist stage during the period 1966-72.  The idea of black control of black community institutions took hold, and there were various attempts to put it into practice.  Its most advanced expression was an experiment in control of schools by a local community school board that was formed through special popular elections in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of New York City.  The project was supported by Mayor John Lindsey, a white progressive who had been elected mayor as a Republican, breaking the hold of the white ethnic democratic machine on city polities.  The local school board ordered the transfer of some of the teachers and hired new teachers, who, it believed, had more respectful attitudes toward black culture and were more committed to the education of black children.  Under local community control, the schools developed significant changes in the curriculum, giving more emphasis to African-American and African history and culture.  The experiment was brought to an end by the determined opposition of the mostly white New York City teachers’ union, which conducted a long strike, paralyzing education in the city.  The crisis was resolved through a compromise that reduced the authority of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board, effectively ending this experiment in local empowerment.

     Then, as now, the local police force was analogous to an occupying army mobilized to control an alien presence in the center of an empire.  Such a force could not be a true law enforcement agency, which ought to function to protect law-abiding citizens from criminal elements.  Indeed, such a force tends toward a limited capacity to discern the difference between law-abiding citizens and habitual criminals, treating all with suspicion.

     There were in the late 1960s and early 1970s some efforts to establish structures of community participation in local law enforcement.  But they were limited.  So we are left to imagine what could had been:  local community control of the employment, education and training of local law enforcement agents; integral relationships between local police and other local economic, political, social and cultural institutions, each of which also possess a capacity for autonomous development; and cooperation between local community institutions and those of the larger society, guided by a common national commitment to fundamental democratic values and principles.  In short, a local community actively involved in its economic, political and cultural development, overcoming step-by-step the poverty and underdevelopment that are a legacy of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and exploitation. 

     Alive as a viable and hopeful alternative before the people from 1966 to 1972, the concept of black community control declined in influence during the 1970s, as a consequence of a lack of political will at the national level.  By the 1980s, with the triumph of Reagan and the national turn to the Right, it was forgotten.

     That we have forgotten the concept of community control is symptomatic of a larger problem.  We have forgotten the key proposals of the two principal charismatic leaders of the 1960s, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  In addition to the idea of community control, Malcolm advocated the development of political and cultural ties with national liberation movements and newly-independent governments of Africa, Asia and Latin America.  To this end, he traveled extensively to Africa, met with African leaders, and addressed the Organization of African Unity.  Dr. King, meanwhile, experienced a significant evolution during the period 1964 to 1968.  Expanding the strategy of attention on political and civil rights, his speeches and organized action increasingly focused on the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens of the nation and the world, including condemnation in 1966 of the “domestic colonialism” of the urban North, and culminating in the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.  In 1967, he condemned the US war in Vietnam as a war of white colonialism against a nation that sought independence and self-determination.  In late 1967, a few months before he was assassinated, he wrote that the United States should support the democratic revolutions of the “barefoot people” of the earth, who seek to bring colonialism and neocolonialism to an end.  As a nation, we recently commemorated the voting rights campaign in Selma in 1965, remembering the leadership of Dr. King in that historic event.  But we have forgotten what King tried to teach us after Selma.

     Jesse Jackson kept alive a number of the visionary proposals of the African-American movement during his presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988.  As a strategy of popular political empowerment, he proposed a Rainbow Coalition of workers, farmers, students, women, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, gays, small businesspersons, and ecologists, incorporating the demands of each in a comprehensive and well-formulated platform.  The Jackson platform also included decisive government action in defense of the social and economic rights of all citizens.  With respect to foreign policy, the platform proposed North-South cooperation, casting aside imperialism as the foundation of US policy.

     I was a Jesse Jackson delegate at the 1988 Democratic Convention, and we Jackson delegates discussed the need to develop the Rainbow Coalition as a permanent political formation at the local and state levels across the nation.  In South Carolina, we held several meetings dedicated to the implementation of this idea in our state.  But we could not sustain the effort.

