If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely

A meticulous and practical decimation of all the reasons typically given for why immigration should stay illegal. The authors then supply their own radical solution -- a completely open southern border. Agree? Disagree? Read more: http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_6_delacroix.pdf

Classical Liberalism and the Fight for Equal Rights

Remembering the forgotten libertarian legacy of American anti-racism

(http://www.reason.com/news/show/134651.html)

In a 1992 speech at Colorado's Metro State College, Columbia University historian Manning Marable praised the black minister and activist Malcolm X for pushing an "uncompromising program which was both antiracist and anticapitalist." As Marable favorably quoted from the former Nation of Islam leader: "You can't have racism without capitalism. If you find antiracists, usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is that of socialism."

Spend time on most college campuses and you're likely to hear something very similar. Progressives and leftists, the conventional narrative goes, fought the good fight while conservatives and libertarians either sat it out or sided with the bad guys. But there's a problem with this simplistic view: It completely ignores the fact that classical liberalism—which centers on individual rights, economic liberty, and limited government—played an indispensable role in the fight for equal rights.

Indeed, from the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who championed the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and declared "give the negro fair play and let him alone," to the conservative newspaper magnate R.C. Hoiles (publisher of what is now the Orange County Register), who denounced liberal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wartime internment of Japanese Americans while most New Dealers (and liberal Supreme Court justices) remained silent, classical liberals have long opposed racism and collectivism in all of its vile forms.

This important yet sadly-neglected history is the subject of Race & Liberty in America (University Press of Kentucky), a superb new anthology edited by Southern Illinois University historian Jonathan Bean, which features carefully selected articles, speeches, book excerpts, newspaper accounts, legal decisions, interviews, and other materials revealing, in Bean's words, that "classical liberals are the invisible men and women of the long civil rights movement." (Full Disclosure: Bean includes one of my articles in a list of recommended readings.)

There's Lysander Spooner, the radical libertarian, legal theorist, and abolitionist who argued that slavery was illegal under both natural law and the U.S. Constitution; Louis Marshall, the "ultraconservative" NAACP attorney and lifelong Republican who won the Supreme Court case Nixon v. Herndon (1927), striking down the "white primaries" favored by racist Southern Democrats; and Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance novelist and folklorist who denounced New Deal relief programs as "the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes" and endorsed libertarian Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio) for president in 1952.

As Bean demonstrates, when it comes to the history of civil rights and racial equality, most of us have only heard one part of the story. Take the NAACP, which was arguably the leading civil rights organization of the 20th century. Why, Bean writes, "do we know so much about W.E.B. DuBois [an NAACP activist and editor] but little about super-lawyer Moorfield Storey"? A founder of both the NAACP and the Anti-Imperialist League, Storey championed free trade, liberty of contract, and the gold standard alongside racial equality and non-interventionism. In 1917 he argued and won the NAACP's first major victory before the Supreme Court, Buchanan v. Warley, relying on property rights to strike down a residential segregation law. As George Mason University law professor David Bernstein argues, "Buchanan almost certainly prevented governments from passing far harsher segregation laws [and] prevented residential segregation laws from being the leading edge of broader anti-negro measures." DuBois credited the decision with "the breaking of the backbone of segregation."

Now contrast that with the racial record of a celebrated leftist such as labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. While typically lionized as a champion of the poor and downtrodden, Debs also served as head of the American Railway Union, a discriminatory outfit that banned blacks from its ranks. And while he was apparently personally sympathetic to African Americans, during his 1912 presidential campaign Debs simply declared, "We have nothing special to offer the Negro." Yet this was during the era of lynchings, Jim Crow, and other acts of state criminality that specifically targeted the rights of blacks, a situation classical liberals like Storey clearly understood and effectively challenged.

Along similar lines, Race & Liberty in America includes a fascinating 1924 article from Howard University president Kelly Miller arguing that in the battle between labor and capital, blacks should side with the bosses. "The capitalist stands for an open shop which gives to every man the unhindered right to work according to his ability and skill," Miller wrote. "In this proposition the capitalist and the Negro are as one." Try finding that quote in most standard labor histories!

Taken together, the documents collected in this volume present overwhelming evidence that classical liberalism deserves serious attention in any account of the American struggle for civil rights and a colorblind society. Rather than serving as the villains caricatured by Malcolm X, Manning Marable, and others on the left, classical liberals provided essential intellectual, political, moral, and financial firepower in the battles against slavery, Jim Crow, imperialism, and racial classifications. With Race & Liberty in America, these largely unsung heroes are finally getting some of their due.

Damon W. Root is an associate editor of Reason magazine.

