Daily Archives: July 12, 2020

[In response to Confederate Monuments Remind Us of Our History, June 24, Xpress:] When this controversy over people wanting to remove Confederate statues in the South first crossed my radar, I really knew nothing about it. Up until that point, I didnt even realize our country had many hundreds of these statues of Confederate generals and the like.

Hearing protesters wanting them removed, claiming they glorify not only racism, but the slavery of Black people, I could very much see where they were coming from. I can understand how these statues could be offensive to people, but why do we have hundreds of Confederate monuments throughout the Southern United States in the first place? As far as I can tell, the Civil War was about the Southern states, the Confederacy, wanting to keep slavery in place, whereas the rest of the country had come to terms with the fact that slaverys f**ked up and, like, we should probably stop doing that. The Confederacy was trying to secede from the United States of America and keep slavery alive. Fortunately, the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the states were reabsorbed back into the Union, and slavery was outlawed throughout the land.

So given the history, why the bleep are there people upset that these statues are coming down, and why were they even erected in the first place?

You got to love the internet I was able to look up a video by Vox on YouTube that breaks this part of the history down really well. Turns out there was this effort about 30 years after the war by a group of wealthy Southern elites under the name of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to propagandize to the youth in schools and erect all of these Confederate statues and monuments to sort of rewrite history, painting the South as fallen victims of big government oppression. Unbelievable stuff really, but these are the facts. I highly recommend checking out the Vox video on this called How Southern Socialites Rewrote Civil War History or look up the Wikipedia page on the United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

So, the next time someone says that removing these statues is erasing their history, ask them what history theyre talking about, because the history the statues and monuments are meant to represent pretends that the Civil War wasnt about slavery (kind of like denying the Holocaust) and by leaving the statues up, theyre promoting this falsified propagandized version of history, or as I loathe to refer to it: Fake news!#doyourresearch.

David AylwardAsheville

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Letter: Confederate monuments, the fake news of the time - Mountain Xpress

By Justin Rhoden

We are in a moment. Weeks of protest in the United States against anti-black racism and the systemic injustices Black people face every day have reignited similar conversations across the globe. In Canada, communities have mobilized in solidarity to advocate against the injustices Black and Indigenous communities experience, despite the health concerns of the current pandemic.

While others still baffle with the reality that systemic racism exists in Canada, endless inquiries, reports, books, articles, and research have exhaustively discussed the pervasive role racism plays in our societies. This moment is certainly not to debate the experiences of many communities across Canada.

It is the moment for change, as all moments in time have been. However, unlike times before, we have the opportunity to transition from the little steps social advocacy has grown accustomed to practicing in which we demand change in small portions: enough to alleviate some suffering but not too much as to upset the oppressors.

In the past, these small victories have been a necessary strategy to cultivate the climate of change that we are currently experiencing. It has allowed us to preserve ourselves and our communities while working tirelessly to decolonize and deconstruct the oppressive systems.

As a result, countless communities of leaders, activists, and educators have produced a wealth of knowledge and resources to guide us towards liberating futures. Now is the moment we collectively create those futures.

Communities are already attempting this by sounding the alarm to defund the police to address systemic racism, police brutality, surveillance, profiling, and the excessive budget used to do this. Of course, racism is not about the police. While many recognize this, it is still the dominant strategy presented to seize this moment and begin addressing racism in Canada.

The injustices Black and Indigenous communities face are not separated and isolated phenomena but are intertwined in a complex structure of marginalization: simultaneously sustained and mediated by various institutions. Policing is merely a single institution that intersects with education, the economy, the government, healthcare, and the media. However, in this fight for justice, we default to reducing violent systems into individual institutions, placing them into categories, and obscuring the interdependence that underscores its functionality.

The masters tools will never dismantle the masters house Audrey Lorde.

