Just in time for Martin Luther King day, Newsweek magazine reveals that Donald
Trump thought that all welfare recipients were black. When told, in a meeting
with members of the Congressional Black Caucus last March, that not all people
on welfare are black, Trump responded, “Really? Then what are they?” –
apparently unable to picture a white person on welfare. In fact, most welfare recipients are white. White
people without a college degree ages 18 to 64 are the largest class of adults
on welfare.
The assumption, spoken or unspoken, that welfare recipients
are black is a common misconception. We can point to the media and their
repetition of stories and pictures of black single mothers on welfare, but that
doesn’t explain why the media makes the assumption and why it comes across as
plausible to most Americans.
In fact this image of welfare recipients as black flows from
the racist ideology that permeates US society: the idea that black people are a
distinct kind of people – a “race” –who are by nature significantly less able
to provide for themselves than white people are. As a factual claim, this idea
has been thoroughly debunked by genetics, most recently by the human genome
project, by anthropology and indeed by history. An excellent analysis and
history of the idea of race is that in the book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Karen Fields
and Barbara Fields, which has helped me to see more clearly that the very idea
of race is racist. It was created in order to mark off, as distinct from and
inferior to the rest of us, people who could be denied the rights we claimed
for ourselves.
Racism did not result from human nature – neither the nature of white people or the nature of black
people. It does not come naturally to people from most other cultures, nor do
children see separate races until they are taught to do so. So how, and more
importantly, why, did it arise? Historian Edmund Wilson argues in his classic
book American Slavery, American Freedom,
that racism was encouraged by wealthy plantation owners in the early days of
slavery in 17th Century colonial Virginia to provide poor whites
with “social, psychological, and political advantages” so that they would
align, not with the slaves who in many ways shared their condition, but with
their exploiters” (344). Virginia’s ruling elites had considerable fears of
uprisings by both enslaved blacks as well as by white indentured servants. So,
quoting from Morgan:
Obviously it was to the advantage
of the men who ran Virginia to encourage …contempt [for blacks and Indians] in
the colony’s white servants and freemen.… By a series of acts, the assembly did
what it could to foster [that] contempt [among] whites. In 1670 it forbade free
Negroes and Indians “though baptized,” to own Christian servants. In 1680 it
prescribed thirty lashes on the bare back “if any negroe or other slave shall
presume to lift up his hand in opposition to any christian.” This was a particularly effective provision in that
it allowed servants to bully slaves without fear of retaliation, thus placing
them psychologically on a par with masters.
Though this last provision is no longer written into law,
it’s still an working assumption of many law enforcement officials,
prosecutors, and juries as is evidenced by the lack of indictments, let alone
convictions, for police who shoot unarmed Afro-Americans.
When African slaves were first set to work in the tobacco
fields, Morgan writes
…there is no evidence that English
servants or freedmen resented the substitution of African slaves for more of
their own kind. When their masters began to place people of another color in
the fields beside them, the unfamiliar appearance of the newcomers may well
have struck them as only skin deep. There are hints that the two despised
groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It was common,
for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together,
get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In
Bacon’s Rebellion one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of
eighty Negroes and twenty English servants. (327)
Racism put a stop to such fraternization and collective
action against the rich and powerful, and it continues to so today, something
the Trump campaign took full advantage of last year. Being white in a racist
society still endows one with “social,
psychological, and political advantages” that many white people, especially
those who feel economically and socially insecure, are fearful of losing. The
existence of a social class of people who, supposedly by their very nature, are
losers in the social struggle leads them to blame those racially marginalized
others for what is wrong with society and not the wealthy elites with whom they
share the imaginary feature of being “white”.
This account should help us see
that Capitalism and White Supremacy grew up together and are facets of a single
system. Political movements to end the exploitation of everyone by Capital must
at the same time work to end the marginalization of some of us by the divisions
of race, and vice-versa. Martin Luther King knew this. He and his allies
understood that the oppression their people faced was linked to the oppression
other people faced, whether it was union workers being denied their rights,
poor whites denied proper education and access to jobs, or laborers overseas
working in sweat shops to produce the products we use every day.[1] As
King wrote, “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there
is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… We must see now
that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied
together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the
others…- Report to
SCLC Staff, May 1967.
Seeing that “economic competition between whites and
blacks undermines civil rights, he called for a “Grand
Alliance” between working-class whites and black, that is to reject
Capitalism’s efforts to split us into contending factions with the wedge of
race which sees to it that the people divided can always be defeated. This is
as much to say, Workers of the World – all
the world – unite.
I’m Clayton Morgareidge for the
Old Mole Variety Hour on MLK day, 2018.
[1] According to a piece on
Alternet by Zaid Jilani, https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dr-king-wanted-grand-alliance-blacks-and-whites-build-economic-justice
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