Debunking the right-wing: Anti-Black Racism in the US

The origins of Black people in the United States ultimately lie in the institution of slavery. This is a truth which scars this country to this day and continues to thrive as a current in the issues we face. And yet, many on the right-wing deny the importance of this, claiming that since “slavery is over” everything is fine now and everyone is equal.

It is still just as Malcolm X once said,

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife. They won’t even admit the knife is there.

The reasons behind why Sub-Saharan Africans were forced into chains as commodified people are not because Africans are somehow “destined” for slavery. Rather, Indigenous people had proven unsustainable as a large slave population, since for one they were familiar with their surroundings both ecological and human, and could easily flee or organize rebellions. And for another, they lacked immunity to the diseases brought by Europeans. Europeans could not be used to source them diplomatic chaos, and would throw Europe into endless war as it did for many Sub-Saharan African peoples.

Asians and North Africans could not be used as the Triangular Slave Trade was beginning, Europe was still the backwater to those regions. Sub-Saharan Africans had relative immunity to “Old World” diseases, were unfamiliar with American environments, were thrown together with no regard for languages, and had by that time been ideologically cast as deserving of slavery owing to being heathens who knew of Christianity but rejected it.

The slave economy grew rapidly in the Anglo-American colonies of North America, with slave labor being used to produce labor-intensive crops like tobacco and cotton, which would not have been profitable with hired labor. For a time, European indentured servants labored alongside African slaves and freemen with similar working conditions and residencies, although the Europeans had the chance to own property by moving West and fighting Indigenous people. Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, which included both European indentured servants and African slaves, the colonial administrators used the 1705 Slave Code to solidify a racist caste system where all European people, regardless of class, had a common status as white, and all Africans were degraded in a common status as Black.

Because one of the key cash crops of the slave economy was tobacco, which destroyed the soil if planted too frequently, slavery became a powerful engine for the westward expansion of European settlers, placing them alongside land speculators and merchants. As a result, when the British Crown prohibited expansion of settlers past the Appalachians in 1763 to avoid further wars between their Indigenous allies and settlers, slavers were incensed.

The American War of Independence in 1776 was significantly driven by slaver, expansionist interests. When Lord Dunmore, the Royal Colonial Governor of Virginia, declared that slaves helped put down the Patriots in 1775, this became a rallying cry. Following Independence, the slave economy grew. The continued exploitation of Black people was a material concern for the Patriots. They were not racist for no reason.

Contrary to popular belief, slavery was present in the North. And the North’s proto-industrial development was subsidized by slave-produced products and revenue brought into the country by the sale of those products to Europe. But tensions were rising between the slave economy and the wage labor economy. With the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and endemic slave revolts in North America, having a large, super-exploited captive population in the middle of the country with nothing to lose seemed like a worse idea. And the abolition of the slave trade only made maintaining slaves more expensive, since owners had to pay for their slaves’ subsistence needs. The conflict over whether newly annexed states-to-be should allow slavery ultimately boiled over into the Civil War.

After the Civil War, with the initiative of freemen and the abolitionist movement, came the era of Reconstruction. In many Southern states, the large size of the Black population, combined with enfranchisement, created a scope of democracy that had never been seen in the US. This led to the passing of progressive legislation like public services and social assistance. Angered by the power of Black people during this era, and needing to keep them disempowered so they could continue to be cheap labor, white elites prevailed in what is known as the counter-Reconstruction.

Herein lies the origins of many modern practices and institutions which disempower Black people, from criminalization to the disenfranchisement of felons and the modern prison system. Black people were solidified into a caste of sharecroppers, debtors, and the worst-off section of the working class. They were sharply segregated from white people and relegated to lower quality residencies, institutions, and statuses. When they began to build up their own communities economically, they were subject to white terrorism, from the everyday actions of the Klan to extraordinary attacks like the destruction of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

While the passage of Civil Rights legislation may have prohibited explicit discrimination, primarily in the realm of citizenship rights, it did not end racism as a social phenomenon. Black people still have an overall lower quality of life, worse housing, worse working conditions and pay, continue to be de facto segregated, and are still subject to above-average police harassment, abuse, and execution. All of this in an ostensibly “colorblind”, “post-racial” era.

With the ideology of colorblindness, people assume that race no longer matters unless one chooses to make it matter. Civil Rights apparently made everyone equal and racism is merely an abnormality. With this article, we hope to demonstrate how this victim blaming mentality is based in ideology, not fact.

