CHAPTER NINE

THE MEANING OF RACIST VIOLENCE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law, parliaments, etc. ..

—Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 216.

History has many cunning passages,

contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such

supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives

too late

What’s not believed in, or is still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be

dispensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear.

—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), p. 20.

I

Throughout his long and brilliant career as both a social scientist and political militant, DuBois speculated that the final solution to racial conflict in America might be the complete extermination of the Black race. In “The Future of the Negro Race,” published in January, 1904, DuBois thought that extinction or “migration to foreign lands” might await Afro-Americans.1 Four decades later, in the pages of the Amsterdam News, DuBois shuddered at the horrors of the Nazi holocaust. “It is a case of race prejudice on a scale unknown and unconceived since the Emancipation Proclamation. What is happening to Jews,” he warned, “may happen to us in the future. Unless (racism) is destroyed, rooted out, absolutely suppressed, modern civilization is doomed.”2 Black writers in the 1960s flirted with the possibilities of Black genocide and emigration from the United States, sometimes with a reluctant ambiguity. Harold Cruse wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that Garveyism and “impractical Back-to-Africa” schemes were ventures into “romantic escapism; for if the Afro-American does not find his salvation in the United States he will find it nowhere.” Yet in the same book, 104 pages later, Cruse asserted, “there may well come a time when the race question in Africa will have to be solved by admitting specified numbers of white Rhodesians, Angolans and South Afrikaners into the United States, in exchange for an equal number of Afro-Americans to take their places in Africa.”3 The most powerful thesis on the inevitability of whites’ genocide of Blacks was Sidney M. Willhelm’s Who Needs The Negro?

The life situation of Black Americans deteriorates with the passing of each year . . . technological efficiency makes possible the full realization of the nation’s anti-Negro beliefs. The arrival of automation eliminates the need for Black labor, and racist values call for the Negro’s removal from the American scene. . . As the races pull apart into life styles with greater polarity, the Black ghetto evolves into the equivalent of the Indian reservation. What is the point, demands White America, in tolerating an unwanted racial minority when there is no economic necessity for acceptance. With machines now replacing human labor, who needs the Negro?4

The historical predictions of race war, genocide and destruction, the darkest fears of previous Black generations, seemed to many to have become reality in the 1980s. Beginning with the public execution of five members of the Communist Workers Party by Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, there was an acceleration of racist violence across the country.5 Traditional leaders of the Black elite were convinced that “an informal coalition of white racist vigilantes, the police and government officials were conspiring to kill Blacks.” Jesse Jackson declared to the New York Times in late November, 1980, that “there is almost a hysteria in Black communities because of the belief that there is a conspiracy. This country has taken a definite swing toward fascism.”6 Even Blacks who dis­counted the possibility of a “national conspiracy to murder Blacks” usually prefaced their statements with the admission that “racism in the form of violence is sweeping the country.”7

Incidents of brutal violence against Blacks are reported infrequently. What usually is portrayed as an unusual or bizarre example of racism is only a small portion of the human tragedy. The lynching of nineteen-year-old Michael A. Donald in Mobile, Alabama, in March, 1981, was publicized as the first in the Deep South since the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.8 Almost completely ignored or suppressed by the white media were a series of barbaric incidents that have occurred in that region since 1979. In May, 1981, the Jackson Advocate reported in Mississippi alone there have been twelve murders “in as many months which are suspected by Blacks of being (racially motivated).” The tortured body of one unidentified Black man was found floating down a river in Cleveland, Mississippi. The man’s sex organs had been hacked off, and the coroner later reported finding his penis in his stomach. On January 11, 1981, the body of 45-year-old Lloyd Douglas Gray was found hanging from a tree in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. A. W. Hulett, Tallahatchie coroner, pronounced Gray’s death a suicide, and no autopsy was performed. On February 28, 1981, the body of 32-year-old Roy Washington was found in Cypress Creek, in Holmes County, Mississippi. Washington had been “badly beaten in the head and face,” his hands bound behind him, and then shot in the head at point-blank range. The corpse was weighed down with a scissor jack and wrapped by barbed wire. Scars around his neck indicated that he had also been lynched. Local white newspapers were silent on the murder. Police did not aggressively pursue leads in the case, and even followed a Black reporter around while he conducted his own investigation. The majority of the other Black men who have been found beaten or hanging in Mississippi counties have also been officially labeled suicides. Familiar with the pattern of racial violence, one Black resident of Tallachatchie County declared, “if they say it was suicide, it was probably a lynching.”9

Reaganites, Black and white, attempted to counter the growing perception that racism was out of control. Edwin Meese III, chief Presidential adviser, deplored the public statements of Jackson and others. “I guess what does disturb me, not from that standpoint of this administration as much as from society in general,” he stated, “is that I think there are those people who are fomenting Black hysteria in order to preserve their own positions of so-called leadership.” Many Black journalists agreed with Meese’s condemnation of Black leadership. “The 1980 elections once again demonstrated that the group that designates itself as the Black leaders spent its political capital on a losing Democratic candidate and the failed politics of branding the winner as a warmongering racist,” argued columnist Tony Brown. “As a result, there are fewer media opportunities, therefore a declining popularity for some of the traditional leaders.” Both Brown and Meese concluded that “Black leaders were promoting hysteria for personal and selfish motives.”10

Only one instance of random violence against Blacks in the early 1980s attracted international attention—the systematic murders of at least 28 young men and children in Atlanta. The immediate questions that virtually every American asked—Who are the killers? What has the city government and police done to thwart the murders?—became almost secondary considerations. Neither the conviction of Wayne Williams, charged with the murder of two Black youth, nor the entry of the FBI in the case reduced the anxiety of millions of Black parents for the safety of their children. Why was Atlanta the site of these bizarre and inexplicable deaths? Were the murders only one small part of a pattern of racial violence which constitutes a national conspiracy? How have different social strata within the Black community responded politically to the killings?

