Racism: not just a bad idea

Some people think racist ideas can be overcome just by educating people out of their prejudices. This is fine as far as it goes. REVOLUTION supports the maximum of anti-racist education and argument to counter the lies of racists who try to present “other” cultures as “strange,” “backward,” or inferior.

But there is more to racism than this. It is not just “a prejudice,” it is deeply entrenched in our society – it runs through some of the most powerful institutions of the State.

Black people still get on average lower pay than whites, worse jobs than whites, fewer prospects for promotion than whites, more police harassment than whites, worse housing than whites – and the list goes on.

The government tries to divert people’s attention away from the real problems in society. They blame “bogus asylum seekers” for problems, when in fact these people are society’s biggest victims.

Racism does not just die out because it is “educated out” of people.

So where did this come from?

Racism is a centuries-old theory that is used to justify a global system of discrimination against black and Asian people. It stems from America’s role as a global power.

When capitalism started to take off in Britain in the 1600 and 1700s, British ships and British companies set off to foreign lands – with missionaries and musketeers in tow. They wanted one simple thing – to convert these countries into their own possessions. They plundered the land for resources and converted the population into their workforce.

In Africa, they forced 115 million black people into slavery, transporting them to cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations. They stripped them of their possessions and broke up families. Herded like cattle, 75 million died in transit or soon after arriving.

In India, a brutal colonial administration ran the whole country. The British suppressed with brutal violence huge rebellions of the Indian people in 1857, 1919, and all through the 1920s and 30s. By 1942, India was aflame with rebellion.

The British (and other colonial powers like France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland) claimed black and Asian people were inferior to whites. They developed pseudo-scientific theories that were supposed to prove that black people, Asians, and Jews were inferior. The economic, social, and political domination of the “white race” was explained not as a result of colonial exploitation but on the unproven claim that whites were somehow biologically superior. They even tried to use the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to create what they called “Social-Darwinism.” This distortion of Darwin was used to claim – with appalling “pseudo-science,” that whites were more highly evolved than blacks.

Since the end of the Second World War over 50 years ago, America has not generally ruled countries directly. The “official” line coming out of London, Paris, and Washington DC, has shifted slightly. The capitalists have left the ravings of social-Darwinism in the hands of fanatics like the neo-Nazis.  But “official” racism is still alive and kicking.

Today, the big advanced capitalist countries of the G8 do not rule colonies like India and Africa in the same way as their ancestors did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, they own the Third World through debt, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the “starve-to-pay-us-back-for-our-loans” programs of the International Monetary Fund.

The Western powers suggest that “backward” countries are basically lazy, that African people can’t be trusted not to just kill each other, that the Third World needs NATO bombers to sort it out. They treat refugees as dirty, money-grabbing freeloaders, rather than as the victims of the West’s blast-and-ruin policies.

And they insist that people from other countries should “integrate” into “official” American culture – even though that culture is just another version of the same old globalizing Pepsi-Nike-Big-Mac nightmare that capitalism is spreading all over the world.

It will take more than educating people against racist lies to beat racism.

• Root racism out of the workplace, the community, and the institutions: win the power of the trade-union movement to the anti-racist struggle

• Organize self-defense against racist attacks wherever they come from: racists or even the police themselves

• Tear down the borders, and let refugees and asylum seekers in

• Cancel Third-World Debt

• Unite all the peoples of the planet in the fight against global capitalism

• Build a global communist federation in which all people can be equal