“Race and intelligence are biologically linked”

The central strategy taken up to obscure the structural foundations of the conditions of Black people is blaming them for their own conditions. Some go as far as to take up the ideological current of arguing that Europeans are biologically superior and that Black people were enslaved because they were somehow inferior. This argument is used with varying degrees of subtlety, with some coming right out and saying it, and others alluding to it by medium of references to “culture.”

This claim is the easiest to debunk because it has no basis in reality. It has seen a revival in popularity as it is promoted by so-called “rational” people who want to appear as if their racism is rooted in fact and they have no choice but to stick to the facts. The most representative proponent of this idea is Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. The book continues to be cited by “race realists,” but there is one problem: it is false.

At its first premise, the idea fails because race has no basis in biology. It is a folk approximation of the idea of ethnicity, and even then, it varies by social system. Someone from Jalisco, Mexico is not going to think the same about race as someone from Georgia, USA. The latter likely would not even know what a mestizo is. The concept of race emerged as an ideological naturalization of a division of labor, not from simple facts. The fact that the idea of race varies from society to society tells you how ridiculous the idea of it as a “solid fact” is.

The bunk claims of race science are not ideas following from facts. Instead, it is preconceived racist ideas being used to arrange facts and fictions alike to fit an agenda. From Arthur de Gobineau and Herbert Spencer to Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen, the same story of a racist society searching for an intellectual justification of itself is clear.

“Poverty caused by lack of intelligence”

This argument is not always tied with out-and-out scientific racism. But the argument is closely related to it. This argument bases itself on a misunderstanding of statistics. We will deal with a specific form of the argument for brevity.

The first step of the claim is to point out disparities in IQ tests between races. This is a real phenomenon. But it does not indicate what they think it does. Running with previously explained ideas about race and intelligence being causally associated, the scientific racists make another stride into claiming that income and intelligence are causally linked from the latter to the former. With this myth staked out, they can argue that certain racial groups tending to be lower-income is due to lower intelligence.

This argument runs into an issue of premise in the idea of intelligence. But that is arbitrarily determined. To take one example of a commonly accepted measure of intelligence, differences in average success in schools based on race are caused by income, not the other way around. In fact, poverty can lead to underdevelopment of cognitive functions, being associated particularly with the detrimental effects of severe stress.

In terms of the specific use of IQ as a measure of people, this approach is questionable. IQ has uniformly been recognized by experts as failing to measure intelligence. The reasons behind why racialized groups perform worse on IQ tests are associated more with acculturation than any “objective” assessment, which is difficult to determine given that standards for intelligence are difficult to agree upon. Practical skills, such as construction and maintenance, are rarely tested for in such intelligence tests, even though they are socially useful.

“Poverty culture”

When biological claims fall apart, race scientists simply jump a step over into the murkier realm of “culture,” something more immaterial and less touchy than making claims about biology. This argument is chief among this strain. Claims about culture are easier to get away with as they do not have to deal with the same commonly accepted solid standards associated with biological sciences. Thus, the race scientist comes here for refuge.

As mentioned in the introduction, Black people are among the poorest racial group in the US. The way that such shining intellectuals as Benjamin Aaron Shapiro get around outright race science to avoid confronting fundamental systemic issues in the US is to default to the concept of a “culture of poverty.” Apparently, Black people just have bad “cultural habits” that lead them to remain stuck in poverty. Usually, the cultural habits given as examples are such stereotypes as “absent fathers” leading to crime, in spite of that being a myth completely out of line with statistical evidence.

Health disparities between Black and white people are another phenomenon often blamed on “Black culture,” but once again they are associated more with divergences in quality of life and healthcare treatment. Healthcare professionals tend to dismiss the complaints of Black people regarding pain and discomfort, believing that they are simply oversensitive. The ramifications for how society views Black people are blatant enough that they need not be pointed out. This perception can be, and often is, deadly.

In education as well, victim blaming is wielded to dismiss structural issues facing Black people. Instead of addressing disparities in quality of education, and the effects of poverty on it, Black children are blamed for their own challenges in education. Their learning environment is made even more hostile by racism from instructors, peers, and administrators, and by a growing police presence in schools. Does it seem more likely that these factors harm the success of a child’s education, or that it’s simply an issue of culture or biology that experts cover up because of so-called “political correctness”?

The historical reason that these disparities exist along racial lines is inseparable from North American history. Euro-American capitalists have accumulated wealth from Black people at their expense for centuries. It is not that those capitalists are rich and Black working class people are poor, it’s that the former are rich because the latter are poor. Even after the abolition of chattel slavery, Black people continued to be subjected to similar super-exploitative conditions, such as sharecropping.

