Our Father, this Africa Day, liberate us from military bases, By Owei Lakemfa

Father, we pray that the dreams of our ancestors, as retold by Nkrumah on 24 May, 1963, that our continent must unite, should come to pass.

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NIGERIA
May 25, 2024

Father, you are the God that answereth by fire. You said it shall be the fire next time. Consume all those misruling Africa and their principals in the metropolis. Let all powers and principalities that plan to recolonise your beautiful continent be destroyed like the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. Those who trouble Africa, trouble them. Those who cause us pains, cause them pains.

Our Father, we your children in Africa come to you this day, the eve of the 25 May, Africa Liberation Day.

We have been enslaved and colonised. We have survived the genocide of our traducers, who, in Congo alone, massacred 16 million of us and wiped out two-thirds of our population in Namibia.

We also survived Apartheid and the pestilence of coups and criminal leadership. Thank you for giving us the ability to survive all these, including the continued exploitation and destabilisation of our continent. At this point, we drag before you the institutions of exploitation and dehumanisation in the continent – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and, their handmaid, the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Like doctors prescribing the same drugs for all ailments, all they have done for over four decades is to force on the continent, subsidy removal, currency flotation, exploitative market forces, higher fuel prices, jobless growth, reduction in education funding and hyper-inflation.

Father, it is not for nothing that you made us the source of humanity, the centre of the universe and the depository of natural resources. We do not take for granted the fact that over 4,000 years ago, we had the knowledge and ability to build pyramids with arithmetical accuracy and precision, which still baffles the rest of humanity. We know that the founders of Western philosophy and builders of their civilisation, including Plato and Herodotus, were pupils of Africa education, having graduated from our universities in Ancient Egypt.

We know that the rise of Africans as one of the most educated groups in the United States is not by accident. May we develop the consciousness and ability to utilise such huge assets, to develop our continent.

The God of Nkrumah, Harriet Tubman, Winnie Mandela, Felix Moumie, Dedan Kimathi, Fanon and Malcolm X, lead us to victory over all persons, groups and nations perpetuating iniquities against the African people.

Give us victory over them, as Toussaint Louverture and other liberation fighters militarily defeated France, the superpower which strived to continue the enslavement of Haitians. Even now, the gangsters, forces of darkness and their minders continue to torment Haiti. May they fail. May African leaders and progressive forces across the universe have the presence of mind and consciousness to intervene positively in Haiti and the rest of our continent.

Father, when Africans had few people to fight for them during slavery in the United States, you raised John Brown and his sons. When the forces of Apartheid were trying to overrun African countries, just as Israel is striving to obliterate the Palestinians, you raised Fidel Castro and the Cubans. May Africa never be short of true allies.

Father, as we mark the 2024 Africa Day, the continent is engulfed in a series of armed conflicts. Some, like that in Sudan, are due to prodigal children fed steroids by foreign powers. Some fires, as those in Somalia and half a dozen countries in West Africa, are set by religious elements dancing on the verge of lunacy. There are also the deliberate wars like that in Libya, engineered and stoked by the West, which destroyed that African promise.

There are over 100 million illegal small arms and light weapons circulating in the continent, almost all manufactured outside Africa. Assist us to silence the guns. Let those who live by the gun, die by the gun. Let those who profiteer from war, know no peace; let them choke on the vomit of their profits. Generally, aid us to overcome the various conflicts and set Africa firmly on the path of development.

Let there be peace in Africa as it is in Washington, London and Beijing. You said, blessed are the peace makers for they shall be called your children. We pray for all peace makers, whether in Tel Aviv or Gaza.

We have not stolen other peoples’ lands, coveted their property or seized their children. We have not sought to own the sun or the moon. All we have tried to do in Africa, is to live on the beautiful land it has pleased you to give us. Our desires are to share salt and pepper amongst ourselves, have schools for our children, roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, and medication to take of ourselves when we fall sick.

…a major challenge Africa has today are the attempts to expand military bases on our continent, where foreign powers will expand their spheres of influence at our cost. We do not want Africa to be turned into theatres of international war or test sites for new weapons. We recall the case of Cuba, whose 116-square metre Guantanamo Base, the United States leased in 1903 for $2,000.

Father, you are the God that answereth by fire. You said it shall be the fire next time. Consume all those misruling Africa and their principals in the metropolis. Let all powers and principalities that plan to recolonise your beautiful continent be destroyed like the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. Those who trouble Africa, trouble them. Those who cause us pains, cause them pains.

Father, a major challenge Africa has today are the attempts to expand military bases on our continent, where foreign powers will expand their spheres of influence at our cost. We do not want Africa to be turned into theatres of international war or test sites for new weapons. We recall the case of Cuba, whose 116-square metre Guantanamo Base, the United States leased in 1903 for $2,000. Despite repeated demands in the last six decades, the tenant has refused to leave. While we pray in solidarity with Cuba to regain its territory, we pray that African countries will not fall victims of possessive spirits that roam the universe.

Finally father, we pray that the dreams of our ancestors, as retold by Nkrumah on 24 May, 1963, that our continent must unite, should come to pass. His words that day continue to echo across our hills and valleys, especially when he said: “Unite we must. Without necessarily sacrificing our sovereignties, big or small; we can, here and now, forge a political union based on Defence, Foreign Affairs and Diplomacy, and a common Citizenship, an African currency, an African Monetary Zone and an African Central Bank. We must unite in order to achieve the full liberation of our continent. We need a common Defence system with an African High Command to ensure the stability and security of Africa. We have been charged with this sacred task by our own people, and we cannot betray their trust by failing them.” We pray Africans give heed to his words and take ‘Positive Action’ to bring them to fruition.

We pray that you bless Africa and all her well-wishers as we mark Africa Liberation Day, 2024. Ameen

Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.

Cops on Campus are the Real Outside Agitators

BY JONAH RASKIN

 MAY 9, 2024

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Portland Police on the campus of Portland State University. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair.

