The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender ~~ Patrick Martin (introductions by Collectivist and Dmorista)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/pers-m28.html

~~ posted for dmorista with introductions by collectivist and dmorista ~~

Introduction by Collectivist

"As the article states, "The American ruling class has gone further than any other in the world to suppress any public discussion of class". That is probably irrefutable. Moreover,  one would not expect the owners of the greatest worldwide accumulation of capital, and the nation state they dominate, to do otherwise.

So far, so good.

Nevertheless, I still find the following passage, from the article,  very problematic:

"In response to the social eruptions of the 1960s—the civil rights struggles and urban riots, the mass movement against the Vietnam War, and major struggles by the labor movement—the American bourgeoisie began to utilize identity politics to divide and confuse the mass opposition to its policies and block the emergence of the working class as an independent social force."

Having been part of those social eruptions, or rebellions,  (as they intensified and escalated,  and de-escalated into the early 1970s) imo, that statement woefully lacks historicity. First of all, what the bourgeoisie did, on one end, was politically repress and VIOLENTLY crush those movements, especially the most radical red, black and brown ones, along with their white allies. Comrades remain incarcerated even to this day for acts which 'others', ostensibly radical,  were only slapped on the wrist for.

"Naughty children. Uncle Sam spank!"

Another strategy used was to bribe and co-opt the most liberal sectors of those movements. (I witnessed, in the "City of Brotherly Love" both strategies.) Concerning the latter, more than a few activists, organizers and self professed revolutionaries objectively betrayed the struggle for good jobs and/or grant money. Others for cars and a credit line.

Nevertheless,  MOST of the 'identity politics' controversy is at best, bogus; at worst, a mass deflection. All things, particularly, living 'things' have an 'identity'. They are no more or less than the multiplicity of names, nomenclature, monikers, labels we give them to distinguish them from other things, or 'identify' their similarities with other things. Furthermore, there are many ways to identify people and social and natural phenomena; some more useful and relevant and significant than others For example, the "beings that think" are called "homo sapiens" ('Vulcans'may call us "bags of water) All of those labels are social constructions, which only societies that have constructed languages (verbal abstractions) create; NOT anything intrinsic to Nature. Even the names we give to the colors of the spectrum are products of our linguistic and  cultural imaginations, not in any way inherent to LIGHT. . . Iow, "a rose by any other name would smell" . . .or how the saying goes.

More important than how we identify things is how we practically relate to them, i.e., our material RELATIONSHIP (s). For instance, our relationship to capital, as workers, is more important than how we socially identify the workers or the capitalists, mainly because it also reveals, more accurately than our identities, our fundamental material relationship. Although class, like race and gender, could be called an identity -  a social construction - it has more utility as a social relationship. 

Also, for example, we know that to merely identify a female, e.g.,  under the of rule patriarchy, tells us very little about her actual relationship in that form of human subordination. Many women uphold patriarchy. Moreover, patriarchy, like class, speaks to property relationships; the means and relations of production and reproduction. To identify the latter as just an identity is insufficient..

And then there's this: "Black nationalism, “Chicano” nationalism, women’s liberation and gay liberation all emerged, to name only the most heavily promoted forms of identity politics. In each case, real social grievances of significant sections of the American population were divorced from their connection to the socio-economic foundation—the division of society between the relative handful of capitalist owners of the means of production, and the vast majority of the population who must sell their labor power to make a living."

The second sentence in the paragraph , of course, explains EXACTLY what is going on (except the word  'grievances' , which hardly describes the righteous resistance to the real historic, material inequalities and domination in the relationship  between the oppressed and oppressive forces.)

The first sentence, however, incorrectly characterizes those movements - arguably some of the most profound and powerful - as mere "identity politics'!!!" With the exception of the 'Feminist' movement, all of the rest represented, in the main, working class and poor peoples' struggles,  against capitalist colonialism, capitalist state repression or other kinds of real exploitation laborers everywhere experience.

Yes, the rulers seek to contain, constrain and identify those movements as all about color or sex, NOT the material relationships,  but conscious and conscientious political people know better. . .or at least should. And we DEFINITELY should not be parroting the bourgeois line.

The statements about Obama and the  ruling class 'Con of diversity', aka, neocolonialism, compradorship, tokenisn,  Uncle Tomism, etc, are indisputable. They represent nothing new; rather they are as old, and older, than the surrogate rulership which attained some power and privileges, and money, from the British Crown, in exchange for maintaining its rule, remotely, in the 'New World' . The collective founding father 'overseers'. . .who, btw, were FOR the Crown BEFORE they were against it, and replaced it with another form of tyranny which Frederick Douglass said "would disgrace a nation of savages" . . .The indigenous people the settler colonists identified as 'savages' were systematically dispossessed and killed. . . . Yet, some, on the left and right, continue to identify that colonialism, slavocracy and capitalistic  tyranny as 'liberty' and democracy'. . .!

And, as Howard Zinn says*, after the slave owners unilateral declaration of independence, in 1776, NOTHING fundamentally changed; certainly not the color or the sex or the most important thing: class rule. The patriarchy and white supremacy were 'nationalized', in the nation state.

And finally, I present several burning questions, (plus the link at the bottom) to the author of this piece, in addition to all those who subscribe to its essential message: 

Why is the term "identity politics"  almost never used to describe the historically DOMINANT politics of patriarchy and white supremacy; only their ostensible - an actual -  opposition forces? Why isn't what Trump (inc) represents, and  other fascist political phenomena,  not called identity politics?