Modern Atlanta is the product of the infusion of monopoly capital into a rapidly changing racial and political milieu. Until the Civil Rights Movement, the piedmont and Blackbelt South’s central means of production were predominantly agricultural, construction and light industry. During the 1950s and 1960s Georgia experienced a massive economic transformation. The number of Black-owned and operated farms in the state dropped from 12,049 to 4,450 between 1954 to 1969, as agribusiness increased. Atlanta became a glittering convention center, and headquarters for virtually every major corporation in the Southeast. Jim Crow was gradually abandoned as Blacks comprised 51 percent of the city’s population by 1970. Atlanta’s Black elite, allied with liberal elements of the city’s white private sector, successfully challenged the older racist hierarchy to become the new managers of the political apparatus. Maynard Jackson was elected mayor in 1973. By the mid-1970s the city projected the image of a successful, pro-business, biracial community.11

Unresolved socioeconomic tensions created by the new realities of modern capital expansion and the older patterns of white Southern racism finally exploded in the late 1970s. Almost one quarter of Atlanta residents now exist below the poverty level. 26 percent of all households heads were unemployed in 1978. In recent years large numbers of middle-to-upper income whites fled to the suburbs. Between 1970-1980, 102,000 whites left Atlanta, and Blacks became two-thirds of the city’s population. Incidents of violence between the remnants of the old segregationist police force and Blacks became more frequent. In 1973 and 1974, 23 Blacks were gunned down by police; 12 were under 14 years old. In the mid-1970s, Atlanta had the highest per capita police killings of civilians in the U.S. By 1979, Atlanta surpassed Detroit as the city with the highest murder rate in America.12

Black Atlantans were poorly prepared to deal with their childrens’ murders. The Black ministers and religious leaders, the backbone of the Black community’s Civil Rights Movement, at first showed little concern in the case. Community groups did nothing to help resolve local tensions until the summer and autumn months of 1980. As the number of victims mounted, criticisms were raised against the Black petty bourgeoisie, and observers commented that only poor Black children were being singled out by the killer or killers. The local white-owned media branded the Jackson Administration hopelessly inept and promoted the racial slur that Blacks were intellectually incapable of governing a major metropolis. Television stations competed with each other to project tactlessly the anguish of Black parents, turning funerals into circus sideshows. One group of white patrolmen leaked to the media their view that Black police and government officials were simply “too stupid to solve the case.” By the winter of 1981 Atlanta was by all accounts “a city under seige.” Small school­ children from poor and middle class Black neighborhoods were actually arming themselves in school with homemade weapons. The white business community was convinced that a “racial blow-up would occur if a white was charged with the murders.” Promising over 8,000 more jobs for inner city youths, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce actually delivered only 2,000. Police repression escalated everywhere. 1,500 children in February, 1981, and 4,670 children in March, 1981, were stopped by authorities for violating a 7 p.m. citywide curfew. Ordered to cooperate with local officials, the FBI promptly infuriated Blacks by suggesting that some of the victims’ mothers may have been the killers. With the arrest of Williams, the FBI left the city, and the attention of white capitalist America moved elsewhere.13

Most Blacks recognized that the Atlanta murders signified a new level of terrorism which suppressed Black social and political development. Whether the racial identity of the killers was Black or white became secondary to what Jesse Jackson termed the conviction that “there is a cultural conspiracy to kill Black people.”14 Blacks in Atlanta’s Techwood Homes public housing project, armed with base­ball bats and revolvers, organized self-defense patrols. Techwood community leader Israel Green stated that patrols were needed to protect the project’s youth from “the crazed racist killers.”15 Blacks and progressive whites organized solidarity demonstrations against the Atlanta murders across the nation. On March 13, 1981, almost 20,000 people marched down Harlem’s Lenox Avenue in a candlelight demonstration. One reporter commented that “a certain religious atmosphere some organizers had called for, highlighted by candles, existed side by side with large pictures of Malcolm X, displays of revolutionary culture, and even an old ‘Free the Panthers’ banner from the sixties.”16 An Atlanta-based association of parents of murder victims, the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, held a protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial on May 25, 1981. The five thousand participants included Black and white hospital workers from District 1199 in New York City, members of the United Auto Workers Local 99, several locals of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the United Mine Workers. Significantly, neither Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry nor Atlanta’s Black Brahmins attended the demonstration. Speakers at the gathering, from Jesse Jackson, Victor Goode, president of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and Bernice Krawczwk of the UAW emphasized that Atlanta was “the product of a racist society.”17