Engaging with racism as a separate and unique form of injustice is unmistakably the oppressors tools. The fight against racism is a resistance to all types of oppression. The racism that disadvantages myself as a Black man also disadvantages Black and Indigenous women, so this is also the fight against misogyny, misogynoir, and violence against women. The same racism impacts those that are made materially deprived, so this is the fight against poverty. It affects our communities and environments; this is the fight against environmental pollution and climate change. It affects LGTBQ members and two-spirited people; this is the fight against gendered and sexual discrimination. It affects people in distant places overseas whose humanity is denied and exploited; this is the fight against imperialism.

Racism is not divorced from these various forms of oppression nor the institutions that sustain them. Social change advocacy that decontextualizes racism erases the complexities of the systems we are addressing, reduces the degree of action needed, resolves the stakeholders, and distorts the ability for all communities to recognize their role in addressing systemic racism in Canada. We cannot advocate against racism and not fight against poverty, or epistemic violence, or climate change, or sexual discrimination, or settler colonialism, or imperialism, oppressive education, and so forth.

These complex intersections of our positionalities and the injustices we face are the driving force for large-scale advocacy and change. They are our own tools that we must use to equip ourselves. Then, we can begin creating new collective realities rather than fragmented change, often subjected to the oppressors insidious co-optation of the justice we seek.

The call to defund the police cannot be divorced from the need to address the entire system of oppression: violent curriculums in education, an exploitative economy, a government that continuously undermines its commitments to Indigenous communities, the historical material deprivation of BIPOCs, etc.

Advocating for these widespread and multifaceted changes is the responsibility of all allies wherever they reside. With so much research, recommendations, and models for transformative change already developed by previous and existing communities, social change is only a matter of unwavering collective action and reflection. For example, all teachers and educators who consider themselves allies need to mobilize the curriculum recommendations and resources curated by Black and Indigenous communities to eliminate the epistemic injustices and taught racism reproduced through education. Likewise, all allies need to organize and advocate for authentic change within the space(s) that they operate in solidarity with Black and Indigenous Peoples and their complex intersectionalities.

Whenever the system fails to meet our demands for systemic justice and social change, we must then collectively reflect on the limitations of the structures that currently exist and collectively create and support our own. If the education system refuses to redesign its racist curriculums, the alternative cannot be to continue students education in these violent environments. Instead, the solution is to begin collectively creating new educational structures that are reflective of anti-oppressive values. We must activate and sustain our agency as social beings to collectively redefine and reorganize our society. However, such transformational movements are only possible if we authentically unite in action and reflection.

We are in a profound moment, where there are many networks, experiences, and resources available to change these systems or create entirely new ones that are reflective of our collective humanity. This moment is for all allies everywhere to meaningfully organize and mobilize for the liberating realities we deserve.

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Opinion: How to make the most of this moment: A letter to anyone who cares about social change - Anishinabek News

I am not sure which is the more terrifying: the idea that the premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, had sufficient evidence to justify locking up about 3,000 of my neighbours, or the idea that he didnt and was doing it anyway.

Last Saturday, shortly after 4pm, Andrews announced that the public housing tenants of Flemington and North Melbourne were to be detained in forced quarantine because of potentially high rates of Covid-19. They would be prohibited from leaving their homes for any reason.

A sudden shock will send your fingers numb. I was watching the press conference on television. I grabbed my phone and ran the two blocks to the Flemington estate.

The police were already there. As dusk fell I began to take photographs of massed police cars, the flashing blue lights, the armed officers stopping people trying to leave the towers, and residents of the estate making their way home and asking: Whats happened? What have we done wrong? Has there been a murder?

The public housing towers are part of the rhythm of my suburb. There are the kids clattering up the hill to the high schools, and the constant traffic in the main street to and from the African cafes.

I can see the towers of the Flemington estate from my living room window. The lights in individual flats, blinking off, prompt me to my own bedtime. Sometimes if I rise in the night, I can see that someone over there is also awake.

I am not part of the public housing community. I am one of the middle-class white people literally and metaphorically at the top of the hill. But these are my neighbours.

On the estates, one in five people have no English, or poor English. The main languages are Vietnamese and Somali, as well as Ethiopian languages such as Amharic, Tigrunya and Oroimo. Arabic is common, as is Cantonese. Many of the residents are refugees from war-torn countries, predominantly in Africa. Unemployment is high.

