Class, Race, and the Police
African-American journalist Jon Jeter often says there won’t be progress for ordinary Americans without strong Black leadership of a multiracial working-class movement. We had leadership like that in the 60s with Civil Rights and Black Liberation, which opened the door to the Women’s, Antiwar, Native American, La Raza, and environmental movements.
But that leadership, from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. to Fred Hampton and Mumia Abu-Jamal were murdered or imprisoned for life. Much weaker leaders took their place, and the working class in America has been ground underfoot ever since. Police killings and poverty, homelessness, war and inequality keep increasing, while jobs, worker and environmental protections, and constitutional rights disappear.
Until now. In the wake of the high-profile police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, The Movement for Black Lives (#M4BL) has demanded that governments Defund the Police, and all kinds of people are supporting them. It’s hard to overstate how radical this is; it brings together the fight for racial equality (‘Black Lives Matter’) with the fight for working class freedom and survival. Pay for housing, they say, not police, for schools not prisons, for healthcare, food, the arts, not repression and incarceration. Stop violently suppressing movements for change.
‘Defund the police’ and the related slogan ‘Disarm the police’ might be the most powerful reform people can demand under capitalism. Along with their 24/7 propaganda, the capitalists rely on raw force to maintain their power as they drive people into ever deeper poverty. Their economic system is falling apart, as the 0.1% loot all the wealth, sucking the demand out of the market, creating another Great Depression. The Corona virus lockdown and corporate bailout are part of this looting.
How can people put up with such criminality when they’re hungry and losing their homes? Only if law enforcement or martial law forces them to put up with it. Police violence and racism prevent workers and communities from organizing and fighting back. Police have broken workers’ strikes since the labor movement started. State violence enables billionaires to leave the working class with nothing.
This is why police budgets keep growing while money for services dries up. It’s why police brutality keeps getting more violent and shameless, even while videos of their actions go viral and protests against them spread around the world. Police violence is what the capitalists want; it’s what they need; it’s what they pay the cops for. Police chiefs and politicians can take a knee with protestors; they can make speeches and launch investigations, but they won’t change police behavior unless we force them to.
If we succeed in defunding or disarming the police to a significant degree, it would allow the working class room to breathe and to fight back. We might get health care, better wages, working conditions, housing and jobs. We might protect the animals and plants, water and earth. We might take away some of the billionaires’ ill-gotten wealth, and they don’t want that.
So, the fight against police violence is a race issue, and it’s also a class issue. The war on Black and Brown people is a way of keeping everybody down. It’s been that way since the 1600s, when African and European indentured servants rebelled against their masters in Virginia, and the governor responded by replacing indentured servants with black slaves.
Racism still powers class oppression to this day. Everyone in the world could see the murder of George Floyd as the naked State terror it was. It was pure, inexcusable racist violence, and it was also pure, murderous class oppression. All the masks are off the American rulers’ game now. People of all kinds are seeing state violence as part of their own oppression, and huge numbers of people of all colors and ethnicities want to fight back.
The rulers want to scare White people away from this movement by making it Black vs. White, instead of Us vs. Them. Division is their strongest weapon, and they’re using it in at least three ways. First, liberals who get their world view from platforms like the New York Times are learning that the fight against police violence is all about race. After decades of denying or hiding the oppression and disparities faced by African-Americans, the main capitalist propaganda organs are now publishing series of well-researched stories about racism’s central role in American life.
‘Finally,’ some might sigh. ‘What took you so long?’ But while it’s great that people are finally learning about the depths of present and past racism in this society, others might ask, ‘Why now?’ Police violence, discrimination, exclusion, poverty — all these aspects of anti-Black racism are nothing new. But until recently, they were rarely mentioned in corporate media. How and why has racism gone from forbidden topic to daily news staple?
It’s hard to know for sure, but we do know the New York Times and the rest speak for the capitalist class. They’re focusing on racism because that’s what they want us to focus on. An extreme example is the Democratic leadership’s recent clown show with the kente cloth scarves in the Capitol. As Ajamu Baraka of Black Agenda Report tweeted, “All that was missing was blackface makeup.” They managed to patronize Black America and alienate White America at the same time, and in the shallowest possible way, without addressing structural racism or State violence at all.
Why would they make themselves look so tone-deaf? Because they desperately need to stop the growing White and Black (and Native, Asian and Latino) anger against the corporate state. They are telling America, ‘This is all about race. If you’re not Black, you shouldn’t care.’
On the other side, White conservatives who get their news from Fox and from talk radio are learning that the protests are not about race or class, but just a bunch of angry young thugs who don’t know what they are doing. Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, says night after night that white supremacy is a myth and that the protests are a threat to America and must be stopped, that Black folks and their allies are enemies of Fox-viewing America.
The extreme element on this side is a completely fabricated threat that rioters are being bused, at George Soros’ expense, to small cities to burn them down and kill whites. Residents of towns across America are arming themselves and going out to protect their towns from this nonexistent threat. The threats are publicized on social media: sometimes by trolls posting under false names, but sometimes by police chiefs or military officers. For now, they seem to be fooling a lot of people.
But it’s also instructive to see that these local militias act less violently and with less racist hostility toward protesters than many police do in the cities. Some were quoted as expressing sympathy for protesters and talking with them. Could these divide-and-conquer strategies become less effective as people get to know each other? Could interracial solidarity develop in spite of rulers’ attempts to divide?
This happened in the 60s. The Black Panther Party were constantly denounced in the media as racists who hated White people, even while their food programs worked with White grocers, their free clinics with White medical students, their political actions supported by White students. But most young people didn’t believe this propaganda. The Panthers inspired and taught leaders of other movements, especially the peace movement.
The fight against police violence could unite people again today. At a protest recently, I heard hundreds of young White, Black, Latino and Asian people chanting together for Black Lives. That growing solidarity terrifies our rulers who live by division. By uniting people around Defund the Police, #MB4L has connected racial oppression with class oppression. Although the rulers are trying every trick to disconnect them, many people are embracing their links with other oppressed people. This is a huge step toward the kind of Black-led working-class movement Jon Jeter was talking about. Now is the time to join this fight.