On several occasions Black speculation concerning the Atlanta crisis lapsed into a regrettable yet understandable (given the circumstances) level of paronoia. Social critic Dick Gregory developed a theory for the murders which asserted that “the missing children’s bodies (are) drained of blood in order to create some miracle cure for cancer.” Afro-Americans “have some special formula in their blood brought about because of the sickling traits which can be used in a formula to defeat cancer.” Out of “sheer desperation,” according to one Black source, some Blacks “have begun to accept Gregory’s statement as fact and many (Black) Atlantans have begun to look strangely at all whites in the area.”18 At the Washington demonstration Ella Collins, the sister of Malcolm X, reiterated Gregory’s theory. She charged that the murders were the “work of white scientists” who were “performing experiments to discover what made the Black man so superior that he was able to withstand the abuses of 400 years.”19 White journalists jumped at these and other statements to malign all progressive activities around the Atlanta murders. Chicago Tribune columnist Raymond Coffey denounced Collins’ remarks as “dangerous, extremist, recklessly irresponsible, inflammatory, (and) abominably racist nonsense.” The rally was a “political-racial-commercial jamboree,” Coffey declared, dismissing the “End Genocide” placards carried by protestors as “preposterous.” The Atlanta killings were not “racially motivated.”20 Without missing a beat, some influential Blacks parroted this line. Big Red, one of New York City’s major Black newspapers’ informed readers that “there is no reason to doubt that all that can be done is being done.” Statements implying that “if those kids were white” that the crimes would be solved do “far more harm than good.” Talk about Black armed self-defense or revolt “plays into the hands of right-wing and left-wing extremists, both of whom constantly seek ways to undermine democracy. We should avoid all the kind of loose talk which adds to the insanity which that tragedy represents.”21 Despite these arguments, the great majority of Blacks are now certain that the Atlanta murders will never be solved completely, and that the essense of the tragedy is both profoundly racial and political.

II

Atlanta represented the smallest fraction of random racist vio­lence that had been mounting across the U.S. In every major city and small town, in virtually every part of the country, a shocking explosion of racist incidents occurred in the early 1980s. A small sample would include the following examples:

White police officers in New Orleans have shot at least 10 Blacks in 1980, killing eight. In one case, officers James Esposito and Robert Sedgeher shot Walter E. Brown on December 20, 1980, for cursing at them. They later resigned from the police force after admitting that they had planted a gun on Brown. An Orleans Parish grand jury cleared them of any wrong-doing.22

On March 16, 1981, police in Roseville, Michigan pursued three young Black men driving what the officers mistakenly believed to be a stolen automobile. After a highspeed chase, police officers Rafael Perez and Thomas Lavender pursued one of the Black men, 20 year old Theodoric Johnson. Both policemen fired, killing Johnson. According to the Reverend Timothy Chambers, who had witnessed the shooting, one of the policemen bragged to the other, “I blew that nigger’s head off”23

Three Black women and one Black man were arrested in Summerville, South Carolina, on August 10, 1980, on shoplifting charges. The night of their transfer from the Summerville to Dorchester County Jail, police lieutenant Roger Hudson, 54 and white, forced the women “to perform sexual acts with and on him.” The women filed charges through the sheriffs office charging Hudson with criminal sexual conduct, aggravated assault and official misconduct in office. A jury of ten whites and two Blacks acquitted Hudson. White jurors laughed and talked with Hudson, and the judge had told the jurors that “if (they) could not make up their minds, then the majority would rule.” Two of the women and the man arrested for shoplifting were finally convicted and received sentences ranging from six to ten years.24

In early 1981, white police officers in northwest Florida and southeast Mississippi circulated a mock hunting regulation document announcing “open season” for shooting “Porch Monkeys.” The flyer continued: “Regionally known as Negro, Nigger, Saucer Lips, Yard Apes, Jungle Bunnies, Spear Chunkers, Burr Heads, Spooks, and the Pittsburgh Pirates.” It is “unlawful to shoot any Porch Monkey in a Cadillac,” to “trap within 25 feet of watermelon patches, or to bait traps with “pork chops, watermelons, mangoes, collards, cheap whiskey, fried chicken, chitlings [sic] or flashy clothes.”25

Cornelius Brown, a 42-year-old Black resident of Cleveland, was playing pool in a delicatessen on November 20, 1980. An off-duty white policeman, Napolean Dismuke, had left the pool table earlier and upon returning, demanded that Brown leave at once. Dismuke shot Brown with his .38 caliber revolver four times, killing him. Dismuke claimed that Brown had tried to assault him with a pool cue. In June, 1981, a jury found Dismuke innocent, and has since returned to active duty on the force.26

Leroy Perry, a 48-year-old Black resident of Annapolis, Maryland, was halted for suspected drunken driving on July 20, 1981, by a white officer, David Hodge. Hodge shot and killed Perry when the latter left his car and came out holding “an ice pick or a pistol.” Actually Perry had been holding a screwdriver which he needed to pry open the trunk, in which the car’s registration was kept.27

In Los Angeles, the police department was involved in a series of brutal citizen murders, where officers applied “chokeholds” across their victims’ necks. In 1981 alone there were the following cases: Luel Marshall, 41 and Black, was stopped by police officers on February 3, 1981. While handcuffed, he was choked several times by police. Marshall suffered a massive heart attack, and died without gaining consciousness on March 17, 1981. Charles H. Hill, 40 and Black, was arrested after an altercation with police on March 14. Hill was beaten viciously with a baton and choked by officers. He subsequently stopped breathing in a Hollywood division cell tank prior to being booked, and was declared dead. The coroner’s office declared that Hill had died from a “sickle cell crisis”! Arthur W. McNeil, 30 and Black, was arrested as a suspected prowler. Police choked McNeil, who died in a hospital on July 28. The coroner’s inquest determined that McNeil died “at the hands of another, other than by accident,” in February, 1982, and a $15 million lawsuit was filed against the city by McNeil’s widow and daughter. When the press asked Daryl F. Gates, the police chief, why so many Blacks and Latinos were dying at the hands of his officers, he responded calmly that perhaps Blacks were not “normal people.”28

