For 250 years: U.S. racism has never ended

“I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream, I see an American nightmare.”

These words spoken by comrade Malcolm X 63 years ago sum up the entire history of what is now known as the United States. From the moment the first colonizers arrived, this country has committed multiple crimes against humanity. Throughout the history of this decadent country, the U.S. capitalist class has unleashed a monopoly of violence and exploitation upon the people, and that legacy has never stopped.

But for the Black proletariat, who have been subjected to centuries of state sanctioned brutality at the hands of the ruling class, the weight of that history is felt more deeply than most. In the words of Frederick Douglass: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice; I must mourn.” And mourning is far more than something Black people do only on the eve of this 250th anniversary. It is something carried across every anniversary, every year, every generation since the birth of the United States empire.

Is it really so bad for the Black community? Are we disenfranchised? The powers that be say this while they kidnap members in the Latine community and send them to the various concentration camps occupying this land. And still they say that this empire must be saved while they continue the genocide of Indigenous nations here and commit genocide abroad thoughout the Global South — victimizing and tormenting people whose only crime is wanting the right to self-determination, to decide their own destiny, without the U.S. pressing a gun to the back of their heads in service of capitalism.

To understand what makes this 250th anniversary so objectionable, we must look back honestly at the history of the U.S. and understand, in particular, why Black people should greet this anniversary with nothing but contempt.

U.S. enslavement

To begin with, there would be no United States, and certainly no capitalist system, without the kidnapping and enslaving of people of African descent. Reactionaries often claim that it wasn’t enslaved labor that built the stolen wealth of the U.S. Not only do these historical revisionists downplay this, they also push the false claim that the United States was the first country to have abolished the slave trade, which is false.

From 1619 to 1860, kidnapped Africans were brought to the United States and sold into bondage, continuing for 52 years after the United States supposedly banned the importation of enslaved people, a ban the government knew was being violated and deliberately ignored. The clearest examples of this were the slave ships that continued to make their runs. The Clotilda is widely considered the last slave ship to deliver enslaved people to Mobile, Alabama, in 1860. Just two years before, the Wanderer and the Echo had attempted the same, though they were fortunately intercepted and failed.

Twelve U.S. presidents were slaveholders, with eight of them being enslavers during their terms.

U.S. racism did not end with enslavement

The continuation of the trade in enslaved Africans was only one part of the story. The U.S. government made it a mission to crush any rebellion mounted by enslaved people, from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War.

Time and again, the state participated in the violent repression of enslaved people who justifiably rose up against their bondage in pursuit of freedom. This was the case in the Stono Rebellion of 1739, Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800, the German Coast Uprising of 1811 led by Charles Deslondes in Louisiana and, most infamously, Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. In that last case, the government under President Andrew Jackson sent in federal troops to crush the rebellion and gave its full support to the retaliatory violence that followed, including the lynching of adults and children who had not even participated in the uprising.

Of course, even after the supposed abolition of chattel slavery, the United States government continued its policy of repression against the Black community, even during the Reconstruction era. Most infamously, the New Orleans and Memphis Massacres of 1866 stand out as early examples of the state looking the other way while white supremacist violence was directed at newly freed Black people.

This pattern of presidential indifference to the mass murder of Black people was not limited to any one president. It would continue across every administration, the position of the U.S government being, in effect, to allow the lynching and massacre of Black people to proceed. And this violence extended beyond U.S. borders as well, through coups and acts of imperialist interference carried out against independent Black countries abroad.

The first example was Haiti. In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, which was victorious against French enslavers in 1804, the United States threatened Haiti with sanctions and military invasion if it did not pay reparations to France for the crime of overthrowing its oppressive ruling class. This began a long tradition of U.S. interference, sabotage and oppression of the Haitian people.

There was the U.S.-backed coup against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, in which both the United States and Belgium overthrew the democratically elected government of the Congo for the simple reason that Lumumba dared to stand up to the Belgian colonizers and the U.S. imperialists and call for the self-determination of Congo and all of Africa. He would later be murdered on the collective orders of both governments.

In 1966, the United States played a significant role in the overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. And in 1983, the U.S. government overthrew the government of Maurice Bishop in Grenada and was complicit in his murder.