     Imagine what could have been.  Had we been able to establish the Rainbow Coalition as a national mass organization, educating and raising the consciousness of our people at the local level, we today would be able to propose a constructive alternative to the superficial and sometimes reactionary discourse of the mainstream.  At any moment when a crisis or stunning or shameful event causes convulsion and anguish among our people, we would be able to offer to lead the people and the nation in a positive direction toward the development of democracy in its fullest sense.

     Following the national turn to the Right in 1980, progressive white, black and Latino leaders and intellectuals in the United States have had the duty to keep alive before our people the principal ideas and proposals of the two most important charismatic leaders in the United States of the twentieth century, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.  We have not been able to fulfill this duty.

     We the people of the United States have a long history of developing movements from below: a labor movement that overcame long hours, low pay, and tenement housing; an abolitionist movement that played a central role in bringing slavery to an end; an African-American movement that overcame Jim Crow and established the protection of political and civil rights; a women’s movement that overcame legal and cultural obstacles to the development of girls and women; and a student movement that rejected US imperialism and that brought to an end the savage destruction of Vietnam.  We should remember our past and rediscover who we are.

      The excellent documentary series “Eyes on the Prize,” in concluding its segment on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, observed that the idea of “Power to the People” is as old as the nation itself.  Indeed so.


Bibliography
McKelvey, Charles.  1994.  The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition. Bayside, New York: General Hall.
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The unresolved issue of race in the USA

2/9/2016

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Posted on June 23, 2015, this is the first in a series of four posts written in the aftermath of a killing of nine persons by a lone white shooter at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.


     As we reflect upon recent tragic events in the United States, let us recall our history, for we can understand the present only if we understand the historical developments that created present dynamics. In examining the history of race relations in the United States, we learn an important lesson: when conflicts are not truly resolved, they re-express themselves.

     European conquest of vast regions of America, Asia and Africa from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was driven by a quest for raw materials and markets.  The imposition of colonial structures on the conquered nations and peoples created a vast peripheral region in a capitalist world-economy, a periphery that functioned to provide cheap raw materials on a foundation of forced labor.  The exportation of raw materials from the periphery would provide the foundation for the agricultural and industrial modernization of the core.  

     One particular manifestation of this global system of forced labor, which nearly everywhere was extremely harsh, was African slave labor in the Americas.  African slaves were forcibly transported to America and forced to work, under threat of death and brutal physical punishment, in the plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the US South, where they produced sugar, cotton, and coffee.  

     As slavery and slave societies evolved, there emerged variations.  Among the English-speaking colonizers in America, in contrast to the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies, there was much less of a tendency to mix and reproduce with slaves.  And when the English did mix, they automatically categorized mixed-race offspring as part of the black population.  So in the English slave societies, like the US South, there was a much clearer demarcation between blacks and whites than was occurring in the evolution of the Latin Caribbean, where there were three racial categories (whites, blacks, and mulattoes) and blurred lines among them.

     Everywhere slaves rebelled and escaped, creating a fear of blacks among whites, who must have felt subconsciously that black violence against them would be just retribution.  Blacks, including freed and escaped slaves, also were active and leading participants in the abolitionist movement.  The dynamics of black political participation varied in each nation, in accordance with particular conditions, including variations in the relation between the struggle for black rights and the struggles for national liberation and the rights of women.

      In the case of the United States, abolitionism and women’s rights emerged as causes championed by progressive sectors in the 1850s.  With the defeat of the Southern planter class in the Civil War, the stage was set for a political alliance between the Northern industrial elite and Radical Republicanism in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of the political and civil rights of the freedmen.  However, full citizenship for the emancipated slaves required not only the protection of political and civil rights but also the distribution of land.  A proposal for the distribution of forty acres of land to emancipated slaves was before the Congress, but it was not approved.  If it had been enacted in the late 1860s, a time when family farming was still economically viable, it would have made possible the emergence of a black agricultural middle class.  Instead, a tenant farming system emerged, in which the freedman were superexploited by the planter class, now reconstituted as a landlord-merchant class that both owned land and controlled local trade.  W.E.B. DuBois called it “economic slavery.”  

