By Malik Miah
Throughout US history "race" has been a major factor in the country's politics. The English occupation and the westward drive by settlers to conquer and slaughter the native peoples was justified in the name of advancing "civilisation".
Racism is as American as apple pie, yet race itself is a political concept having little to do with biology or science. The attitude of white superiority was embedded by the founding fathers in the US Constitution, wherein African slaves were defined as property.
A century later, laws enacted in the late 1800s against Chinese and other non-white immigrants were based on racial differences and presumed white superiority.
Bigotry between whites, particularly when new European immigrants arrived, has existed throughout US history. Within a generation, however, common skin colour brought about an accommodation and access to the system that former slaves and fourth and fifth generation Japanese and Chinese Americans still do not share.
Class divisions, of course, are also mainstays of US history and society. But race politics has always crossed class lines and cannot be viewed — as some socialists in history have done — as a subordinate problem that will disappear once a successful anti-capitalist revolution takes place.
A victorious socialist revolution cannot happen unless the independent working-class movement understands that the issue of race is central.
Racism is not simply about colour. It is a power relationship.
The backlash
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and other opponents of affirmative action and civil rights shifted "race" politics to the right under the guise of supporting a "colour-blind society" and "equality and fairness".
The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a series of articles entitled "About Race". They included a discussion of what it means to be white.
Some whites have even begun organising against "white bashing". Others, motivated by anti-racist goals, have set up groups to learn about "what it means to be white".
In 1996, the Center for the Study of White American Culture in New Jersey held a national conference. The founder, Jeff Hitchcock, said, "Some people say, 'Oh my God, this is white supremacy'. It is not. It is a conscious attempt to look at the racial structure in our society. Is it being used to support white privilege?".
No one denies what the raw statistics document. African Americans in all social and economic categories are worse off than whites. The question is why?
The right wing says it is because of the breakdown of the family and the failure of government social welfare and affirmative action programs. Its solution is to gut or get rid of all social programs won in the 1960s.
For the right, 30 years of "trying to amend" for crimes of their white ancestors is enough "time served" for 400 years of inequality. It promotes the myth that we live in a "colour-blind society" based on "equal opportunity".
Conservatives use these code phrases to deny the historic privileges that flow to Caucasians. The result of this sustained ideological backlash against civil rights is that whites feel more at ease to discuss the so-called privileges of being black or Asian!
The failure of the labour and civil rights leadership to effectively answer these attacks has everything to do with their basic support of the profit system. The fight to end legal discrimination was always much easier than organising a battle to end the discrimination woven into the very fabric of the economy.
Cooption
This is the context in which we should view President Bill Clinton's decision to establish an Advisory Commission on Race, headed by Professor Emeritus John Hope Franklin.
The commission's just-released report has received little attention — not surprising, given the president's other preoccupations.
What is Clinton's purpose? Obviously, he's not out to relaunch a new civil rights movement to take on institutionalised racism.
Rather, the rise of the radical right in mainstream politics is a concern for the powers that be. These forces have no need, and no desire, to have the stability of their system disrupted by overt racial conflict.
Clinton, representing dominant sectors of the corporate class, wants to slow down the racist backlash that could undermine the incorporation of middle-class African Americans, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans into the political and economic structures of US capitalism.
Big business has learned to live (and thrive) with the demographic changes of the last 30 years. The latest federal population figures show, for example, that within five years whites will be less than 50% of the population of California, the country's most populated state.
Clinton's job is twofold. First, he must explain to whites of all classes, but particularly working-class whites, that their relative privileges are secure.
His second task is to ensure that legal segregation for the middle-class layers of the black (and non-Caucasian) population remains a thing of the past. They can stay in their comfortable homes, but they must let their working-class and poor cousins fend for themselves.
Wall Street is not afraid that coloured capitalists will take over. It is not interested in preserving segregation.
For that matter, most whites, if asked (and recent polls confirm this point), are for equality and oppose racism, as they understand these terms. Moreover, global economic realities dictate no turning back of the clock.
The existing African-American leadership supports the profit system. They're no longer on the outside. There are even black investment firms. These "leaders" accept inequality based on income. They oppose racism since it still affects how high up the corporate and political ladder they can go.
But would they lead new movements against discrimination? Not likely. To end racism requires a new state structure based on placing human needs over profits. That new state cannot be reformed into existence.
A new leadership based on the most oppressed and exploited layers of the black population will be needed. While some middle-class individuals will join in as the inevitable next recession hits, they will not play the role they did in the 1960s.
[Malik Miah is an airline union activist and a member of socialist organisation Solidarity.]