The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history

Table of contents :
The New York Times’ 1619 Project:A racialist falsification ofAmerican and world history
Book review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
Why are reparations for slavery an issuein the 2020 US elections?
The attacks on Green Book and the racialist infection of the affluent middle class

Citation preview

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 1619 PROJECT

A racialist falsification of American and world history NILES NIEMUTH S TOM MACKAMAN DAVID NORTH

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A WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE PAMPHLET

The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, David North

World Socialist Web Site Pamphlet

©2019 World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org Published by World Socialist Web Site P.O. Box 48377 Oak Park, MI 48237 Printed in the United States of America

Contents The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of   American and world history������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������7 Book review:   Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South������������������� 23 Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections?�������������������������������35 The attacks on Green Book and the racialist   infection of the affluent middle class�������������������������������������������������������������������������39

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Editor’s note:

“The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history” was published in the World Socialist Web Site in two parts on September 3 and 4, 2019. Additional articles from the World Socialist Website addressing the theme of racial politics are also included.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history By Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict. The occasion for this publication is the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Port Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. On the very next day, the slaves were traded for food. The Project, according to the Times, intends to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race. The Times is promoting the Project with an unprecedented and lavishly financed publicity blitz. It is working with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has developed a proposed teaching curriculum that will be sent to schools for teachers to use in their classes. Hundreds of thousands of extra copies of the magazine and a special supplement have been printed for free distribution at schools, libraries and museums across the country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the staff writer and New America Foundation fellow who first pitched the idea for the Project, oversaw its production and authored the introduction, will be sent on a national lecture tour of schools.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development. The transfer of this critical biological term to the study of a country— even if meant only in a metaphorical sense—leads to bad history and reactionary politics. Countries do not have DNA, they have historically formed economic structures, antagonistic classes and complex political relationships. These do not exist apart from a certain level of technological development, nor independently of a more or less developed network of global economic interconnections. The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analyzed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labor, but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions. Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes. Democratic Party politician Stacey Abrams, in

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an essay published recently in Foreign Affairs, claims that whites and African Americans are separated by an “intrinsic difference.” This irrational and scientifically absurd claim serves to legitimize the reactionary view—entirely compatible with the political perspective of fascism—that blacks and whites are hostile and incompatible species. In yet another article, published in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, the neurologist Robert Sapolsky argues that the antagonism between human groups is rooted in biology. Extrapolating from bloody territorial conflicts between chimpanzees, with whom Nikole Hannah-Jones humans “share more than 98 percent of their DNA,” Sapolsky asserts that understanding “the dynamics of human group identity, including the resurgence of nationalism—that potentially most destructive form of in-group bias—requires grasping the biological and cognitive underpinnings that shape them.” Sapolsky’s simplistic dissolution of history into biology recalls not only the reactionary invocation of “Social Darwinism” to legitimize imperialist conquest by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialists, but also the efforts of German geneticists to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for Nazi anti-Semitism and racism. Dangerous and reactionary ideas are wafting about in bourgeois academic and political circles. No doubt, the authors of the Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments. American slavery is a monumental subject with vast and enduring historical and political significance. The events of 1619 are part of that history. But what occurred at Port Comfort is one episode in the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world, and of the origins and development of the world capitalist system. There is a vast body of literature dealing with the widespread practice of slavery outside the Americas. As Professor G. Ogo Nwokeji of the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has explained, slavery was practiced by African societies. It existed in West Africa “well before the fifteenth century, when the Europeans arrived there via the Atlantic Ocean.”1  1.  The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 3, AD 1420-AD1804, edited by David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 81.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

The Cotton Pickers, 1864, by Winslow Homer

Historian Rudolph T. Ware III of the University of Michigan writes, “Between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, millions lived and died as slaves in African Muslim societies.”2 Among the most important of contemporary scholarly works on the subject is Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, originally published in 1983, by the Canadian historian Paul E. Lovejoy. He explained: Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas, and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in Africa slavery lasted well into the twentieth century—notably longer than in the Americas. Such antiquity and persistence requires explanation, both to understand the historical development of slavery in Africa in its own right and to evaluate the relative importance of the slave trade to this development. Broadly speaking, slavery expanded in at least three stages—1350 to 1600, 1600 to 1800, and 1800 to 1900—by which time slavery had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy.3

2.  Ibid, p. 47. 3.  Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery Third ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1.

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Professor Lovejoy remarked in the preface to the Third Edition of his now-classic study that one of his aims in undertaking his research “was to confront the reality that there was slavery in the history of Africa, at a time when some romantic visionaries and hopeful nationalists wanted to deny the clear facts.”4 In relation to the New World, the phenomenon of slavery in modern history cannot be understood apart from its role in the economic development of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Karl Marx explained in the chapter titled “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in Volume One of Das Kapital : The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.5 Marx’s analysis inspired the critical insight of the brilliant West Indian historian Eric Williams, who wrote in his pioneering study Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944: Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.6 The formation and development of the United States cannot be understood apart from the international economic and political processes that gave rise to capitalism and the New World. Slavery was an international economic institution that stretched from the heart of Africa to the shipyards of Britain, the banking houses of Amsterdam, and the plantations of South Carolina, Brazil and the Caribbean. Every colonial power was involved, from the Dutch who operated slave trading posts in West Africa, to the Portuguese who imported millions of slaves to Brazil. An estimated 15 to 20 million 4.  Ibid., p. xxiii. 5.  Karl Marx, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Capital, Vol. 1, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010 [digital edition]), p.739. 6.  Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 7.

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Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas throughout the entire period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of these, 400,000 ended up in the 13 British colonies/United States. Slavery was the inescapable and politically tragic legacy of the global foundation of the United States. It is not difficult to recognize the contradiction between the ideals proclaimed by the leaders of the American Revolution—which were expressed with extraordinary force by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—and the existence of slavery in the newly formed United States. But history is not a morality tale. The efforts to discredit the Revolution by focusing on the alleged hypocrisy of Jefferson and other founders contribute nothing to an understanding of history. The American Revolution cannot be understood as the sum of the subjective intentions and moral limitations of those who led it. The world-historical significance of the Revolution is best understood through an examination of its objective causes and consequences. The analysis provided by Williams refutes the scurrilous attempt by the 1619 Project to portray the Revolution as a sinister attempt to uphold the slave system. Apart from the massive political impact of Jefferson’s Declaration and the subsequent overthrow of British rule, Williams stressed the objective impact of the Revolution on the economic viability of slavery. He wrote: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. …” Jefferson wrote only part of the truth. It was economic, not political, bands that were being dissolved. A new age had begun. The year 1776 marked the Declaration of Independence and the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Far from accentuating the value of the sugar islands [in the Caribbean], American independence marked the beginning of their uninterrupted decline, and it was a current saying at the time that the British ministry had lost not only thirteen colonies but eight islands as well. It was not an accident that the victorious conclusion of the revolutionary war in 1783 was followed just four years later by the famous call of English abolitionist William Wilberforce for the ending of Britain’s slave trade. In examining the emergence of British opposition to the slave trade, Williams made a fundamental point about the study of history that serves as an indictment of the subjective and anti-historical method employed by the 1619 Project. He wrote: The decisive forces in the period of history we have discussed are the developing economic forces. These economic changes are gradual, imperceptible, but they have an irresistible cumulative effect. Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware

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of the ultimate results of their activity. The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.7 The victory of the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States did not solve Scars of a whipped slave (April 2, 1863, Baton Rouge, the problem of slavery. The eco- Louisiana) nomic and political conditions for its abolition had not sufficiently matured. But the economic development of the United States—the simultaneous development of industry in the North and the noxious growth of the cotton-based plantation system in the South (as a consequence of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793)—intensified the contradictions between two increasingly incompatible economic systems—one based on wage labor and the other on slavery. The United States heaved from crisis to crisis in the seven decades that separated the adoption of the Constitution and the election of President George Washington in 1789 from Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. None of the repeated compromises which sought to balance the country between slave and free states, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, were ever able to finally settle the issue. It is worth bearing in mind that the 87 years of history invoked by Lincoln when he spoke at Gettysburg in 1863 is the same span of time that separates our present day from the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. The explosive socio-economic tendencies which would do away with the entire economic system of slavery developed and erupted in this relatively concentrated period of time. 7.  Ibid., p. 210.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864

The founding of the United States set into motion a crisis which resulted in the Civil War, the second American Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands of whites gave their lives to finally put an end to slavery. It must be stressed that this was not an accidental, let alone unconscious, outcome of the Civil War. In the end, the war resulted in the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, took state power for the first and so far, only time in world history. Hannah-Jones does not view Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator,” as the freed slaves called him in the 1860s, but as a garden-variety racist who held “black people [as] the obstacle to national unity.” The author simply disregards Lincoln’s own words—for example, the Gettysburg Address and the magisterial Second Inaugural Address—as well as the books written by historians such as Eric Foner, James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, David Donald, Ronald C. White, Stephen Oates, Richard Carwardine and many others that demonstrate Lincoln’s emergence as a revolutionary leader fully committed to the destruction of slavery. But an honest portrayal of Lincoln would contradict Hannah-Jones’ claims that “black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” So too would a single solitary mention, anywhere in the magazine, of the 2.2 million Union soldiers who fought and the 365,000 who died to end slavery. Likewise, the interracial character of the abolitionist movement is blotted out. The names William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, do not appear in her essay. A couple of abolitionists are selectively quoted for their criticism of the Constitution,

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Pullman Company workers walking off the job in 1894 (Credit: Hoosier State Chronicles)

but Hannah-Jones dares not mention that for the antislavery movement Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was, in the words of the late historian David Brion Davis, their “touchstone, the sacred scripture.” Hannah-Jones and the other 1619 Project contributors—claiming that slavery was the unique “original sin” of the United States, and discrediting the American Revolution and the Civil War as elaborate conspiracies to perpetuate white racism—have little to add to the rest of American history. Nothing ever changed. Slavery was simply replaced by Jim Crow segregation, and this in turn has given way to the permanent condition of racism that is the inescapable fate of being a “white American.” It all goes back to 1619 and “the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day.”8 [emphasis added] This is not simply a “reframing” of history. It is an attack and falsification that ignores more than a half-century of scholarship. There is not the slightest indication that Hannah-Jones (or any of her co-essayists) have even heard of, let alone read, the work on slavery carried out by Williams, Davis, or Peter Kolchin; on the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood; on the political conceptions that 8. The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 19.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

Three coal miners of the Lorain Coal Dock Company in Lorado, West Virginia in 1918

motivated union soldiers by James McPherson; on Reconstruction by Eric Foner; on Jim Crow segregation by C. Vann Woodward; or on the Great Migration by James N. Gregory or Joe William Trotter. What is left out of the Times’ racialist morality tale is breathtaking, even from the vantage point of African-American scholarship. The invocation of white racism takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history of the country. There is no examination of the historical context, foremost the development of the class struggle, within which the struggle of the African-American population developed in the century that followed the Civil War. And there is no reference to the transformation of the United States into an industrial colossus and the most powerful imperialist country between 1865 and 1917, the year of its entry into World War I. While the 1619 Project and its stable of well-to-do authors find in the labor exploitation of slavery a talisman to explain all of history, they pass over in deafening silence the exploitation inherent in wage labor. A reader of the 1619 Project would not know that the struggle against slave labor gave way to a violent struggle against wage slavery, in which countless workers were killed. There is no reference to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 which spread like wildfire along the railways from Baltimore to St. Louis and was only suppressed by the deployment of federal troops, nor to the emergence of the Knights of Labor, the fight for the eight-hour day and the Haymarket Massacre, the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894, the formation of the AFL, the founding of the Socialist Party, the emergence of the IWW, the Ludlow Massacre, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the countless other labor struggles that followed World War I, and finally the emergence of the CIO and the massive industrial struggles of the 1930s.

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In short, there is no class struggle and, therefore, there is no real history of the African-American population and the events which shaped a population of freed slaves into a critical section of the working class. Replacing real history with a mythic racial narrative, the 1619 Project ignores the actual social development of the African-American population over the last 150 years. Nowhere do any of the authors discuss the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970 in which millions of blacks, and whites, uprooted from the rural South and flocked to take jobs in urban areas across the US, particularly in the industrialized North. James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, captured the revolutionary implications of this process, for both African-American and white workers, in his inimitable prose: American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South, and exploiting their ignorance, and their poverty, and their fears, and their individual helplessness, herded them into the steel mills as strikebreakers in the steel strike of 1919. And in the brief space of one generation, by its mistreatment, abuse and exploitation of these innocent and ignorant Negro strikebreakers, this same capitalism succeeded in transforming them and their sons into one of the most militant and reliable detachments of the great victorious steel strike of 1946. This same capitalism took tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of prejudiced hillbillies from the South, many of them members and sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan; and thinking to use them, with their ignorance and their prejudices, as a barrier against unionism, sucked them into the auto and rubber factories of Detroit, Akron and other industrial centers. There it sweated them, humiliated them and drove and exploited them until it finally changed them and made new men out of them. In that harsh school the imported southerners learned to exchange the insignia of the KKK for the union button of the CIO, and to turn the Klansman’s fiery cross into a bonfire to warm pickets at the factory gate.9 As late as 1910, nearly 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the former slave states, overwhelmingly in conditions of rural isolation. By the 1970s, they were highly urbanized and proletarianized. Black workers had gone through the experiences of the great industrial strikes, alongside whites, in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago. It is no historical accident that the civil rights movement emerged in the South in Birmingham, Alabama, a center of the steel industry and the locus of the actions of communist workers, black and white. 9.  James P. Cannon, “The Coming American Revolution,” Speech delivered at the Twelfth National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, 1946.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

The struggle of wage labor against capital at the point of production united workers across racial boundaries. And so, in the fevered rhetoric of the Jim Crow politician, the civil rights movement was equated with communism and the fear of “race-mixing”—that is, that the working masses, black and white, might be united around their common interests. Just as it leaves out the history of the working class, the 1619 Project fails to provide political history. There is no accounting of the role played by the Democratic Party, an alliance of Northern industrialists and machine politicians, on one side, and the Southern slavocracy and then Jim Crow politicians, Martin Luther King, Jr. holding up a photo of in consciously pitting white and black Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman at a press conworkers against each other by stoking frence on December 6, 1964 up race hatred. In the numerous articles which make up the 1619 Project, the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. appears just once, and then only in a photo caption. The reason for this is that King’s political outlook was opposed to the racialist narrative advanced by the Times. King did not condemn the American Revolution and the Civil War. He did not believe that racism was a permanent characteristic of “whiteness.” He called for the integration of blacks and whites and set as his goal the ultimate dissolution of race itself. Targeted and harassed as a “communist” by the FBI, King was murdered after launching the interracial Poor People’s Campaign and announcing his opposition to the Vietnam War. King encouraged the involvement of white civil rights activists, several of whom lost their lives in the South, including Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Teamsters union organizer from Detroit. His statement following the murders of the three young civil rights workers in 1964, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (two of whom were white) was an impassioned condemnation of racism and segregation. King clearly does not fit into Hannah-Jones’ narrative. But, in its most significant and telling omission, the 1619 Project says nothing about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Americans—the Russian Revolution of 1917. Not only did this arouse and inspire broad sections of the African-American population—including countless black intellectuals, writers, and artists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,

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Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry—the Revolution undermined the political foundations of American racial apartheid. Given the 1619 Project’s black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts that “we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military,” and celebrates the fact that “we” have fought “in every war this nation has waged.” Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a “volunteer” army whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the “War on Terror” and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria—all supported by the Times—that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably “color-blind.” She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of “people of color” butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. The toxic identity politics that underlies this indifference does not serve the interests of the working class in the United States or anywhere else, which is dependent for its very survival on unifying across racial and national boundaries. It does, however, serve the class interests of privileged sections of the American upper-middle class. In a revealing passage at the end of her essay, Hannah-Jones declares that since the 1960s “black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.” She is speaking here not for her “race” but a tiny layer of the African-American elite, beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, who came to political maturity in the years leading up to and through the administration of Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president.

