[ The corporate media never challenge the underlying and
pernicious myth that anti-racist struggle is a zero-sum game in which
the oppressed gain at the expense of other non-elite sectors of the
population.] [[link removed]]

WHEN BLACK MOVEMENTS WIN, EVERYBODY BUT THE 1 PERCENT WINS  
[[link removed]]


 

Megan L. Jordan, Joshua Murray, Michael Schwartz & Kevin A. Young,
December 24, 2020
Truthout
[[link removed]]


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_ The corporate media never challenge the underlying and pernicious
myth that anti-racist struggle is a zero-sum game in which the
oppressed gain at the expense of other non-elite sectors of the
population. _

Protesters march with family members of victims of police brutality
through Midtown Manhattan on July 31, 2020, in New York City., SCOTT
HEINS / GETTY IMAGES

 

Donald Trump and the right wing refer to Black protesters as
“thugs” and “looters” guilty of “treason.”
[[link removed]] In
contrast, liberals offer support for the protests, urging white people
to become “allies”
[[link removed]] to
the movement.

Though their rhetoric is starkly different, there is a dangerous
overlap between the Trumpian and liberal views. They both imply that
concessions won by Black protesters will hurt white people. Trump
tells whites to defend their interests, while liberals urge them to
make altruistic sacrifices.

The corporate media never challenge the underlying and pernicious myth
that anti-racist struggle is a zero-sum game in which the oppressed
gain at the expense of other non-elite sectors of the population.

Black revolutionaries have long rejected this myth. They have
understood that when Black protesters win material gains, almost
everyone but the white elite benefits.

 

Black abolitionist David Walker highlighted this truth in his iconic
1829 _Appeal_ [[link removed]]. The
document was a call for Black insurrection against slavery and white
supremacy, but Walker understood that poor and working-class whites
also had a stake in that revolution. White supremacy not only
subjugated people of color, it also facilitated the exploitation of
the white 99 percent, who would benefit from a coalition with the
Black working class. Walker envisioned a future in which white and
Black working people “will all live in peace and happiness
together.”

However, Walker also understood that Black people must lead the
struggle. Though white abolitionists had criticized Thomas Jefferson
and other racists of the day, Walker warned against relying on whites
to do the heavy lifting: “Let no one of us suppose that the
refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough
— they are _whites_, we are _blacks._ We, and the world, wish to
see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the
blacks _themselves._” Walker knew that without Black people at the
helm of the struggle, the movement’s demands or strategies might not
reflect their interests. For instance, many white critics of slavery
advocated the deportation of freedpeople to Africa, a solution that
Black abolitionists like Walker vehemently rejected
[[link removed]].

Diverse figures within the Black radical tradition — from W.E.B. Du
Bois to Martin Luther King Jr. to the Combahee River Collective
[[link removed]] —
have expanded upon the dual insights of Walker’s _Appeal_. That
understanding is also apparent within the movement that burst into the
national spotlight after the 2014 murders of Michael Brown and Eric
Garner, and which reentered the public consciousness after the murders
of George Floyd, Tony McDade and Breonna Taylor earlier this year. The
platform of the Movement for Black Lives
[[link removed]] advocates changes that would
benefit society as a whole in numerous ways.

White people must appreciate all that they have to gain from the
success of the Black movement. Altruism is rarely enough to produce
committed activists when people must incur physical, material and
social risks to join a movement. Solidarity, not altruism, is the only
viable foundation for the struggle to achieve collective liberation.

DIVERSITY AND POWER WITHIN MOVEMENTS

Historically, victories by Black protesters have benefited working
people of all races. This is because Black victories require the
dismantling of both economic and racial hierarchies, and therefore
open pathways for more people on the oppressed side of the system.

The reverse is not true: Victories by white working people often
exclude Black, Latinx and other nonwhite groups, or even intensify
their oppression; concessions delivered to relatively prosperous
groups need not benefit the more oppressed groups below them. The most
famous U.S. example is the New Deal, which granted Social Security and
labor rights to most workers but denied those rights to farmworkers
and domestic workers. Black and Latinx workers were concentrated in
these sectors, thus intensifying their oppression and delaying their
acquisition of those rights (some of the New Deal’s exclusions
are still on the books
[[link removed]] today).