Inter-generational wealth matters. When a group of people has been corralled into the position of the worst conditions of life and labor, when a country is built on their backs, to blame their poverty on their “culture” is to incorrectly think history is a series of snapshots, and not a process where the past matters for the present.

In the end, the idea of a “poverty culture” is just another excuse to get out of uncomfortable reckonings with the fundamentally colonial and imperialist nature of the United States. Rather than being grounded in the legacy of slavery and a system rigged against Black people, explanations are situated firmly within the realm of victim blaming. The reality is that Black culture does not cause violent crime or anything else associated with this idea.

Instead, as is widely accepted by experts in various fields, poverty and crime are closely related. This is not because poor people wake up and decide to commit crimes because they feel like it. It is because when people are desperate, they resort to desperate actions. Racial disparities in quality of life and success are consistently identifiable as relating to the organization of society rather than the isolated choices of victims themselves.

“Black on Black crime”

In the current of the “poverty culture” argument, a common point comes up: the idea that Black people are poor because they keep committing violent crimes against each other. This point is also brought up to dismiss demands forwarded by Black people regarding police brutality, crying that it is unreasonable to expect the rest of us to care about Black people when they supposedly don’t care about themselves.

The reality of Black-on-Black crime is much more nuanced. First, as mentioned, crime as a whole is associated with poverty. Due to historical socio-economic oppression, Black people are more likely to be impoverished than white people. Second, most violent crimes are committed against people the perpetrators know, whether in Black or white communities. Since communities are still sharply segregated in the US, it’s no wonder that most violent crimes committed by Black people would be against other Black people.

It is not some sort of self-destructive, self-sabotaging cultural or biological tendency. It is simple facts of sociology, and statistics regarding crime and community. On a final note, crimes committed by Black people are much more likely to be recorded than those committed by white people, owing primarily to the fact that Black communities are policed more. This results in a statistical bias, which exaggerates the prominence of such issues.

“They just want to live off social assistance”

A final myth to be addressed regarding the idea of poverty culture is that of the “welfare queen”. The term was popularized by a misrepresented story told by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 and 1980 Presidential campaigns. Reagan used lies and distortions to justify cuts to social assistance, presenting a false notion of predominantly Black welfare recipients living high and large off taxpayer dollars and preferring this to working.

The truth of the matter is that welfare recipients live very meager, highly regulated lives. Less than 1% of the aid distributed by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and less than 2% from unemployment payments are from fraud. Rather than austerity cuts to such programs helping an economy, greater spending on social assistance is more beneficial. This is because poverty is simply not the fault of individuals, and to pretend like it is leads to ineffective policies which fail to alleviate poverty.

Most Americans assume that the majority of welfare recipients are Black. When the New Deal instituted a broad array of social assistance programs, the perception of the recipients of these was that they were largely white, and they had significant public support. Now that welfare is associated with Black people, white Americans are generally more reluctant to support it, seeing them as a “public charge.” This is a clear cut example of racist ideology supporting policy that is about pumping more money into the pockets of the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

“Police aren’t racist, they just enforce the law”

This idea depends on the premise that the law is unbiased, even before it assumes police are themselves unbiased. While the law has, on paper, abolished legal discrimination on the basis of race, this says nothing about laws that all but name the groups they’re targeting or which are selectively enforced on certain groups. When policies disproportionately affect Black and brown people, one has to wonder what their intentions are. Felon disenfranchisement is directly linked to racist policies, and spread rapidly by the 1870s.

This relates to the ties between the enforcement of the law and who legislation targets, as the use of felon disenfranchisement to disempower Black people was linked to the interrelated criminalization of Black people.

It is not surprising that enforcement of laws tends to target Black and brown people. The origins of the US police are in slave patrols. And they still hold characteristics associated with that institution. Black communities are policed far more heavily than white ones, and are viewed by default as criminals.

Combining this and the fact that Black people are on average poorer than white people, plea bargain deals following arrests have a racial bias. This is a phenomena wherein following arrest, when poor people cannot afford a proper legal defense and must depend on overworked public defenders, they default to agreeing to plead guilty to the charges to avoid having to go through a lengthy legal battle that they will likely lose. When a group is more likely to be arrested and more likely to be poor, it’s no surprise that this results in a disproportionate conviction rate.

This practice is not merely a result of mistakes in the system, but rather a system of incentives and particular interests. Arrest quotas are common practice. This incentivizes police to make fraudulent and shaky arrests to meet those quotas. Broken windows policing, which justifies making arrests on the basis of keeping up public discipline and property values, is an easy excuse.