Nothing agitates a campus as dramatically as the arrival of the cops. Indeed, the cops have been the only real outside agitators on campuses across the country this Spring. They have brought upheaval and disorder by breaking up peaceful protests by disciplined students with a cause and ideals. And, of course, the administrators are responsible for calling in the cops. It’s the administrators who up the ante and invite confrontations and clashes. Blaming outsiders for rebellions and revolutions is one of the oldest and nastiest ruses in the world. And one of the newest, too. But it’s not working.

New Yorkers and others aren’t buying the Columbia administration’s story that outside agitators are to blame for the protests that have taken place on the campus. As though Columbia students are too blind or too stupid to see the terrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by the Israeli military with weapons supplied by the USA. At UCLA some masked men with clubs attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The cops aren’t the only culprits now much as they weren’t in ‘68.

Columbia President Shafik must take us for idiots who haven’t learned the lessons of the past and can see what’s happening in front of our own eyes. I mean the abuses of state power in Gaza and to a lesser degree on college campuses from New York to California. I know loads about the cry that outside agitators are to blame for protest movements and rebellions. I’ve heard it before. I have been called one.

I graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1963 and from Columbia University with an M.A. in 1964. By 1967 I was an assistant professor at the State University at Stony Brook. Along with more than 700 or so other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden – who coined the slogan “Create two, three, many Columbias” – I was arrested on the Columbia campus in ‘68 and went to jail briefly. I suppose in some respects I could have rightly been called an “outside agitator.” I had graduated from Columbia College five years before students occupied and liberated buildings where classes had been held, though I mostly relinquished the agitating on campus to the Black students who kicked off the 1968 rebellion soon after MLK was shot and killed. Now, that was an incitement to riot.

In ‘68 I didn’t think of myself as an outside agitator. I still reject that label. In the world today insurgents are both insiders and outsiders, localists and internationalists who reject political boundaries and borders. Imperialism respects no national boundaries and neither do anti-imperialists. The line that supposedly divides insiders from outsiders and domestic from imported agitators is far more blurry than it might seem to the casual eye. In ‘68 I felt that I had as much right to sit in as any of the undergraduates. I paid my dues. I had been miseducated and misinformed when I was a student.

I was arrested twice in ’68. The second time I went on trial in a courtroom after I declined to apologize to the Columbia administration when I was asked to do so by a representative of the university. “You are a Columbia graduate and a scholar and gentleman and as such ought to say you’re sorry for your actions,” I was told by Professor Quentin Anderson. In the eyes of the university I would not be an outside agitator if I kissed its academic ass. That I would not do.

I still feel like a member of the extended family of Columbia insurgents. I identify with  the students who protested the invasion and occupation of Gaza this spring and who have been arrested.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1960s, when I marched against segregation and nuclear testing, my mentors and role models were off-campus radical intellectuals such as Carl Marzini and Paul Sweezy, civil rights activists like MLK and Rosa Parks and further afield Che Guevara, the continental revolutionary who was born in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro in Mexico, fought on the side of the guerrillas in Cuba and later against imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia.

When we referred to the Cuban revolutionaries by their first names as though we were brothers-in-arms, our Cold War profs  – who saw Moscow gold behind all insurrections – were shocked. Like Che, only far more modest than he, American agitators belong to the world and to the legacy of homegrown anti-slavery men and women like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Slavers didn’t respect boundaries and neither did abolitionists. Nightstick-wielding cops on campuses are “pigs.” I haven’t used that word, which I learned from the Black Panthers, for decades. But it’s as timely now as it was in ’68.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

Black women struggle to find their way in a job world where diversity is under attack

Mon, March 4, 2024



BOSTON (AP) — Regina Lawless hit a professional high at 40, becoming the first director of diversity and inclusion for Instagram. But after her husband died suddenly in 2021, she pondered whether she had neglected her personal life and what it means for a Black woman to succeed in the corporate world.

While she felt supported in the role, “there wasn’t the willingness for the leaders to take it all the way,” Lawless said. “Really, it’s the leaders and every employee that creates the culture of inclusion.”

This inspired her venture, Bossy and Blissful, a collective for Black female executives to commiserate and coach each other on how to deal with misogynoir — misogyny experienced by Black women — or being the only person of color in the C-suite.

“I’m now determined to help other women, particularly women of color and Black women, to see that we don’t have to sacrifice ourselves for success. We can find spaces or create our own spaces where we can be successful and thrive,” said Lawless, who is based in Oakland, California.

Many women in Lawless' group have no workplace peers, making them the “Onlys” — the only Black person or woman of color — which can lead to feelings of loneliness or isolation.

“Getting together helps us when we go back and we’re the ‘only-lonelies’ in a lot of our organizations," Lawless said.

With attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives raging, Black women looking to climb the corporate ladder face a more hostile landscape than ever. Aside from having to constantly prove themselves and talk in a manner that can’t be labeled as angry or emotional, obtaining top managerial positions doesn’t stop the double dilemma of racial and gender pay gaps. All this adds up to disproportionate representation of Black female senior leadership.

Claudine Gay's resignation in January as Harvard's first Black president following accusations of antisemitism and plagiarism was just the latest in a revolving door of Black women who have been aggressively questioned or abandoned after achieving a career pinnacle.

Black female professionals also were hit hard when an administrator at a historically Black college in Missouri accused the school's white president of bullying and racism then took her own life. This led some to build networking groups and mentorships. For others it triggered an exodus to entrepreneurship and reinvention.

In Boston, Charity Wallace, 37, a biotech professional, and Chassity Coston, 35, a middle school principal, reflected on their own career struggles in light of Gay's ordeal. Wallace said she was being more cognizant of her mental health, and that's where their young Black professionals group, sorority sisters and family come in.

“It’s a constant fight of belonging and really having your girlfriends or your homegirls or my mom and my sister. I complain to them every day about something that’s going on at work,” Wallace said. “So having that circle of Black women that you can really vent to is important because, again, you cannot let the things like this sit. We’ve been silenced for too long.”