And now, without warning, they were locked up by government.

The police, it emerged, had only about an hour and a halfs notice of the lockdown. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the lead agency managing the lockdown, had about the same warning.

The two local governments City of Melbourne and Moonee Valley city council had no warning, and nor did the community leaders on the estate.

Ever since the coronavirus crisis began, these leaders had been asking the health department for a plan. They wrote emails and made phone calls asking for hand sanitiser on every floor, regular deep cleaning of lifts and shared spaces, and public health information posted in multiple languages.

Bottles of sanitiser were placed in the foyers, but when they ran out they were not replaced. Otherwise, there was no visible response.

Now the community depended for its most basic needs on the same department which they routinely experience as deaf to their voices.

And that department was responsible, with next to no warning, for provisioning a vulnerable community the size of a small town, vertically stacked.

Among the residents, shock at the sudden and heavy police presence was universal, but there was also some relief that the emerging Covid-19 crisis, which they had been uneasily aware of, was at last attracting serious government attention. Yet there were no health workers, social workers or health department employees in the first wave of government action.

As one frustrated department employee said to me later, there are no standing armies of health workers and social workers. We have no surge capacity in caring. If you need an emergency response, you have either the army or the police.

In the African Australian community, there were angry people who did not believe the public health justification for the lockdown and saw the operation as a racially motivated act of oppression.

One resident of the Flemington estate, Melissa Whelan, got the text telling her about the lockdown when she was in the checkout queue at the supermarket. Short on cash, she had popped out for milk and bread with a budget of $7. She rapidly rang a friend, borrowed another $50 and stocked up.

Other households were not so quick or lucky. These tend to be big and young families, living week to week. Those who had planned to shop on Sunday soon ran short of food.

By Sunday morning, there were a few DHHS workers on the estate, dispatched at no notice and with no clear directions. The police were still in charge, and there were hundreds of them.

The DHHS and other agencies struggled with the implications of the premiers promise that this vulnerable community would be supported with wraparound services. To start with, they could barely keep it fed.

The basics boxes the government delivered in the first day of lockdown contained date-expired food, Weetbix without milk, jam without bread. They were stacked in the foyers while the DHHS worked out how to get them safely up the towers.

Calls went out from those inside the flats to friends and relations, desperately asking for grocery deliveries and, in some cases, medication.

Local federal and state MPs Greens and Labor devoted their staff to trying to fill the gaps, escalating emergencies on an ad hoc basis. The premiers office made a staff member solely available for their calls.

There were people with asthma who had no Ventolin, diabetics without clean needles, mothers of premature babies now isolated from their infants in the nearby Royal Melbourne hospital.

Meanwhile, the African community was rallying, wanting to look after its own. In the forefront were young volunteers from the North Melbourne-based Australian Muslim Social Services Agency Youth Connect (AMSSA) who began soliciting and trying to deliver bags of goods. Others were trying to deliver just to specific family members and friends.

It was chaotic, and made harder by the fact there was no protocol. Police concern for security, and DHHSs concern for infection control, meant the deliveries were frustrated. Food was left in foyers and on steps, attacked by rats overnight.

The people on the outside were desperate knocking their heads against a system failing to care for the community, yet prevented from doing the job themselves.

That was the first 48 hours.

On Monday night, I began to get texts telling me things were going very wrong. Residents looking down from their windows, hoping for deliveries, could see hazmat-clad workers carrying away bags of food. The DHHS infection control officer had knocked off for the day, and so the order went out that deliveries from the community were to be stopped.

The bags being carried away were the food that had been left to spoil overnight, but the combination of events meant that people in the flats believed goods bought for them by family members were being stolen.

They are starving our people, one social media post said.

Everyone pitched in. The local MPs hit the phones. I tweeted that it was a mix-up. I got replies saying I was just a lickspittle for racist authorities. The police were heard arguing with the DHHS orders.

I am not sure which part of this effort worked, but the order to prevent deliveries was rapidly reversed, and DHHS issued an apology.