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The New York Times’ 1619 Project

A 2017 analysis of economic data found extreme levels of wealth inequality within racial groupings. Among those who identify as African-American the richest 10 percent controlled 75 percent of all wealth; during Obama’s tenure the wealthiest 1 percent increased their share of wealth amongst all African-Americans from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the bottom half of African-American households have zero or negative wealth. While a very narrow layer of black millionaires and billionaires has been deliberately cultivated in response to the mass unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, the conditions for working class African-Americans are worse than they were 40 years ago. This has been the period of deindustrialization, which saw the systematic shutdown of auto, steel and other factories across the United States, devastating working-class cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee, and Youngstown, Ohio. The major social gains won by workers in the bitter struggles of the 20th century have been rolled back so that an immense amount of wealth could be transferred from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top. Poverty, declining life expectancy, deaths of despair and other forms of social misery are drawing together workers of all racial and national backgrounds. It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the world. Earlier this year, auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico called on their American counterparts, white and black, to join them in wildcat strikes. Across the South, black, white and Hispanic workers took strike action together against telecommunications giant AT&T. In Tennessee, black and white neighbors defended an immigrant working class family against deportation. Now, the multi-racial and multi-ethnic American auto industry labor force finds itself entering a pitched battle against the global auto giants and the corrupt unions. At the same time, opinion polls demonstrate growing support in the population for socialism—that is, the conscious political unity of the working class across all boundaries and divisions imposed on it. Under these conditions the American capitalist elite, Democrats and Republican alike, are terrified of social revolution. They are joining with their ruling class counterparts around the world in deploying sectarian politics, be it based on race, religion, nationality, ethnicity or language to block this development. The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics. The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, was explicit in this regard, telling staffers in a taped meeting in August that the narrative upon which the paper was focused

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would change from “being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character.” As a result, reporters will be directed to “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.” Baquet declared: [R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. This focus on race is a mirror image of Trump’s own racial politics, and it bears a disturbing resemblance to the race-based world view of the Nazis. The central role of race in the politics of fascism was explained concisely in Trotsky’s analysis of the ideology of German fascism: In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoologic materialism.10 There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history. Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics.

10.  Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” accessed on 09/03/2019 at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm

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A Slave Auction in the South, Harpers Weekly

The New York Times’ 1619 Project

“1619” and the myth of white unity under slavery

Book review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt (Cambridge Press, 2017) By Eric London 9 September 2019 In August, the New York Times launched the “1619” initiative, marking the 400th anniversary of the disembarkation of the first African slaves in what was to become the United States. The historical premise of the Times campaign is that “white people,” as a race, benefited from slavery economically, politically, and socially, and that even today, white workers—an irredeemably racist “basket of deplorables,” in Hillary Clinton’s words— continue to benefit from the privileges invented during slavery. The unstated agenda is to sow racial divisions among workers and to forestall the growing movement of the working class. In the series’ lead article, Nikole Hannah-Jones cites a group of historians to claim that “white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, ‘had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.’” In the same issue, Matthew Desmond writes that the slave system “allowed [white workers] to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement.” In reality, the “facts” upon which the Times bases its claim that slavery produced “white privilege” vary from half-truth to outright falsehood. The book  Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Press—2017) by Keri Leigh Merritt, does much to set the record straight.

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Merritt is an independent scholar, and her distance from academia is a strength. A Southerner from a self-described poor and right-wing family, she has explained that her goal is to uncover the historical roots of social backwardness and political confusion in the South. The vast majority of whites did not derive any social, political or economic benefits from the system of slavery. On the contrary, Merritt explains: Under capitalism, labor power was the commodity of the laborer. Conversely, under feudalism, as well as under slavery, the ruling classes owned, either completely or partially, the labor power of the working classes. The system was predicated on elites coercing individuals to work, often by violent means. In the slave South, where laborers were in competition with brutalized, enslaved labor, the laborers, whether legally free or not, had little to no control over their labor power. The profitability and profusion of plantation slave labor consistently reduced the demand for free workers, lowered their wages, and rendered their bargaining power ineffective, indeed generally (except in the case of specialized skills) worthless. In essence, they were not truly “free” laborers, especially when they could be arrested and forced to labor for the state or for individuals. A solely racial view of slavery in the American South is insufficient to grasp the thoroughly reactionary character of the social order which arose on the rotten foundations of human bondage. In the first half of the 19th century, an oligarchy basing itself on slavery and aristocratic privilege enforced its rule through vigilante terror and police-state dictatorship aimed at the whole non-slaveholding population, black and white alike. This slaveholding class, enriching itself through trade with the ruling classes of aristocratic Europe, threatened to destroy the egalitarian and democratic principles of the American Revolution. Secession of southern states in 1860–61, which the oligarchy carried out in the face of broad opposition among poor whites, was a counterrevolutionary rebellion from above against the principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Merritt begins by attacking the “myth” that whites were united in defense of slavery, a lie first created by the political representatives of the slavocracy, then revived by Jim Crow-era historians, and today pushed forward by the Times. She takes up the Tennessee Agrarians school of Confederate apologists, including historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, writing, “The antebellum South, Owsley incorrectly asserted, was undoubtedly democratic in nature. Slavery, he claimed, was actually beneficial for all whites, regardless of economic class and social status.” Instead, Merritt’s research led her to conclude, “One of the biggest and most persistent falsities of southern history is revealed: the myth of white unity over slavery.”

Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

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The antebellum South was defined by extreme inequality not only between slaveholders and their human “property,” but among whites. In 1850, Merritt notes, 1,000 cotton-state families received $50 million per year in income, as compared to $60 million per year for the remaining 66,000 families. She also North Carolina Emigrants; Poor White Folks by James Henry cites a study of Louisiana Beard (1845) which found 43 percent of whites lived in urban areas in 1860, and that of these city dwellers 80 percent were semi-skilled or unskilled workers. Meanwhile, half of rural white families were landless, and half of those who owned land tilled less than 50 acres. Poor whites comprised the vast majority of the free population, Merritt concludes, noting “only about 14 percent of the state’s whites could be classified as middle class.” In 1860, 56 percent of personal wealth of the United States was concentrated in the South. In that region’s cotton belt, wealth in slaves accounted for 60 percent of all wealth, greater even than the value of the land itself. As the price of slaves rose in the final decade before the Civil War from $82,000 in 1850 to $120,000 in 1860 (in 2011 dollars), the concentration of slave ownership at the top of Southern society increased dramatically. Slave ownership was far beyond the economic reach of even most landowning whites. The poorer whites who did own land were forced into unproductive terrain. As the abolitionist National Era put it, “Slavery, with its biting social ills, beats them away from the richer soil, and keeps them hopelessly down and debased on the barren hills.” Merritt writes that one-third of whites in the South “had nothing more than clothing and small sums of petty cash on the eve of secession.” “Slave labor eliminated job possibilities, depressed wages where jobs existed, and forced white wage workers into the most degraded and dangerous work deemed ‘too hazardous for Negro property,’” Merritt explains. Whenever whites attempted to strike, “they constantly were made aware of the thousands of readily available black strikebreakers waiting to take their places should they ask for better wages or request safer working conditions.” Merritt quotes Richard Morris, historian of the American Revolution and onetime president of the American Historical Association, who wrote: “a significant segment of the southern labor force of both races operated under varying degrees of compulsion,

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legal or economic, in a twilight zone of bondage…[they] dwelt in a shadowland enjoying a status neither fully slave nor entirely free.” Despite their legal freedom, Merritt writes, “This grave economic stratification between masters and non-masters meant that in material terms, the poorest southern whites lived somewhat similarly to slaves.” Whites lived in “one room shacks made of logs and mud,” normally without windows. They had difficulty traveling from place to place, often in carts pulled by dogs. Without shoes, hookworm was a constant concern, and starvation was a threat. “Not having enough to eat was a constant worry for a sizable percentage of the white population,” Merritt writes, citing one slave who said, “We had more to eat than they did.” Of their white neighbors, the slave wrote, “They were sorry folk.” Merritt cites historian Avery Craven, who “identified several similarities between the material lives of poor whites and slaves. Their cabins differed ‘little in size or comfort,’ he wrote, as both were constructed from chinked logs and generally had only one room. Furthermore, these two underclasses ‘dressed in homespuns, [and] went barefoot in season… The women of both classes toiled in the fields or carried the burden of other manual labor and the children of both early reached the age of industrial accountability.’ Even the food they prepared and ate, Craven concluded, ‘was strikingly similar.’” White men often spent months apart from their families as they walked through the country looking for work. “In contrast to the low divorce rates of the upper class,” Merritt writes, “poor whites’ relationships were similar to slaves in some respects” due to this lack of economic stability. Alcoholism and illiteracy were widespread. The southern antislavery advocate Hinton Helper explained that among Southern whites, “Thousands ... die at an advanced age, as ignorant of the common alphabet as if it had never been invented.” While a widespread system of “common school” public education had taken root in the North, there were hardly any schools in the antebellum South. Curtailing access to public education was a deliberate measure to socially control whites who were natural opponents of slavery. As Merritt explains: Whether the means involved disenfranchising poor whites, keeping them uneducated and illiterate, heavily policing them and monitoring their behaviors, or simply leaving them to wallow in cyclical poverty, the ends were always the same: the South’s master class continued to lord over the region, attempting to control an increasingly unwieldy hierarchy. Slaveholders’ worst fears were coming to pass as the ranks of disaffected poor whites grew. As one editorial out of South Carolina contended, the biggest danger to southern society was neither northern abolitionists nor black slaves. Instead, the owners of flesh needed to concern themselves with the masterless men and women in their own neighborhoods—this “servile class of mechanics and

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laborers, unfit for self-government, and yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens.”

The dictatorship of the slave oligarchy

To maintain order under conditions of extreme social inequality, the Southern oligarchs subjected not only slaves, but also poor whites to physical coercion, paramilitary terror and police surveillance. The society they ruled was an aristocratic order in which the Constitution was a dead letter. An entire legal code was established to police non-slaveholding whites. The South’s first police forces and prison systems were established “to impose social and racial conformity,” with police “jailing individuals for the most benign behavioral infractions. Indeed, the rise of professional law enforcement changed the entire system of criminal justice.” In the antebellum it was whites who filled the new jails, since black property was too valuable to remove from labor through incarceration. White convicts were subjected to brutal acts of public whipping and even water torture. Slaveowners illegalized trade between poor whites and slaves and arrested whites suspected of befriending or engaging in sexual relationships with slaves. Slaveowners built vigilante groups, especially following the devastating Panic of 1837, “in an effort to force the population into acquiescence.” They were not, as the Times claims, comprised merely of “white people,” but rather of wealthy white people. Merritt explains that these vigilante groups were: [E]ssentially bands of slave- and property-holders who monitored both the behaviors and beliefs of less affluent whites. [Historian Charles] Bolton described the targeted whites as those “whose poverty or indolence made them undesirable.” Slaveless whites increasingly found themselves inhabiting a world in which they had to censor every utterance and defend every action. Under the direction of this oligarchic terror: [L]ocal mobs lynching and killing poorer whites abounded in the late antebellum period. The majority of those brutalized were accused of abolitionism of some sort—whether they were distributing reading materials, talking to other non-slaveholders about worker’s rights, or simply seemed too friendly with African Americans. This contradicts the Times’ blanket indictment that “slave patrols throughout the nation were created by white people who were fearful of rebellion,” and showed “our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people.” Far from gaining political privilege as a result of slavery, poor whites’ supposed rights existed at the mercy of the masters. They could be jailed without charge, arrested

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for “vagrancy,” and even executed for committing property crimes like burglary and forgery. As Merritt notes, “for all intents and purposes, due process was nullified.” Tellingly, poor whites were barred from reading abolitionist literature, and could be executed for engaging in political speech threatening to the great plantation owners. Poor whites were effectively barred from voting as they desired, casting ballots viva voce as the slave-owning election monitors who controlled their employment prospects and store credit looked on. Poor whites were sometimes auctioned off into indentured servitude for defaulting on loans. White children—including young Abraham Lincoln and his presidential successor, Andrew Johnson—were also “bound out as indentures” either by their impoverished parents or where a judge found the parents “immoral.” Merritt explains that “binding out was an arrangement not unlike slavery in many respects,” and in the years preceding secession, a section of slave owners even advocated the enslavement of whites as well as the re-enslavement of freed blacks. Some dark-skinned whites were captured and enslaved. Those who found themselves in this fate, by the 1850s had the burden to prove they were not black.

The emergence of white opposition to slavery in the 1850s

Outcast from the profits of the slave system and subject to the dictatorial conditions of the oligarchic government, slaveless whites developed a profound sense of their class position, Merritt explains—as did the slaveowners themselves. She references the private diaries and public statements of many slaveowners, including “Christopher Memminger, a wealthy Charlestonian slaveholder, [who] argued that white workers—especially foreign ones—were ‘the only party from which danger to our institutions is to be apprehended among us.’ Poor white laborers, who had to compete with unpaid and underpaid black laborers, ‘would soon raise the hue and cry against the Negro, and be hot abolitionists—and every one of those men would have a vote.’” Further, “By the middle of the 1850s, the cracks that had always been present within the façade of white racial solidarity finally turned into deep fissures. When the Panic of 1857 hit and wealth inequality continued to deepen, slaveholders realized that they had to be proactive in the defense of their property and power.” As inequality grew and as the South slowly industrialized in the 1850s (by 1860, 10.5 percent of white men in Alabama worked in manufacturing), emerging trade union associations began holding meetings and publishing statements demanding abolition of slavery. Merritt quotes a group of workers in Lexington, Kentucky, who resolved that slavery “degraded labor, enervated industry, interfered with the occupations of free laborers, created a gulf between the rich and the poor, deprived the working classes of education, and tended to drive them out of the state.” The white workers concluded that “public and private right ” required slavery’s “ultimate extinction.”