There were also a series of inexplicable hangings in jails of perhaps four dozen Black men in 1981 alone. Three such examples include 19 year old Eric Boyd, charged with armed robbery, and lynched in a Chicago precinct jail cell on March 13; Cleophus Powell, 31, serving a 10 day sentence for shoplifting in Chickasaw, Alabama, on March 31; and Grant Lee, 19, arrested for driving a stolen car by Cleveland police, on April 22, and found strangled by his socks attached to a crossbar section of the jail cell door. In most cases, the Black men were in relatively good spirits when contacted by family or friends hours before their “suicides.”29

Perhaps the largest number of racist incidents did not involve law enforcement officers at all, but were initiated by white youths. In 1981, there were at least 500 documented cases of random white teenage violence, including the following examples:30

The drowning of John Stencil, a Black freshman at Farleigh Dickenson University on April 11, 1981. Two white youths pushed Stencil into the Hackensack River as he sat on a bridge railing. Stencil reportedly “shouted to them that he could not swim but they went away.” Hackensack prosecutor Roger Breslin, a white lawyer, termed the drowning an “accident.”

Five white youths in a car attempted to run down three Black women in Far Rockaway, New York on February 28, 1981. Charged with attempted murder, the youths pleaded innocent and were released on only $5,000 bail.

Five young white men were arrested by Maryland State Police on June 1, 1981, and charged with conspiring to burn a cross on the lawn of Harford NAACP president Joseph Bond of Churchville.

Gary Allen Smith, a 24-year-old Black student at Morgan State University in Baltimore, was viciously attacked by eight white youths in June, 1981, after Smith had argued with a white female employee where he worked. Smith was beaten with pool cue sticks and suffered “a broken left arm, contusions and swelling of the brain.”

Three white men, ages 19, 21, and 23 tossed a pipebomb into the house of a Black Detroit family. Mrs. Synthia Steele had seen the bomb crash through the bathroom window, picked it up and was attempting to throw it away when it explocled in her hand. Three fingers of her right hand were blown off. The attack was the last in a series lasting two and a half years. Previously, white youths had thrown baseballs through Mrs. Steele’s windows and painted KKK signs on her garage.

Michael Jarrett, a Black youth of 19, was killed by a gunshot wound to the head in Steubenville, Ohio on April 17, 1981, for allegedly dating white girls. Police traced the murder weapon to a white youth, who was eventually released. Over 500 people marched to protest police inaction in the case.

White students at Cass Technical High School in Detroit began calling themselves “the Junior KKKs” and “Baby Hitlers.” In March 1981, the juvenile racists circulated white supremacist literature, spraypainted lockers with swastikas and assaulted a student with a knife.

At Wesleyan College, Connecticut, a racist campaign of terror mounted for months. White youths posted a series of “Wanted—Dead or Alive” flyers throughout the campus, with an ugly, twisted sketch of a spear-carrying Black man portrayed. One flyer charged “Jigaboo” with a variety of crimes, including “rape, murder, robbery. He (is) led by Communist Jews in a conspiracy to destroy America and the White race.” Another flyer taunted: “All you fuckin’ black sambas think you own the fuckin’ campus—well I’ve got news for you. . . I hate you, Mr. Fuckin’ nigger. Oh yes I do . . . get that white man’s cock outta your mouth—I’m talkin to you. Mr. Nigger, you suck. You call yourselves brothers . . . well you’re brothers of the gorillas. I have a dream . . . you-all gonna die in pain.” Still another racist tract promoting a fraternity informed prospective white members that it was “dedicated to wiping all goddamned niggers off the face of the earth.” By late October, 1981, KKK members visited Wesleyan’s campus to recruit young racists.31

The number of random racist incidents intensified to such an extent that it became a “normal” part of daily life for Blacks in the United States. Few Black parents were not concerned about the safety of their children during the 1980s. Few Black women did not worry about the possibility that their husbands, fathers, lovers and/or sons might be killed or horribly mutilated in Buffalo and dozens of other American cities. Even while writing this chapter in late 1981, I happened to return to my office at the Africana Center, Cornell University, early one morning. The windows on the first-floor of the building were punctured by an air-rifle. On the front door was printed clearly a single word—“NIGGER.”

III

Simple recognition of the explosion in racially motivated random violence is no substitute for an analysis of the crisis. The current outbreak of racist attacks is a manifestation of a profound and fundamental crisis within the political economy of monopoly capitalism. Simultaneously it represents the logical culmination and popular expression of cultural/social patterns of race relations that increasingly pits the petty bourgeoisie, working class, and permanently unemployed of different ethnic groups against each other over increasingly scarce resources. What many Blacks perceive as a “white conspiracy,” in the words of Jesse Jackson, is in reality the conjuncture of racist ideological hegemony in the U.S., an acceleration of the use of physical coercion and terrorism against Blacks by both the coercive apparatuses of the state (e.g., the police) and by paramilitary racist groups (the Ku Klux Klan, and many others), and the absence of a powerful, democratic and progressive movement by Blacks which challenges racism in the streets as well as in the courts.