This whole crisis took about 90 minutes to brew, peak and dissipate, but during that time I thought there might be a riot that the whole situation might slip disastrously out of control. Some police confessed the same fear.

By Tuesday, things were beginning to improve. The emergency management commissioner, Andrew Crisp, was brought in, as were many volunteers, emergency services and local government. Coles repurposed an entire supermarket to the provisioning effort.

It was an immense effort, with many people working ridiculously hard hours, all in the knowledge that they were still in some ways failing.

Pallets of food and supplies were trekked into the estate and up the tiny, decrepit lifts. Nevertheless, that night there was an arrest during another conflict between police and young African-Australian volunteers delivering food.

Meanwhile, the huge effort to test every resident for Covid-19 was underway. In the end, they managed to test 85%.

By Wednesday, there was plenty of food far too much food and much of it was wasted.

But the help was still generic. MPs and family members were hearing of urgent medical needs and mothers without nappies for their babies. The hotline established for residents had a wait of over an hour to be answered.

One MP described dealing with DHHS as struggling with institutional somnambulance, including an inability to realise that more than a nine-to-five effort was needed, and a stark refusal to embrace the efforts by the community to look after its own. Some called for the community to be allowed to run its own hotline.

It was paternalism, said another community representative. The fact that people wanted to help their own was seen as a problem, not a strength.

Behind the scenes the Labor MPs for the area, Bill Shorten and Danny Pearson, the Trades Hall Council and other Labor groups were pushing a mutually agreed log of claims about what needed to be done to save the state government from getting this wrong. The Greens MPs, Ellen Sandell and Adam Bandt, with their colleagues on the Melbourne city council, were pushing a similar message.

Top of the list was arguing for the young people of AMSSA to be taken into the heart of the effort, instead of being resisted and frustrated. By Wednesday morning that was beginning to happen. Protocols for community deliveries were established and the authorities began to cooperate with the community.

By the afternoon, the relief effort was at last adequate and impressive. It was a mighty thing just three days late. There were dedicated workers on site, consistently identifying individual household needs.

Thursday was intense. Testing had been finished the night before an immense effort by many health workers. Residents were to be given news of their results, and the future of the lockdown. The premiers press conference was to be at 11 am, then early afternoon. He finally got to his feet at 4.30pm.

All but one of the towers were to be moved to the same stage 3 restrictions as the rest of Melbourne. Alfred Street, on the North Melbourne estate, with 53 people testing positive, would remain in quarantine for another nine days.

Most significantly, AMSSA would become the host of the continuing work of provisioning Alfred Street. The police minister, Lisa Neville, even thanked them.

That night, the young people of AMSSA posted images of themselves to social media, dancing as they delivered the food parcels.

The Greens have called for an inquiry into the public housing lockdown. It seems inevitable there will be a reckoning and only that can determine whether such action was justified.

Questions will surely include why there was no planning for this scenario. The states pandemic plan, written in 2015, makes no mention of public housing. But surely when the coronavirus crisis began in March, plans could have been made that included consultations with community leaders on the estates.

As Daniel Andrews likes to say, this isnt over.

Some residents who were not on the estate when the lockdown occurred did not return. About 10% of residents did not open their door to the authorities at any stage during the lockdown, whether from fear or anger.

Almost certainly, more Covid-19 cases will emerge. But lessons have certainly been learned.

Awatif Taha, who told the Guardian her story at the beginning of the crisis, said on Friday afternoon: Last night we were all screaming with joy.

Perhaps, she said, the government had learned something about her community, its strength and resourcefulness. Perhaps now they would be heard.

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'It was paternalism': how government support for Melbourne's locked down public housing blocks fell short - The Guardian

We are in the middle of one of the most inspiring protest upsurges in the United States in decades. Mass demonstrations against racist police violence have swept the country since the police murder of George Floyd, demanding an end to state murders of unarmed black people and racial inequality more generally.

