I recommend two short essays — about entrenched US racism

© 2017 Peter Free

 

17 August 2017

 

 

Disclaimer

 

I often let pertinently affected others state views that I have held for decades. Sometimes it is better (with regard to motivating action) for repressed groups to speak for themselves.

 

When they do not, I wonder whether it is a lack of insight, combined with cultural brain-washing and physical oppression, that explains the apparent silence.

 

Fortunately, with regard to the United States' institutionalized racism, something appears to be birthing among numerically more than just the Past's perceptive few.

 

I point you toward two illustrating essays. Notice the implications their conclusions have for our way "forward".

 

 

First essay

 

Professor Donald Earl Collins wrote that:

 

 

[B]lacks are as far away from the "Promised Land" as their great-great-grandparents were 150 years ago.

 

[W]hen I look at the US, I see a nation as unwilling to confront its history in 2017 as it was on that April Tuesday 49 years ago, when James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

DC public historian, Marya McQuirter told me, historians like me have been too "deeply ensconced in the 'American Dream'," and have cared "too much about individual progress and not enough about white supremacy, capitalism, [and] patriarchy".

 

What can blacks do in a nation that will ultimately never change, in an America forever committed to a racial and gendered caste system?

 

[I]t would be easier to build a faster-than-light spacecraft than to expect a nation built on racial and sexual oppression to one day turn the corner.

 

© 2017 Donald Earl Collins, Have black historians been wrong all along?, Al Jazeera English (16 August 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

Second post

 

Danny Haiphong illuminated the problem posed by an acquiescent black political culture:

 

 

Colin Kaepernick's struggle [see here and here] with the NFL corporation continues to make headlines. In recent weeks, the 29-year-old quarterback came close to signing with the Baltimore Ravens. Retired linebacker Ray Lewis [who is also black] obstructed the signing in consultation with the Raven's ownership.

 

Lewis advised Kaepernick to keep his activism "private."

 

Ray Lewis, ESPN, and the owners of the NFL have all conspired to punish Kaepernick for his political activity. Kaepernick has committed a heinous crime in the eyes of US imperialism’s ruling class. He connected the oppression of Black people with the roots of the nation itself.

 

[T]he Black Lives Matter network organization and its affiliates have been silent on the Kaepernick issue.

 

As gatekeepers of oppression, these so-called leaders of Black America have promoted a politics of respectability in place of a politics of liberation. Their aim has been to ensure poor Black and brown people cozy up to power rather than fight it.

 

Lucrative employment in political offices, corporate sporting leagues, and media outlets has provided enough material incentive for them to do the bidding of imperialism whenever called upon by their employers.

 

US imperialism is currently negotiating whether humanity itself is worth risking in favor of the profits of the ruling class.

 

No amount of representation nor reform can eradicate the oppression wrought by a system that is rotten to its core.

 

© 2017 Danny Haiphong, Kaepernick Shows Why Black Lives Will Never Matter under US imperialism, Black Agenda Report (16 August 2017) (excerpts, resequenced for clarity)

 

 

The moral? — They are right, of course

 

Haiphong and Kaepernick are re-making the inarguable point that Martin Luther King Jr made in his 1967 Vietnam War speech.

 

All three echo Malcolm X's (and others') earlier prescience.

 

Given that little has changed since Malcolm X's time, Professor Collins' concluding point is more substantiated than not.