Racism

- a talk given by Trish on October 19, 1994
(View Original)

Any discussion of Racism needs to examine the roots of Racism in order to understand it and to struggle against it effectively. There are basically 3 explanations for the existence of racism.

The dominant view which is rarely expressed as a worked out theory but rather operates at the level of assumptions is that racism is an irrational response to difference which cause some people with white skin to have hateful attitudes to people with black skin which sometimes leads to violent and evil actions. People who have this understanding of racism advocate awareness and education as a way of preventing the practice of racism.

The second view is that racism is endemic in white society and that the only solution is for black people to organise "Themselves separately from whites " in order to defend themselves and to protect their interests.

The third view and the one which I am advocating is an explanation of racism based on a materialist perspective, which views racism as a historically specific and materially caused phenomenon. Racism is a product of capitalism. It grew out of early capitalisms' use of slaves for the plantations of the new world, it was consolidated in order to justify western and white domination of the rest of the world and it flourishes today as a means of dividing the working class between insiders and outsiders, native and immigrants and settled and Travellor in the Irish context.

It is necessary to examine the underlying assumptions about racism in more detail in order to arrive at the materialist analysis of it. Racism is commonly assumed to be as old as society itself. However this does not stand up to historical examination. Racism is a particular form of oppression: discrimination against people on the grounds that some inherited characteristic, for example, colour, makes them inferior to their oppressors.

However, historical references indicate that class society before capitalism was able, on the whole, to do without this particular form of oppression. Bad as the society of classical Greece and Rome were it is historically pretty well proven that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. Slaves were both black and white and in fact the majority of slaves were white. The first clear evidence of racism occurred at the end of the 16th century with the start of the slave trade from Africa to Britain and to America.

CLR James Modern Politics writes that 'the conception of dividing people by race begins with its slave trade. Thus this (the slave trade) was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religious and philosophers had . . .the only justifications by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that Africans were an inferior race"

So racism was formed as an attempt to justify the most appalling and inhuman treatment of black people in the time of the greatest accumulation of material wealth the world had seen until then.

By the end of the 17th century, racism had become an established, systematic and conscious justification for the most degrading forms of slavery.

The justification of slavery by an ideology of racism started to fade under attack by abolotionists and with the decline of the slave trade. Racism, however took on a new form as a justification for the ideology of imperialism. This racism of empire was dominant for over a century from the 1840's on. Concepts such as the "white man's burden" became fashionable especially in England where British Colonialists liked to cast themselves as father and mother with a clear duty to take responsibility for the material and spiritual well-being of their 'colonial' children. Racism became the ideological justification of capitalism's expansion into conquering countries, plundering their wealth and exploiting the natives.

When white imperialism was at its height, a new expression of racism was taking shape - that is anti-immigrant racism which was typified in England by racist opposition to new immigrants from Ireland. The expansion of capitalism required the importation of foreign workers, a trend which continued in industrialised European countries and in America and Australia up to the 1980's. The long boom of British capitalism after the 2nd world war, for example, encouraged the immigration of West Indians and Asians to Britain. These so called foreign workers provided the employers with the basis for encouraging a split within the workforce.

The same happened in Germany with the immigration of Turkish workers, and the same kind of anti-immigrant agitation emerged in many other European countries and is the main focus of racism in these countries today. Racial attacks on non-white immigrants and on Gypsies have become almost commonplace in parts of Germany and in England. This form of racism has been fueled by economic crisis and by capitalism's need to find a convenient scapegoat for unemployment, housing shortages and every other problem which the current crisis of capitalism has thrown up. Immigration controls, and racist anti-immigration laws have grown up in response to this expression of racism.

On this point, people should be aware that Ireland has the worst immigrant laws in Europe and that they are specifically racist and have been used to exclude non-whites and Jews from this country on many occasions.

Racism and anti semitism

Anti semitism is generally considered to be a variety of racism. It has taken different forms over the centuries, being justified on religious grounds during the middle ages, for example. Ruth Benedict argues "during the middle ages persecutions of the Jews, like all medieval persecutions were religious rather than racial. As racist persecutions replaced religious persecutions in Europe, however, the inferiority of the Jew became that of race".

As recent anti semitism took hold in Europe in the 1890's, Jews started to be attacked not for what they did but for what their forefathers were. This is what racial anti-semitism means. This kind of anti-semitism found an echo in some parts of the working class where Jews were identified as capitalist parasites and userors even though the reality in Britain, anyway, was that most Jews were in fact workers. Racial anti-semitism was a useful way to deflect attacks for the real problems created by capitalism in general.

