It IS about race

It IS about race

August 2013



THE OUTRAGEOUS “NOT GUILTY” verdict for the murderer of Trayvon Martin, coming less than three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, demonstrates that all talk of a post-racial United States is just so much hot air.

If those two events aren’t proof enough, we enter into evidence the top court’s recent decision that continues to erase affirmative action and Senate passage of an immigration bill that would turn the Mexican border into a war zone and the “path to citizenship” into a boulder-strewn obstacle course. We judge the racist system guilty.

ISSUES HAVING TO DO WITH the color of one’s skin — like slavery, like segregation — have torn the U.S. apart. But multi-racial fights against racism and its effects have led to enormous improvements in the consciousness and conditions of life for every working-class person: think about the successful battle for public education during post-Civil War Reconstruction.

What’s been missing so far is a common agreement that racism exists because someone profits from it, that it can only be eradicated therefore with the eradication of capitalism — and that workers will never defeat capitalism as long as they let race divide them.

In honor of Trayvon Martin and every other victim of racism, it’s time to get radical.