In economic terms, the early 1980s are characterized in part by the crisis of capital accumulation and the steady erosion in the standard of living of the white petty bourgeoisie. The number of small business failures, to cite one example, reached epidemic proportions. During the first week of October, 1981, 468 U.S. companies—dry cleaners, lumber mills, restaurants, retail stores—closed permanently. From September, 1980 to September, 1981, commercial and industrial failures exceeded 12,600, a 250 percent increase over the bankruptcy rate of 1978. Median U.S. family incomes grew from $7,500 in the mid-1960s to over $22,000 in 1981. But inflation climbed from only 2 percent in 1965 to over 12 percent in 1980, negating any real income gains. As a result, many “middle class” whites believe that the Federal government’s deficit spending, Keynesian economic policies since the Great Depression, and national, state and local taxes are the reasons for their economic plight.32

In 1950 the U.S. manufacturing output totaled 62 percent of the combined output of the ten major capitalist nations. By 1965 the percentage dropped to 50 percent, and was 43 percent by 1976. A series of major bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies threatened to produce a chain of economic disasters, from Penn Central in 1970 to Chrysler, First Pennsylvania Bank and the Hunt brothers in 1980.33 For the automotive retail industry, including parts suppliers, service stations, new and used car dealers and repair shops, bankruptcies in 1980 rose more than 96 percent. Personal bankruptcies in the U.S. increased from 179,223 in 1977 to over 450,000 in 1981, with projected losses to creditors in excess of $6.4 billion. For white middle class families, even their solitary hedge against inflation, the home, ceased to provide any real security in the early 1980s. After adjustment for inflation and financing discounts, the average price of homes fell 10 percent in 1981, “the steepest drop since the Depression,” according to the New York Times. The number of mortgage foreclosures instituted on homes financed by the Federal Housing Administration was over 2,000 each month in 1981, a 30 percent increase over 1980.34

The crisis within capitalism is expressed within racial relations as a public repudiation of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s and a vicious posture towards health care, welfare, job training and social service programs which benefit large numbers of Blacks and Hispanics. A decade ago, even so malignant a politician as Richard Nixon was forced to promote “Black Capitalism” by releasing Federal Reserve funds to Black-owned banks, appointing a moderate civil rights leader, James Farmer, to his cabinet, and expanding welfare and some social service programs. Under Reagan, all stops have been pulled. Daniel Moynihan’s infamous 1970 memorandum to Nixon, justifying “benign neglect” of Blacks, has succumbed to a public policy posture which threatens to smash affirmative action, vocational programs, food stamps and a host of democratic reforms won by the Black masses over a half century of struggle.35

Within civil and political society, a series of “Green Lights” has been signaled since 1978 which have been largely responsible for unleashing the racist terror. The first was the Bakke decision, which crystalized the anxieties of millions of whites of declining socioeconomic status to blame their misfortunes upon a scapegoat-Blacks and Hispanics. “The wide publicity given to the relatively small number of affirmative action programs instituted by government, by private corporations, and by unions, as well as the publicity given to Bakke, provided a highly distorted picture of undeserved Black gains to many white Americans,” states Michael Reich in Racial Inequality. “The perception offended many white Americans’ ethic of fair treatment and led to charges of ‘racism in reverse.’ It also provided a simple and emotionally appealing explanation of one of the principal causes of the economic deterioration that many households were experiencing in the 1970s.”36

The second “Green Light” was the vicious execution of five members of the Communist Workers’ Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, November 3, 1979. The coordinated efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, and in all probability, the FBI and local law enforcement officers, were needed to blunt the momentum of antiracist forces in that state. Only sixteen of the forty racists were indicted, and just six were tried. One year later, the six white supremacists were declared innocent by an all-white jury. The lesson of Greensboro was not lost by any observer on the left. Marxist-­Leninist journal Line of March noted grimly that “the state had given the Klan a hunting license against the anti-racist movement, particularly against any forces who attempted to link that movement up to a broader political perspective.” In Monthly Review, Michael Parenti and Carolyn Kazdin charged that “the Klan and Nazis could not have done what they did in Greensboro had they not enjoyed the active support and passive complicity of state officials and agents. . . The Klan and Nazis were doing the work of the state.”37

The third “Green Light” was the election of Ronald Reagan in November, 1980, which represented the culmination of a sixteen year effort by the Right (beginning with Goldwater’s Presidential campaign in 1964) to capture the executive branch of government. Reagan’s campaign was based upon the same putrid ideology of racism, limited Federal government, sexism, anticommunism and states’ rights that catapulted George Wallace to national prominence in the 1960s. Unlike Wallace, Reagan was able to win over Wall Street and monopoly capital, while maintaining his electoral base among small businessmen and sectors of labor. His greatest public relations victory in the area of race relations was the creation of “Black Reaganism,” that tendency of the Black petty bourgeoisie which supported his election. Thus Reagan’s Administration pursues what objectively amounts to an unprecedent, racist assault against national minorities while simultaneously appointing Blacks to prestigous positions and disclaiming any racist intentions. Thomas Sowell, Ralph D. Abernathy, Tony Brown, Walter Williams, Nathan Wright, ad nauseum therefore became essential to the destruction of the Black community.