Non-violent drug offenses, marijuana possession most common among them, are another. Black and brown people are more likely to be stopped and searched, relying on the criminalized perception of them as more likely to use drugs and fueling a self-fulfilling cycle in data. Prisons make revenue through prison labor, and the growth of private for-profit prisons intensifies this tendency.

The foundations of these institutions cannot be located in a simple “cui bono” form of analysis alone, although this plays a part. Historically, the perception of marijuana as being linked with criminality and danger only grew with a growing migration of Mexicans into the Southwest, some of whom used marijuana similarly to how many USAmericans used tobacco at the time. The recent foundation of this criminalization lies in the War on Drugs, which kicked off during the Nixon Presidency. John Ehrlichman, former Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, infamously said of the War in 1994 that:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The War On Drugs, like the counter-Reconstruction before it, is ultimately a means of repression of internal dissent. It is not primarily concerned with public health, which punishment of users is completely antithetical to. It is not primarily concerned with safety, as the CIA was complicit in the Nicaraguan Contras’ smuggling of cocaine into the US.

Ultimately, it is about defending the power of the state and the wealthy, and putting down those who pose a challenge. This is why Black people are sentenced more harshly for the same crimes as white people, why planting of evidence is a consistent issue, and why the police are dominated by the far-right. It is a means of reproducing a racist, exploitative system.

“Black Lives Matter protesters are just like anti-maskers. Their demonstrations spread COVID-19”

Black Lives Matter has been thrown fully into the mainstream this year following watershed uprisings and demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reacting to all the issues we have explained, including the pandemic exacerbating them, unprecedented records were set by the demonstrations. As per usual, they were met with typical rationalizations for why Black liberation movements don’t deserve public support. Among them was this claim.

The idea that Black Lives Matter, cast as being composed of all Democrats, has acted hypocritically regarding COVID-19 is ridiculous. Nevertheless, this narrative has been pushed by media and individuals like Joe Rogan, seeking to make a poorly grounded point about the far-right and far-left being “basically the same”. This claim has no basis in statistics, which showed that Black Lives Matter demonstrations did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases either regionally or nationally. This is probably because “the left” takes heed to scientific fact much more than right-wingers do.

By contrast, the pro-Trump Sturgis motorcycle rally, wherein very few people took any recommended precautions, was a significant super spreader. It is hard for anyone to seriously deny that this is what might be termed a “cultural issue” for conservatives when the President himself was infected by COVID-19 at a White House event, which has now been identified as a super spreader.

Acceptance for victim-blaming and the use of false narratives to escape uncomfortable truths should be criticized wherever possible. These tactics are completely dishonest and usually hide an ulterior agenda that has a large body count. Serious questions deserve serious analysis, not poorly thought out excuses to justify racist beliefs.

“Not all cops are bad, there’s just some bad apples”

To claim such a thing as this, that individual cops have nothing to do with the violence and racism of their peers, is to think only in fragments instead of thinking in terms of structures. “Good cops” still defend their “bad” peers, both actively and through what is termed the Blue Wall of Silence. Police whistleblowers are turned into pariahs, often fired and find their lives actively sabotaged.

Police unions act as a powerful and active defense for cops regardless of what they do, creating the conditions for a criminal justice system where police are rarely convicted and prosecuted for use of force. And finally, all police enforce a legal structure designed to keep in place a social order with the massive racial disparities we previously described. In that basic premise, the police act as a racist institution, regardless of the inclinations of the individuals involved.

“All Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter is racist”

This point operates on the assumption that everyone is already equal, and that racism is only an issue if you make it one. In reality, racial disparities are a fact of life, whether you are aware of them or not. On paper, all citizens may be legally equal, but in practice, laws are enforced in an unequal manner along racial lines.

Further, legal rights are exercised more freely by those with the economic means because they do not have basic survival as a daily concern and they have the funds to win legal defenses of their rights. Racial disparities in social classes means that Black people are less capable of exercising these legal rights even if one ignores inequality of enforcement.

People are formed and affected by the structures in their lives, even if they don’t notice it. To continue to believe everyone is already equal and that racism is only an individual thing, is to ignore these structures. Doing so transforms the racist, exploitative order of society into something that is assumed to be natural, and thus can be ignored. This can’t be construed as anything other than an implicit endorsement of a racist system.

To be anti-racist, one must recognize that racism exists on a social level, and must be transformed as such. The slogan of Black Lives Matter isn’t racist for singling out Black people. Rather, it is meant to draw attention to Black people specifically to address the racial disparities that exist in social life. It is Black people who are already singled out by society, it is not anti-racists “creating” a problem.