Why aren't the politics of the founding fathers, the CSA insurgency, Christo Fundamentalism, anti-reproductive rightwingism, etc. not referred to, even by much of the left,  as the (quintessential) highly weaponized, historically dangerous, most divisive, identity politics they ALWAYS WERE and ARE"?*. . .Collectivist

Edits follow:  *Read Zinn's, A People's History of the United States

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/07/americas-original-identity-politics/

==============================================================

Introduction by dmorista

This article, published by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) 12 years ago upon the accession of Sonia Sotomayor to a position of the Supreme Court, was written in the long-standing WSWS tradition of pointing out the primary importance of class as compared to race or gender. After a short discussion of Sotomayor's pro-business and anti-labor attitudes the article states that: “The American ruling class has gone further than any other in the world to suppress any public discussion of class. From the late 1940s on, the anti-communist witch-hunting associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a drive to effectively outlaw any public discussion of socialism, Marxism or the class divisions in American society.”

This quote from the article above refers to the period immediately after WW 2, sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age of American Capitalism”. U.S. industries were dominant, in a world where the capitalist and even socialist rivals to the U.S. had been thoroughly bombed or had bitter battles fought in their main productive areas.  The rival economies were busy rebuilding and recovering; while the capitalists in the U.S. were intent on maximizing the profits out of the industrial base that the U.S. state apparatus had largely built for them with government funds, to prosecute the war effort from 1940 - 1945. The U.S. ruling class was able to manage the electoral and street-level politics of the country merely by appealing to the interests of the dominant “identity group”, the White Working and Middle Classes (not yet defined as an identity, but in reality that is exactly what those two groups were). The political tasks that faced the rulers were simpler then, the national electorate was about 85% White, and the hopes and aspirations of non-Whites could be effectively ignored with impunity.

The main project of the ruling class at that time was to destroy as many of the gains made during the New Deal period as possible. 1947 was the pivotal year when the Congress passed the first of several anti-labor laws “The Taft-Hartley Act” as the spearpoint of their offensive against the Labor Movement. During that same year the imperialist operations were massively overhauled and reorganized. The CIA was established, the Air Force became a separate military branch rather than a part of the Army, and the military was “desegregated” for the first time in U.S. history.

David Harvey has argued that the 1947 desegregation of the U.S. military and the support given to the Civil Rights movement, grudgingly and in small measure by the Eisenhower administration, and to a much larger measure under the Kennedy / Johnson administrations, was a function of significant problems with the image of the U.S. in the Third World regions. Harvey points out that the efforts of the U.S. ruling class, to provide leadership and control of the Capitalist regime in the world, suffered significant public relations consequences from the images of segregation. The whole world saw graphic photos and video of the resistance to segregation by Civil Rights activists, the vicious response of Southern Law Enforcement, the fire hoses, the snarling dogs, and the physical attacks on Civil Rights demonstrators; not to mention the various bombings and murders that killed numerous people around the South. This was also the period when the U.S. State Department began to sponsor “good will” foreign tours by famous Jazz and Blues artists. Harvey argues that these various developments were not just coincidental. (See, The Legitimation Crisis of the late 1960s, May 20, 2021, David Harvey, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, at < https://anticapitalistchronicles.libsyn.com/the-legitimation-crisis-of-the-late-1960s >)/

In the next paragraph of the WSWS article the author, Patrick Martin, points out that: “In response to the social eruptions of the 1960s—the civil rights struggles and urban riots, the mass movement against the Vietnam War, and major struggles by the labor movement—the American bourgeoisie began to utilize identity politics to divide and confuse the mass opposition to its policies and block the emergence of the working class as an independent social force.” My friend and colleague here at Leftist Politics, Collectivist, had some serious criticisms of this particular paragraph, anybody reading this should read his introduction for more details on his point of view. I will only say this. The U.S. ruling class, in this case in the person of the Democratic Party, did what it could to encourage the working class to fragment into “identity groups”, groups that did not unite in a struggle against the rulers but rather concentrated on their own immediate interests. At the same time there was “identity group” formation and encouragement for those much more likely to ally with right-wing forces. The famous “Hard Hat” attack on anti-war demonstrators in New York City was one manifestation of that. The largely right-wing slant taken by the most heavily promoted segments of Country Music was another. This sort of “identity group” formation on the right continued and reached a high point with the Trump regime, when the President of the U.S. openly encouraged paramilitaries and vigilantes to attack people who were demonstrating and protesting against the police killings of unarmed African-Americans. This escalated into the halls of state legislatures that passed laws that allow right-wing motorists to run down and kill protesters who are “blocking traffic”.

Of course the most important “identity group” would be that of “the rich” who conduct their affairs via such institutions as The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Meetings, the World Economic Forum, the Bohemian Club, etc. etc. But they are far too powerful to ever be identified as an identity group in any sort of Corporate Controlled Media outlet, or even in much of the “alternative media”.

The U.S. ruling class has long depended on a combination of cooptation of potential leaders of popular resistance, and smears, prosecutions, imprisonment, and murder of popular leaders who could not be coopted or bribed into cooperation. This certainly has not changed. What has changed is the ability of the socioeconomic and political system to hand out sinecures to individuals and economic advantages to groups, an ability that has declined significantly necessitating a more complete resort to force. ~~ dmorista

======================================

The article follows:

The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.

As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.

No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind. 

There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.

Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.

Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.

The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.

The American ruling class has gone further than any other in the world to suppress any public discussion of class. From the late 1940s on, the anti-communist witch-hunting associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a drive to effectively outlaw any public discussion of socialism, Marxism or the class divisions in American society.

