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Mark observed: the author is entirely mistaken when he compares the
racialization of Arabs and Muslims 'in ways that approximate Cold War images of
African-Americans.' White racism against blacks was always endemic to American
history, and the period of the Cold War saw the most serious assault on racism
in nearly a century. And it was extremely successful, insofar as the images
of African-Americans might go.
Mark's point is not as inconsequential as he believes. Although Bayoumi may be
entering the historic discourse on race and its role, especially in U.S.
society, his points are particularly poignant when one considers, as Mark
correctly does, that race relations changed during the Cold War era in some,
though in the broad scheme of capital's struggle for survival inconsequential,
significant way. Historically speaking Blacks, in main, though one could argue
that legal Latinos might be included, won some measure of uplift through the
radicalization of the 50's 60's that ultimately resulted in the establishment
of a strengthened Black middle class; that is to say, bourgeois sectors such
as the Johnsons (i.e., of Johnson Johnson), petite bourgeois in the form of
strengthened small business owners, and the most important, labor aristocracy
(e.g., in the academy and labor unions) and Democratic Party bureaucracy (we
are all familiar with that outcome). However that history is one of maintaining
the survival of capital by enlisting the most squeaky wheel of the squeaky
wheels into the buy-in to defend the interests of capitalism and its ultimate
control of the reins of power; commerce and government.
Making this point does not alter in any way the true nature of the Black (or
Brown, or Asian, or Indigenous) experience in capitalist society, Blacks remain
the most chronically unemployed, the most likely to profiled, and targeted, in
short, remain the prime targets of racial oppression precisely because of their
potential for playing a different role. Why else would capital (metaphorically
and actually) spend so much time upholding Black leadership in their
unrelenting attack on the working class and oppressed communities of which
comprise working people? The racist, xenophobic assault on Arab peoples,
disguised alternately as an assault on terrorism and anti-Christian values,
is only strengthened if White capitalists can hide behind Black leaders (and
legal Latinos, reasonable Asians, and Indians, in a particularly cynical
twist of history) in their true assault on all working people and the
oppressed. What better way to make the case for the best of all possible
worlds than by enlisting the very people who will need to be oppressed to
accomplish such a world?
I know this view is not news to many of you (though I find sometimes that there
are those who never truly learned this point), but the current and real
observed racialization of Arab peoples is in total consistency with the
historical advent of racism that was the most salient outcome of the European
conquest of the rest of the world. It is best for the oppressor to divide and
conquer, by any means necessary. Hence it is essential we follow the dictate to
unify the working class by any means necessary.
I make these points not to render into relief the rather obvious for most of
us, but to make explicit the true historic change that has come about by the
advent of Black leadership in the defense of capitalism and imperialism; the
enlisting of a significant sector of the oppressed in American society in the
direct promotion of racist policy abroad and within the U.S. It is not simply
the racist campaign against Arabs and Muslims of all stripes that is the
historic target, it is the racism associated with dividing Latinos, Asians, and
even Indigenous peoples against themselves; legal vs. illegal, immigrant vs.
refugee, pro-capitalist (e.g. Cuban, Hmong) vs. potentially anti-capitalist
(e.g. Haitian, Mexicans, among others) that such a play for enlisting hatred
can facilitate. It is this historic change that I believe many--Black radicals,
Marxists, and even revolutionary-minded leftists among the oppressed
communities--seem to be missing. For some, the advent of a Black president was,
at one, an anomaly or sign of radicalization. Leftists, missing the true
definition of radical, were either blinded by this seeming progressive
event, initially suspending their otherwise insightful judgment, or simply
blown onto the side of capital in their support absent the necessary anchor of
a truly radical appraisal of the Obama election. But the trajectory of the
economic crisis, actually portended by the economic boom of the 90's and
brought to relief by our current circumstances ,