Coston said she mourned Gay's resignation and, fearing something similar could happen to her, she reconsidered her future in education. But she didn't want to give up.

“Yes, we’re going to continue to be scorned as Black people, as Black women. It’s going to continue to happen. But we can’t allow that," Coston said. “I’m speaking from my strength right now because that wasn’t always how I felt in my stages of grief. We have to continue to fight just like Rosa (Parks), just like Harriet (Tubman)."

Gay struggled despite her resume full of accomplishments, Wallace said.

“I can’t imagine how she felt trying to do that and getting all these accolades, her degrees that she has, the credentials, and it just seemed like even that was not enough for her to stay," Wallace said.

The backlash to DEI efforts is only amplified with clashes over identity politics. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones' tenure bid at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stalled in 2021 because of her work with the 1619 Project, a collection of essays on race. The 2022 confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court, drew criticism for their harsh and race-based questioning.

President Joe Biden emphatically stating he only would consider a Black woman for the high court deepened resentment toward DEI, said Johnny Taylor, CEO of The Society for Human Resource Management.

“Contrast and compare a CEO standing in front of his workplace or her workplace saying, ‘I’m only gonna consider, the next candidates will only be this,’" Taylor said. "That created some real tension.”

Black women are questioning whether it's even worth trying for top positions, said Portia Allen-Kyle, chief advisor at social justice organization Color of Change. Extreme scrutiny and online vitriol are high prices to pay.

“What I’ve heard from quite a few Black women — family, friends and otherwise — is a little bit of feeling of frustration at the idea that excellence is not enough,” Allen-Kyle said. “The ‘Work twice as hard, be twice as good ... maybe you'll be able to be accepted on your merit.' That lesson that maybe that's not the case is hard and frustrating and disappointing all around.”

The number of Black women in the workforce is in danger of shrinking because of a lack of support and opportunities, according to advocates.

Black women comprise 7.4% of the U.S. population but they occupy only 1.4% of C-suite positions and 1.6% of senior vice-president roles, according to a 2020 report from Lean In, “The State of Black Women in Corporate America." U.S. Census data shows Black women working year-round and full-time in 2021 made 69 cents for every dollar a white man got. Meanwhile, white women made 80 cents on the dollar.

Lawless, who left Instagram/Meta in August, thinks more Black women will decide to be their own boss rather than enter a traditional workplace.

“There’s going to be a chilling effect and you’re going to see more Black women pivot and go into entrepreneurship, which we’re already doing at higher rates,” Lawless said. “Corporations have a real problem. They’ve lost more women at the director and above level since the pandemic.”

Even self-made businesses cannot avoid DEI resistance. The Fearless Fund, a small venture capital firm, is embroiled in a lawsuit accusing a grant program for Black women-owned companies of discrimination. The litigation has scared away potential investors, according to the firm's founders.

Job openings for diversity officers and similar positions have declined in recent months. The combined share of venture capital funding for businesses owned by Black and Latina women has dipped back to less than 1% after briefly surpassing that threshold — at 1.05% — in 2021, according to the nonprofit advocacy group digitalundivided.

Stephanie Felix, of Austin, Texas, just started her own DEI consulting firm in January. It's not something the 36-year-old, who worked in DEI for company review website Glassdoor, initially saw for herself.

“People say there’s risk in leaving but there’s also a lot of risk in staying,” Felix said.

Colleagues, family and even Felix herself had reservations about her career leap. But she said she has too often seen DEI hires go from “office pet to office threat.” Their arrival was heralded as a new chapter, but senior leaders wouldn't come through with promised resources or authority to effect change.

“I applaud women that choose to step away and choose themselves. I applaud myself for it too,” Felix said. "Even though it’s not easy, it gives you more sovereignty over your life which is, in my mind, definitely worth it.”

___

Associated Press business writer Alexandra Olson in New York contributed to this report.

___

Terry Tang reported from Phoenix. She is a member of the AP's Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @ttangAP.

Terry Tang And Michael Casey, The Associated Press

ACTUAL CULTURAL MARXISM




Feminism, Intersectionality, and Marxism


Josefina L. Martínez

July 11, 2023

Debates on gender, race, and class: How can the working class become hegemonic in struggles against oppression?


Intersectionality is a word that is frequently used in academia, among feminist activists, and in social movements. “Class, race and gender” are, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, the “contemporary holy trinity.”1 There is a lot of discourse about intersectionality, but the definition of the term is often unclear. Is it a theory or an empirical description? Does it operate in the realm of individual subjectivity or does it analyze systems of domination? And finally, what does it say about the causes of intersecting oppressions and, above all, about the paths toward emancipation?

Although reflections on the relationship between gender, race, and class had long existed in Marxist debates and among the left, the concept of intersectionality was defined for the first time as such in a 1989 article by Black lawyer and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw2 that aimed to answer these questions in the context of U.S. anti-discrimination law. That origin undoubtedly marked the concept, as we will see later. However, its most important precedent is in the work of Black feminists of the 1970s, such as those of the Combahee River Collective, who offered an “intersectional” critique of liberation movements in the context of Second Wave feminism and the political radicalization of the time.

In this article, I briefly summarize the historical background of the concept, its first formulations, how it shifted with the rise of postmodernism, and the ongoing debate on the concept within today’s social movements. I also critically contrast the theories of intersectionality with Marxism.
1. The Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists

The Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977, took its name as a tribute to the brave military actions led by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman in 1863, which led 750 enslaved people to liberation through enemy fire. She was the only woman to run an army operation during the U.S. Civil War.

Black feminists in the 1970s saw themselves as part of a historical tradition of Black women’s struggles dating back to the 19th century. In her book Women, Race and Class,3, Angela Davis referred to their role in the U.S. abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Ohio Women’s Convention for women’s suffrage in 1851 went down in history. One man had argued that women couldn’t vote because they were the “weaker sex,” to which Sojourner Truth gave a powerful response:


I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery … And ain’t I a woman?