In response to the social eruptions of the 1960s—the civil rights struggles and urban riots, the mass movement against the Vietnam War, and major struggles by the labor movement—the American bourgeoisie began to utilize identity politics to divide and confuse the mass opposition to its policies and block the emergence of the working class as an independent social force.

Black nationalism, “Chicano” nationalism, women’s liberation and gay liberation all emerged, to name only the most heavily promoted forms of identity politics. In each case, real social grievances of significant sections of the American population were divorced from their connection to the socio-economic foundation—the division of society between the relative handful of capitalist owners of the means of production, and the vast majority of the population who must sell their labor power to make a living.

The Democratic Party became the principal vehicle for peddling the politics of race and gender, recruiting a layer of black, female and Hispanic politicians who engage in populist demagogy that uses race and gender to counterfeit an orientation to the interests of the oppressed masses of American society. But Republican administrations have learned how to engage in such posturing as well.

For the past 12 years for instance, under two Democratic presidents and one Republican, the post of US Secretary of State has been occupied by, in succession, a white woman, a black man, a black woman, and a white woman. This exercise in “diversity” has not the slightest progressive significance. It has not democratized American foreign policy or made it one iota more conciliatory to the interests of the oppressed, either internationally or within the United States. Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton are all representatives, not of “blacks” or “women,” but of the most rapacious imperialist ruling class on the planet.

Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.

The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.

Patrick Martin

Critical Race Theory ~~ Articles written by D Haiphong and Gerald Horne

https://www.blackagendareport.com/critical-race-theory-debacle-signals-collapse-american-empire

~~ and ~~

https://theanalysis.news/why-the-right-attacks-critical-race-theory-gerald-horne/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Critical Race Theory Debacle Signals the Collapse of the American Empire

Critical Race Theory Debacle Signals the Collapse of the American Empire

Whatever the strengths and limitations of Critical Race Theory, the debate over its usefulness to establishment circles is indicative of the American Empire’s rapid decline

“The months-long protests and rebellions against racist policing forced the establishment to take a position on the United States’ ongoing legacy of apartheid.”

Critical Race Theory has become the latest target of the White Man’s Party (Republican) in its ongoing struggle for ideological primacy over the Democrats. Several primarily Republican state legislatures have banned Critical Race Theory from K-12 curriculums. At its core, the debate is a contest between factions of the U.S. ruling elite over how to best preserve the decaying legitimacy of American exceptionalism amid collapsing empire.

A recent spat between Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley brought the contest between factions of the ruling class to a national audience . When pressed at a budget hearing by Republican lawmakers, Milley defended the use of Critical Race Theory in West Point’s curriculum. “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white” said Milley, who added, “I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” 

First, it is important to understand what Critical Race Theory is and isn’t. Critical Race Theory is an academic field of study that emerged from the work of scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Much of Critical Race Theory centers on race in the context of legal and institutional power and has become immensely influential in the debate over diversity and inclusion within universities, legal institutions, and corporate boardrooms. Critical Race Theory is neither akin to communism nor is it a generalized curriculum employed uniformly across public school settings. Some on the Black Left, including the late BAR editor Bruce Dixon, have criticized aspects of Critical Race Theory for their marginalization of class analysis and negation of the possibility for solidarity.

“Critical Race Theory is neither akin to communism nor is it a generalized curriculum employed uniformly across public school settings.”

The debate over Critical Race Theory would not have extended to elite circles were it not for the movement known as “Black Lives Matter” and the massive protests against racist policing that took place last summer. These protests not only took aim at racism, but also occurred at a particularly fragile period for the American Empire. The condition of Black America suddenly re-entered public discourse during a global pandemic and an economic crisis. Whatever the strengths and limitations of Critical Race Theory, the debate over its usefulness to establishment circles is indicative of the American Empire’s collapse.

While the Democrats declared a political return to “normalcy” following Joe Biden’s presidential victory in November 2020, the roots of the American Empire’s crisis of legitimacy only grew deeper. Protests waned with the conviction and eventual sentencing of George Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin . Still, the months-long protests and rebellions against racist policing forced the establishment to take a position on the United States’ ongoing legacy of apartheid. The topic of racism became a marketable commodity for major corporations. Several states banned chokeholds and implemented other meagre reforms to policing. 

While the movement for Black Lives has ebbed and flowed over the past year, the pandemic and economic crisis have remained a key feature of the United States’ “new normal.” To add to the instability, both capitalism and the U.S. political system have simultaneously lost legitimacy in the eyes of a large segment of the population. A majority of voters believe that the time has come for a third-party alternative  to the two-party system. Medicare for All and a range of universal policies are supported by majorities of voters, especially Democrats . Polls indicate that opinions of socialism have become increasingly positive among young adults, with Black Americans driving much of the renewed interest in the word. 

“Both capitalism and the U.S. political system have simultaneously lost legitimacy in the eyes of a large segment of the population.”

Stability is critical to any social order, and this is especially true of the American Empire. Critical Race Theory is a terrain from which the ruling class is actively debating the most preferred means for reproducing itself and the system that it presides over. Mark Milley and Matt Gaetz did not spar over the validity of white supremacy, but rather what form white supremacy should take in the American Empire’s reproduction process. Milley has chosen to align with the Democratic Party-led administration because its vision of Critical Race Theory does not challenge the establishment, especially where militarism is concerned. His embrace of Critical Race Theory helps rebrand the Pentagon as a racially conscious champion of human progress rather than the machinery of racist mass murder that it is.

Herein lies the danger of the duopoly’s debate over Critical Race Theory. Mark Milley is a racist because he is an imperialist. Milley was an active participant in the violent coup of Jean-Paul Aristide  in Haiti and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq . These interventions alone have led to the deaths of more than a million people and reinforced the white supremacist roots of the U.S. military as the world’s police force for Western hegemony. The GOP’s entire identity is shaped by white supremacy in part because neither side of the duopoly has any interest in debating key bipartisan priorities such as endless austerity and war. This quandary for the elite necessitates an overemphasis on public relations and a strong avoidance of policies that could improve the lives of the people. 

“The GOP’s entire identity is shaped by white supremacy.”

The question that must inevitably be answered is: where do correct ideas come from? It is clear they do not come from General Mark Milley. The U.S. military will not become less racist if it studies “white rage” because white supremacy is baked into the fabric of its very purpose as an institution. Correct ideas also do not come from the GOP, as its opposition to Critical Race Theory is based on the equally faulty and racist premise that “culture wars” are destroying what makes the United States “special.” Correct ideas are inevitably lost on dueling sections of a ruling class seeking to stabilize an illegitimate empire.

The people’s struggle to liberate themselves from systems of exploitation is the primary generator of correct ideas. Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests dating back to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011. The growth in the popularity of “socialism” can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the struggle against union busting and austerity in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere. The history of class struggle, whether in the case of Black America or liberation movements abroad, is characterized in part by masses of people being propelled into a lifelong search for the correct alignment of ideas and actions that will bring qualitative changes in their conditions of life.

“Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests.”

The debate over Critical Race Theory will not resolve the contradictions that ensure Black Americans make less than sixty cents for every white American dollar , the U.S. military receives trillions  to bomb Black and brown people abroad, and racist New Cold War tropes continue to be recycled to justify policies such as the extremely counterproductive sanctions on China’s solar energy sector . Super exploitation and war are all the American Empire has left to offer. A huge challenge for the class struggle in the United States is the fact that there are more corporate consultants and Democratic Party operatives posing as “anti-racist” than grassroots leaders and organizations prepared to take on the urgency of the political moment. Liberal elites, even when they tolerate criticisms of capitalism and racism, ultimately suppress or smear the revolutionary leaders and movements that inform revolutionary struggle. This is why establishment adherents to Critical Race Theory can offer anti-capitalist critique while scantly supporting organizations fighting to free U.S. political prisoners  like Mumia Abu-Jamal whose activities remain criminalized by the state. 

The collapse of the condominium in Florida serves as an apt metaphor for the system of imperialism as a whole. Our search for correct ideas exists within the confines of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. Conditions continue to worsen for the majority, which will inevitably lead to graver and more acute crises as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Empire offers no answers, just platitudes and lies. Social transformation rests upon the ability of the oppressed to look beyond the narratives of their oppressor, seek truth from facts, and build a mass movement that can sustain radical and revolutionary debate and organization. 

=========================

Why the Right Attacks Critical Race Theory – Gerald Horne

The Right, and some of the Left, don’t want to acknowledge the critical role of white supremacy and settler colonialism in the founding of America and shaping sections of the working class. Gerald Horne joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget the donate button, the share button, subscribe button. And also particularly sign up for our email list which you can do on the website because that’s the only way you’re going to know when there’s a news story. I’ll be back in a few seconds with Gerald Horne and we’re going to talk about critical race theory and why the right-wing has their knickers in a knot over it.

So the right-wing legislators, media pundits are going on and on about critical race theory. In many states run by Republicans, school boards, and such, they would like critical race theory outlawed, not taught in the schools. I’m guessing most, if not all, of these right-wing legislators and media pundits actually have absolutely no idea what critical race theory is. But that being said, they’re going on and on about it.

So now joining me to talk about: Well what is critical race theory and why is the right so up in arms about it, is Gerald Horne. Gerald is a historian who holds the John Jay and Rebecca Morris Chair of History and African-American studies at the University of Houston, and many books, including The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean, and most recently, The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing. Thanks very much for joining me, Gerald.

Gerald Horne

Thank you for inviting me.

Paul Jay

So critical race theory. So, first of all, well, let’s as briefly as you can, what is your take on what critical race theory actually is? And then why is the right so up in arms about it?

Gerald Horne

Well, before I was a historian, I was a lawyer and I happened to be present at the creation of CRT some decades ago.

Paul Jay

So CRT, critical race theory.

Gerald Horne

Critical race, sorry, critical race theory.

Paul Jay

OK, from now on CRT is fine. Go ahead.

Gerald Horne

OK, and folks have to realize that law schools, or the legal profession generally, they’re basically fortresses and citadels of propaganda and falsification. So, therefore, if you have a decision as you had by the U.S. —

Gerald Horne

So law schools are fundamentally fortresses and citadels of propaganda and falsification. I mean, for example, if you look at the 1954 decision for the U.S. Supreme Court decided to move away from U.S. apartheid segregation by law, Jim Crow. In law school classes, you might be taught that these brilliant Supreme Court justices came up with a new interpretation of the law after they studied carefully, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They will not necessarily talk about how there was a change in the global environment, a Cold War where Washington was in a battle of ideas with a socialist camp and competition for hearts and minds and resource-rich Africa, having difficulty competing as black Americans were treated so atrociously. And that creates a dynamic that leads to the retreat of Jim Crow, which even the Supreme Court itself acknowledged, albeit obliquely. And so critical race theory was an attempt to deal with this second variety of interpretation of the law as opposed to what law professors routinely and traditionally taught. Now, this is nothing new, those who follow the law might be familiar with schools of legal realism, which also tries to look beyond the four corners of legislation and statutes in order to figure out how the law evolves.

In the 1970s, as critical race theory was being launched, you got a companion movement, Critical Legal Studies, which too was embedded at Harvard Law School, supposedly the apex of the legal profession. And interestingly enough, one of the founders of critical race theory, the late law professor Derrick Bell, a mentor of Barack Obama, by the way, he was not necessarily a left-winger, to put it mildly. He worked for the Justice Department. And in fact, if you look at my book on southern Africa, you see the exchange that Derrick Bell and myself had about him critiquing this legal organization that I once led, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, for being too involved in international affairs, which he felt was distracting from the domestic agenda.

If you look at the writings of another founder of critical race theory, speaking of a man still in the land of the living, Kimball Thomas of Columbia Law School, he did a law review article on the Scottsboro case called The Scottsboro Case in the 1930s, where the Communist Party of the United States intervenes on behalf of these nine black youth in Alabama, on the fast track to being executed, generates a worldwide campaign that not only leads to ultimately the saving of their lives, but changes in criminal law and criminal procedure.

Professor Thomas’s article basically is a surrender to anti-communism, which makes it even more curious, to put it mildly, how and why critical race theory is now being accused of being a branch of Marxism because the founders consciously and intentionally set out to create a way of looking at the law that would shield them from pro-communist charges, which I think is quite revealing because it helps us to realize that these anti-communist charges are more an attack on any kind of challenge to the status quo, which leads to the moral panic that’s now unfolding about critical race theory, the fact that supposedly it can’t be taught in K-12 education when actually —

Paul Jay

Before you go there, just what’s the basic theory of critical race theory like in terms of what they say it is.

Gerald Horne

It’s a set of loose propositions that fundamentally come down to this. If you look at the overrepresentation of black Americans in prisons or the overrepresentation in terms of being suspended from schools K through 12, you can come to one or two conclusions. You can come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with black people, or you can come to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with society. And critical race theory leans towards the latter. The. U.S. Patriots and flag wavers feel that this is the greatest country on earth, this is the greatest country in the history of planet Earth, and so making that kind of indictment does not go down very well. And that leads to this attempt to suggest that critical race theory should not be invoked in the classroom. And of course, it’s not invoked in K-12 education. If anything is invoked in law schools, it’s hardly invoked in graduate schools, in history or sociology, and all the rest because it’s a particular theory. But now it’s been broadened to encompass any kind of critique of U.S. society. It’s been broadened to indite efforts by corporations on the plane of diversity, inclusion, and equity.

It’s been invoked to indite writers who write in that sphere, like Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University in his book How to Be an Antiracist, which has been a runaway bestseller. He’s not even a lawyer, yet he’s being, quote, tarred with the brush, unquote, of critical race theory. But it has more to do, once again, with national chauvinism. It has more to do, I would also say, with the changing role of the United States in the world with regard to the rise of China, which has led to these attacks on Asian Americans on the streets of the United States of America. And it’s also led to efforts in the state of Texas by certain think tanks to suggest that there are certain buzzwords that you should flag. And if these buzzwords are being used, that’s a hint that critical race theory is being invoked, which means that it should not happen.

What are those buzzwords you ask? Well, ally, believe it or not, colonialism, black lives matter, white supremacy, etc. It seems to me that it’s going to be difficult to talk about the history of U.S. apartheid, the Jim Crow, without talking about white supremacy. It’s going to be difficult to talk about a movement like Black Lives Matter, another buzzword that you’re supposed to avoid without talking about allies. And so obviously, they’re trying to narrow the range of issues that can be discussed in the classroom with the ultimate goal of propagandizing the youth so that they’ll grow up to be adults who then accept the latest harebrained scheme of the right-wing.

Paul Jay

All right. So let me make sure I’m getting this, because the way I understand it, what the right-wing is attacking, it’s not really about critical race theory. They don’t want any conversation, in schools, frankly, anywhere in the culture, that systemic racism is at the core, or founding, of the American state and continues to this day. And the enslavement of people of African descent and the genocide against indigenous people is at the very roots of the current day system. They don’t want that conversation, and critical race theory is a way for them to have a buzzword about that. Because I know you, you have your own critique of critical race theory, but that’s your critique has nothing to do with what the right-wing is talking about. So do I have it correctly so far?

Gerald Horne

Well, yes, you do. And I think that critical race theory or CRT becomes the boogeyman, because at the center of it is race, which automatically makes a good deal of the U.S. public nervous when that term is evoked, invoked. And then there’s theory which points to these pointy-headed intellectuals and these eggheads who you’re supposed to despise. And then there’s critical, and you’re not supposed to be critical of the greatest country on planet Earth, which has a flawless history. And then the founders of critical race theory happened to be of African descent, which then makes it even more suspect in the eyes of some. And so, therefore, you can take CRT and as a blanket, you can throw it over efforts, and the Pentagon, for example, to rout, as they say, they’re trying to do, of white extremists and white supremacy. You might have seen the congressional testimony of the head of the U.S. military, General Mark Milley, where he said he was not necessarily opposed to reading this sort of thing, you would think that he was saying that he endorsed the devil’s scrapbooks, for example. It was a volcanic reaction on the part of certain Republican members of Congress. And so once again, to drive the entire discourse to the right as an effort to drive the entire country to the right, and rather than talk about, for example, January 6 and the apparent complicity of Republicans and as opposed to talking about why they voted against the commission of inquiry into that very volatile episode, we’re bogged down in supposedly talking about critical race theory, but we’re not really talking about critical race theory. We’re actually talking about efforts to critique systemic racism. We need that to be part of the discussion.

Paul Jay

OK, well, we can dig into your critique of critical race theory maybe another time or later on, because I want to get to something else, which you’ve hinted at several times in our numerous interviews and we’ve never dug into, and I think we should. You have said several times that you don’t think the American white left gets the other side of this, the significance of white settler colonialism, of using that kind of language, the extent to which the white working class is imbued with racist ideology. So talk about your take on this, because I’ve always said we’re going to do it. So now we’re going to do it.

Gerald Horne

Well, it gets to some of the history that I’ve written. I wrote a book on the 16th century. I wrote a book on the 17th century. I wrote a book on 1776. And if you look at that trilogy, which you come away with, is that the United States is a kind of classic settler-colonial society, not unlike Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The U.S. left, oftentimes, use the settler colonialism with regard to Palestine, Israel. But that appropriate phrase is conspicuously and curiously missing from their ordinary vocabulary in talking about this particular nation. And if you look at settler colonialism, as I have, if you look at the first effort by London, in particular, to embark on that path in the 1580s and what is now North Carolina, it was from its inception a class collaborationists effort. That is to say, you had an investor class in London sponsoring those who were not part of the one percent to cross the Atlantic to confront the indigenous. And with a little bit of luck and a lot of pluck, they could line up with indigenous land and eventually wind up with enslaved Africans, at least in the United States, to work that land for free.

And so to me, that’s the embryo of the United States of America. And you cannot begin to understand how and why it was in November 2020, Donald J. Trump, after all of his misdeeds and blunders and lies and all the rest, that almost 75 million votes disproportionately and overwhelmingly from rural American working-class and middle-class folk, you can’t begin to understand unless you understand the concept of class collaboration. Likewise, you can’t begin to understand a city like New York, the premier city of the United States, and why and how it is that of the five boroughs in Staten Island, which has a significant number of Euro-American middle-class and working-class folk, particularly city workers, police officers, firefighters, etc. It’s the only boroughs of the five boroughs that gave Trump a majority and a significant majority at that. So at a certain point, we’re going to have to seek an explanation for this phenomenon as opposed to torturing the numbers until they cry out, oh, there’s no such thing as racism goes objectively, the U.S. working-class is confronting capital, etc.

It reminds me of the fictional French intellectual who says, I know what you’re saying is true, in fact, the question is, is it true in theory? In other words, their theory of the case does not necessarily correspond with the facts. So they torture the facts until somehow it can be shoehorned into their theory. And it’s that sort of magical thinking that if we’re not careful, it is going to leave many of us, including, I’m afraid to say, a person like myself in some sort of camp and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, believe it or not.

Paul Jay

You’re referring to what happened in Chile after the overthrow of Allende. So, well, first of all, what doesn’t need too much historical examples to make your case. I mean, certainly a large number, I don’t know, I’m assuming a majority, at least by the late 1930s of the German working-class supported Hitler, even though in the late 20s and early 30s, a large section of the working-class was pro-socialist. So you know the phenomena of the fascisization of a people and which includes the working-class, or sections, thereof. Clearly, there’s lots of precedent for it and we’re seeing it before our eyes in the United States.

The other thing, just to add a little bit to what you’re saying, because I know in terms of my own memory, I, you know, I grew up more in the 1960s and then, but it’s only since about the 60s and, or even 70s, 80s, that absolute overt racism wasn’t the norm. In 1969 in Baltimore, in the Baltimore Sun newspaper and the classified ad section, there was a section of real estate ads for whites, a separate section for Jews, and no section for blacks. You know, you had signs in these suburban areas where white families weren’t supposed to sell to black families and that the signs were– and I’ll use the word N-word, even though I’ve never been a fan of this N-word thing, but I’ll do it just to not to have a secondary controversy. And no N-word, no Jews, no dogs. That’s 1969. So like, it’s really quite recent that overt racism was the norm. And then you go back into the periods you’re talking about the racism against native people. Oh, my God. I mean, you can’t get more barbaric than it’s OK to go out and scalp native people and get paid for it. And that’s where this culture has its roots.

Gerald Horne

Well, and also the question becomes, how do you explain this historically? And I think that that’s part of the controversy with regard to critical race theory, because it’s seeking a materialist explanation for these phenomena. I’m sure you and your audience are familiar with the 1619 project at the New York Times, which in August 2019, there was a special issue with the New York Times magazine that sought to connect the parlous conditions that black people face today with slavery and Jim Crow. And you had a number of objections by mainstream historians who, as part of their ordinary praxis, believe it or not, do not necessarily connect the past to the present. As I’ve explained before, they’re akin to visiting a doctor who takes your medical history and you tell the doctor about your mothers’ and fathers’ maladies and their mothers’ and fathers’ maladies and on back to their mothers’ and fathers’ maladies. And you wait for the diagnosis and the doctor says, well, I’m only interested in history for history sake. I’m not interested in history in terms of helping you to get better. And that’s believe it or not, it sounds ludicrous. But that’s the ordinary praxis of so many historians, which is why they objected so strenuously to the 1619 project, not to mention the fact that it had the audacity to suggest that a revolt against British rule in 1776 in North America might have had something to do with slavery, since there were slaveholders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry leading the assault. And then if you fast forward to the 20th and 21st century —

Paul Jay

Can I just add quickly, you were part of that project. You were on the panels and —

Gerald Horne

Oh, yes.

Paul Jay

And, you know, you’ve written extensively on this whole question of one of the motivating factors of the American Revolution was the defense of the slave system. Sorry. Go ahead.

