Racism and ideology

Issues of racism and ideology go together, inextricably.  The ruling class has used racism not only to amass vast wealth via enslaved labor, but it has also used racism to get working and middle class white people to psychologically buy into our own class exploitation.

Part of the bargain has been the many psychological and material benefits of white skin privilege. W.E.B Dubois called this the “wages of whiteness” in exchange for accepting the rule of the historically white capitalist class.

During wave after wave of immigration from Europe in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, whites fleeing hardship and exploitation psychologically and politically bought into anti-black racism.Instead of forging common ground with fellow exploited people (African Americans), the Irish and other white immigrant groups, (with only a few notable exceptions) viciously adopted US-based racism in order to assimilate into this country, with eventual entry for many white immigrants into the middle class and eventual entry for a few white immigrants and their descendents into the upper class.

The ideology wherein people believe that many white immigrant groups have succeeded and so should have blacks is nonsense, because the white immigrants,  and more recently, Asian immigrants adopt racism as a requirement of assimilation in a country that has attacked the political and economic advancements of black people time and again, from the post Civil War Reconstruction era to the New Deal era, to Reagonomics and the Clinton “Third Way” era.

Some black folk can get into the upper class, despite all of this and many enter the middle class despite all this. But the huge white-black racial wealth gap persists, changing little since the Civil War.

The ideology of racism and the ideology of our capitalist system go together. Some refer to our system as “racial capitalism.”
More recently, the anti-government rhetoric of Reagan relied on racism whereby anti-poverty and other social safety net, and working-class oriented institutions such as unions were attacked.

Programs that offered opportunities for the working class were wildly popular from the time of their creation under the New Deal in the 1930s and they remain popular until the Black Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s pressured Lyndon Johnson to dismantle racist aspects of those programs and to expand those programs in order to address systemic racism.

In the late 1960s, there begun a concerted effort to use racism in new ways : to erode public support for working class oriented social programs.
The Republican Party, starting in earnest with Richard Nixon, used anti-blackness to appeal to “law and order”, laying the foundation for the War on Drugs and mass incarceration of black people that intensified under Reagan and then under Clinton.

Reagan used racism not only for the “war on drugs” propaganda but also to break down public support for anti-poverty and other social safety net programs. Though those programs helped a lot of whites, the mainstream media and conservative politicians hammered away at a sort of messaging to link “welfare” with supposedly lazy, stupid black people. And Reagan’s intensification of the Drug War used racist  notions of the inherently violent nature of black people.

The massive racist sales pitch to white America that was coded as “anti-government” and as protecting “hard working, law-abiding Americans” worked its destructive magic not only against black people in the US, but also against the white working class.

In the bargain with racism, unions were attacked during Reagan’s tenure, and rules were  set in place that began a vast redistribution whereby wealth gushed up to the 1 and .1 percent, beginning a process in which many working and middle class people of all races experienced declines in pay, benefits, retirements…etc.

Under Reagan, taxes for the wealthy were slashed and social programs were cut and  mass incarceration accelerated, while stock buybacks were legalized in 1982, allowing a process whereby huge amounts of concentrated wealth could occur at the very top of the ladder, all while doing little or nothing to create actual goods and services that are beneficial to the public and to longterm US national interest.

Unfortunately, Clinton continued the policy patterns that Reagan and Bush Sr pursued, undoing Glass-Steigall that had protected consumer banking from the abuses of financial speculation. Clinton worked with Republicans as well as you know who in the Senate, (Biden) to intensify mass incarceration, using appeals to racism, such as Hillary Clinton’s reference to

John Dilillo’s racist term “super-predators” which he and another author presented to the Clintons in a  subsequently widely discredited study which, at the time, was received as credible social science by those in power, even though it was bogus research. 

At the time of  all of this, racism functions in a different direction, which none the less ends up dividing and conquering the working and middle classes.  In this other sense, racism is used by those segements of the ruling class that are more tied to the Democratic establishment than to the Republican establishment.  This involves the mainstream liberal establishment framing racism as if it were an ontological force that has no connection to our economic system.

Both the mainstream liberal and mainstream conservative establishments use racism in different, but complementary ways. 
The Republicans rally their base by appealing to the racist idea that undeserving non-whites (Latinx immigrants, low-income blacks, Muslim immigrants from Somalia…etc) are cutting ahead in line, so to speak. The Republican establishment also uses the usual anti-government, ‘big-government’ rhetoric which is actually both racist and classist when you look at the actual policies and social programs that are under attack.
The mainstream liberal establishment, most of the Democratic Party, relies heavily on appeals to racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity as well as to youth as an identity to rally their base.

To minimize addressing economic issues, the mainstream liberal establishment leans on terms such as “diversity” “inclusion” a “place at the table” and so on. All those things in and of themselves are good, morally and politically, if we value having a pluralistic open and free society. But the Democratic establishment turns virtue into vice by using the very good cause of inclusion, tolerance and cultural diversity with apparent aim of disguising their fealty to the super-wealthy donor class that runs both major parties.

Some leftist critiques of mainstream liberalism and the Democratic establishment use the term  “rainbow neoliberalism.” One article in Jacobin cleverly, albeit cynically, is titled “Let Them Eat Diversity.” The mainstream liberal establishment celebrates the increased cultural diversity occuring within the top 5 percent, top 1 percent, top .1 percent and maybe also the top .01 percent, while overall, there are increasing numbers of people of most or all races and cultural identities that are experiencing economic precarity.

Black people are now among millionaires and billionaires and among the influential professional classes as well as among the political class, especially as mayors and council members of big cities, and even chiefs of police. All of that in and of itself is good, if we want a multiracial democracy. 

But the racial wealth gap in 2021 differs little from that at the time of the Civil War. Millions of black people are disproportionately experiencing economic precarity and also disproportionately deprived of access to what should be basic amenities in an advanced industrial society such as nutritious food, healthcare, safe drinking water and so on. Not only with mass incarceration, police brutality, COVID deaths , and other healthcare access issues do black people generally get the worst of it, but that occurs also with wealth generation. For example, Black people disproportionately lost wealth during the 2007 and 2008 crash. 

Ideology and racism go hand in hand, because the economic system was built on racism (ie, slavery, genocide, colonialism in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America). Diversity  and inclusion is important to having a free and just society but racial representation among the political and economic elite won’t by itself dismantle white supremacy.  It hasn’t worked in South Africa and won’t work here in the US. The economic system must be deeply reformed in order to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy.

In South Africa, much of the wealth is still white-owned and controlled, even though Black folk run the government and comprise the majority of the population. White supremacists laugh at this and see South Africa as proof that Black folk cannot govern themselves as well as they were supposedly “taken care of” under white rule.

But that racist view is incorrect. The problem of continued inequality and poverty in South Africa shows that the economic system must be addressed if white supremacy is to be dismantled and poverty drastically reduced.
After Apartheid, the ANC, even under Mandela, sought support from the Washington Census and other elements of neoliberal capitalism, because, (understandably) they wanted global finance and transnational corporations to invest in the post-Apartheid new nation.

The global economic system of extreme wealth concentration and wildly unregulated financial markets that are heavily slanted toward wealthy countries in Europe and the US has been a challenge to anti-imperialist, anti-racist movements in the US and the rest of the world.

China’s rise and the shift of economic and political power from the US and Europe to China will have at least some effect on global white supremacy, likely furthering the cause of dismantling it, even though white nationalism in the US and Europe poses the risk of armed conflict, including nuclear war .
It’s in the enlightened self-interest of white people to proactively embrace the ending white supremacy not only here in the US but also globally.