Protesters have persisted in the face of vicious police rioting and repressive curfews. The number of protests has waned in recent weeks, as all protest upsurges eventually do. But they are still going strong throughout much of the country and have produced a massive ideological shift, making defunding the police a mainstream policy proposal. Elected officials in some cities, with varying degrees of sincerity, are arguing for or have already pledged to cut police budgets.

The protests have inspired many white Americans to reflect on the persistence of racism in the United States and their role in changing it. One common framework for reflection involves asking how white people can be good allies to people of color.

This framework seems to suggest that, while white people have a moral obligation to assist people of color in anti-racist struggles, we who are white have no interests of our own at stake in these struggles. So white people must be moved to anti-racist action through feelings of obligation, guilt, or sympathy. At its worst, the white allyship framework promotes introspection and quasi-spiritual self-improvement as political action.

Black people in the United States have faced and continue to face horrible forms of oppression that white people dont. Yet thinking of white peoples role in anti-racist struggle solely in terms of allyship is myopic. White people have sometimes taken part in significant black freedom struggles in the past not just out of altruism or a sense of moral duty. They saw the moral imperative to fight racial oppression as bound up with broader projects of collective liberation projects in which they, too, had a stake. They were moved, in other words, by solidarity.

Take the story of the Haitian Revolution, as an example, recounted by C. L. R. James in his classic The Black Jacobins and dramatically illustrating the power of solidarity. The revolution in the French colony of Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) began with an uprising of the enslaved in August 1791. This revolt took place against the context of the ongoing revolution in France.

The enslaved black people of Saint-Domingue won their freedom through years of protracted, bloody struggle against the white plantation owners, as well as French, British, and Spanish troops who attempted at different points to crush the rebellion.

Given the forces they were up against, the Haitian slaves victory over so many European imperial colonizers and invaders is one of the most incredible achievements of recent history. The slaves themselves were the principal protagonists in overthrowing slavery. As James writes, the revolutionary troops led by Touissant LOuverture, and not the perorations in the Legislative [Frances governing body] would be decisive in the struggle for freedom.

But the victory of the Haitian revolutionaries was also aided by the revolutionary action of the French masses. In 1792, the internally divided French government, which had not yet entered its more radical, Montagnard phase, sent armed forces to Saint-Domingue to help quell the enslaved peoples rebellion. By early 1793, these forces had nearly crushed the uprising.

But in the meantime, the French masses had deposed and executed the King, provoking Britain and Spain to declare war on the revolutionary regime. These events helped turn the tide. They forced a diversion of French troops away from their assault on LOuvertures army to defend the coasts against British and Spanish invaders, and they allowed LOuverture to make an alliance with the Spanish against the French.

In the course of these events, the cause of the Haitian rebels and that of the French revolutionaries came to be fused in the minds of the more radical militants. As a Jacobin-aligned governor of the colony said: The slaves of the New World are fighting for the same cause as the [revolutionary] French armies.

Local French authorities in Saint-Domingue were forced to declare the abolition of slavery, in an attempt to win the formerly enslaved to their side in the struggle against the counterrevolutionary powers. The abolition of slavery was finally made official and extended to all colonies by the French government on February 4, 1794.

Robespierre and the left-wing Jacobins (the Montagnards) had won control of the National Convention, and their voting for abolition reflected not only longstanding personal convictions, but the revolutionary mood of the French people. James writes:

It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. Servants, peasants, workers. the labourers by the day in the fields all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the aristocracy of the skin. There were many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes At that time slavery had been overturned only in [Saint-Domingue] of all the French colonies, and the generous spontaneity of the Convention was only a reflection of the overflowing desire which filled all France to end tyranny and oppression everywhere.

The revolutionary French masses came to fight for the abolition of slavery not out of a sense of pity or disinterested moral obligation, but because they had come to see their own destiny as tied up with the enslaved. As James says, the poor and working classes of France felt towards them [enslaved Saint-Dominguans] as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counter-revolution, they hated as if Frenchman themselves had suffered under the whip.