Gerald Horne

Well, of course, Canada comes into play because you have this control group, that is to say, Canada, there’s no revolt against British rule in 1776. And my understanding is, is that the monarch is still on the currency in Canada. And so yet the so-called revolutionary republic where I’m now sitting, it has a pay, or die system with regard to health care, for example, which is part of the basic obligation, you would think, for society and certainly a revolutionary republic so-called, you would think, would have a single-payer system that Canada, which it did not go for a revolution, does have. Even Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a leading Native American scholar, in light of the uncovering of all these mass graves in Canada, Native Americans. That notwithstanding, she was suggesting that Native Americans in Canada have much more influence and power than Native Americans in the so-called Revolutionary Republic of the United States of America.

Paul Jay

For what it’s worth, as we speak today, the new governor-general, the queen’s representative, was announced, it’s an indigenous woman. I wouldn’t suggest that means indigenous people in Canada have any real power, but at any rate —

Gerald Horne

Well, it’s compared to the United States of America. That’s the relevant comparison. One nation undergoing the supposed grand revolution. The other nation does not. You would think that the latter would be lagging behind. But actually, it’s the so-called revolutionary Republicans is lagging behind, which then leads me to the other point, which is that there’s this idea that our liberal colleagues peddled, in particular, where they tend to think that the expansion of democratic rights in this country, that it’s an inevitable process and they tend to dismiss or downplay the fierce resistance to the expansion of democratic rights, which you saw throughout the South, starting with Little Rock in 1957, where President Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops armed into Central High School to keep nine black students from being mauled. Where you have to have federal troops that Ole Miss University of Mississippi in 1962 to keep one black student from being mauled, James Meredith, and to show you that it was not sexual. The Boston bussing controversy where black students were pelted and many of them coming within an inch of losing their lives. And so there was this fierce resistance which you now see being played out on January 6, 2021, being played out in terms of decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court circumscribing voting rights being played out in legislatures, where there are circumscribing the teaching of the true history in the classroom, being played out legislators and legislatures where, such as in Florida, where they’re immunizing drivers driving their cars into protesters, for example. And so the actual facts do not necessarily correspond with this theory that there is this kind of inevitability to progress. The sort of whiggish notion is that certain historians would call it. And the more that that whiggish notion is proven to be falsification, it seems the more that certain whiggish historians cling to this idea and then denounce and castigate those of us who are trying to introduce material factors in terms of explaining historical change.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I mean, I do believe that over the long term, what’s that thing about the arc of history bends towards progressive and all that. I do think there’s truth to it, but it only happens if there’s an honest facing up to the history. If the history is deluded, delusional, then I don’t know where that arc bends. It can easily bend to fascism. And maybe, you know, if you have hundreds of years, a thousand years, that will bend overall. Except, what do we got, nine years to deal with climate? I mean, I don’t know as again, I’ll get back to this. I don’t know exactly what world we’re headed into here, but I do know that the mentality that accepts the plundering of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that the mentality rooted in colonialism, where it was not just accepted, it was applauded. If you were a general that wiped out South Africans in South Africa. Or, you know, in India, if you were a successful conqueror, you were a bloody hero for hundreds of years, whether you were British or Portuguese or Spanish. I mean, you were bringing plunder and riches back to the people. And, you know, and that mentality is the same mentality that, you know, both of us as kids watching Westerns were the aggressors, were indigenous people. I mean, the white settlers are waging genocide against native people and stealing their lands, of course, led by the government and the bankers in New York, really, and the railroad magnates. But still, TV show after TV show, we grow up that it’s native people who are killing children in wagon trains. And I’m not saying some of that might not have happened, but what do you expect people to do when they’re being wiped out?

So, this — like so I’m agreeing with you. Certainly, I’m not sure we actually have any disagreement, but the idealization of the white working-class is wrong. But also I’ve experienced the demonization of the white working-class when I was in Baltimore by black activists of sorts. Honestly, they wind up, they’re really black capitalists in the end. But they are so antagonistic to the white working-class that they see nothing should even be attempted to reach out to talk to and whether it’s seen as allies or not — and these are not people that work in factories because anyone that actually worked in a factory that was unionized and fighting in a struggle, and I have for years, the issue of race went away pretty quickly within that particular factory in that particular struggle. I’m not saying it does in terms of a more general culture, but the demonization of the white working-class is a big mistake. And you know, I said to these people I was talking to, I said, if nothing else, you’re going to lose if you’re right. I mean, if you’re right that the white working-class is a write-off, then you better come up with another plan because there’s a hell of a lot more of them, and you’re going to lose the struggle. And if for nothing else in terms of dividing your enemy, and I actually don’t think that’s the right way to look at it, because as much as a large section of the white working-class, it has been fascisized and has a lot of its thinking rooted in this culture we’ve been talking about right from the founding of the United States. There’s a lot of sections of the white working-class that are not like that. And in fact, some of these Trump voters even voted for Obama. So it’s complicated. I don’t know where this all heads up, I agree. At least in any historical horizon that’s meaningful, there’s nothing inevitable here.

Gerald Horne

Well, the late economist John Maynard Keynes used to say certain things will happen in the long run, but in the long run, we’re all dead. And I would like to see certain change take place before six feet under.