Her response was a rebuttal of the patriarchal narrative that constructed “femininity” based on the idea that women are weak, “naturally” inferior beings incapable of exercising political citizenship. But it also challenged the many white suffragettes who neglected the demands of Black and working women.

In the mid-1970s, a number of Black women, having had negative experiences in the white feminist movement and in organizations for Black liberation, decided to revive that tradition and form their own militant groups. With the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Black feminists simultaneously questioned white feminism, the Black movement, and the bourgeois Black feminism of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

Their starting point was the shared experience of simultaneous oppressions rooted in the trilogy of class, race, and gender, to which they added sexual oppression. From there, they aimed their critique against the feminist movement that was hegemonized by radical feminism. This current of feminism interpreted social contradictions through the opposition between “sexual classes”4 and prioritized one system of domination — the patriarchy — over all others5. While questioning the preeminence of sexual or gender oppression over that of race and class, Black feminists also debated against the openly separatist tendencies that promoted a “war of the sexes,” which had gained strength in the feminist movement of the late 1970s. The Black feminists defined this type of feminism as a movement guided by the interests of white, middle-class women. They also maintained that any kind of biological determination of identity could lead to reactionary positions.


Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.

In her book Feminism Is for Everybody, Black feminist bell hooks argues that, in those years, “utopian visions of sisterhood” and the ahistorical definition of patriarchy were challenged by debates around race and class. Taking stock of this period, she asserts that “white women who had attempted to organize the movement around the banner of common oppression evoking the notion that women constituted a sexual class/caste were the most reluctant to acknowledge differences among women.” She also highlights the debate with the separatist currents within the movement:


They portrayed all men as the enemy in order to represent all women as victims. This focus on men deflected attention from the class privilege of individual feminist activists as well as their desire to increase their class power.6

The Combahee River Collective Statement characterized the struggle for the emancipation of Black women and Black people as inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system. That is why its authors explicitly supported the fight for socialism:


We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products … We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

In relation to Marxism, they asserted a fundamental agreement with Marx’s theory regarding “specific economic relations,” but they believed that the analysis had to be “extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” It should be noted that although they expressed the need for a socialist revolution, the practical tasks they proposed as a group were limited above all to self-awareness workshops and the struggle for the specific rights of Black women in their neighborhoods.

The notion of identity politics appears in the Statement as a response to the specific way in which Black women experience oppression. Recognition of one’s own identity is considered necessary for converging, a posteriori, with other liberation movements. There is tension between the constitution of a differentiated identity and convergence with other oppressed people to fight against a system that combines forms of economic, sexual, and racial domination.

A few years later, however, as the social, political, and ideological context drastically changed with the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernism, the concept of intersectionality would take on new meaning. With the radical transformation of society no longer on the horizon, the moment for collective action tended to dissipate, and differentiated “identities” and the demand for policies of recognition within capitalist society began to increase.
2. Intersectionality as a Category of Discrimination

Kimberlé Crenshaw first defined the concept of intersectionality in 1989. She highlighted that the separate treatment of race and gender discriminations as “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” had problematic consequences for legal doctrine, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics. She thus proposed that a contrast should be drawn between “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience [and] the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”

She pointed out that any conceptualization based on a single axis of discrimination (whether it be race, gender, sexuality, or class) erases Black women from identification and the possibility of ending discrimination, limiting the analysis to the experiences of privileged members of each group. Racial discrimination tends to be viewed from the perspective of Black people with gender or class privileges, while with gender discrimination the focus is on white women with economic resources. Since “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

In her analysis, Crenshaw examines how several lawsuits brought by Black women were simply dismissed by the judiciary. In one case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five women sued the multinational, alleging employment discrimination because as Black women they were denied promotions to better positions. The court dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that it was not possible to establish the existence of discrimination because they were “Black women,” as they did not constitute a group subject to special discrimination. Instead, the court agreed to an investigation of whether racial or gender segregation had occurred, but “not a combination of both.” Finally, it determined that since GM had hired women – white women – there was no gender discrimination involved. And since the company had also hired Black people – Black men – there was no racial discrimination involved either.

The Black women’s lawsuit was unsuccessful. The court claimed that its admission would open up a “Pandora’s box.”

Crenshaw points out that the objective of intersectionality is to recognize that Black women may experience discrimination that has complex forms, which the single-axis conceptual framework fails to address. In the late 1980s, the concept of intersectionality emerged as a category for addressing the complexity of experiences of “discrimination,” with the aim of establishing new case law that would allow “diversity policies” to be regulated by the state.

Later, U.S. sociologist and scholar of Black feminism Patricia Hill Collins defined intersectionality as “being constructed within an historically specific matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions.”7 In her view, intersectionality defines a “social justice” project that seeks a convergence or coalitions with other “social justice projects.”

The concept of intersectionality was subsequently developed by many other Black, Latina, and Asian feminist intellectuals within the expanding framework of “Women Studies” in academia. Intersectionality became a buzzword at conferences and symposia, and in research departments. NGOs were created to develop intersectional studies in the fields of economics, law, sociology, culture, and public policy. Other vectors of oppression were added to the trilogy of gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, nationality, age, and functional diversity. But while this increased the visibility of the specific oppression faced by multiple groups and communities, it paradoxically developed in a climate of resignation to capitalist social structures, which had come to be perceived as impossible to challenge.
3. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Multiple Differences

The rise of intersectionality studies in academia coincided with the beginning of a new historical phase that completely transformed the intellectual and political climate under neoliberalism. The period of “Bourgeois Restoration”8 or neoliberal boom saw generalized attacks on workers’ gains worldwide, with privatization and deregulation policies running rampant given the defection of the trade union and political leaderships of the working class. This led to an increase in the internal fragmentation of the working class and a huge loss of class subjectivity.