How, then, do we ensure that a victory benefits the entire working
class? The New Deal demonstrates that anti-discrimination must be in
the forefront of any struggle, to ensure that the demands of the most
oppressed are answered. That means that a movement and its leadership
must not only reflect the full diversity of the workforce, but must
intentionally over-include those most oppressed. White leaders cannot
be trusted to represent a Black constituency. Black men cannot be
trusted to represent Black women. No American can be trusted to
represent those suffering the effects of U.S. imperialism. Movements
can only answer the needs of those at the bottom by positioning them
as decision-makers.

When they do so, the whole 99 percent benefits. This pattern is clear
in some of the most important victories of the Black movement.

School Integration

Take, for example, race-based affirmative action, which draws major
opposition because it allegedly harms qualified white applicants.

The poster child for affirmative action in higher education was
the open admissions program
[[link removed]] instituted
at the City University of New York (CUNY) between 1970 and 1976, after
a long campaign led by African American and Puerto Rican students. The
program guaranteed a spot in the CUNY system to all high school
graduates in New York City, leading to a 75 percent increase in
enrollment in 1970. The movement had also called for raising the
percentage of Black and Latinx students to align with their percentage
in New York public schools. Its demands had therefore been both
universal and race-specific: it insisted on increased public spending
to benefit the entire population of New York City public schools,
coupled with affirmative action to address racial exclusion.

The results
[[link removed]] of
the program reflected this dual emphasis. Before 1970, less than 10
percent of CUNY students were Black or Latinx, but in 1972, 28 percent
of all open admissions spots went to Black students and another 10
percent went to Latinx students — still not equal to their
percentage of the New York population, but much closer. Note, though,
that _57 percent of the newly created spots went to white students_.
Thus, open admissions did not deny admission to any qualified white
students; instead, it actually opened up CUNY to tens of thousands of
whites.

The white beneficiaries of open admissions included not just
working-class kids but also large portions of the middle class. Since
many of the newly admitted whites would otherwise have attended
private colleges, it saved their parents tens of thousands in tuition
dollars while giving them access to the academically more rigorous
CUNY system. Furthermore, the huge infusion of resources needed to
accommodate the 75 percent increase in enrollment created many new
professional and administrative positions, which were overwhelmingly
filled — because of ongoing discriminatory practices — by white
professionals.

The same dynamics operated during the struggle for public school
integration in the South. White supremacists argued, without evidence,
that school integration would hurt white students. But as Gavin Wright
shows in _Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights
Revolution in the A__merican South_, the desegregation of public
schools “led to substantial gains in educational attainment and
earnings for black southerners, with no measurable adverse educational
effects on white students.”

The Black movement also dramatically increased federal funding for
Southern education during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
The highest levels of funding
[[link removed]] went to areas
where the Black movement was most disruptive. Yet white students also
benefited from Black protest, since Head Start and other new programs
enhanced educational opportunities for all students. And War on
Poverty programs produced no reductions in budget or quality for the
schools white students attended.

Jobs and Wages

Southern elites had likewise stoked fears that the integration of the
Southern workforce would hurt white workers. But as Wright
demonstrates in _Sharing the Prize_, gains for Black workers usually
coincided with gains for white workers.

Quantitative research
[[link removed]] by
economist Michael Reich has shown that racial inequality translates to
lower wages for Black workers and _also_ lowers wages for whites.
The reason is that Black-white wage inequality “weaken[s] workers’
solidarity and bargaining strength.” Greater racial equality is
associated with more solidarity between Black and white workers, and
thus stronger unions.

Again, Black revolutionaries have always understood this point. In
1969, the Black feminist Frances Beal wrote
[[link removed]] that,
“the entire labor movement in the United States has suffered as a
result of the super exploitation of black workers and women.” This
“super exploitation” ultimately “works to everyone’s
disadvantage,” and so “the liberation of these two groups is a
stepping stone to the liberation of all oppressed people.”