Facism

Anti semitism and racism are not an essential component of fascism which is essentially a mass movement of the middle class and petit bourgeois built in periods of defeat for the working class when even the most basic trade union organisation is a threat to profits of capital.

In Italy, for example, Jews were encouraged to join the fascist party in its early days.

In Germany, however, the economic condition were ripe for the growth of anti semitism. Leon argues that "the economic catastrophe of 1929 threw the petty bourgeois masses into a hopless situation . . . the petty bourgeois regarded their Jewish competitors with growing hostility." Jewish capital was attacked by the Nazis which appealed to the anti-capitalist instinct of German workers and support for Hitler's Nazi Party rocketed. Anti Semitism was also an important part of a Nazi racial philosophy which justified 'Aryan' supremacy and the need to develop 'Aryan' racial purity.

The Nazi holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered alongside an equal number condemned either as political opponents of Hitler or as members of other 'inferior' groups such as Slavs, gays, Gypsies and the mentally ill represented racism and capitalism in their most extreme and barbarous form.

Race and Culture The concept of race or racial difference is essentially an artificial one as all of humanity is actually the one race. In recent times, the concept of culture has been used to discriminate against groups of people when racial discrimination was officially outlawed.

Culture is essentially the way that different group of people acquire a particular world view, a way of making sense of the world from particular social, economic, environmental and demographic conditions. Cultures are not static, they change all the time in response to a wide variety of factors.

Racists sometimes argue "I have nothing against Asians or Blacks as people, it's just that their culture is incompatible with the British/German/French way of life." This is a nonsense argument as all groups of people have a culture and their culture is an essential part of what they are as is their skin colour. Likewise, some anti-racist work especially in schools adopts a "colour blind" approach to the issue and introduce pupils to the more exotic and acceptable aspects of non-white culture while ignoring the materialist nature of racism. This is known as the "saris and samosas" style of anti-racist work and is obviously of very limited use.

Racism which is focussed on a hatred of another groups culture, as it is in the case of Travellors and Gypsies, is sometimes harder to identify clearly as racism because the victims are sometimes white. However, the power relationship which is one of domination and oppression is the key to identifying the reality of racism in these situations.

Response and strategies for fighting racism

The strategies adopted to fight racism depend on the analysis. They basically break down into reformist strategies and revolutionary ones.

The American experience illustrates some of the strategies that have been used. Militant civil rights campaigns such as those which took place in the 1960's in America with leaders such as Martin Luther King succeeded in gaining basic civil rights for black and in forcing the dismantling of the worst forms of institutional racism. It involved mass civil disobedience and voter registration campaigns.

However, the leaders of the movement were middle class with no concept of the need for working class unity. Although many very worthwhile reforms were won, racism remained very mush part of American society. Another more radical strategy associated with Malcolm X was that of black nationalism and black separatism. Racism is defined as endemic to white so like that of the unemployed in the fifties. The Irish National Organisiation of the Unemployed is entirely dominated by Union hacks, poverty pimps, CV tripers and time servers.

We should not be entirely pessemistic. We know that things can change quick, fast and in a hurry. The massive mobilisiation in the case of the autorney general Versus the X case and the climbdown it caused is ample proof of this. We can't afford to throw up our hands and give up on activism. We must not retreat into the realmhe roots of racism in this strategy.

As revolutionaries, we recognise the material basis of racism and its use under capitalism to divide workers, set foreign workers against natives and to provide convenient scapegoats for all the problems capitalism produces. It can only be defeated by a class based strategy which aims to unite non-white and white workers in a struggle for anarchism.

Finally, it is important for us to be aware of the devastating effects of racism at a personal and at a community level. To be black, Asian, a Travellor or a member of an ethnic or cultural minority in most Western countries is a debilitating experience.

Racism shatters individuals self confidence and self image and leads to poor mental and physical health. It can destroy communities subjected to it as it almost has done in the case of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, for example.

For this reason, it is important to challenge individual acts of racism when we come across them as well as campaigning politically against it.

Racism, Free Markets And Libertarian Deceit

The Orangeburg Massacre

by Amy Goodman

(View Original)

Sen. Barack Obama is clearly a bad bowler. The networks rolled the video clip of his gutter ball endlessly across our TV screens. It was an Internet favorite. The media served it, and the public ate it up. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” hammed it up when interviewing Obama on the campus of West Chester University in Pennsylvania:

Matthews: One of the perks, senator, of being president of the United States is that you have your own bowling alley. Are you ready to bowl from day one?

Obama: Obviously, I am not.

But in fact, it was not too long ago when African-Americans were not allowed in some bowling alleys. In Orangeburg, S.C., three young African-American men were killed for protesting against that town’s segregated bowling alley.