In this new context, the radicalism of the Black feminists and socialists of the Combahee River Collective gave way to a formulation of intersectionality in the framework of an increased fragmentation of subjects, from a postmodern perspective. The idea of ​​intersectionality became more akin to that of “diversity” and “identity politics.” Such a formulation shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, from the material to the subjective, in a process of “culturalization” of the relations of domination. It generalizes the idea that the struggle of oppressed groups fundamentally involves acquiring self-awareness of their own identity — a “situated knowledge” — to ensure that privileged groups (men, white women, heterosexual women, etc.) “deconstruct” their privileges and recognize diversity. In the framework of the postmodern “cultural shift,” identities are presented as exclusively constructed in discourse, so the possibilities of resisting are restricted to the establishment of a counter-narrative.

This perspective, however, cannot be applied to class exploitation: Can we expect those who own the means of production — bankers and capitalists — to “deconstruct” their power through self-reflection? In reality, the proposition is also useless as a strategy for ending racism, heterosexism, and sexism, unless these “axes of domination” are considered to be separate entities that operate exclusively in the cultural or ideological sphere, rather than being intertwined with the material and structural relations of capitalism.

Conversely, the multiplication of an increasingly extensive series of oppressed identities, without considering the possibility of radically transforming the capitalist social relations on which these oppressions are based, gave rise to practices of “ghettoization” and separation in activism. Pratibha Parmar warned of this problem in her work:


There has been an emphasis on accumulating a collection of oppressed identities which in turn have given rise to hierarchy of oppression. Such scaling has not only been destructive, but divisive and immobilising. … [M]any women have retreated into ghettoised “lifestyle politics” and find themselves unable to move beyond personal and individual experience.9

As the counterpart to this impotence, the capitalist system appropriated the explosion of “diversity” as a market of identities, which it could assimilate as long as they did not challenge the social system as a whole. Terry Eagleton noted with regard to postmodernism:


One would be forced to claim that [given] its single most enduring achievement, the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda, that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production.10

In a footnote, however, Eagleton clarified that it had not been postmodern intellectuals who had placed those issues on the political agenda, but the previous action of social movements through struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Once that wave of political radicalization was defeated, the visibility of issues of race, gender and sexuality grew, while class became increasingly invisible (to the point that some authors have written about the disappearance of the working class as such).
4. The Retreat from Class Politics

In the class/race/gender trilogy, class tended to be diluted, or became just another identity, as if it were a category of social stratification (by income) or type of occupation. Citing Collins, Marta E. Giménez11 notes that one of the characteristic elements of intersectionality theories is the assumption that “in order to theorise these connections it is necessary ‘to support a working hypothesis of equivalency between oppressions’,” but that this leads to the elimination of the specificity of class relations.

Against this view, it is necessary to point out that race, gender, and class are not directly comparable categories. This does not mean that we must establish a hierarchy of grievances, or determine which is most important to people’s subjective experience; the goal is to achieve a greater understanding of the relationship between oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.

For example, class, race, and gender operate very differently in relation to “equality” and “difference.” Historically, the bourgeoisie has tried to camouflage class “social differences” as much as possible behind an “egalitarian” ideology of “free contract.” But it uses racism and sexism to establish “differences” that are attributed to biological or “natural” conditions to justify inequality in the distribution of resources and access to rights and to defend the persistence of a certain division of labor or, simply put, the enslavement of millions of people, dehumanizing them.

From an emancipatory perspective, the objective is to ensure that no difference in skin color, birthplace, biological sex, or sexual choice can be used as a basis for oppression, grievances, or inequality, while recognizing diversity and promoting the development of the creative potential of all individuals within the framework of social cooperation. But in the case of class differences, the aim is to eliminate them completely, as such. Through its struggle against capitalist social relations, the working class seeks to eliminate the private ownership of the means of production, which entails the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a class and the possibility of ending all class society.

What structures capitalist society is the social difference between the owners of the means of production and those who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, beyond all attempts to render this contradiction invisible. Patriarchal relations — which emerged thousands of years before capitalism — and racism are not ahistorical entities, but have taken on new forms and a specific social content in the framework of capitalist social relations.

Capitalism uses patriarchal prejudices to establish an unprecedented differentiation between the “public” and the “private,” between the sphere of production and the sphere of the home, where women sustain — through invisible work — a large part of the tasks of social reproduction of the labor power needed for the reproduction of capital. Institutions such as the family, marriage, and heterosexual normativity, reformulated under new social relations, socialize and naturalize this role for women. The multiple manifestations of gender oppression and the painful grievances that they imply for millions of women through violence and femicide are not “reducible” to class relations, but they cannot be explained without connecting the categories of oppression and exploitation.

Racism was used to provide an ideological justification for enslaving millions of human beings, while at the same time the Enlightenment elevated the ideas of “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity” as a basis for the “rights of man.” Racism accompanied and reinforced the massive colonialist endeavors of imperialist states, as well as internal genocides such that carried out in the United States against indigenous peoples. Since the U.S. Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism has continued to be used to exclude of a large part of the country’s population, which is treated as “second-class citizens” and “second-class workers.” This promotes internal division within the U.S. working class. In turn, as Black feminists have pointed out, racial oppression and gender oppression are masterfully combined to maximize capitalist profits: it is a fact that there is a larger wage gap for Black and Latina women workers in the United States, just as there is disproportionate institutional and police violence against Black youth. It is also used to support racist and xenophobic policies against migrants in Europe, where they are treated as second-class workers and lack basic social and democratic rights.
5. Marxism and Intersectionality

In Capital, Marx wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” In an earlier work, he and Friedrich Engels had pointed out that “social progress, changes of historical periods, take place in direct proportion to the progress of women towards freedom; and the decline of a social order occurs in proportion to the reduction of women’s freedom”, paraphrasing the utopian socialist Fourier. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels had specifically analyzed the reality of working women who were entering the sphere of capitalist production in large numbers and experiencing the twofold grievances of oppression and exploitation. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels continued the incomplete ethnological studies carried out by his friend to develop an analysis of the family institution in history and the oppression of women.