The history of union organizing confirms both the shared interests of
all workers and the need for diverse working-class leadership. The
auto industry offers a clear example of how anti-racist unions lift up
all workers and, conversely, how the abandonment of anti-racism
ultimately harms all.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) was originally a pioneer of anti-racism
in the labor movement. Its early organizing included a massive effort
to recruit Black workers
[[link removed]], which was led by Black
communists
[[link removed]].
The UAW of the 1940s was a relatively democratic
[[link removed]] union, as
reflected in numerous instances when the rank-and-file successfully
pushed leaders to fight rather than acquiesce to the bosses. During
the war, Black members got the UAW to demand an end to job segregation
and unequal wages. The resulting solidarity between Black and white
workers enabled the rank and file to stage hundreds of strikes —
usually in defiance of the leadership’s wartime “no-strike
pledge” — which assured that workers shared in the soaring wartime
profits.

By the mid-1950s, however, the UAW’s anti-communist white leaders
[[link removed]] had suppressed the
interracial democracy that had allowed for earlier victories. The
result was a union that bought short-term benefits for white workers
by selling out Black workers. When the auto companies began moving
production from the Detroit area to white suburbs and the segregated
South, the UAW barely resisted, and even denied resources to local
chapters that tried to resist. As the jobs moved to the suburbs, white
workers were able to move with them, while the Black workers were
stuck in Detroit — blocked by racist loan programs, realtors
[[link removed]] and government
policy [[link removed]]. The union was
thus consenting to a transfer of jobs from Black to white workers.
When the jobs later moved south, the UAW was abandoning both Black and
white workers in the Detroit area, in exchange for modest wage
increases in the short term for those workers who kept their jobs.

When Black workers
[[link removed]] in
the Detroit area began organizing in the late 1960s against dangerous
conditions and racist supervisors, they encountered fierce opposition
from the union leadership. The Black radicals explicitly fought for
both racial equality and the “uplifting of the working class as a
whole.” [[link removed]] And indeed, the
strikes they organized stood to improve conditions, pay and job
security for all workers. On the other hand, the defeat of the Black
insurgents laid the foundation for five decades of union-negotiated
givebacks [[link removed]] that have
hurt all auto workers.

The defeat of militant anti-racism has also spelled doom for numerous
other unions
[[link removed]].
As goes the Black worker, so goes the whole working class.

Police Terror

The same logic applies to the movement against police terror. Ending
police violence against people of color will also end police violence
against whites. From 2013 through the end of November 2020, U.S.
police had killed at least 8,658
[[link removed]] people — hundreds of times
more
[[link removed]] (total
and per capita) than in other wealthy countries.

In an attempt to discredit Black protest, Trump recently declared that
police kill “more white people”
[[link removed]] than
non-whites. The statement is almost true, since about half
[[link removed]] (49
percent since 2013 [[link removed]]) of the
victims of police violence are white. But Trump’s conclusion is
disingenuous: it neglects the much higher per-capita rates
[[link removed]] at which Black,
Indigenous and Latinx people are killed, and it implies that because
whites are also brutalized, there’s no reason for non-whites to be
angry. It’s like saying Black people have no right to protest
Trump’s homicidal response to COVID-19 because the virus also kills
white people
[[link removed]].

Yet Trump’s comment did inadvertently reveal that whites share an
interest in stopping police violence. If the movement achieved a 50
percent decline in police murders, thousands of white lives would be
saved.

Moreover, if the demand to defund the police is even partially
successful, it will produce manifold economic benefits for working
people of all races
[[link removed]].
Defunding the police by even 50 percent would free up $58 billion
[[link removed]] a
year to be spent on public education, health care, community-run
violence prevention programs and a Green New Deal, in the process
creating hundreds of thousands of professional, administrative and
industrial jobs that pay living wages.

Your Liberation and Mine

Australian Aboriginal organizer Lilla Watson famously said to
non-Aboriginal supporters, “If you have come here to help me, you
are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is
bound up with mine, then let us work together.” The lesson for
non-Black observers of the recent protests is clear: most non-Black
people will benefit from the Black resistance, and should join not
just as well-meaning “allies” but as partners in rebellion.

This shared interest doesn’t mean we all have the exact same
experiences. The voices of the most oppressed should always carry
special weight on the questions that affect them. When movements do
that, all workers benefit.

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