When the United States elected its first African American president in November, many undoubtedly hoped that the government had closed its long ugly chapter of promoting white supremacy. It was hoped that the government founded by slaveholders, developed on the backs of chattel slaves and expanded through violent conquest would now come to terms with its legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism.
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For many years and in many resolutions, members of the United Nations recognized Zionism—the movement to create a Jewish-only state on the stolen land of Palestine—as racist. Since the bloody siege of Gaza, which laid bare Israel’s blatant hostility to the Palestinian population, many countries have called for Israeli leaders to be charged with war crimes. Having inflicted heavy military blows during the siege of Gaza, the Israeli state has seen its credibility and viability as an exclusivist racist state in the middle of the Arab world reach new lows. The last thing the U.S. government wants is its attack dog in the Middle East to face further international embarrassment at a conference against racism.
This year is just more of the same; U.S. imperialism has boycotted or disrupted every World Conference Against Racism. The United States led a boycott of the first World Conference Against Racism in 1978 because the document about apartheid South Africa—another staunch U.S. ally—included a condemnation of Israeli apartheid. The second conference took place in 1983, and the same states again voted against any measures being taken against South Africa. In the 2001 conference, which fittingly took place in post-apartheid South Africa, the U.S. representatives walked out, calling the participants “anti-Semitic” because they explicitly deemed Zionism a racist ideology.
It is especially noteworthy that the Obama administration insists reparations be removed as a topic at the conference. On the campaign trail, Obama rejected reparations— a position many explained away as a political necessity during election season. Now, as the chief executive officer of U.S. capitalism, his position has hardened; reparations cannot even be brought up.
Why is there such hostility to reparations? It is an issue that leads directly to an indictment of U.S. capitalism. For one, major banks and corporations that participated in the genocidal slave trade still exist in some form today. Corporations like CSX, Fleet Boston, Aetna and JP Morgan Chase were started with profits reaped from exploiting slave labor. Aetna and JP Morgan Chase made millions insuring slaves as the property of their masters.
After the Civil War, freed slaves and the Northern ruling class—with whom they aligned against the Confederacy—had very different concepts of what “freedom” looked like. Not only were slaves uncompensated for the generations of work, but also denied access to property—the “forty acres and a mule” many expected as part of emancipation. They were free to pick cotton as wage laborers or sharecroppers.
But it goes beyond chattel slavery. Throughout U.S. history, Black workers were routinely the last hired and first fired. During the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 did not cover agricultural and domestic laborers—which constituted 90 percent of Black workers. Absent Social Security benefits, large numbers of Black families had little or nothing left by the end of life to pass on to the next generation thus reinforcing the differential in opportunity and support between Black and white youth. In the mid-twentieth century, the government’s Federal Housing Administration helped create the white suburban “middle class” by providing $120 billion in housing equity to real estate developers that almost entirely excluded Black families.
Some have pointed to Barack Obama’s election as proof that this era is over, that now “anyone can make it.” They say the existence of a small Black “middle class” proves reparations are no longer needed. But in most foreclosure “red zones” it has been precisely this so-called “middle class” that has suffered most—due to a lack of inherited family wealth. Even today, the typical Black couple with college degrees starts out with a combined wealth of only one-fifth that of white couples with college degrees. Moreover, Black teenagers, even in “middle class” urban settings are routinely profiled and arrested by local police forces.
For those who have called reparations “impractical” or “too expensive,” look at how quickly and thoroughly the U.S. government has acted to pour trillions into the pockets of the biggest banks. As if it were some cruel joke, the slaveholders’ descendants have gotten the reparations long due to the descendants of slaves.
We are not in a “post-racial” period as so many liberal and conservative talking heads claim. Even with the new administration, the government refuses to even discuss its racist legacy, let alone pay for it.