The rise of Reaganism in electoral politics now has permitted the Right to openly question the utility of democracy for the 1980s. Whether Reagan’s supply side version of restoring corporate profits or an alternative state-directed/corporatist strategy emerges which calls for the state to regulate prices and allocate government con­tracts to corporations which agree to reorganize themselves is almost a mute question. Marxist economist Sam Bowles was one of the first observers to note that either public policy strategy would be forced to impose massive political repression and civil terror upon workers. Thomas Weisskopf, writing in Socialist Review, suggested that the restoration of “a system more palatable to corporate capitalists, it might well be necessary to undermine the ability of others to function within that political framework. Such an effort at political repression could take the form of growing authoritarianism—the removal of major decisions from arenas where they are subject to some degree of popular influence. . .”38 Following this line of reasoning, California State Senator John Schmitz, a former Congressperson and colonel in the Marine Corps reserves, openly advanced the probability of a military coup in the U.S. as “the best we could hope for.” In the October 30, 1981 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Schmitz sketched the following scenario: “Reagan’s programs fail, the economy disintegrates, people are rioting in the streets, the Russians plan an invasion to take advantage of the domestic strife, the military recognizes the threat and the coup occurs.” Schmitz stated that the coup will happen within several years, “definitely by 1986.”39

Rightwing ideologues are usually more tactful than Schmitz, but nevertheless are drawing similar conclusions. In a critically important essay published in the Wall Street Journal in October, 1979, Irving Kristol admitted a year before Reagan’s election that his policies would be inadequate to resolve the crisis of capitalism. Kristol noted that an “increase in the growth of the private sector can be achieved only by a cut in tax rates for business” and upper-income families. ‘Truly massive cuts” in social and educational programs, and a balanced Federal budget, would also help. In short, Kristol called for an austerity agenda “which will put America through the wringer. There is only one country,” he noted, “where this economic policy seems to be working. That is Chile, where the nation has indeed been ‘put through the wringer’ these past couple of years and where the economic outlook is steadily improving.” Commenting lightly upon Chile’s bloody military junta, Kristol observed, “it would be ironic if it turned out that free-market economics .. . could only be achieved at the expense of a free society.”40

The function of the rise of racist attacks is the preparation of the ideological and cultural foundations necessary for a potential “Chilean Solution” to resolve the crisis of U.S. capitalism. This is not to predetermine the course of history. The capitalist ruling classes have not yet reached a stable consensus in their search for a strategy to accumulate capital and reduce Federal government intervention into the economy and society. Conversely, the emergence of a democratic and progressive front of national minorities, working people and the oppressed could reverse the present balance of forces. Another more probable option available to the state is the selection of key aspects of the “Chilean Solution” (e.g., brutal state repression of leftists, labor union activities, minorities) without moving toward the complete domination of the political apparatus by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their subordinates. The open encouragement of police brutalities against Blacks by law enforcement officials and elected politicians, plus the proliferating civil violence by white youths and adults against nonwhites, sets the social and cultural climate necessary to establish an authoritarian regime. Whether this regime is “fascist” in the classical model of Nazi Germany, or “authoritarian,” which would permit some democratic rights, could be simply a question of semantics.

Therefore, the existence of random violence against Blacks and civil terrorism is no accidental phenomenon. It is a necessary element in the establishment of any future authoritarian or rightwing government. Attacks by political rightists, small property owners and the police against workers and peasants in Chile during the early 1970s disrupted civil society and established the possibility for the military’s coup over the democratic government of Salvador Allende in 1973. The fascist terrorism of Patria y Libertad, the Comando Rolando Matus of the rightist National Party and other paramilitary groups in Chile closely parallel the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party and other more mainstream, conservative, mass based forces in the U.S.41 In the United Kingdom, the rapid growth of the rightist National Front, founded in 1967, the neo Nazi British Movement and other racist parties constituted the essential right tendency for the emergence of Thatcherism. In late June, 1979, the chair of the National Front, John Tyndall, toured the U.S. at the invitation of the National States Rights Party. The “keynote of the tour,” according to one British journalist, “was the unification of the far-right” in both English-speaking countries. Both the National Front and the U.S. Right are characterized by “authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, racism, biological naturalism and anti-intellectualism.” Both have had recent success in attracting “white youngsters,” have leaderships which are “firmly middle-class,” and endeavor politically to appeal to both the white urban working class, petty enterpreneurs, and sections of the police.42 Thatcherism, like Reaganism, is “conservatism no longer content with pragmatism and compromise, vying with a social-democratic Labour Party for a middle ground, or with piecemeal retrenchment in public spending in the face of economic crisis.”43 Both reactionary political movements unleash and rely upon the Klan and National Front/type movements to obliterate any possibility of unity between Black and white workers.

By late 1981 the State’s repression of the Black Liberation Movement became conspiciously more overt than covert. The fourth “Green Light” was the arrest of Fulani Sunni Ali on October 27, 1981. Between 150 to 200 Federal agents, “a phalanx of four armored cars and a helicopter” descended on her farmhouse residence in Gallman, Mississippi. Charged with complicity in the New York robbery of a Brink’s trunk, Ali was arrested and held under $500,000 bond by Federal magistrate John Countiss. Her arraignment to New York was under such intense security that one official described the courtroom as an “armed fortress.” The FBI’s “frameup” failed when witnesses testified that she was in New Orleans at the time of the holdup. Nevertheless immediately after Ali’s release she was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury on November 16. Federal Judge Irving Cooper, in an unprecedented move, granted the motion of U.S. Attorney John S. Martin to forbid one of Ali’s attorney’s, Chokwe Lumumba, to represent her in court. Although never accused or convicted of any crime, Lumumba’s membership in the Republic of New Africa, [RNA] characterized by the FBI and media as a “terrorist organization,” disqualified him as an attorney in the case. The New York Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Central Committee of the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP), and other progressive groups denounced the FBI’s attempt to smear Ali, the RNA and the State’s efforts to bar Lumumba from representing his client.”44