The racist COINTELPRO program

At home, the ruling class pursued the same strategy through the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) of the 1960s and 70s, one of the most infamous examples of repression of Black revolutionary activity in U.S. history. The explicit aim of COINTELPRO was to destroy any revolutionary and mass organizing within the Black community, whether through coordinating with state officials to arrest and frame revolutionaries or through outright political assassination. Among those killed were Black Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles, George Jackson in California’s San Quentin prison, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago and Carl Hampton in Houston.

The state also responded to popular rebellions with overwhelming force, such as in the Watts Rebellion of 1965, the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 and the Newark Rebellion of 1967. In each case, the government responded by sending in the military against people who had been pushed to resist by the violence and deprivation that capitalism imposed on their communities. Even during the Civil Rights Movement, the National Guard was deployed against Black communities that attempted to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.

And all of these policies are still being carried out today by the ruling class, as both last year and this year have made painfully clear. Several Black people have been found lynched or killed at the hands of white supremacists in different parts of the U.S. Trey Reed was infamously found lynched on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Tory Medley suffered the same fate, his body found hanging from a tree at a golf course in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Then the body of 58-year-old Earl D. Smith was found hanging from a tree in downtown Albany, New York. And most recently, in February of this year, Georgia State University student Kyle Bassinga, just 21 years old, was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area of Fair Oaks Park in Cobb County.

But the terror visited upon Black people does not come only in the form of the noose. On Feb. 16, in Savannah, Georgia, Dr. Linda Davis, a Black woman, was killed when a person being pursued by ICE agents struck her car during a chase. Her death was a direct consequence of the state’s occupation of Black and Brown communities, and it must be named for what it is: another life taken by the machinery of this system.

The killing of Black people in this country has never stopped, it has only been ignored.

Racist disenfranchisement, occupation 

On top of these murders, the ruling class has also moved with open enthusiasm to strip away what little political power Black people hold in this country. In April of this year, the Supreme Court of the U.S. effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act. Tennessee responded by gerrymandering Memphis, dismantling the political power of Black people there. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and other states have followed suit. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called a special legislative session for the explicit purpose of redrawing the state’s U.S House map in a way the Supreme Court had previously found would dilute Black voting power, a brazen act of disenfranchisement.

And making matters worse still is the open, unapologetic military occupation of Black communities across this country. Both ICE and the National Guard have been deployed into Memphis, New Orleans and other predominantly Black cities, under the banner of fighting crime. That is the justification the Trump administration has offered. But what it amounts to is occupation, plain and simple. The state has never stopped treating the Black community as enemy territory.

So this raises the question: What do we do to end the terror that the state continuously unleashes on the Black community? First, we must ensure that Black voices are heard and centered. We must recognize that the struggle for Black liberation is just as vital to ending capitalism as the liberation of the working class as a whole, because the Black proletariat is a major part of the working class.

The struggle for Black liberation cannot be reduced to a matter of class alone. We cannot fall into the trap of class reductionism, into the naive belief that abolishing capitalism will automatically resolve the contradictions of white supremacy, misogyny, ableism and other forms of chauvinism that have become the bones of this society. Those confrontations will not disappear on their own.

We must also be clear-eyed about the dangerous tendency that exists within certain sections of the working class, among people who call themselves revolutionary yet still operate from the premise that Black liberation is somehow a distraction, or those who, consciously or not, still believe that Black people should step back and allow white people to lead. This tendency is not just wrong. It is dangerous. It is exactly the kind of division the ruling class depends on to keep the working class fragmented and unable to fight back.

The 250 years of terror directed at Black people is not only a crime against the Black community, it is a wound inflicted on the entire multinational, multigendered and multigenerational proletariat.

That is why we must constantly build solidarity, through revolutionary education, through recognizing and supporting whatever direction Black people choose in pursuit of their own liberation. It is not our place to prescribe that direction. It is our place to stand alongside it. Only by doing all of these things together can we ensure that we do not find ourselves, 50 or 100 years from now, marking 300 or 350 years of the same terror, the same occupation, the same nightmare that Malcolm X named all those decades ago and that has never truly ended.