Re: [Marxism] Bonds, Genes, Racism

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sayan writes, "'Sociologically, racism pervades everything'? Maybe you can
explain how Barack Obama, a black man, is a leading candidate for
president?"

Sure, for one thing it's a fucking POLL, Sayan, and a lot of the content of
that question right now is: "are you a racist" and of course lots of white
people are going to say no, because racism --including their own racism-- is
invisible to them.

In a survey done by Gallup, nearly two thirds of whites said that Blacks
were treated equally in their community. And this was in 1963, while
official, Jim Crow Apartheid was still the law of the land, civil rights
activists were being brutally attacked and murdered, and before the civil
rights act and the voting rights act.

Racism pervades EVERYTHING in the United States, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. Not
just sociologically. Politically. Economically. Culturally. And in every
other fucking way.

If you're a dialectical and historical materialist, the question is not how
could this be, but how could it possibly be otherwise? 

THIS country was founded on the genocidal extermination of Native Americans.
The "little house on the prairie" was populated by little Eichmanns,
MILLIONS of them came over from Europe for the express purpose of settling
and working land stolen from the Native Americans. 

Estimates of the population of what is now the United States at the time
Columbus got lost on his way to India range from a few million to 20 million
or more. After the last great massacre of Native Americans in the Westward
expansion of the colonial-settler United States, At Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, in 1891, there were 100,000 left. 

And that dispossession continues to be defended TO THIS DAY by genocide --
just look at the deaths on the border.

And then there's the Blacks. The slave trade was the cornerstone of
industrial capitalism. That's where Britain's capital came from. The great
British industry of the early 1800s --textiles-- was made possible by Black
slavery in the United States. And even after the abolition of slavery,
Blacks were kept "in their place" through a campaign of mass, genocidal
terror. 

Unlike most cultures, which hide and even deny their genocidal crimes, in
the South lynchings were public, family affairs, written about in the
newspapers, memorialized in postcards, carried out brazenly.

How could racism NOT permeate EVERYTHING in such a country? Racism is the
very soul of America -- it has no other.

Joaquin


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