This blatant assault designed to discredit Black nationalist and progressive forces was by no means an isolated event. In early morning raids on October, 16 and October 21, 1981, California Department of Corrections agents arrested four members of the Black August Organizing Committee, an “anti-imperialist and revolutionary prisoners’ group” inspired by “the work of George Jackson and other martyrs of the prisoners’ movement.” The four Black men were charged with parole violations and conspiracy to assassinate California prison officials.45 Four radical activists, Vera Michelson of Albany, Aaron Estis of Massachusetts, Mike Young of New York City and John Spearman of Kansas were arrested by police in Albany, New York on September 21, the night before the Springboks antiapartheid demonstration and march. The arrests were part of a well-publicized effort by Democratic Governor Hugh Carey and other administrators to diffuse criticism of the appearance of the South African regime’s rugby team in the state capital.46 In late October, 1981, the Youngstown, Ohio chapter of NBIPP was sued for $300,000 by the white owner of a local super­market. Black Party members had organized a campaign to urge the Black community not to shop in stores where few or no Blacks were employed. The legal suit against NBIPP was curious in that the Party had previously achieved a tentative written agreement to hire more Black workers at the store in question. Charging that NBIPP was “conspiring to interrupt and destroy” his profits, the owner gave the Party no advance warning before filing the suit.47

The wave of random racist violence and “legal lynchings” can be placed in perspective only in the light of these fundamental factors—the socioeconomic instability within the white middle to upper classes, the rise of Reaganism, the recent surge of FBI and local police terrorism to suppress dissent, and the growing probability of some kind of “Chilean Solution” by the ruling class to resolve the crisis of capital accumulation. Any authoritarian or even fascist regime in the U.S. would conform to the basic definition given by Georgi Dimitrov in 1935: “the terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of finance capital.”48 Reagan’s base among white professionals and managers, the petty bourgeoisie and more affluent trade union members—and the emergence of virulent racist antagonisms which are manifested in their social and civil behavior towards Blacks—does not negate the basic and decisive corporate prerogatives behind Reaganism and contemporary racist violence. It is the interests of capital, in the final analysis, that permits the climate of racist terrorism to continue. It is the desire to restructure modern capitalism and to accumulate profits at the expense of Black, brown and white labor that is at the root of the current racial crisis.49

IV

It is impossible to detach oneself from the spectre of racist violence and the inevitable emotions of outrage it created within the Black community. So many millions of Afro-Americans have become convinced that a racist conspiracy exists that whether it is real or simply a political phantom may no longer matter. The question of an American conspiracy to destroy the Black community must be approached historically. Almost twenty years ago social historian Richard Hofstader first perceived that white American politics has been frequently “illuminated by the lurid glare of paranoid visions.” The paranoid style was a standard “psychological device for projecting various symbols of evil on an opponent and for building emotional unity through a common sense of alarm and peril.” Colonial historian Bernard Bailyn illustrated in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution that the belief in a British conspiracy against American colonists was a powerful force in creating the foundations for war. David B. Davis’ The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style carried the thesis into the Civil War. Some Northern abolitionists were convinced that the slaveholder was quite literally the “antichrist.” Paranoid polemics “awakened millenarian fantasies of persecution and suffering, of absolute power and absolute emancipation.”50 Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon manipulated the politics of postwar America through the demagoguery of the Red Scare in the late 1940s and 1950s. Black “paranoia” in the face of the white backlash against human dignity and civil rights, may be viewed as simply part of a largely American social/political response to fundamental change or conflict.

Perhaps a more productive approach to the problem of a racist conspiracy is suggested in the works of Louis Althusser. The solutions reached within any inquiry are predetermined by the paradigm from which one derives one’s questions. A “problematic” exists, according to Althusser, “the objective internal reference system of its particular themes, the system of questions commanding the answers given.” In Reading Capital he asserts that a social scientist “can only pose problems on the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theoretical structure, its problematic, which constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility, and hence the absolute determination of the forms in which all problems must be posed, at any given moment.”51

Using Althusser’s problematic as a theoretical construct provides new insights into the contemporary reemergence of white racist atrocities. The theoretical common denominator of the variety of statements on Atlanta and other instances of violence raised by Blacks is the a priori assumption that whites as a group have adopted a more aggressive bigotry. The integrationist Old Guard (Vernon Jordan of the Urban League, Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, and others) relate the recent killings to a general political retreat of white American from the Great Society and Kennedy liberalism. This position suggests that a return to Keynesian economic policies, tougher affirmative action and civil rights legislation, and the successful election of a liberal Democrat into the White House would effectively reduce racial violence and social tensions—at best, an unlikely scenario. Black nationalists and community activists agree with the petty bourgeois integrationists that most whites are more overtly racist today than a decade ago, and that the current violence is a concrete manifestation of the level of racism tolerated by white civil society. But this approach starts from a false problematic that implies that all whites, to a greater or lesser extent, benefit materially from racism. Both problematics are profoundly superstructural—that is, the essential assumptions made by both paradigms exclude any serious recognition of the current crisis of U.S. capital accumulation. Both approaches emphasize racism as an ideology or consciousness which directs or dictates certain behaviors or public policies. Their “structured fields” that define the problem do not provide answers which will effectively combat racism, or even explain adequately the central reasons for the relatively recent series of incidents in which Black workers, the unemployed and the elite alike have become seemingly random victims.