The white slave owners of Saint-Domingue had always opposed the French Revolution, which represented an assault on their property rights and political power. In 1793, they actually took the side of the invading British who had promised to restore slavery against the revolutionary French government. These counterrevolutionary efforts incited the French masses against the the aristocracy of the skin, which the common people associated with the hated French nobility they had just deposed.

Thus the slave owners opposition to the revolution made it easy for the French masses to see the connection between their own liberty and that of enslaved Saint-Dominguans. And as James notes, the planters counterrevolutionary conspiracy also gave the Montagnards strategic reasons to abolish slavery.

[The] [abolition] decree, by ratifying the liberty which the blacks had won, James writes, was giving them a concrete interest in the struggle against British and Spanish reaction. Frances revolutionary leaders (rightly) predicted that the formal abolition of slavery would recruit the former slaves to their side.

It was up to the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue to make the legal abolition of slavery a reality on the ground, through several more years of war with European armies who wanted to return them to bondage. Facing the possibility of death or torture at the hands of a vicious enemy, the formerly enslaved freed themselves through courageous armed struggle. But they also werent alone.

At the high point of the French Revolution, the French masses joined the Haitians to push forward the fight for abolition. And they did so because they saw their freedom and that of the black people of Saint-Domingue linked together by the struggle to defeat their common enemies.

Multiracial solidarity is a big part of the story of slaverys destruction in our own country, too. As in Haiti, it took a violent war to end slavery, during which the actions of black people themselves were central to the process that led to their emancipation.

As W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued, the Union victory was hastened by a general strike of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the South, who deserted their plantations to assist and join the Union war effort.

But understanding why the Civil War occurred in the first place requires us to look to the mass antislavery movement that brought Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to power. It was the Republican capture of the federal government that provoked Southern secession, and as historian Matt Karp writes, the party achieved this [by] linking the moral battle against slavery to the material concerns of millions of Northern voters.

The ideological connection that the antislavery movement and Republican Party forged between the material interests of ordinary white Northerners and the freedom of enslaved black people helped make it possible for many Northern whites to find common cause with the enslaved and, again, to perceive a common enemy.

Republicans mass appeal rested in large part on developmental and egalitarian economic policies that ran counter to the interests of the slave-owning class, including tariffs and federal infrastructure spending. Their central economic proposal, Karp says, was a homestead act by which the government would give away millions of acres of land for free.

This policy, opposed by the pro-slavery Democratic Party, was justified by its advocates with the argument that citizens should be able to live on and work their own land for themselves, as free laborers, rather than be subject to the domination of landowners or industrial capitalists.

As Karp notes, it also depended, wrongly, on an assumption that the North American West rightly belonged to Euro-American settlers, not its indigenous inhabitants. The denial of prior inhabitants rights to the land was a justification for a different racist monstrosity the displacement and mass murder of indigenous peoples, which could never be justified.

Southern opposition to the Act, led by the regions enormously wealthy oligarchs, allowed Republicans to portray the slave owners as proponents of land monopoly and plutocracy, and hence as opponents of liberty for both white and black people. In doing so Republicans provided a material basis for Northern white solidarity with enslaved black people against the slave aristocracy.

Many Northerners also saw the pro-slavery laws passed by Congress as direct attacks on their own freedom, revealing the dominance of the slaveholding class over the political system. The House of Representatives passed a gag rule in 1836 barring from consideration any petition or resolution regarding slavery. Many viewed the law as an attack on their political liberties; it encouraged antislavery activism and actually resulted in a significant increase in petitions to Congress.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced private citizens to aid in the capture and return of enslaved fugitives. Defiance of the act was punishable by fine or imprisonment. The law was met with outrage and civil disobedience in the North: even many who had been less sympathetic to the abolitionist cause saw the act as the product of a slave power conspiracy to subject Northern whites as well as enslaved blacks to the power of the slave owners. Like the gag rule, the Fugitive Slave Act heightened antagonism to slavery.

Republican appeals to white Northerners economic and political freedom went hand-in-hand with increasingly strong moral denunciations of slavery and its perpetrators. Partly through the partys electoral campaigns and propaganda efforts, both a sense of shared interests with enslaved people and a moral hatred of slave owners came to be established in the minds of millions of Northern voters.

Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chases comments during the 1856 election were typical of Republican rhetoric, which made the continued existence of slavery a threat to the freedom of all Americans:

[T]he popular heart is stirred as never before, for the issue is boldly made between Freedom and Slavery a Republic and a Despotism! The chain-gang and Republicanism cannot coexist, and you must now elect whether you will vindicate the one at whatever cost, or whether you will yield to the other.

Sentiments like these led to the election of an antislavery government. That election in turn put the country on the road to a social revolution, in which black and white Americans fought side-by-side to defeat the Confederacy and abolish slavery.

The movements which brought about abolition in Haiti and the United States provide particularly dramatic examples of the power of solidarity. But we dont need to look so far back in time to make the point. The US Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century was led by many activists, including socialists and labor organizers, who connected the struggle for black liberation with wider fights for economic justice.

Black workers led the struggle for civil rights in the 1940s, through participation in militant unions belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and especially the most left-wing unions, led by members of the Communist Party. Radical unions like the United Public Workers of America fought against discrimination and for full rights for their black workers.

Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America fought against racist police and voter disenfranchisement in Jim Crowera North Carolina. Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union of San Francisco also fought racial discrimination against its black workers in the 1940s.

Many of these Communist-led unions were destroyed by McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s, significantly setting back struggles for racial justice. Even so, many leading activists of the Civil Rights Movement later on continued working to forge multiracial coalitions, by connecting anti-racism with broader redistributive demands. Paul Heideman writes:

At the grassroots, organizers like Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin came out of the Old Left, and knew full well that legal equality without redistribution would be a hollow victory. The 1963 March on Washington was built with crucial assistance from the United Autoworkers, and the marchs full title was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The policy objectives of this tendency in the movement were summed up in the Freedom Budget, a proposal that attempted to translate the Civil Rights Movement into a campaign for full employment and public works.

Martin Luther King Jr, best remembered for his passionate moral speeches against racism, was a supporter of the Freedom Budget. Toward the end of his life, King declared the need for democratic socialism and began organizing a Poor Peoples Campaign to demand economic justice. (He was assassinated before the campaign began, when he traveled to Memphis to support a strike of black sanitation workers.)

In the late 60s and early 70s, radical activists like those involved in Detroits League of Revolutionary Black Workers also sought to reconnect anti-racist struggle to workplace militancy. The League fought racism in the auto plants and within their own union, while building multiracial solidarity with other workers around their shared interests.

Civil rights activists of various stripes refused to separate anti-racist struggle from class struggle. Many of the movements successes in fact depended on linking struggles against racism with economic demands, within the workplace or outside of it. And movement leaders like King realized that the movement for racial equality would not make further progress without tackling economic equality. That vision of anti-racism linked the interests of black Americans with poor and working-class whites.

White people have a moral obligation to help dismantle white supremacy. But it would be wrong to see anti-racism only as a moral imperative. Now, as in the past, poor and working-class white people have a shared interest in fighting racism and destroying its material infrastructure.

Policies and institutions responsible for the severe oppression of black people and other people of color hurt the entire working class. Our massive, heavily militarized police forces kill black people at higher levels than whites, but kill the poor of all races at higher rates than the rich; mass incarceration locks up black people at much higher rates than whites, but it also locks up an enormous number of white people and represses labor organizing; xenophobic immigration restrictions also make it harder for workers to organize. That means working people of all races have a material stake in defunding the police, dismantling mass incarceration, and ending repression of immigrants.

The emancipatory potential of anti-racist demands for the working class as a whole is nothing new, of course. As Jamelle Bouie documents, the black freedom struggle in America has long been bound up with struggles against the dominance of capital and for economic redistribution.

Those who participated in great freedom struggles of the past did not lose sight of their common plight and common enemies. Neither should we. White people can act in solidarity with people of color to fight racial oppression and to work toward collective liberation.

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Solidarity Should Be the Basis of White Anti-Racism, Not Allyship - Jacobin magazine