     Once the Northern industrial elite secured control of the federal government, it abandoned the Reconstruction project, leaving southern blacks to the fate of the forces marshalled by the landlord-merchant class.  The result was the emergence of Jim Crow, a political-economic-cultural system characterized by: legally sanctioned racial segregation, the systemic denial of the political and civil rights of blacks, the economic slavery of tenant farming, and unofficially sanctioned violence against blacks for purposes of social control.  Jim Crow ruled the South from 1876 to 1965, and it was responsible for the diffusion of racist assumptions and sentiments among whites and a profound cultural separation between whites and blacks.

     During World War I, blacks migrated from the South to the urban North in significant numbers, pushed by the decline of the system of cotton tenant farming in the South and pulled by job opportunities created by the war.  In the North, the rights to vote and hold public office were protected, but key civil rights were not.  Housing was restricted to a designated section of the city; and there was not equal employment opportunity, so that a clear racial hierarchy and segregation in employment emerged.  The “black ghetto,” although overcrowded and poorer than white society, had its virtues: it was a vibrant multi-class society that housed musicians and writers, and a thriving urban black culture emerged.
  
     The movement for the protection of African-American rights emerged in the urban North in the post-World War I era, for urban life provided possibilities for communication and organization.  During the 1920s, expanding black membership led to black leadership of the NAACP, which originally had been established in 1908 by white liberals who were horrified by lynching.  W.E.B DuBois became editor of Crisis, the NAACP review, thus becoming an important African-American public intellectual.  Influenced by world-wide debate concerning the disposition of the German colonies in Africa, the NAACP during the 1920s had a global and Pan-Africanist perspective.  Similarly, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had a wide following, also had a Pan-Africanist view.  During the 1930s, with the decline of the Africa debate in the international arena and with the increasing electoral presence of blacks in key Electoral College states of the North, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund shifted attention to legal and constitutional challenges to the segregated system of education in the South.  These efforts, led by Thurgood Marshall, who later became a US Supreme Court justice, culminated in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which struck down segregation in schools as a violation of the Constitution.

       During this period of 1917 to 1954, the urbanization of blacks in the South established conditions for the development of movement organizations in southern cities.  Black urbanization strengthened black churches, colleges, and protest organizations in black southern society.  A dynamic interrelation emerged, with black colleges educating an independent class of pastors influenced by tendencies of liberation theology, who provided moral legitimation and strategic support for protest and movement activities.  

     Since its origins in the post-World War I era, the African-American movement had formulated a comprehensive vision of democracy as including not only civil and political rights but also social and economic rights, such as adequate housing, nutrition, education, and standard of living.  And it included the concept that the African colonies were entitled by right to independence.  But national and international dynamics of the 1950s favored a strategy that focused on the denial of political and civil rights in the South, utilizing non-violent mass action.  Thus the African-American movement came to be known as the “Civil Rights Movement,” and often there was the mistaken impression that it began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.

     The heroic African-American journey from Montgomery to Selma during the period 1955 to 1965 is well known to the people of the United States, black and white.  It was the time of the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  It was a time of courage, self-sacrifice, heroism, and eloquent oratory.  It culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marked the definitive end of the Jim Crow system of the South and blatant forms of discrimination in US society.  

     But there were other components to the story that are less known, and our ignorance of them is central to our problems today.  The process of attaining political and civil rights was full of conflicts and contradictions that led to a distrust of white progressives among young black activists.  Black youth active in the protests naively had believed that mass action exposing the undemocratic and brutal character of the Jim Crow system would quickly bring the “good” white liberals from the North to the support of the movement.   But it was not so.  Many white liberals equivocated in their support of the civil rights movement, and the federal government was reluctant to intervene to protect civil rights workers from violence.  The federal government did not decisively act until 1964 and 1965, when the momentum of the movement had created a national and international climate of opinion that made such action unavoidable.

      Disappointed with white allies, black activists turned inward, vowing to develop separate black organizations.  It was not the first time in the history of the African-American movement that the conduct of white progressives had stimulated separatist tendencies, and the dynamic would deepen in the period 1966 to 1972.