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Rebel Deserters Coming Within Union Lines, Harpers Weekly (1864)

When the seceding states held conventions and voted on disunion, Merritt explains that white workers and poor farmers overwhelmingly voted against. This contradicts the Times’ presentation of poor whites as actively supporting or silently acquiescing to slavery—“they generally accepted their lot,” in the condescending phrase of Matthew Desmond. In fact, secession was rammed through in fraudulent elections by slaveowners in a desperate attempt to save their slave system both from Northern Republicans and from the prospects of disunion from within. A war to establish slavery in the west (and likely in the Caribbean and Latin America) was needed to prop up a slave order that was crumbling from within. The slaveowners carried out their rebellion in order to preempt this movement from below. Merritt writes: “Regardless of their professions, one thing was clear. Secession, the Confederacy, and Civil War were all overwhelmingly the creations of one small class of Americans: wealthy southern slaveholders.” The lack of support among poor whites for the Confederate war effort and the active opposition from below was a major factor in the South’s military collapse in 1864 and 1865, as explained by David Williams in Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War and Victoria Bynum in Free State of Jones, upon which the 2016 film by the same title was based.

Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the myth of “white privilege”

Merritt’s work disproves the assertions by the Times that slavery was a popular institution among all white southerners and that all whites obtained special privileges under

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slavery. These arguments, based on distortions, lies, and simply leaving aside contradictory evidence, amount to a rehashing of the segregationist myth of the solid South. Yet Merritt ultimately asserts in her book’s conclusion that with the end of Reconstruction, poor whites obtained a privileged position in Southern society relative to poor blacks. She writes: Poor whites began as pariahs in the antebellum era because they had no real place in the slave system and therefore actually threatened it. With the emancipation of African Americans, poor whites were finally brought into the system of white privilege, albeit at the bottom. This inclusion nonetheless placed them higher on the southern social hierarchy than freedmen, and they gained certain legal, political, and social advantages solely based upon race. The historian cannot be taken to task for ending her study with the conclusion of the Civil War. Class and race relations in the South after the Civil War comprise a vast and complicated subject. However, having demonstrated, contrary to the morality tale of the  Times’ Project 1619, that poor whites in the antebellum South did not benefit from slavery, Merritt baldly asserts that after the Civil War, they did. This is an unfortunate conclusion that not only vitiates against her previous analysis. It is false and necessitates a reply. The Civil War and its major achievements—the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, etc.—represented a dramatic step forward for all workers. Furthermore, for a brief moment during the period of “Radical Reconstruction” immediately following the Civil War, there was a dramatic improvement in the political position of both the freed slaves and poor whites, with both groups flocking to the Republican Party. However, the Republican Party was a capitalist party. Having carried out the “second American Revolution,” which included the largest seizure of private property in world history prior to the Russian Revolution, it proved to be far more assertive in representing the interests of private property and the railroad corporations than in defending the interests and rights of the freed slaves. Over the course of the 1870s, the radical Reconstruction policies were whittled away, and abandoned altogether in the “Great Compromise” between the southern Democrats and northern Republicans in the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. In the reaction that followed, the former slave-owning class, deprived of their human property but not of their land, continued to view forced racial division as necessary for maintaining social order and defending extreme levels of social inequality. The political mechanism through which this was achieved was, as before, the Democratic Party, this time overseeing a political monopoly based on Jim Crow segregation—whose aim was the total division of black workers from white. Merritt concludes that, while poor whites “actually threatened” the status quo under slavery, they did not threaten post-slavery property relations because they “had

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a place” in post-Reconstruction Southern segregation due to their “privilege” in contrast to blacks. She does not explain what this alleged “privilege” consisted of, but it was nowhere to be found for the millions of white southerners who were subsumed, alongside blacks, in the crop-lien system of agriculture known as sharecropping. Neither did poor southern whites benefit politically from the extreme oppression of blacks. Beginning in the 1890s, the Southern elite imposed a series of restrictions on the vote that virtually barred blacks from participating in elections, and drastically reduced the involvement of whites, among them poll taxes (fees levied at the voting booth), literacy tests, and the “grandfather clause” which required voters to demonstrate that their grandfathers had been voting citizens. As for social improvements, the South remained the most backward region of the country, with massive poverty for both races, poor infrastructure, low levels of literacy, and short life expectancies. Poor blacks and whites remained in objective terms exploited by the white Southern ruling class and, behind it, the railroad companies, the banks and the corporations in the North and Northeast. As historians like C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner have established, postwar Southern racism was fanned from above by a Southern ruling class that was terrified over the prospect that poor whites and blacks would act upon their common interests. None of this lessens the horrific reality that thousands of blacks were lynched, tens of thousands more thrown in jail, and blacks as an entire segment of Southern society were forced into legal and social second-class citizenship in what was, in all but name, a racial caste system. Skin color made a qualitative difference in the life of a Southern person living under Jim Crow. But segregation did not provide poor whites with positive political or social benefits that would lead to an improvement of their living standards. In economic and political terms, racial segregation drove wages down for all races, it reduced social spending on schools, hospitals and other social services, and the backward political and cultural climate that dominated the South well into the mid-20th century has created conditions for the hyper-exploitation of all white and black workers that remains today. In a larger sense, regardless of what an individual poor white person thought (and racism was not the sole property of the rich), the segregationist system did not provide the majority of whites with “privilege” because segregation ultimately blocked the development of a united movement from below, which was the only thing that could have improved the living conditions of all Southern workers and farmers.

The political and material roots of racist ideology

As Woodward showed in his landmark The Strange Career of Jim Crow, segregation, and all that it entailed, took decades to implement. It was not until the first years of the 20th century that it reached its full dimensions—the near-total segregation of public space, the stamping out of democratic rights, and the ready use of violent “southern justice” and the lynch mob to prop it all up. And it came in direct response to a political

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movement of poor whites and blacks that posed an existential threat to slavocracy’s heirs in “the New South.” The post-Reconstruction development of the class struggle across the US, including in the South, gave impetus to a powerful tendency among black and white workers and poor farmers toward unity against the corporations. It was this objective process which organically undercut the racial politics of the Southern Democratic elites. Faced with the threat posed by the Farmers Alliances and Populist movements of the post-Reconstruction period, rich whites, aided by the strikebreakers in the Ku Klux Klan, asserted that efforts to mobilize small farmers and workers against the big landowners and the corporations (especially in unity with black sharecroppers) threatened the system of “white supremacy.” Woodward describes how thousands of poor white and black farmers filled the small towns of Georgia in the early 1890s, traveling great distances to hear Congressman Tom Watson declare that the People’s Party opposed racism and would “make lynch law odious to the people.” Woodward wrote of southern Populism at its apex: Under Watson’s tutelage the Southern white masses were beginning to learn to regard the Negro as a political ally bound to them by economic ties and a common destiny, rather than as a slender prop to injured self-esteem in the shape of “White Supremacy.” Here was a foundation of political realism upon which some more enduring structure of economic democracy might be constructed. Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.1 The catastrophic breakup of this burgeoning alliance was in large part the product of widespread farmer dissatisfaction with the People’s Party’s rotten “fusion” with the Democratic Party, both in the 1894 midterm elections and in 1896 with the party’s nomination of Nebraskan agrarian Democrat William Jennings Bryan as its presidential candidate, who had previously secured the nomination of the Democratic Party. This event, hypocritically facilitated by Watson himself, deflated the Populist wave and opened up a period of bitter reaction across the country. This should serve as a historical lesson for those who argue today that “left” causes will be aided by working within the confines of the Democratic Party. In the South, the Democratic Party capitalized on the mood of defeat to drastically expand Jim Crow segregation, making a breakthrough in their decades-long effort to divide poor whites and blacks against one another. In May 1896, when the plan for Bryan’s nomination was far advanced, the Supreme Court gave pseudo-legal cover to the doctrine of “separate but equal” in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