Constructing a Black socialist problematic for analyzing contemporary racism might begin with four critical observations. The first, which has been illustrated, is that there has been in recent years an extreme racial polarization within U.S. civil society, accompanied by a pervading climate of fear and terrorism which has reached into virtually every Black neighborhood. Second, many Black institutions which were either developed in the brutal crucible of antebellum slavery or in the period of Jim Crow segregation are rapidly being destroyed. Two of these are the Black educational systems, especially the traditional Negro private and public colleges, and Black-owned and operated businesses. Third, a growing number of Black workers have become irrelevant to the U.S. economy. The level of permanent unemployment for Blacks under the age of 25 has reached staggering levels, and continues to climb. Fourth, an urban “ghetto-class” or underclass has emerged since the recession of 1970, consisting largely of women and children, who survive almost totally on transfer payments and the illegal, subterranean economy of the inner city. Reagan’s budget cuts in food stamps, medicaid, and other social services are in reality akin to capital punishment for the millions of ghetto-class Blacks. The root cause of the last three factors is generated by the crisis of capital accumulation, wherein major corporations must demand the restructuring of the capitalist economy in order to preserve it. The capitalist state must drastically reduce social expenditures, and pass legislation to permit a more favorable climate for higher profits and reinvestment. The first factor is both a manifestation of popular white working class anxiety which accompanies any basic restructuring of the economic order, and an expression of the New Right’s ideological and cultural commitment to provide the final solution to the Negro Problem in America.

Genocide is usually defined as the systemic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political or cultural group. Blacks have been brutally oppressed, unquestionably, since 1619 as chattel slaves, sharecroppers and industrial laborers. But the dynamic of racial prejudice traditionally has not culminated into a political demand to exterminate Blacks. The most dogmatically racist Southerners at the height of Jim Crow would have found the idea of Black genocide unworthy of cursory debate. Lynchings and terrorism of all kinds were used to suppress the Negro, to “keep him in his place.” The goal was to insure a continued supply of relatively cheap laborers who were politically docile. Whites could be prejudiced toward Blacks, but absolutely intolerant of Jews, for instance. Racists could admire the Hitlerian solution to the Jewish problem, while at the same time could recognize the necessity to sustain the Black U.S. community as a racially segregated entity for the systematic exploitation of its labor power.52

The scientific justification for the gradual eradication of “marginal” ethnic groups has been growing for two decades. In fall 1962 anthropologist Carleton Coon published The Origin of Races which proposed that Blacks were the youngest subspecies of Homo sapiens and therefore the least advanced intellectually and socially. In a similar vein, Dwight J. Ingle wrote a major article for the journal Science in October, 1964, entitled “Racial Differences and the Future.” Ingles’ thesis suggested that “equal representation of the Negro at the highest levels of job competence and in government will be deleterious to society.” The greatest proponents of the neoracist scientific school are William Shockley and Arthur Jensen. Since 1965 Shockley has waged a relentless campaign, declaring that the soaring “crime and relief rates” are due to “some hereditary defect(s).” “The major deficit in Negro intellectual performance must be primarily of hereditary origin and thus relatively irremediable by practical improvements in environment,” Shockley stated in 1968. Jensen’s February, 1969 essay in Harvard Educational Review, “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?,” was praised as “the most important paper in psycho­logy since Pavlov and Freud, a masterful summary of evidence that has been gathering for several decades.” Jensen’s extension of Shockley’s arguments was swiftly entered into the US Congressional Record by Louisiana Representative John R. Rarick. Copies of Jensen’s polemic were sent to every member of the National Academy of Sciences with a letter from several prominent U.S. scientists, including Shockley, stating that “irrefutable evidence continues for the inheritance of genetically controlled, socially maladaptive traits. We fear that ‘fatuous beliefs’ in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to the decline of human quality for both the Black and white segments of our society and that the fears of genetic deterioration expressed by Jensen are sound and significant.”53

What is qualitatively new about the current period is that the racist/capitalist state under Reagan has proceeded down a public policy road which could inevitably involve the complete obliteration of the entire Black reserve army of labor and sections of the Black working class. The decision to save capitalism at all costs, to provide adequate capital for the restructing of the private sector, fundamentally conflicts with the survival of millions of people who are now permanently outside the workplace. Reaganomics must, if it intends to succeed, place the onerous burden of unemployment on the shoulders of the poor (Blacks, Latinos and even whites) so securely that middle to upper income Americans will not protest in the vicious suppression of this stratum. Unlike classical fascism, Reaganism must pursue its policies without publicly attacking Blacks or Puerto Ricans by obvious racial slurs. The government’s strategy must include a number of petty bourgeois minorities in responsible but low key positions to diffuse charges of white racism which would be levied by white liberal Democrats and progressives. But the final results of these socioeconomic policies, carried to their logical conclusions, would be the total destruction of all-Black institutions, the political separation of the Black elite and intelligentsia from the working class, and the benign but deadly elimination of the “parasitic” ghetto class that has ceased to be a necessary or productive element within modern capitalism.

Over a decade has passed since the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders published its devastating indictment against white racism. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”54 With the failure of the Black Power Movement and the political collapse of white liberalism, the direction of America’s political economy and social hierarchy is veering toward a kind of subtle apocalypse which promises to obliterate the lowest stratum of the Black and Latino poor. For the Right will not be satisfied with institutionalization of bureaucratic walls that surround and maintain the ghetto. The genocidal logic of the situation could demand, in the not too distant future, the rejection of the ghetto’s right to survival in the new capitalist order. Without gas chambers or pogroms, the dark ghetto’s economic and social institutions might be destroyed, and many of its residents would simply cease to exist.