Revolutionary Marxism has analyzed the relationship between exploitation and oppression in other ways as well. For example, Marx and Engels maintained that the English proletariat could not be free if its rights were based on the oppression of Irish workers. Later, Lenin argued that a people that oppresses another people cannot be free, and defended the right to national self-determination as well as the fight against colonial oppression.

In her critique of intersectionality theories, Lise Vogel correctly argues that socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had already highlighted the intersection between patriarchy, racism, and capitalism before the term intersectionality became popular. It is important to note, however, that a long tradition of socialist feminist thought had developed long before that period, from Flora Tristán to Engels and Clara Zetkin, the Russian revolutionaries, and many others. This led to important international socialist women’s conferences and programs and organizations of peasant and working women. The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the Fourth International in 1938, includes among its slogans the need to “Open the road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!” and to seek “support among the most exploited layers of the working class.”

Intersectionality theorists often criticize Marxism for what they consider to be “class reductionism.” But defending the centrality of a “class analysis” does not mean limiting it to the activity of unions in wage struggles. That is a corporatist, economist, or narrowly syndicalist perspective of class. It is true that the 20th-century practices of many of the Stalinized Communist parties, as well as the trade union bureaucracies, were based on these narrow corporate politics, thus deepening the divide between “class politics” and the struggle of movements against oppression. But only by falsely equating Stalinism with Marxism is it possible to assert that Marxism has not considered the “intersection” of class exploitation with gender oppression, racism, colonial oppression, and heterosexism.

A class analysis aims to reveal the relationships that structure capitalist society, based not only on the generalized expropriation of surplus value for the accumulation of capital, but also on the appropriation of women’s reproductive work in the home, as well as on the concentration of capital in large monopolies, the expansion of financial capital, and the competition between imperialist states that lead to global wars and plunder. It also examines how capital uses and establishes “differences,” fueling racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic ideologies to maximize exploitation and provoke divisions within the ranks of the working class. This class analysis, far from expressing an “economic reductionist” view, includes the interaction of political and social elements and allows a deeper understanding of the connection between class relations and racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism.

At the same time, it recognizes that if the working class — which in the 21st century is more diverse, racialized, and feminized than ever before — manages to overcome its internal divisions and fragmentation, it has the unique capacity to destroy capitalism and place the entire economy, industry, transport and communications system under its control as the basis for organizing a new society of free producers. The retreat from “class politics” actually means abandoning the struggle against the capitalist system, without which it is impossible to put an end to the terrible injustices caused by exploitation and oppression based on race, gender or sexuality.

Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, with the emergence of new resistance movements against neoliberal policies, some sectors of feminist activists, anti-racist, and the youth movements have been defending the idea of “intersectionality” in a new sense to form coalitions among various oppressed groups. The women’s movement that organized the March 8, 2018, strikes in the Spanish State, for example, has itself as an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist” movement. This was undoubtedly a very important step forward toward the convergence of struggles and a countertrend to the logic of fragmentation. However, the sum or “intersection” of resistance movements is insufficient if they are not connected with a common strategy to defeat capitalism, without which it is impossible to end racism or patriarchal oppression.

It is not about counterposing “movements” or “identities” to an abstract and genderless working class. Never before in history has the working class been so diverse in terms of gender and race. Women already make up 50 percent of the working class, and of that Black, Latin, and Asian women are the majority. The key to a hegemonic strategy, then, is to return to the centrality of class politics that decisively incorporates the fight against all oppression based on gender, race, and sexuality. This means seeking to unite what capitalism divides, strengthening the internal unity of the working class, as well as adopting a policy of alliances with movements that fight against specific oppression. This perspective, along with the fight to expropriate the expropriators, is the only one that will allow progress toward a truly free society.

First published in Spanish on February 24, 2019, in Contrapunto.

Translation by Marisela Trevin


Notes

Notes↑1 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London, UK: Verso, 1986).
↑2 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. by Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991).
↑3 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, NY: Knopf, 1981).
↑4 Whether in terms of the radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone in a 1970 essay or the materialist feminism of Cristine Delphy from 1980. See Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. by Barbara A. Crow (New York, NY, New York University Press, 2000); Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (1980): 23–40.
↑5 As formulated by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
↑6 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
↑7 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 127.
↑8 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “At the Limits of the ‘Bourgeois Restoration,’” Left Voice, December 24, 2019. First published in Spanish in 2011.
↑9 Pratibha Parmar, “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 107.
↑10 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 22.
↑11 Marta E. Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays: (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2019.


Josefina L. Martínez
Josefina is a historian from Madrid and an editor of our sister site in the Spanish State, IzquierdaDiario.es.

Joseph Bologne Could Have Been As Big As Beethoven — In Chevalier, He Finally Gets His Due

Story by Ineye Komonibo • Friday

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In 2020, an old theory resurfaced on the internet hypothesizing that world famous composer Ludwig van Beethoven may have actually been Black, sparking controversy as well as a long overdue conversation about the well-documented whiteness of the classical music landscape. The claims about Beethoven’s race have been heavily debated by classical music scholars for centuries, but ultimately, we don’t need to spend our time trying to figure out if the German virtuoso would have been invited to the cookout. Other Black composers existed — their contributions to the genre and to culture as a whole were just disregarded and hidden in the shadows. Until now.


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Chevalier, a biopic that hit theaters today (April 21), follows the lost story of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (played by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), a French composer and musician who rose to prominence in the 18th century during the reign of Marie Antoinette. Born in the then-colony of Guadeloupe to a white plantation owner and an enslaved Senegalese woman, Bologne was raised and professionally trained in France, flourishing in music and fencing to the point that his excellence earned him the covetous throne-appointed title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges (a position equivalent to that of a knight). Although Bologne lives and works among the elites as a chevalier, he begins to realize that in France, he will always be seen as inferior because of the color of his skin. He may not be surrounded by other Black people, but in the eyes of the world, Bologne will always be more Black — more other — than he is French.

