Not just a slip of the tongue

After his white supremacist attack on two Black audience members was captured on cell video and aired on the Web—tmz.com—and national television, disgraced performer Michael Richards appeared on numerous talk shows and radio programs and expressed scripted surprise about his racist rage, as though he didn’t have an inkling of where it had come from.

Where did it come from? Not from thin air.

Richards had pointed at the Black men and shouted, no less than seven times, the “n” slur—a central weapon in the arsenal of white supremacist epithets. He taunted them with a description of how they would have been lynched in this country five decades ago—the hallmark of Klan terror. He concluded that they deserved all this for “interrupting a white man”—invoking the apartheid hierarchy of state-enforced segregation.

All of this was not part of Richards’s “act.” However, he also has a history of racism in performance. In 1986, Richards appeared in black makeup and a wig in an odious portrayal of a blind African American. A clip of that vicious role is posted at defamer.com. That performance is rooted in more than a century of racist minstrel shows that date back to the antebellum South.

Michael Richards was awarded several Emmys for playing the character “Kramer” in the 1990s television sitcom “Seinfeld.” Many critics characterized the show as racist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, anti-woman, anti-disabled and anti-lesbian and gay. Corporate backers, in turn, armored themselves against charges of racism by arguing that the program ridiculed many groups.

In 1998, the May 7 episode was so egregiously anti-Puerto Rican that it sparked mass protests from New York City to Miami, San Francisco to Philadelphia. In that episode Michael Richards “accidentally” sets the national flag of Puerto Rico on fire, throws it on the ground and stomps on it as the Puerto Rican Day Parade passes. When enraged Puerto Rican marchers rock a car in response, “Kramer” concludes that “It’s like this every day in Puerto Rico.”

This desecration of the Puerto Rican flag was aired during the 100th anniversary of the U.S. imperialist invasion and colonization of this island nation.

That program was no accident. NBC network executives refused input from Puerto Rican community activists who heard the announced title of the upcoming segment a month before it aired.

Who owns NBC? General Electric, the capitalist mega-monopoly that produces nuclear bombs, spy satellites and war planes for the Pentagon.

From GE to NBC, finance capital is at war—on the domestic front, as well as the international front.

Any country that demands its right to self-determination and sovereignty faces military might and racist imperialist propaganda that attempts to dehumanize those in the crosshairs.

Here in the U.S., whole nations are held as virtual domestic colonies—Black, Latin@, Native, Arab and Asian. As police gun down people of color in occupied oppressed communities, white supremacist ideology—spewed from every venue of the dominant capitalist culture—cloaks itself as “free speech.”

The war abroad and the war on the domestic front must be fought in tandem, united shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy—the barons of capitalist industry and banking—who rely on a system of divide and conquer oppression in order to continue to grow rich from exploitation of the laboring peoples here and around the world.

Unity against racism, and every manifestation of bigotry, is the only glue that can cement the anti-capitalist struggle. One immediate act of solidarity is to support any protests and ban against racist performers like Richards.