RONALD REAGAN AND CAPITALIST
RACISM
 The
death of Ronald Reagan and the anniversary of
Brown vs. Board of Education are two events
seemingly unrelated but tied together by a
history of race in this country: Tied together
tragically, intricately and necessarily.
Brown vs. Board of Education released
tremendous energy in the fight for justice,
provided hope for progress, broke down the
ideological fortress justifying Jim Crow
segregation and destroyed the underlying
justification for racism.
Ronald Reagan, 26 years later, established a new
form of coded racism and method of oppression by
pandering to the most racist perspectives in the
South and then using those perspectives for a
political power movement.
Certain basic principles need to be analyzed to
understand how we can build a new movement for
social change.
Before Brown vs. Board of Education, ideologues
for capitalism had constructed a body of ideas
to justify the manifest injustice of
concentration of wealth and oppression of
working people. The foundation was that
capitalism under a democratic system of
government allowed everyone to compete equally
and many people were able to reap enormous
wealth or at least a comfortable living through
hard work, etc. While the myth had little
factual basis, it had a considerable emotional
attraction.
The most blatant example of the senselessness of
this apology for capitalism was Jim Crow
segregation. The vicious violence used to secure
positions of privilege in the South destroyed
any pretense of equality of opportunity.
The Communist/Progressive movement led the
battle to expose this contradiction. In doing
so, the two-pronged attack by a section of the
ruling class was to eliminate de jure
segregation and countenance the Red Scare
McCarthyism.
Elimination of the de jure segregation also
benefited a section of the ruling class: This
section could move plants to the South and
undermine the unionization that existed in the
North. It all seemed so easy for those engineers
of social manipulation:
“In 1954, or even 1955 or
’57, few imagined that the system wouldn’t last
another generation. Even activists weren’t
prepared for the prairie fire of insurgency that
opposition to Jim Crow ignited between the
mid-1950s and mid-1960s. Brown was both
illustration of and impetus for that change. It
was also a culmination of decades of careful
strategizing and organizing, of protracted legal
struggle, against one facet of the
segregationist order – a point where its
separate-but-equal sophistry was most vulnerable
– led by the NAACP and its allies.” Adolph Reed,
Jr., Watson (5/3/04 – Page 17)
It was not just Brown vs. Board of Education,
but Emmett Till’s murder and the organizing of
the bus boycott when Rosa Parks refused a
segregated seat. The above discussed prairie
fire, most importantly, eliminated the
ideological and moral foundation not just of Jim
Crow segregation, but also the very concept of
racial inferiority that justified segregation.
Soon, the entire structure began to crumble.
Miscegenation laws came under attack.
Scientifically, the entire concept of different
races was destroyed. There is only one race, the
human race. That only left the cultural mores to
hold up the citadel of capitalist racism.
The ideological principles of capitalist
racism were destroyed:
1) There is no genetic basis for racial
differentiation;
2) The entire human race originated in Africa
and visual differentiation was, at best,
superficial;
3) The history of racism and segregation was, in
fact, a history of “racial” mixing principally
through the rape of Black women.
The picture of hateful, vicious Whites screaming
at young high school students trying to enter
their high school in Little Rock Arkansas, the
police dogs, the water hoses, the bombings, the
murders, all exposed the bankruptcy of the
ideological structure. Once these vivid images
were brought into living rooms, Whites could no
longer ignore the racist oppression of Blacks in
this country.
But then the plants moved South, the unions were
subverted, and a new strategy was created using
new code words and subtle alterations in racial
ideology. Concepts of reverse discrimination,
and a so-called colorblind society were used.
More importantly, there was a separation of
concepts; the concept of economic oppression was
separated from the concepts of the oppression of
women and the oppression of African Americans
and national minorities.
In the development of the movement, women played
a leading role in breaking down both political
and legal barriers. Emmett Till’s mother refused
to accept the murder of her child quietly and
bore the pain of an open casket. Fannie Lou
Hamer came out of the fields to lead a major
political movement. This leadership linked up
with the past of Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells
and the Blues singers as described by Angela
Davis. Angela Davis herself emerged as a major
feminist leader.
The Civil Rights movement re-energized and
nurtured the feminist movement and the
liberation of sexual orientation. It was the
power of this combination of forces that
revolutionized the cultural foundations of the
United States capitalism and capitalism
throughout the world for that matter.
But the right wing was not standing still.
Instead, the right wing began to regroup, create
new concepts to justify the extant structures
and build coalitions to keep political power.
Ronald Reagan perfected the attitude of coded
racism, tokenism and defended capitalist racism.
Opening his campaign in Philadelphia,
Mississippi in 1984, where three civil rights
workers were brutally murdered trying to
register Negroes to vote, he symbolically
pronounced his support for the most vicious
forms of racial oppression while verbalizing
principles only of reverse discrimination and
the colorblind society. In that way he could
justify economic determinism which supported the
most grossly disproportionate concentration of
wealth in the hands of the few.
There were many unanticipated
legacies of Brown. The most obvious is white
flight. Who could have anticipated that whites
would start leaving communities because their
schools were going to be integrated? Who would
have anticipated that we would find ourselves
with so few African American educators as role
models when other doors opened? Who would have
thought that an academic achievement gap would
be something that we would be talking about five
decades later?” Cheryl Brown Henderson, Black
Issues Book Review (6/04 – page 15).
As stated by Cheryl Brown Henderson, the
unanticipated legacies of Brown were surprising.
However, it could be expected that a victory of
such magnitude would generate a counter attack.
The Reagan conservative movement fought for
these results.
Shocking as it may seem, the single greatest
weakness of the full spectrum of left thought in
this country has been the failure or refusal,
especially by liberals, to recognize that there
is a powerful and fully operational right wing
in this country. Whether it is Ralph Nader or
Susan Brown-Miller, these individuals look at
all differences as antagonistic contradictions
without accepting that differences can be
nonantagonistic, capable of discussion and
operational unity.
Obviously, this is a complicated social process.
The right wing in this country must be fought
militantly and with considerable discipline.
However, because of the cultural history of this
country, there are many differences within the
working class. Those differences have to be
struggled against but the struggle has to bring
unity, not separation. Every step towards unity,
however small, builds a movement.
“Racial apartheid has shaped
and continues to shape the intimate lives of
citizens in the United States. Most black people
spend their personal social time primarily with
other black people. The same is true for whites
and other nonblack groups. Within all of these
groups some form of color caste system exists,
for example, whites valuing blond blue-eyed
people more, seeing them as the epitome of
beauty, or different Asian groups overvaluing
fair skin. Tragically, in the midst of
state-legitimized racial apartheid, in
predominantly black communities everywhere, the
intimate terrorism of the color caste is
enacted. Children are its most vulnerable
victims.
In my first women’s studies class, when
contemporary feminist movement was just
starting, I was the only black female. The white
students did not comprehend what I was talking
about when I disagreed with their assumption
that at the moment of an infant’s birth (when it
exists the maternal body), the first concern is
the child’s gender identity. I shared with them
that in black American life when a newborn is
emerging from the body what is first noticed is
skin color, that black parents know skin color
will, to a grave extent, over determine some
aspects of their child’s destiny as much as
gender.” Bell Hooks, Rock My Soul, Atria Books
2003, Page 41-42
Illustration of this process of breaking down
separation was provided in the Progressive Film
Festival. The film “Panther Women” discussed the
tactical and strategic methods of fighting
against sexism within the Black Panther Party
while building unity to fight against capitalist
racism. To put it in Panther terms, it was
necessary to fight internal contradictions in
order to build unity for the fight against
external contradictions.
The film festival provided these historical
landmarks: Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit as a
fight against lynching; Marin Luther King’s
linking of racial oppression and capitalist
oppression and the Black Panther Party’s fight
for female leadership and against sexism within
the Party along with the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers fight at the point of production.
The film festival provided practical and
operational methods of building unity.
The Civil Rights Dinner of April 3, 2004, also
provided that organizational framework. By
fighting for the democratic rights of women
within the NLG, we established the basis for
building the broad coalition that became the
Civil Rights Dinner. That coalition reenergized
forces throughout Michigan.
Willie Mukasa Rick’s speech was integral to
building that coalition. Historically, the Guild
Civil Rights summer provided protection for
field workers trying to register Negroes to vote
but it also exposed the violence of
segregationist oppression. One forgets that the
South with the compliance of an important
section of the media contended that Negroes in
the South were content with segregation and it
was only communists from the North stirring up
problems. Mukasa’s speech reminded everyone that
violence was the preferred method of social
control by segregationist institutions. The
success of the civil rights summer of 1964 and
the Civil Rights Dinner of 4/3/04 depended on
uniting with the most oppressed sections of the
working class. To the extent that we separate
ourselves even in the slightest manner from the
vitality and militancy of that movement, we
become sterile and ineffective. Mukasa’s speech
provided that powerful energy.
In continuing this struggle, the NLG unites with
its past history and obtains immediate
credibility in current struggles. Guild members
have made a choice to become advocates for the
working class for individual reasons. But, in
doing so, they have united with a collective
struggle. Now we must look at methods for
building operational unity with the
African-American struggle in general and the
NCBL in particular. If we are successful we can
then build broader coalitions with the Wolverine
Bar, the Detroit Association of Black
Organizations, the NAACP, women’s groups, etc.
We are part of a bigger picture. The one factor
that we must learn is that culture is far more
rigid and immutable than we realize. Patterns of
behavior, once learned, are passed to the next
generation with only minor alterations.
That is why the conservative movement was able
to reshape a racist society with new symbols and
shibboleths even though the underlying concept
of racial inferiority had been destroyed. The
“Bell Curve” rewrote the junk science and they
started all over again. They have now created a
new series of lies and myths that must be
destroyed.
The Guild has had a breakthrough and we now have
3 years of tentative operational unity. We must
now look at building on this unity through
further joint activity that can breakdown the
cultural barriers created by capitalist racism.
Yours in Struggle,
-
Ronald D. Glotta
220 Bagley, Suite 808
Detroit, Michigan 48226
(313) 963-1320
(313) 963-1325 fax
rglotta@glottaassociates.com
www.glottaassociates.com
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