I think part of the problem, at least in the United States of America, is the ideological question. That is to say, over recent decades, in order to execute the Red Scare, the Cold War, you have to have a demonizing, a marginalizing of the most internationalist sector of the black community, starting with Paul Robeson, for example, and going down from there, the late, great activist socialists, etcetera. And that was part of the trade-off. That is to say, in return for anti-Jim Crows concessions, you had to throw the internationalists overboard, which then leads to ideological trends, a kind of liberalism, like liberalism which you see, embody the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], the Congressional Black Caucus, which is oftentimes, not only not internationalist, they oftentimes shun internationalism, as I was pointing out with regard to my exchanges with the late Derrick Bell during the foundations of critical race theory, which helps to explain why I’m afraid to say Mr. Biden has so much latitude in terms of getting U.S. imperialism in hot water abroad, because many constituencies, not least the black constituency, were not engaged globally. And then you have a certain kind of black nationalism, which also is not necessarily engaged globally either. And so what that means is that they’re ignoring the most powerful factor that helps to explain the final defeat of slavery, the erosion of Jim Crow, as I’ve explained and other historians have sought to explain in numerous books. And speaking of these historians, once again, I have to come back to them because I think that they bear a certain amount of culpability, because what happens with these historians is that oftentimes they become narrow specialists. They’ll look at 1861 to 1865 or they’ll look at 1750 to 1812, and it reminds me of a patron who comes to the theater, midway through the movie, and thinks they grab the essence of the plot, even though half the movie has already run. What I mean is that they don’t have a clear understanding of the actual history of the United States, particularly a grasp that allows them to make certain pronouncements which they make on a regular basis.

Another analogy that I’ve used is the case of the black motorist Rodney King recalled early 1990s. He was beaten to a pulp by officers of the law in Los Angeles County. It was captured on tape. The officers went to trial. The defense lawyers, rather than showing the tape in a continuous loop, which shows snippets, and then asked the credulous jury, do you see an offense there? And of course, the credulous jury would say no. Do you see an offensive there? They would say no. And then, of course, the officers are acquitted. L.A. [Los Angeles] goes up in flames and one of the most expensive bouts of civil unrest, to use the euphemism, in the history of the country. And so these historians are somewhat similar. They do not deal with a continuous loop of U.S. history. They’ll parachute into 1861 and think they understand everything that went before the onset of the civil war, which clearly they don’t, or they’ll parachute into 1960 and begin to describe the agonizing retreat of the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow without understanding how and why we got to that point and how global factors might have impelled us in that direction. So like an Agatha Christie mystery novel, there are many potential culprits when it comes to doing an autopsy of this experiment known as the United States of America.

Paul Jay

So just to bring this to where we are now. It seems to me that the practical problem in terms of progressive U.S. politics is how to develop a broad front against fascism, systemic racism, war, and particularly for actual really dealing with the climate crisis. And I would throw in also the threat of nuclear war, though it’s hard. You know, I’m working on this project with Dan Ellsberg now based on this book Doomsday Machine, and it needs to be part of the conversation, but it’s hard to get it to be part of the conversation because there’s so much else going on.

But that being said, one of the things that keeps, I think, holding back the development of this broad front is how siloed the American white left and black left are. There’s some points of exchange. Certainly, you know, the Bernie Sanders campaign, there are a lot of African-Americans working together with Tenex and young whites and others. I mean, it’s not like it never happens, but it doesn’t seem to happen in a way that becomes sustainable. I would add independent of the Democratic Party. To what extent does this issue of your critique that the white left doesn’t get the history or doesn’t talk about the history in a realistic way? Is that an impediment? One of the things that’s an impediment to the development that this kind of broad front politics?

Gerald Horne

Well, clearly it is. And now let me bring up some hopeful signs. For example, the recent elections in New York State where apparently a socialist will be elected as mayor of Buffalo in a few months. She won the Democratic primary, which is usually a guarantee to becoming the mayor of the second-largest city, Buffalo, in the United States of excuse me, in New York state.

Paul Jay

New York State. Yeah.

Gerald Horne

Exactly. Sorry. And she was backed by DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. She was backed by the Working Families Party, which is a left-leaning party, statewide. And in some ways, once again, New York in the United States, they’re trying to catch up with Canada, which it did not, as noted, have this so-called grand revolution, which has the NDP, the New Democratic Party —

Paul Jay

Oh, hang on here. Hang on here. As you know, I’m a dual citizen and right now I’m in Toronto. Honestly, most of these DSA candidates are significantly to the left of the NDP. With some exceptions. There’s individual NDP members maybe. But the leadership of the NDP in Ontario and nationally to a large extent are honestly they’re closer to some of the mainstream Democrats than to the DSA Socialists.

Gerald Horne

Well, I think it’s important to have an alternative to the Tories and the Liberals. And I think in the United States it’s important to have an alternative to the Republicans and the Democrats. And I think that it’s rather striking that you have that kind of parliamentary representation in Ottawa, which you hardly have in the United States of America, for example, the so-called Revolutionary Republic once again. And so I think that there are some hopeful signs. And I would also point out this fact to come back to my question, the question of internationalism, I would really like to throw down the gauntlet to our Canadian friends because it’s clear that we need help in the United States of America and that a brush fire in the United States could easily expand north, northward to Canada. And so it’s in the self-interest of the Canadian progressive movement to lend a hand across the border. And I see that as well with regard to the recent report by the United Nations Human Rights Council, led by the former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, which just issued this report that suggested that buzzwords systemic racism was a continuing problem and helping to explain police killings, the plethora of police killings which are so prevalent in the United States of America. And she even raised the R-word, reparations. It’s that kind of international pressure, it seems to me, that has been so indispensable to progress here in the United States. And we need all the help we can get, even if it’s from an NDP that many in Toronto might see us not being up to snuff.

Paul Jay

Wow, that’s a whole another conversation, the NDP, because it goes beyond not up to snuff, but at any rate. All right. Well, listen, thanks very much, Gerald. We’ll pick this up again soon.

Gerald Horne

Thank you.

Paul Jay

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