1.  C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, (1938; 1955) Google Books.

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The lynching of Leo Frank, August 17, 1915

The historian Robert Wiebe wrote that “the movement for Jim Crow revived after 1896.” Referencing the decline of Populism, Wiebe adds: The viciousness with which Southern farmers and townsmen attacked the Negro after 1896 told a story of the community’s failure … Along with that lingering suspicion of immigrants came an increasingly elaborate race theory, designed to cover all peoples, and the spread of a cold, formalized anti-Semitism. Throughout America a residual fear had shrunk the outer limits of optimism.2 Tom Watson, as Woodward explains, became a vicious racist, rejoining the Democratic Party and notoriously inflaming public opinion against Jewish factory manager Leo Frank when the latter was falsely charged with the 1913 murder of a 13-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta. Watson called Frank a “libertine Jew” and demanded his death in his newspaper, the Jeffersonian, contradicting his earlier statements by writing, “Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that justice lives among the people.” A mob killed Frank on August 17, 1915. The political degeneration expressed by Watson’s transformation was not inevitable or predestined by intrinsic racism or popular Southern “bitterness” over the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. That position has far more in common with the Lost 2.  Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 110.

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Cause historians than the New York Times’ “1619” promoters would care to admit. A different trend was expressed, for example, in the Alabama-born anarchist editor Albert Parsons, who had served as a young man in the Confederate Army and would be hanged in 1887 in Illinois after the Haymarket provocation. Parsons wrote of his break with the Confederacy: I have made some enemies. My enemies in the South States consisted of those who oppressed the black-slave. My enemies in the North are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage-slave.3 Merritt cites Karl Marx’s statement from his writings on the American Civil War that “Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin.” Marx continues, “But out of the death of slavery a new, rejuvenated life sprouted immediately.” The abolition of slavery triggered a massive growth of manufacturing, in particular in the Northern cities, and opened up the prospect for great revolutionary struggles of the working class, which rapidly manifested in the explosive railroad rebellion of 1877. That strike witnessed powerful united demonstrations of white and black workers in places like St. Louis, where the Workingman’s Party fought for the unity of workers of all races in the fight against the railroad barons. Since the end of World War II, the South has undergone heavy industrialization, transforming states like Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina from agricultural backwaters into the “sun belt” of manufacturing and production. This is a component of a global process, in which the international integration of the world economy has transformed China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India and even sections of Africa into centers of world production, bringing billions of workers into the process of production. All over the world, traditions of racial and religious chauvinism are being undercut by objective economic developments and advances in communications and transport. The chief task of the present political situation is to establish the unity of this powerful international working class, regardless of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or any other dividing line, in a common global fight against the capitalist system. This requires a fight against all forms of historical falsification, including efforts to portray American slavery as having conferred on white workers a “privilege” from which they still benefit. Ultimately this argument is another chapter in the American ruling class’s long history of employing race to divide and conquer. Merritt’s book is a critical contribution to this fight, undermining the claim that poor and working-class whites benefited from slavery. It is hoped that she, along with other honest historians, will reevaluate the assumption that they were beneficiaries of the racial oppression under Jim Crow. 3.  Albert R. Parsons, Autobiography, accessed September 2, 2019: http://memory.loc.gov/award/ichihay/ m07/m07.htm

Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections? By Niles Niemuth 21 June 2019 A contentious hearing was held Wednesday before the US House Judiciary Committee on Bill H.R. 40, that would establish a congressional commission to study and consider a national apology and reparations for slavery and succeeding racial and economic discrimination against African Americans. The bill, sponsored by Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston, Texas, was first introduced by the former Congressman John Conyers in 1989 and at every annual session since for nearly three decades. Wednesday, however, marked the first time that a bill relating to reparations for slavery was considered by the full committee. Despite the widespread coverage in the media, including front page and op-ed treatment in the New York Times, there is no mass upswell of popular sentiment for reparations. In fact, a 2018 poll found that just 26 percent of Americans supported monetary reparations for the descendants of slaves. At a time when social inequality is driving a growing movement of workers and youth, the issue is being deliberately promoted by the Democratic Party to inject racial divisions into the heart of the 2020 election campaign. The formation of a commission has been co-sponsored by Tulsi Gabbard, Eric Swalwell and Tim Ryan, three of the four current Democratic Representatives running for the party’s presidential nomination. The bill also has the backing of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, both presidential candidates. Booker was the first person to testify at Wednesday’s hearing. The panel included a cross section of privileged, upper-middle class African Americans, from author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a strong supporter of Barack Obama who spoke

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Ta-Nehisi Coates and Danny Glover testified at the Congressional hearing on H.R. 40

out in favor of reparations, to retired American football player Burgess Owens, who used his time to oppose reparations from the far-right, delivering a screed denouncing socialism and Marxism. The call for reparations raises complex political and historical questions that are nowhere addressed by any of those taking up the demand. With no living survivors of the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery, it is impossible to place it in the framework of legal reparations. How would such reparations be paid and by whom? By the direct descendants of slave holders? Only by those who had ancestors living in the US during the period of slavery? By all whites? Or would it be extracted from society as a whole? By what mechanism, moreover, would it be established who is eligible to receive reparations for slavery? Since race has no biological foundation, would the proponents of reparations return to the racist “one drop” rule that prevailed in the south to determine who is black? Or would they object to paying reparations to the many Americans with African slave ancestors who identify as white, and therefore presumably benefit from “white privilege”? Moreover, why limit reparations to African Americans? The story of the United States is one of countless tragedies and historical injustices affecting every segment of the working class, from the Irish, Chinese and Germans to Italians and Jews. And of course, there are the many tribes of Native Americans, who had their land stolen and treaties with the federal government routinely broken. With many today still living on remote reservations, they suffer rates of poverty and police violence higher than African Americans. Proponents of reparations transform race into the fundamental category that is the essential framework for understanding all American history. Chattel slavery

Why are reparations for slavery an issue in the 2020 US elections?

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is seen as just one episode in an enduring reign of “white supremacy,” which was simply continued after the Civil War in another form of racial oppression, Jim Crow segregation and housing discrimination, and continues in the current period with mass incarceration. In fact, slavery was a system of socio-economic exploitation, with a global reach, stretching from the heart of the African continent to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the dockyards of Great Britain. It was abolished in the United States more than 150 years ago after a monumental civil war, the Second American Revolution. Those promoting reparations display a complete indifference to the actual historical experience. They ignore and dismiss the significance of the Civil War, in which the working class played a critical role. The hundreds of thousands who paid for the bondsmen’s freedom with their lives were overwhelmingly white, motivated by an ideological and political struggle against slavery. It was understood by the most advanced political thinkers at the time that there was a fundamental connection between the development of a working-class movement against capitalism and the elimination of slavery. Karl Marx noted in Capital: “[E]very independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, the oppression of African Americans was linked to the development of modern capitalism and the class struggle. Racism was consciously stoked by the elites and demagogues to divide white and black workers. Campaigns of terrorism and lynchings were carried out by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to enforce divisions between black and white workers and tenant farmers. The Civil Rights movement developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a mass movement, uniting blacks and whites, in the fight for the enforcement of legal equality for all. At the end of his life, one of the leaders of that movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a Poor Peoples March to demand economic justice for all, regardless of race. However, in the half century since the end of the Civil Rights movement, there has been an enormous effort, led by the Democratic Party, to separate the social issues that confront African American workers from the working class as a whole. The result of policies such as Affirmative Action has been a social disaster for those at the bottom and the enrichment of a tiny layer of black millionaires and billionaires. The fundamental dividing line in American society—and world capitalism as a whole—is class, not race, nationality or gender. The reparations bill refers to the fact that African Americans have “an unemployment rate more than twice the current white unemployment rate; and an average of less than 1/16 of the wealth of white families, a disparity which has worsened, not improved over time.” It says nothing, however, of the class disparity among African Americans, or among whites. Never has the wealth gap between rich and working-class blacks been greater, and the same goes for everyone else, regardless of skin color.

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Lincoln with McClellan and Union troops at Antietam, October 3, 1862

The basic issues confronting African American workers—unemployment, poverty, debt, attacks on wages and health care, police violence, war—are the issues confronting all workers, white and black, immigrant and native born. Under these conditions, to propose that a social program be developed to benefit one or another ethnicity is repugnant. The demand for monetary reparations has the unpleasant odor of a financial scam. Figures like Coates and Booker do not speak for the working class, but for a layer of the upper middle class who are seeking to affect a more equitable distribution of wealth at the top of society. If a racial reparations program ever did get passed through Congress, one can be certain that it would only benefit upper middle class African Americans and leave workers scrounging for crumbs from the table. It has, moreover, the clear character of a political scam. Under conditions of growing class struggle internationally, its purpose is to divide workers against each other and preserve the social and economic system, capitalism, that is at the root of all the ills, including racism, confronting the working class as a whole. In this regard, it serves a similar function as Trump’s fascistic appeals to anti-immigrant chauvinism. The Socialist Equality Party does not support reparations. It fights for the unity of the working class in the struggle for genuine equality. The vast wealth monopolized by the rich must be expropriated, and the giant corporations turned into democratically controlled utilities, run on the basis of social need, not private profit. This is the fight for socialism, in the United States and around the world.

The attacks on Green Book and the racialist infection of the affluent middle class By David Walsh and Joanne Laurier 8 March 2019 As the WSWS previously noted, the decision to bestow the Best Picture award on Green Book (directed by Peter Farrelly) at the Academy Awards on February 24 triggered a furious response in the American media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. How dare the Academy honor a work that suggested whites and blacks could get along, that they might even learn from each other and overcome prejudices, and that, indeed, social progress depended upon such interactions! What outdated, regressive, hopelessly naïve views! Bridge the gap between “white America” and “black America”? What a fantasy! The official media spoke almost as one: Green Book, with its suggestion that human beings can be enlightened and undergo change (in this case, an Italian American worker from the Bronx), is primarily designed to make whites “feel good” when the reality, according to such elements, is that the white population is thoroughly racist, now and forever. The outpouring continues. The racialist infection of the affluent middle class, including its “left” elements, has reached an advanced stage. In many cases, and we write this advisedly, there is not a great deal of difference between the current infection

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and the fascist-nationalist ideology that helped produce such immense tragedy in the first half of the 20th century. Something deeply sick and reactionary is occurring in these layers. At the same time, popular sentiment in favor of  Green Book  is considerable. Some of the vile reviews and columns have provoked a response, including in online commentary. A social and moral divide has opened up, on this question as on many, between the cynical, selfish petty bourgeoisie, obsessed with its wealth and advancement—and the great majority of the working population, essentially decent and democratic in its outlook and, in fact, relatively generous in its attitude toward differences and tolerant of human foibles. ( Green Book, in fact, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, a fact which the film’s detractors find revealing and unforgivable.) Summing up the state of affairs, Indiewire noted that the victory of Green Book at the Academy Awards “was immediately met with outrage from movie journalists and critics on social media, who all felt a sense of déjà vu in watching a polarizing drama about race relations.” Polarizing? This is not a case of a film with some dubious or inflammatory, possibly right-wing message. The “polarization” in this case occurs between this crowd of hardened racialists in the media, official politics and the universities and the general public, which is moving in another direction. Again, for those who have not seen Green Book, it concerns an Italian-American bouncer, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) who is hired as a driver and escort for black pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), during a tour of the Midwest and Jim Crow South in 1962. The script was co-written by Vallelonga’s son. Over the course of the two months, the two men become close. One of the film’s most poignant moments occurs after Vallelonga has discovered, as the result of an unhappy incident involving the police, that Shirley is gay. “I’ve been working nightclubs in New York City my whole life,” Vallelonga says. “I know it’s a... complicated world.” There are Hollywood-esque aspects of the film and no doubt a certain simplification takes place of a highly complicated and intense event and relationship. Some of that, however, is almost inevitable when such thorny issues are involved. All in all, this is a popular film working at a high level, that both entertains and sheds light on important matters. In any case, the racially obsessed commentators are not criticizing Green Book for its weaknesses, but its considerable strengths. The notion, for example, that a piece of trash such as Black Panther or Spike Lee’s poorly constructed and tedious—and in its most “political” sections, utterly contrived and unconvincing—BlacKkKlansman was more worthy of the Best Picture award is simply laughable. The bitter complaints directed against Green Book (along with Lee’s own disgraceful performance at the award ceremony) have next to nothing to do with the film’s art, and nearly everything to do with its social outlook and optimism.

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Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book

Lest we be accused of exaggerating the pernicious assault on Green Book, it is necessary to cite more passages than we would care to from its treatment in the media. Heaping scorn on the possibility of whites and blacks getting along has been a favorite theme. Vanity Fair magazine, for example, commented: “Green Book purports to be about racial reconciliation, a popular sentiment among people who want everyone, holding hands, to take responsibility for ending white supremacy—not just its beneficiaries. It’s a troubling, tedious idea, but a very common one—rooted, I think, in a desire to be forgiven.” Teen Vogue argued brilliantly that “Green Book Won Best Picture at the Oscars Because it Made White People Feel Good About Themselves.” Apparently, “white people” should only “Feel Bad” about themselves. This kind of reactionary rhetoric helps drive layers of the population into the arms of the extreme right. One of the fouler pieces, which we have commented on previously, appeared in the New York Times prior to the Academy Awards, “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” ( January 23), by Wesley Morris. In that piece, Morris counterposed Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) to Green Book. He described Lee’s miserable film as a “masterpiece about a boiled-over pot of racial animus in Brooklyn.” That movie, he asserted, “dramatized a starker truth—we couldn’t all just get along.” In 1989, Lee “was pretty much on his own as a voice of black racial reality … He helped plant the seeds for an environment in which black artists can look askance at race.” As opposed to those who “had been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies,” Lee understood, according to Morris, that “closure is impossible because the blood is too bad, too historically American.” Morris followed up this foulness by taking part in a conversation about the Academy Awards with two other New York Times critics, A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis (“What ‘Green Book’ Says About the Academy. Our Critics on the Oscars,” February 25).

