>> Racism discriminates against people on the grounds of race. Just like it says on the packet. It can be as arbitrary in its choice of victim as it is systemic in its execution. And while it never works alone (but rather in cahoots with class, gender and a host of other rogue characters), it has political license to operate independently. It's a basic lesson at relatively low cost. And yet the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests we are doomed to keep repeating the lesson. Barack Obama was right when he referred to the arrest as a "teachable moment," but given the brouhaha that has followed, it seems that even a moment involving the nation's most prominent black intellectual teaches us nothing. <<<
Comment There’s a old saying where I grew up. “There’s two kind of creatures that don’t live long in America. Dogs that chase cars and niggas fucking with the police.” I don’t chase cars or fuck with the police. Gates damn near got an “ outdate.” Outdates are widely celebrated in Detroit and areas in America where the poorest of America’s proletarians are concentrated in large numbers. Outdate is the date you got out of jail. In America its easier to catch a case than a cold. Such is the circumstance of the most destitute and politically oppressed sections of our proletariat. Let’s examine what happened. A prominent professor - “public intellectual,” gets arrested and has charges against him dropped. The incident is sparked by a neighbor calling the police. The police - the laws, arrived to discover the individual in question is “breaking into their own home” because of a jammed door or lost keys. The professor produces identity papers establishing residency and a verbal squabble ensues. The professor demands badge numbers from the police and apparently puts forth his personal ideology concerning the nature of policing in America and ends up arrested on a flexible charge of battery. Let’s make the professor WHITE. See where this is going? Now this white professor happens to be married to a black women. Did the police notice the pictures of the white professor and his black wife sitting on the mantle? What’s actually happening inside the home was not just the professor establishing his residency, but the residency establishing that the professor resided their through pictures of husband, wife and children. Testosterone levels rise and the complex body language between individuals undergo subtle shift. The professor understands the soundless communication of body language; the shifting of weight that is the agitation before attack mode. The intimidation is palpable. Professor with glasses shifts body weight and so does the police. “You guys got what you want get the fuck out of my house.” “There’s nothing to look at here.” The laws pivot on their feet and lock eyes with professor glasses. Professor is 5’7 and the laws are all 6’ and above. “Take it easy professor. We’re just doing our job and don’t have to put up with your crap.” The laws grin sensing fear in the intellectual eyes of professor. In a nervous impulse professor wipes his glasses with his shirt. His heart rate increases with a deafening noise. The laws hear this accelerated heart beat and lovin it. Professor going to jail. The charge: he used a bad word. II. One cannot speak of the color factor as American history in a rational manner. Insanity cannot be understood or articulated on the basis of sanity. Every social problem cannot be resolved. Some things are dissolved by history, like the peasant question and the fate of the small producer. Historical feces cannot be fixed by politics. White supremacy cannot be resolved, only dissolved. History dissolves as resolution. Historical questions and issues are dissolved by human beings fighting for resolution. Liberal intellectuals deeply feel that politics and intellectual-political fiat and/or class outlook or correct political line, can resolve issues. Bullshit. Talk about faulty logic. Once social - human, phenomenon is set in motion it has to run its course. Social phenomenon as systematic class relations and economic systems, are subject to human assault and physical reshaping at two junctures; when leaping between a quantitative boundary and/or a qualitative reformulation. When something fundamental to a process change, or begins changing, then everything dependent upon that which is fundamental must in turn change. Not all at one time, but change must take place. Its that simple. The evolution of the color factor in our history has passed through quantitative and qualitative boundaries. The color factor in history begins with primitive accumulation of capital. Reaches America as Indian slaughter and leaps to a new juncture with the invention of Eli Whitney. Class becomes branded and crystallized as color. A slave class. Color becomes an index. Color is not a category of class or economics. Color as an index is the framework for application of the rules of the game. The game is power politics and class rule. The Civil War frees the slaves and a new juncture is reached. Emancipation is cool. A mutherfuckers can now make some money and have a girlfriend without the middle man sampling the product. In 1885 nobody knows the next 90 years going to be really fucked up. Reaction sets in in 1890’s. I guess the American workers did not have a class program. There was however, an ass program: “asses and elbows.” The slave class - the branding, becomes the sharecropping class. Some escape to the North. The Russian Revolution realigned politics planet wide and the color factor is placed under the rubric of the national and colonial factor. The shift takes place in 1928 in the Comintern documents on the Negro Question. 1928 was a big year. The Comintern forcing the Negro Question documents on the American communist would spilt the communist/socialist movement for the next 91 years. Oh .. . Pardon, this history is usually told from the upside cloaked in denial deeper than the mythical Egyptian river of the same name. Let me get history right. 1928 unfolds as the year of the great depression and industrial union conflict. A man without a job in heavy industry in the North does not need a union. Classes cannot be united. Un-equals can never be united without tremendous pressure that deepens and maintains the inequality. In this time frame the blacks are sharecroppers in the main and the industrial proletarians are white. The grand alliance called workers and peasant is rolled out like a Ali’s carpet. Stop it. 1939 introduces the tractor. The sharecropper as a class is liquidated from history. Not all at one time. The color factor evolves or rather, a new form of the class struggle unfolds inside all classes. . The Civil Rights Movement is underway. Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Workers Power. This is not called the class struggle by most. It is called the race struggle. Desegregation in its fundamentality is achieved. The year is 1987. The signpost is the 1987 UAW Contract. Home rule - extra-seniority rights to return to ones department, by local plants is overthrown. Some use other signposts. From Montgomery, Alabama to 1963 Birmingham where the workers engaged the state, to 67 Watts to Detroit and Newark of 1967/68 to Tampa Florida 1989. Then Rodney King entered history and the City of Angels exploded. I’m like, “Ok . . . This another level.” At any rate the 1960s Voting Rights and Fair Housing Legislation is a signpost up to the period of the Denny’s Restaurant lawsuit. From a caste/class/color question to the class and color factor seems to be the evolution. The police also evolved during this entire period. Y’all remember the mythical story about the hillbilly family feuds between with the Jones battling the McCoys, because somebody did not marry someone and said the baby was not mine? The police evolved from flatfoots to armed men in vehicles or the “rolling Jones” then a direct subsidiary of the military. Corporations built private armies and then next thing you have is professors with glasses being handcuffed. The bourgeoisie and the police - the laws or state, or what is the same, “ the rolling Jones,“ understands this process from their unique state of being the state. We are not going to resolve the color factor by political fiat. Can’t happen no matter how many times one screams internationalism. Capital rest exclusively on wage labor in competition for work. - jobs. As one layer of workers are crushed down into another the lowest section of the proletariat becomes truly multinational. A layer of capitalist becomes truly multinational and divorced - suspended in mid air, from productive capital. Antagonism supersedes contradiction. See the serf could not overthrow the nobility or the landed property relations. New class(es) had to form, birthed in antagonism with the existing system. The system is constituted as a primary property/class relations or class contradiction stabilizing the system called feudalism. New classes overthrew political feudalism. The advance of industry shattered, destabilized and led to the overthrow of the feudal system. As the overthrow unfolded political representatives of labor and capital fought to capture political authority. The signpost for our brave new world is the emergence of anti-property as a multinational class of the dispossessed. Capital, property and wealth as a property form has to be overthrow to dissolve the color factor. Capital is doing this as much as it can. We’ll finish the job. Demographic and economic shift makes such possible today. III. Henry Louis Gates Jr., understand this process as “old school “heir of the Talented Tenth. Go rent the video “Two Nations of Black America” narrated by Gates. The front jacket reads: “Explore the gaping chasm between upper and lower classes of black America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” President Obama slipped, as his Presidential functioning collided with his function as representative of the state. Government and state are not the same. When Obama called the arrest of Gates an act of stupidity, he spoke as President or government official. When he apologized it was as head of state. The state is an organization of police violence. National security or Security National my man. Obama’s slip does not mean he blurted out the unspeakable. Slipped as in standing on oil. Oil lubricates the interlocking gears of state and government as these functions are expressed in one man. The state struck back swiftly against government. This reminded me of Stalin’s Russia where state, government and party were combined in one figure. “Nigga fuck you,” cried the state. “I’m sorry, lets drink a beer,” roared government. “You and the WHITE professor and black police officer need to chill the fuck out and sit down and drink a beer. Let the police do their job.” The state gets the last word in. See how nothing changed? After all, the large spaces in America set aside for mass incarcerations are meant for the white proletarian population, who would never agree to such programs in previous decades unless they were repeatedly told the purpose is to house the blacks. See how nothing changed? The split between the police and great bulk of the proletarian masses is complete. All of society is experiencing the historic rupture. For reasons of history this process ruptures first on the basis of the color factor. IV. Gates should not have been arrested. First intellectuals are drummed out of jobs - for faulty research, (Ward Churchill) and then arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama says this is a “teachable moment.” Pardon, but I have a headache and not in the mood for another lesson. No more “teachable moments” for me, thank you. Such moments tend to involve handcuffs, guns, blue uniforms and mutherfuckers over 6‘tall wearing those size 13 round toed shoes. “A teachable moment.” OK. What have we learned? A little dude with glasses arrives home from China. He was probably lecturing the Chinese in the intellectual and cultural protocols of being better capitalists than capitalist and other delicacies of implementing bourgeois democracy and freedom of thought. “Dare to be Bourgeois.” Gate’s teaches cultural heritage shit with all kinds of fancy descriptions of the historical significance of the “signifying monkey.” Dr. Du Bois - who went to China, probably had his name tossed about. Do you know why the monkey signify? His symbolic gestures betray his powerlessness. The monkey can hurt you but he is after all a monkey. The teachable moment. Little guy with glasses cannot find his front door keys. He gets into the house after neighbor calls police to investigate a back door break in. The story end with little guy in handcuffs. Members of the Communists Party of China or is it still the Chinese Communist Party, see little guy on television with handcuffs on. Then Obama appears protesting little guy’s arrest and the members of the CCP says, “maybe things are getting better in America. After all the President spoke up for the black guy.” Insanity cannot be explained on the basis of sanity. Do the teachable moment ever end and one graduates from this school? Remember the movie “Groundhog Day,” where dude keep waking up to the same day? V. America has in fact changed without changing the property relations Let’s locate this event in Detroit outside the isolated island neighborhoods of prosperity. You call the police and say, “I believe someone is breaking into the house next door. They are trying to push the back door in.” You wait for the police to arrive. After three months you stop waiting. The police do not show up over a house break-in in that growing area of America that are its proletarian slums and bums. The police show up in nice neighborhoods. Other than that, the laws ride the large boulevards, regulating the legal, illegal and extra-legal exchange of commodities. The same thing happens when the police ask you to pull your car over. That is to say, the police don’t just pull over people in Detroit, unless there are 10 squad cars and a SWAT team. See, the young boyz have got out of hand and 80% of them have “outdates.” When pulled over, it is understood that the strategic design is to be the last one to die. VI. Gates is starting to look like a Sambo intellectual. Sambo was the slave that beat Uncle Tom to death in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” This is not to suggest Henry Louis Gates Jr. should have been handcuffed or arrested. Society moves in class antagonism. In the blink of an eye Obama has crystallized the new period. Let's drink a beer. Miller time. 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