     Nevertheless, in spite of the equivocation and violence that attended the process, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented important gains, won by the heroism of the African-American movement.  However, at this historic movement, the difference in the perspectives of whites and blacks became even clearer.  To most whites, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement meant that the struggle was completed, that blacks had attained what they wanted.  But for the African-American movement, it was a partial victory.  From the beginning, the African-American movement had sought the protection of social and economic as well as civil and political rights.  So from the perspective of the movement, the historic moment now required a decisive step forward in pursuit of social and economic rights.  And the movement found that, more than equivocation, most white allies completely disappeared.

      In response to this profound disappointment, the movement beginning in 1966 divided into two directions, and both encountered difficulties.  The first direction was the turn to black power, which was symbolized by the assassinated Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and which was announced dramatically by Stokely Carmichael at a rally on June 16, 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi.  Black power advocated black control of the institutions of black society, and it called for the development of an alternative black-led political party, black economic enterprises supported by the black community, and separate black cultural institutions (see “Black community control” 5/10/2015).

      The black power movement was greeted with a systemic police repression that involved the concerted action of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, a phenomenon rarely discussed in the US popular discourse.  By 1972, many African-American leaders had been killed or placed in prison, or they had left the country.  Only leaders who took the moderate path of seeking power through electoral politics within the Democratic Party survived the repression.

     The political project of black power, and its intellectual variant, Black Nationalism, offered a profound analysis of US society from a global perspective.  It discerned the role of European colonial domination in creating the modern world and global inequalities, and it interpreted white-black relations in the United States as a particular national manifestation of a global relation between the colonizer and the colonized.  It advocated the alliance of blacks in the United States with the African and Third World movements and governments of national liberation.  It equivocated with respect to alliance with white progressives in the United States.

     Whites needed to learn from the teachings of Black Nationalism, for they revealed the colonial foundation of the modern world-system, which was obscured by popular discourse and by the bureaucratic character of higher education.  But most whites did not encounter Black Nationalism and take seriously its insights.  A few did, such as the young white activists who formed an anti-imperialist tendency within the student/anti-war movement, including the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.  However, white society by and large, including white progressives, did not come to understand Black Nationalist insights.

     The second direction in the movement was spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Although Black Nationalism had pervasive influence in the African-American movement from 1966 to 1972, King proposed a different strategy, namely, that of alliance with the white, Latino, and indigenous poor on a basis of common economic interests.  His efforts culminated in the SCLC Poor Peoples’ Campaign of 1969.  However, the strategy of a multi-ethnic alliance among the poor confronted the same problem that had stimulated the turn to black power, namely, the lack of support by whites for a democratic restructuring of US society.  The charismatic leadership of King represented the most potent unifying force for overcoming this obstacle.  But his assassination brought to an end hope for a popular movement that united blacks and whites in a coalition that sought the protection of social and economic rights and that advocated a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations and movements of the Third World.

    The prevailing view in the United States today is that the “Civil Right Movement” attained the protection of the political and civil rights of all citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity.  But this superficial view is challenged by a more comprehensive study of the development of the African-American movement, in which we can come to understand that that the movement was unable to attain two important historic demands: the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens; and a foreign policy of cooperation with the peoples of the world in the construction of a just and more democratic world-system.  With its goals only partially attained, the movement came to an end, forced into silence by police repression, white rejection, exhaustion, and the possibility of a moderate alternative in the form of electoral politics.

     Thus, for the second time in the history of the American republic, the nation cast aside the hopes and aspirations of black society.  White rejection of fundamental historic goals of the African-American movement was to have profound consequences for the development of race relations in the United States from 1972 to the present, as we will explore in subsequent posts.


Bibliography

McKelvey, Charles.  1994.  The African-American Movement:  From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition. Bayside, New York: General Hall.

Key words: Emanuel AME Church, race, race relations, racial violence, racial divide, racial division, racism, symbolic racism, affirmative action, poverty, lower class, Civil Rights Act, Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalism, the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson, popular coalition

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    Author: Charles McKelvey

    Retired professor, writer,  and Marxist-Leninist-Fidelist-Chavist revolutionary

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