As he becomes cognizant of his true place in French society as a Black man, we see him struggle to reconcile his Blackness with his Frenchness and his high status in society. Here, the concept of “double consciousness” comes into play. Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term specifically to describe the double but often contrary minds that Black Americans have to possess while facing anti-Blackness in white space, but it’s applicable to every Black person, certainly for Bologne. He was taught to be excellent in order to make up for the fact that he was Black, but when a painful rejection from the highest musical prestige in the land solely on the basis of his race firmly illuminates his reality, Bologne quickly comes to understand that within a white supremacist framework, being ten times better will just never be enough. In his crisis, the sudden reappearance of Bologne’s mother Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo) provides him with the stability and connection to his roots that he’s always needed but was denied. Patiently but with a firm hand, Nanon reminds her son that he is Black first and foremost, and her unshakeable security in her identity as a Black woman helps Bologne find confidence in his own as a Black man.

The more comfortable he becomes with his roots, the more discontent and disgusted he becomes with France’s racist and classist hierarchy. After ignoring the class war raging outside of his swanky villa’s window, Bologne finally decides to join the efforts of the proletariat against the iron fist of the crown and her bourgeoisie. The film shows Bologne leveraging his talent and network as a composer to create the soundtrack for the revolution, but in real life, he actually stopped making music to fight as a colonel in a volunteer brigade composed of soldiers of color until his death in 1799.

“I learned about Joseph Bologne when I was 16 years old, and the thing that really stood out to me was that he was just a rockstar,” says Chevalier writer Stefani Robinson in a Zoom interview with Unbothered. “Joseph was at the forefront of a cultural movement, like a Prince or a Jimi Hendrix. When you’re a kid, history feels so far away, but that rockstar quality of his made him seem so much more than just a guy in a book. This person was special. He was singular. And that fascinated me.”

Robinson didn’t have a lot to work with while penning Chevalier years ago besides Gabriel Banat’s 1840 book, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow. Bologne’s life wasn’t well-documented in history, and that erasure was intentional. Following the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte’s hostile takeover of the country was marked by violent nationalist and racist international policy, and as a result of government-mandated anti-Blackness, much of Bologne’s work was intentionally buried. But as she began to look deeper into what she could find about the life of the chevalier, Robinson felt a personal obligation to bring Bologne’s story to the silver screen. If he was that important to the culture, it was only right that he take center stage once more.

Though building upon the bare bones subject material of the film was a daunting task, Chevalier’s talented cast easily fills in the gaps of Bologne’s life, painting a convincing picture of what trying to navigate 18th century France might have been like for him. The ever-talented Kelvin Harrison, Jr. (Waves, Cyrano) is a perfect fit as the chevalier, balancing Bologne’s abundance of pride and swagger — some of the few aspects of the composer’s life that were well-documented in history — with the deep wound he’s nursing as a Black man fighting for his place and his acknowledgment in a white world. That constant mental toil of double consciousness is something that Harrison Jr. can deeply relate to — after all, he’s a Black actor working in Hollywood. The pressure of trying to be “more” than a Black actor is always there.

“I came into Hollywood at the right moment,” Harrison Jr. explains over Zoom, pointing out how the industry had just started to tell nuanced Black stories when he first made his acting debut in 2013. “At the same time, there have been so many roles that I’ve had to come in and help reimagine it from my perspective. I feel like I’ve often been asked to exist in a space that isn’t necessarily mine. It becomes a non-negotiable — if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t work. There’s some choice in it, of course, and I’ve tried to keep my individuality and hold on to a sense of my culture and where I come from. But it’s definitely been a struggle at times.”

“I want to expand how we can be seen [in Hollywood], and that’s part of the negotiation as well,” he continues. “How do we expand our understanding of who we are?”



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His co-star Ronke Adekoluejo took a similarly introspective approach to her storytelling process as well, using the lack of information about Nanon to get creative in building the character from the ground up. Joseph was able to evolve because his mother paved the path for him and as a key player in her son’s radicalization, Nanon is central to this plot. (Art imitates life — aren’t Black women always the catalyst behind change?) Ronke Adekoluejo found inspiration for the role in the journeys of other Black women in history who weren’t afraid to antagonize the system.

“I needed to understand what gave Nanon resolve, what made her so resilient, so I started to research,” says Adekoluejo. “Yaa Asantewa, Harriet Tubman, Stagecoach Mary — all of these women valiantly fought back against oppression because they wanted to create a different narrative for themselves, and I felt like it was important for Nanon to have that same righteous indignation of by any means necessary, to not fear violence as an instigator of change.”

Chevalier may be a biopic about a man who walked this earth over 200 years ago, but his story is timely because it speaks to the unfortunate phenomenon of Black erasure. Throughout history, Black people’s work and contributions to society have been downplayed, overlooked, and even appropriated because of racism. We see it in Napolean’s intentional concealment of Bologne’s work, but we can also see it today — in Black TikTok creators not being fairly compensated for the success of their content, in Beyoncé repeatedly losing Album of the Year at the Grammys, in luxury fashion brands stealing aesthetics from traditional Africans design, in conservative lawmakers fighting to rewrite history to minimize the dire circumstances that led to the necessary work of Black activists. Unfortunately, Black people from every corner of the diaspora have demonstrably not been given their due in the mainstream.

“We’re seeing it in real time, these efforts to erase our history — any sort of marginalized community’s history — in schools,” Robinson shakes her head. “It’s so insidious, but I feel like the only way to stand up against that is to keep doing what I’m doing: making the conscious effort to amplify what people are trying to hide.”