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(It apparently doesn’t occur to either Morris, Scott or Dargis, in their petty bourgeois blindness and obtuseness, that their very intellectual and personal cooperation puts the lie to their opposition to “racial-reconciliation fantasies.” How do they, two white people and one black, “get along”? Why aren’t they at each other throats before 10 minutes has passed?) In the course of the three-way discussion, Scott complained that “the best picture trophy went to a movie whose best friend is black [sic], a movie that doesn’t see color, a movie about how all lives matter.” Horrors! Aside from the fact that the claim is patently untrue—racism, both in Vallelonga’s family and in the Deep South, is a very active issue in Green Book —the reader is evidently supposed to respond with indignation to the fact that the movie “doesn’t see color” and suggests “all lives matter.” That such views are anathema within this milieu, and that Scott and company see nothing objectionable about holding such reactionary views, is an indication of how far to the right this well-heeled liberal and even “left” layer has moved. The Guardian in Britain (of course!) chimed in to claim, in a column by Joseph Harker, that “Green Book ’s Oscar shows Hollywood still doesn’t get race—A best picture for this trite, nostalgic white-centred tale? The academy wants us to believe racism no longer exists.” On the contrary, of course, Farrelly is obviously disturbed by present-day conditions, including the growth of the extreme right and fascistic forces encouraged by the Trump administration, and intends his work to be a cautionary tale. Harker, like many of the critics, objects strenuously to the notion that Vallelonga, “a racist white driver,” is “somehow ‘saved’ by his black passenger.” This was one of Morris’ themes too, in his January 23 piece, in which he denounced Green Book for its “particularly perverse fantasy” that “absolution resides in a neutered black man needing a white guy not only to protect and serve him, but to love him, too.” This is not only malicious, but stupid. In any event, as we have previously noted, the civilizing influence of one human being or layer of the population on another is simply ruled out of order by this logic. Another particularly repellent and provocative piece, by Justin Chang, appeared in the Los Angeles Times on February 24. Chang, a LA Times film critic and identity politics zealot, is especially venomous: “Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. ‘Green Book’ is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.” Chang goes on in this right-wing vein at considerable length. To a certain extent, the review has to be read to be believed. The LA Times critic acknowledges that his views are not popular: “I can tell I’ve already annoyed some of you, though if you take more offense at what I’ve written than you do at ‘Green Book,’ there may not be much more to say. Differences in taste are nothing new, but there is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked

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by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult. Maybe ‘Green Book’ really is the movie of the year after all—not the best movie, but the one that best captures the polarization that arises whenever the conversation shifts toward matters of race, privilege and the all-important question of who gets to tell whose story.” Yes, we will point out once again, the “polarization” exists between this aspiring, grasping petty bourgeois and wide layers of the population struggling to get by economically and hostile to the obsession with racial and Don Shirley gender politics. An interview published in the Nation (“Hollywood Is Still a Sundown Town for Black Representation,” February 26) pointed to this social reality. In speaking to filmmaker Yoruba Richen, who has made a documentary about The Negro Motorist Green Book (the starting point for Farrelly’s Green Book, published between 1936 and 1966), interviewer Aaron Ross Coleman asked what call to action—in response to Farrelly’s film—Richen envisioned, “whether it’s supporting black-owned businesses or maybe a call for more investment in them?” And Richen replied, “I would say, support blackowned businesses, support black stories, let’s change the narratives. It’s about high time. Let’s change the narrative and take control of our own image and representation.” Identity politics is an immense and profitable industry. A substantial social stratum has a heavy investment in it. The lives and careers of thousands of people are thoroughly bound up with it. What would be left of a filmmaker like Spike Lee or a critic like Chang if racial and gender politics were removed? Very little. Aside from their selfishness and ambition, these wealthy social layers, including upper middle class and bourgeois African Americans, are increasingly terrified of a unified movement of workers from below because it threatens their class position and privileges. To divide the working class along racial, ethnic and gender lines is essential for the defense of American capitalism. (It is no accident that David Duke, the former KKK leader, has expressed admiration for Spike Lee and that white supremacists found much to praise in Black Panther. Racialism and chauvinism are the province of the far right.)

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Chang’s comment was so egregious that it provoked an angry response. The LA Times was obliged to post some of the replies in “Criticism of ‘Green Book’s’ Oscar win by The Times’ Justin Chang sparks strong reader reaction” (February 28). One reader commented, “Just as Justin Chang said I would, I take offense at his review of the best picture Oscar winner, ‘Green Book.’ ‘Reasonable disagreement’? No, it was a hatchet job; the film was great.” A second wrote, “I find this ‘Green Book’ backlash ridiculous. This is a film about two men, opposites, who through a dangerous journey found friendship and grew to have each other’s backs. They changed each other’s lives on countless levels.” A third asked, “Must we also loathe such films as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Glory’ because of the sin of a white perspective?” One reader observed, “As an African American, I was offended by the presumption that only black audiences can take the moral high road on matters of race. Really? Folly, arrogance and cruelty come in all colors. Don’t tell us what is white and what is black.” A number of prominent figures, some of whom actually knew Don Shirley, also responded positively and powerfully to Green Book. In December, legendary African American music producer Quincy Jones addressed the audience at a screening of Farrelly’s film in Los Angeles. According to Deadline, Jones said, “I hope that you all enjoyed this very special film about friendship and the power of music to bring people together … I had the pleasure of being acquainted with Don Shirley while I was working as an arranger in New York in the ’50s, and he was without question one of America’s greatest pianists … as skilled a musician as Leonard Bernstein or Van Cliburn. … So it is wonderful that his story is finally being told and celebrated. Mahershala [Ali], you did an absolutely fantastic job playing him, and I think yours and Viggo’s [Mortensen] performances will go down as one of the great friendships captured on film.” Deadline reported that Jones added, “I did that ‘Chitlin Circuit’ tour through the South when I was with the Lionel Hampton band, and let me tell you … it was no picnic. And we were a band. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to do it alone with just a driver. So Peter [Farrelly, the film’s director-writer], thank you for telling this story of our country’s not-so-distant history and capturing on film the ties that can bind us when we spend time listening, talking and living with one another.” More recently, 92-year-old Harry Belafonte, the singer, songwriter and actor, answered critics of the film. (Significantly, Belafonte has a role in Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.) In an email, he commented, “My wife Pamela and I just finished watching Green Book and although I don’t usually do this, I am compelled to drop this note to thank the filmmakers for having made this film for us all to see. I knew Don Shirley, and, in fact, had an office across the street from his at Carnegie Hall, and I experienced much of what he did at the same time. This movie is accurate, it is true, and it’s a wonderful movie that everyone should see. “The few people who appear to be objecting to the film’s depiction of the time and the man are dead wrong, and, if the basis of their resentment stems from it having

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been written and/or directed by someone who isn’t African American, I disagree with them even more. There are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and all can be true. “I personally thank the filmmakers for having told this important story from a very different lens, one no less compelling than any other. “So again, I say to the filmmakers, thank you, and congratulations.” In a piece in the Hollywood Reporter (“Why the ‘Green Book’ Controversies Don’t Matter,” January 14), basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar defended the film against its racialist critics. As his final argument, he took up “the question of whether the story should have been told by three white men: director and co-writer Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga (Tony’s son) and co-producer Brian Currie. Artistically, it shouldn’t make a difference. A good artist must be able to re-create characters who are different than themselves. While I’m aware that blacks in the film industry need greater representation—and I strongly advocate for them—I’m also aware that this was a passion project that might not have been made if not for the commitment of these men.” At an event in New York City in January, a group of Don Shirley’s friends strongly defended the film. Indiewire, before it discovered how “reprehensible” the film was, reported, for example, that former friend and piano student “Michael Kappeyne told the crowd, ‘I believe I speak for all of [his friends] when I say that this has been a wonderful experience, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful movie for so many reasons.’ … Choking up, he continued, ‘We are really thrilled with Dr. Shirley’s portrayal, because we think it’s right on the money, we feel the dignity, we feel the wariness, we feel some of the hidden anger, of which he had a lot, but we also feel the presence and generosity of spirit that he had towards all of us, and he helped several of us and changed our lives.’” The social and cultural divide is great in America, and, as the class struggle intensifies, it is only becoming greater.

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