It was Feb. 8, 1968, months before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. It was more than two years before the massacre of students at Kent State University in Ohio. Students at South Carolina State University were protesting for access to the town’s only bowling alley. Cleveland Sellers, a student at the time at that historically black college, was also a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and an organizer of the protests. In a recent interview, he said about that night 40 years ago:

“It was a cold night … this was the fourth day of activities around the effort to desegregate the bowling alley. … The students had built a bonfire to keep themselves warm and build morale. They were trying to work out some strategy. What should they do next? Should they go back to the bowling alley, where they had been arrested on Tuesday night? Should they go to the City Hall? Should they go to the state Capitol? And they thought that they were in an area that was pretty safe and secure, and they never expected the police to open fire.”

Sellers is now director of the African-American studies program at the University of South Carolina. His memory is vivid: “The darkness turned to light as the police opened fire, nine highway patrolmen and one local police officer firing rifles and shotguns and pistols. It was a shock to many of the students that there was no bullhorns, no whistles, no anything that indicated that this kind of extremely lethal action would be taken on these students.”

Survivor Robert Lee Davis recalled the event in an oral history project conducted by Jack Bass, who was a reporter at the time and now is a professor at the College of Charleston: “It was a barrage of shots … maybe six or seven seconds. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Students was hollering, yelling and running. … I got up to run, and I took one step, and that’s all I could remember. I took that one step. I got hit in the back … this was when I got paralyzed. Students was trampling over me, because they was afraid.”

Sellers put the largely unreported and forgotten Orangeburg Massacre in context: “It’s ironic that here we are 40 years later, and the issue of poverty and the issue of war are still issues that are pertinent all around America again. And I think that it just says that in 1968, with the assassination of Dr. King and with the decline in the civil rights movement during that period, that a number of issues were left unachieved.”

There have been advances in the 40 years since the Orangeburg Massacre. Now, rather than protesting for access to a bowling alley, an African-American man is a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, his bowling flubs merely the object of ridicule. But the three young African-American men murdered that night in Orangeburg-Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton and Henry Smith — are not with us to share in the progress. They are hardly remembered at all.

The media this week recognize the one-year anniversary of the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech, in which a lone, disturbed gunman killed 30 students and faculty members. It is an important date on which to reflect. The Orangeburg Massacre deserves a place in our national consciousness as well. We need media that provide historical context, that offer more than a one-year perspective on our society. Instead, the mainstream media keep throwing gutter balls.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

Barack Obama’s pastor Wright’s Sermon in Context

The point of Pastor Wright's sermon is that America has been and remains a deeply racist country. Instead of seeing an impassioned African American leader whose message is, well, farily accurate the MSM only sees an angry black man screaming "goddamn America". I think they just proved him right.

Thanks: Lo

Jeremiah A. Wright. No more half truths, see the whole context. Available on ITunes. Added: March 20, 2008

Eye of Nye

"Bill Nye talks about how the notion of race in our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is completely wrong and outdated. He and his colleagues in the scientific community show us how we are all of the same race, and that the notion of different races/sub-species in humans today is 100% scientifically incorrect."

--4article1

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Friday Flashback: Frank Zappa - Stairway to Heaven & Uncle Remus

Race doesn't exist

Race is an artificial human construct This may be a bit shocking especially to those of us who live in America where racism has shaped so many of our affairs, but scientifically one's race cannot be defined. There's no gene for race and if you trace anyone's genealogy back far enough we all come from a common ancestor.

First the difference between ethnicity, race and nationality. Ethnicity is a person's cultural identity while nationality is the country of one's birth and/or any additional nations a person chooses to pledge allegiance to. Race, by traditional standards, is simply a way to describe skin color. So, Tony Danza's ethnicity is Italian, his nationality is American and his race is Caucasian. You can alter nationality but not ethnicity or race.

Racists have tried to overcome this problem of nebulousness which always ends in incoherence. Take the example of South Africa's National Party during Apartheid. They wanted to split the country into Blacks, Indians and Whites. The way they determined which were which was through appearance alone. When this failed to fully encompass the population of Indians, who were thought to be a racial mix, an individual's parents were considered. If a person who was white in appearance had one "coloured parent" then they would be categorized as an Indian. Because the wording of the law was based on a person's physical characteristics often what became the deciding factor was whether or not a comb could pass through one's hair or an examination of the flatness of one's nose.

This goes to show how governments have played upon racism to divide a population against each other. Much like religion, I believe our government is currently fanning racial flames to create social rifts. Instead of a centralized opposition to established corruption we're bickering amongst ourselves over a superficial concept.

Sources:
Where I Drown
Socialist Standard