Harrison Jr. wants us to take cues from Bologne’s trajectory; he only found true peace and security in himself once he turned his gaze away from the people who othered him and towards his own community. “Joseph made art for those who wanted to recognize it, for those who wanted to appreciate it — for people who saw him,” says the Chevalier star. “That preservation only really happens in community. It’s important to branch out, but you have to sing to the choir that wants to listen. If you feed it to the wolves, the wolves are going to eat it, but not in the way you want them to.”

Chevalier is proof that we can’t be blotted out of the timeline. No matter how much they try to bury them, our stories will be told.

Chevalier is now playing in theaters.


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Capitalism in Black and Blue

John Parker
08 Feb 2023 

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

There are two very frightening realities faced by the capitalist ruling class - their smaller numbers in relation to the majority, and their inability to derive profit without exploited human labor. Since they are the sole owners of the means of production (the factories, land and machines) – with an essential armed force to protect that ownership – they have irreconcilable differences with the majority of people who, instead of owning those means, are exploited by them. We can’t even decide how the profits created by our labor, which turns into the wealth of the nation, gets used. Only the capitalist class gets to decide that with their bought and paid for politicians in Washington.

So, the problem for the ruling class is how to hide that reality from the human labor they depend on for profit. How do you keep the majority from understanding that their misery is based on their not owning the means of production and having no role in how the wealth produced from those means is spent? Should it go towards endless wars, WWIII, more police, joyrides to space? Or, for healthcare, jobs and housing?

And, more importantly, how do you hide from this class of people that they reside in the same boat sharing a reality of economic exploitation, increasing with every utility gas hike, deteriorating social services or diminishing wages?

That is the role of racism, to keep those in the boat from recognizing each other’s similarity. Like a magician’s use of misdirection, they hide that truth by defining the parameters of difference for us, then giving those who meet the preferred parameters of the ruling class more. They get more in terms of quality of life, allowing them the tools and opportunities to develop a fantasy of superiority. However, even with all those benefits the preferred in that boat are still simply the human labor necessary to develop profit for those owners of the means of production - the ruling class. They will continue to have no say so in how the wealth they create is used, and eventually their benefits will hit up against austerity - losing their pensions, jobs and quality of life to maintain the profits of the ruling class - forcing even the “preferred” to react. This is when the wealth founded on their labor is ironically used to pay for the police or military now taking aim at them.

Let’s get back to that racism thing.

Racism is a tool to weaken our working class through division in general. It’s specifically used as a whip that inflicts pain to the oppressed for the purpose of maintaining the system of Capitalism and it’s neocolonial relationships. In order to attempt to feel less of that pain some cowardly people of color will willingly lend themselves as the lash of that whip, hoping to divert their pain onto another’s back.

They will lend themselves as mercenaries for the ruling class, but they must meet the higher standards of allegiance to their white masters by frequently having to prove a willingness to match the psychopathic violence of their white supremacist peers. They are traitors for sure.

Sometimes they serve as presidents or legislators serving their imperial masters at Lockheed, Raytheon and the various financial and oil monopolies making up the ruling class. They willingly participate by commanding drone assassinations even on the continent of Africa. And many of them are found wearing a uniform they should never adorn – the Blue one.

But no matter who has transformed into the lash of that whip, they are all under strict orders to aim their greatest violence towards the oppressed, wielded for a ruling class desperate to maintain and enforce the ideology of white supremacy.

That ideology had its primary beginnings in the 17th Century when it became clear that the numerous slave revolts consisting of a combination of enslaved Africans, Indigenous and poor and indentured whites jeopardized not only the slave owners and the monarchy, but the developing capitalist class.

In order to break up that unified struggle, slavery, where it had its greatest institutional development in the Americas, had to begin to be defined for an exclusive few using skin color and African and Indigenous ethnicity. However, the greatest emphasis - in regards to maintaining a continued supply of this free labor – was reserved for those from the African continent. This meant that Europeans would soon no longer be considered for slavery (as some were in the 17th and earlier centuries) and only as indentured. And, even if indentured, would be morphed into overseers, or slave catchers for runaway slaves; eventually given the title of police shortly after Reconstruction targeting Black people in the South using ¨legality.” The Southern ruling class created laws designed to justify imprisonment for the purpose of continuing the slave labor they were economically addicted to.

Racism also aims at the mental health of the oppressed. It’s used as a means to destroy its targets from the inside with self-loathing and self-doubt and a general belief of inferiority. This also is sometimes a motivation for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples to put on that blood-drenched uniform of Blue: to become something different. But, even if by ignorance people of color join U.S. police forces, they will quickly learn the genocidal role of their employer and either quit or remain with a clear understanding that they are an enemy of their own ethnicity and class.

Those murdering cops who killed Tyre Nichols, just like their peers who killed George Floyd knew the role they were playing in protecting, not us, but a racist murderous system of Capitalism. The only color that mattered in those incidents and the multiple incidents this year set to create another record of police killings, was the color of their uniforms.

As the U.S. economy sinks further into crisis of overproduction, inflation and war economy - austerity will continue to increase and generalize the want that oppressed people in this country have always endured. This is when racism is of utmost importance, whether it's used here or in Ukraine (with different parameters – Russian ethnicity is part of the subhuman race as defined by Nazi Germany and the current neo-Nazis leading a significant portion of the government and military in Ukraine). Racism is an integral part also of fascism and it will do us no good to deny its existence.  It exists for Black and Brown people on a daily basis when we are treated horribly by those receiving more in society and when we apply for a job not meant for us or come home to communities occupied by military forces of the ruling class. How can we be told that our rage against prejudice, disrespect and the targeting of our children by police is simply a reaction to a phantom? We cannot disconnect the gun from the bullet as if they exist independently. Capitalism and Imperialism and Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism depend upon their bullet of racism - and they cannot exist for very long without each other.

John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center For Social Justice In Los Angeles  and a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party . He accompanied former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on many anti-war delegations abroad. Parker was only 18 when he organized his first union election--at a small steel plant in New Jersey. Having authored a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2014, his organizing efforts helped to push the city to act on the minimum wage increase proposals in Los Angeles. John Parker is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace.