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Theory Discussion: How to Get Shot in America

Frankly speaking I think the entire mainstream discourse surrounding racism and white supremacy in America is a toxic clown-show masquerade that obviously serves to enrich the avatars of elite capital. If you step back and look objectively at the accepted discussion surrounding racism in our society, what you’ll find is that corporate media is more than happy to talk about street violence, working class racism and the malignant bigotry of petty authority – police, preachers, small time administrators and so on. By contrast, rarely will you hear discussions about the structural reasons racism persists in our society, the profit motivations behind racism or the origins behind racist ideas. If these subjects are discussed in the mainstream conversation at all, they will typically be placed in a distant historical context; thus slavery and Jim Crow can be understood to be structural, institutionalized racism while the literal occupation of minority communities by hostile authorities engaging in policing for profit is just “getting tough on crime.”

Furthermore on the rare occasions where economics and racism do intersect in the public discourse, the focus will be entirely on the impact, not the origins of that intersection. You sure as hell aren’t going to hear about how class warfare and structural racism combine to create an understood if unrecognized “under caste” in the American capitalist system.  This is because the public discourse primarily serves the interests of elite capital, and it’s obviously in the interests of the ruling class to confine the discussion about racism to the hateful bigotry of broke, ignorant crackers shouting racial slurs in the parking lot of your local Wal-Mart. Why? Because this hides the complicity of the upper classes and obscures the reasons that racism continues to propagate in our society.

Anyone who has studied any history can tell you that systemic racism has always served an obvious purpose in American capitalism, because it’s about creating a group, or groups of people that it’s legally and socially acceptable to exploit ruthlessly; and this true whether we’re talking about antebellum slavery, discriminatory housing markets after desegregation, or a modern prison industrial complex fed by racialized mass incarceration. While it may indeed represent a tremendous financial drain on individual communities and even governments, systemic and or institutionalized racism is absurdly profitable for the right sort of people because it typically allows for a tremendous transfer of public wealth to the private sector; someone is paying to militarize police forces, someone is paying to fund prisons and so on. In plain terms, America is a country that literally subsidizes the private racism industry to the tune of billions and billions of dollars per year.

In terms of the African American community, we’re talking about a cumulative, generational extraction of wealth from black families, directly into the coffers of rich investors and American corporations. This extraction is enabled by a structurally racist economic system that has constantly adapted its methods, but has never ceased to function throughout all of American history; you’d have to be some kind of naive fool to genuinely believe that this is accidental. There’s a reason that the median wealth of a white family in America is forty-one times higher than the median wealth of a black family. There’s a reason that predatory lenders can get away with targeting minority communities with toxic loans that functionally amount to extortion. There’s a reason it was primarily non-white homeowners who lost their homes when the economy imploded and kicked off the US foreclosure crisis.  There’s a reason that mass incarceration overwhelmingly targets visible minorities and not suburban white kids for the exact same non-violent drug offenses both groups commit. And frankly none of those reasons have anything to do with Jethro the racist gas station attendant.

Okay, so how do you get away with it then? How do you convince the majority to participate in, or at least allow for, the brutal exploitation of the minority in the so-called “land of the free?” Well, you use emotional appeals wrapped inside racist ideas to create some combination of hatred, superiority, dehumanization, fear, marginalization, greed, rationalization and convenient ignorance. How do you package, propagate and encourage the adoption of these desired racist ideas among the broader population? Through various forms of media – and I’m not just talking about the news here; racist ideas are transmitted into public discourse through movies, literature, academic journals, political campaigns, social media, internet forums, church gatherings, mailing lists, newsletters, and so on ad infinitum.

So who controls those means of communication? Who decides what news corporate media reports, which books get published, which studies are conducted, which movies containing which ideas get made? Who decides which politicians get campaign donations and which don’t? Who controls giant social media companies? Who, in our society has the actual power to inject racist ideas in the discourse? Is it broke redneck bigots who buy Kid Rock albums? No, it is certainly is not. If you examine the actual recorded history of these racist ideas, you’ll very quickly discovered that they’re largely introduced, supported and defended by the very same individuals and organizations dependent on legalized exploitation to turn a profit – it certainly isn’t an accident that cracker slavers were the leading proponents of white supremacist ideology in American history! In other words, racist ideas don’t come from working class whisper campaigns; they’re introduced and legitimized in our society by the upper class, through a variety of media influencers, to protect the right of the ruling class to continue the lucrative exploitation of a visible minority “sub-caste” in American capitalism.

Of course, the introduction, propagation and perpetual recycling of these racist ideas for the benefit of a primarily white and invariably wealthy exploiter class, also has the tragic side effect of enabling and emboldening violent bigots, working class racism and the white supremacist tendencies of petty local authority. The ruling class however does not significantly profit from this lowest common denominator form of bigotry, and thus it is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged to rail away against this kind of racism; so long as attention is never brought to the structural, economic reasons these more vulgar expressions of white supremacy continue to occur. You certainly can’t, for example, quote Pan-Africanist scholar and Black Power activist Kwame Ture when he says:

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”

There will always be bigoted, hateful and even violently racist individuals in our society, but it is the ongoing propagation, normalization and legitimization of racist ideas by the ruling class, that empowers and emboldens individuals to act on those malevolent beliefs. Ultimately, I’d argue that any public discussion about racism, bigotry and marginalization in the United States that doesn’t center the economic, structural and class war aspects of systemic white supremacy is insulting, performative and oftentimes counterproductive. It’s not about prioritizing class over race – it’s about understanding that racism itself is simply another, highly lucrative aspect of the ongoing extraction of wealth from the marginalized, by the powerful.

Everyone always regurgitates the idea that you can’t talk about racism in America, but it’s simply not true. In fact, you can actually make a mighty fine living talking about racism, arguing either for, or against, so long as you only talk about the right kinds of racism, and the right kinds of racists. If on the other hand, you try to talk about the economics of racism, the structural reasons that racism persists in our society, the question of precisely who benefits from racism and who is responsible for the perpetual repackaging and dissemination of racist ideas – well, then you will be diminished, marginalized and eventually attacked. Finally, if symbolic and social destruction does not silence you, if you’re still determined to get the truth about the economics of racism out, if by some miracle people are still listening to you after the machine has torn your life apart – then, they’ll just put a fucking bullet in your ass and maybe someday put you on a stamp.

– Nina Illingworth