Martin Luther King is well-known as a martyr in the fight for racial equality, but is somewhat less known for having taken an economic turn towards the end of his abbreviated life. He became increasingly “committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements”
This wasn’t just a matter of branching out to yet another area of inequality worth fighting against, but of recognizing that the two battles are fronts in the same war, that inequality against anyone is inequality against all. He understood that American racism is not driven by inexplicable hatred, but is instead rooted in the historical and ongoing desire of the 1% to take economic advantage of the rest of us.
Slavery amounts to an extreme version of labor abuse. Much as factory owners brought in scabs to replace inconvenient union labor, plantation owners replaced the inconvenience of paid labor with people whose skin color made it impossible for them to blend in with the populace after escaping. Slavery is the result of the economic inequality demanded by conscience-free capitalism being taken to its natural conclusion; it is union-busting on steroids.
White supremacy not only excuses the inexcusable crime of treating people as property, it serves to drive a wedge between two natural allies: black slaves and white trash. Race is an invented concept used to explain away inequality as inherent and necessary, and to convince poor whites to throw in their lot with rich whites instead of poor (or, worse, enslaved) blacks.
If this sounds familiar, you need look no further than right-wing politics in America today, a con game in which the poor are convinced to throw in their lot with the rich by opposing progressive taxation, social programs, and civil rights. In fact, it’s the same trick: you can get white people to go against their own interests just by telling them that the policies which hurt them also hurt non-whites even more. They’ll gladly accept a relative win against the out-group over a rising tide that lifts all. Chumps.
Most recently, Trump rode a wave of white supremacy into power and immediately used it to cut taxes on the rich and corporate. This is not a coincidence; it is literally all that matters to the American oligarchs that support him. His imaginary wall is an icon to white supremacy that quite effectively distracts bigots from noticing that they’re being robbed.
All of these forms of inequality, whether economic or racial or sexual or any of the rest, form the many heads of a single hydra: hierarchy. No one head can be attacked without the others joining in to defend it. Plans that focus on fighting racism will be undermined by ongoing sexism and economic abuse. Plans that focus on soaking the rich will, as shown above, be undermined by racism and xenophobia. The only way to win is to fight all the heads at once.
This is what MLK grew to understand, but many of us have since forgotten. White “progressive” populists are focusing on economic equality while showing apathy towards civil rights, to the point of relegating them to mere “identity politics” and writing them off as irrelevant. In this form of trickle-down socialism, they’re claiming that the various minorities will get theirs as soon as straight, white, cis, abled men get theirs first.
The white supremacy of the extremist left is racist in policy, not rhetoric, and is not marked by displays of hatred. If asked, most of these “progressives” would honestly say that they support civil rights for all. And they do, in theory, just not in practice. The problem is that this support ranks very low on their list of priorities, to the point where it might as well not exist.
As a result, they ignore their natural allies among non-whites, non-males, non-straights, non-cis, non-able, and so on. They allow themselves to be divided and conquered by white supremacy, all the while insisting that they oppose it.
If MLK had lived to see the state of affairs today, by dodging that bullet and then making it to 90, he would be praying for sweet release now.
Your blog is great. I am glad I will be able to follow you after G+ is gone. It is nice to have someone that thinks along similar lines.