America Has Always Been Racist—Now Trump Takes It Further
Make America WHITE Again??!? No Goddam Way!!!!
April 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Think of the world in which many Black and Latino youths come of age.
A world of crumbling schools, nonexistent health care. A world where people’s lives are routinely cut short. A world of heartless cutbacks in social services. A world with plenty of jail cells, but no jobs. A world that degrades and mocks at every turn.
A world prowled by murderous, brutal police. A world where all too many you came up with are dead or in a notorious hellhole set aside for people like you—San Quentin, Angola, Huntsville.
Violent oppression of Black people has been deeply embedded in every aspect of this country for hundreds of years. Brought here in chains. Whipped in cotton, tobacco, and rice fields during hundreds of years of slavery. A century of “second class citizenship” working those same fields, enforced by legal segregation and KKK lynchings. Forced off the land when profits dried up. Crammed into overpriced, decaying housing, working the shit jobs in factories. Even people who “make it”—professors, professionals and businesspeople, athletes, musicians—are subjected to discrimination, police harassment, and worse for “existing while Black.”
But now the system of capitalism-imperialism has developed other ways of wrenching profit from imperialism’s global empire. Millions of Black people in the inner cities have become expendable in the eyes of this system.
The political leadership of this system—Democrat and Republican—has responded with a sharp-edged program of repression. That program’s blade: vicious police brutality and mass incarceration and a legal system that lets killer cops off over and over.
Trump’s program for inner-city Chicago will take this to another level and serve as a model for his nationwide plan: Unrestrained police terror. Prisons and jails swelling with Black and Latino youths. Forcing youths into Christian fundamentalist schools that instill blind obedience. Maybe a place in the army or Border Patrol or police for those willing to enforce submission to a fascist order.
People need to resist. And when Black and Brown people rise up, they inspire and bring forward the best in people of all nationalities, as happened in the 1960s. This began to happen again in the past few years, and is one reason the system backed the fascist Trump.
That resistance is critical, but not enough. This system has white supremacy so deeply woven into its DNA that no reforms can fundamentally change the situation. And now we have Trump. The Trump/Pence program for the masses of Black people is not “more of the same only worse.” It is fascism. It truly has the potential to be genocidal. White supremacists are drawn to Trump like flies to shit. Lifelong racists are at the core of his administration. As Carl Dix said, Trump’s program “will bring down a reign of terror on top of the hell that has been coming down on Black people for centuries.” And fascist repression will make resistance, let alone revolution, immeasurably more difficult, which means we have to unite, now, with everyone who is ready to, or can be convinced to, drive out that regime in the interests of humanity.
Bob Avakian has worked for decades developing answers to the deepest questions of revolution. He has written a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, a blueprint for a society aimed at getting to a world without exploitation or oppression of any kind. And there is strategy for doing this, in the statement HOW WE CAN WIN: How We Can Really Make Revolution, put out by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Bob Avakian says:
There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.
Get with this revolutionary leader. Join the movement for revolution.
Photo: Li Onesto/Revolution
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