"Fuck Hope!" - George Carlin



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Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the “End” of Racism
An interview with Juan Santos

“King spoke Truth to Power, while Obama spoke Lies to get in Power.

One might say that other than that, and other than the fact that King stood up to end Black people’s suffering while Obama stood silent in the face of it, they’re just alike.”

Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, and author of the essays Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism, and Obama's Denial: The Fear of a Black Messiah.

Andrea Luchetta interviewed him for a feature piece on Obama’s inauguration for the Italian daily Il Manifesto. The following is the full text of that interview.
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Luchetta: I‘ve interviewed Ms. Makeeba Lloyd, of the "Harlem4Obama Commitee". According to her, racism is nowadays a minor problem. The main conflict, for her, is of a class nature, rather than racial in nature. The social dividing line, she says, is now between the rich and the poor, not between the white and the black. What do you think of this position?

Santos: This is nonsense, Lloyd’s claim is in line with Barack Obama’s utterly false claim that peoples of color are “90% of the way to equality” with whites in the US.

Ms. Lloyd is wrong. The poverty line is a race line. Race determines who is poor and who is not. Roughly a quarter of black and brown people in the US live in poverty, while less than 1/10th of Euro-Americans live in poverty. A black person in the US is 3 times more likely to be poor than a white person.

That’s 90% of the way to “equality”?

No. The very best thing I can say about the idea that peoples of color are approaching equality with whites in the US is that it is an example of extremely bad math, or of people promoting an illusion in hopes that it will come true.

Black unemployment in the US is currently at 11.1% - almost double the average for white people, whose rate of unemployment is 5.9%. Among the general population, - by which I mean those outside of the reservation system that imprisons Native Americans on the remnants of their lands - Blacks have the highest rate of unemployment in the US, followed by Latinos, at 8.8%. Among Black youth unemployment reaches a stunning 32.3 %. From 1976 through today, a new study shows, Latino unemployment rates typically exceeded that of the white population by some 65%. The absolute rate of unemployment for Native Americans on the reservations is, however, roughly SEVENTY PER CENT.

50% of Native American reservation homes have no phones and 1/5 of the homes lack complete kitchen facilities.

It might be interesting to show these figures to Ms. Lloyd to see if, reading them, she is still willing to claim a distinction between a race divide and a class divide in the US.

But economics is by no means the only measure of equality.

Race also determines who is imprisoned and who is not.

Black people in the US are 8.5 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned.

On any given day 1 in 9 young Black men are in prison.

Latinos are 4 times more likely to go to prison than white people.

68% of all U.S. prisoners are people of color, although Black, Latinos and officially recognized Native Americans together make up slightly less than 25% of the overall population of the U.S.

The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It is a system of mass imprisonment aimed at the control of people of color, who, the elites fear, have the potential to violently and politically rebel again as they did in the 1960s. People in other parts of the world simply cannot begin to imagine the conditions that exist here; the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners – a Gulag comprised mostly of prisoners from the minority populations of African and Native American descent – Blacks and Latinos.

This is no “minor problem,” contrary to what Ms. Lloyd suggests. It is a form of mass social control of potentially dissident and rebellious populations based on race and class status. Ms. Lloyd has missed the point entirely.

It’s not a matter of race versus class – race and class are in many ways one thing here in the US.
Usually that kind of system is called a caste system. Despite a few exceptions, like Obama himself, that’s exactly what exists in the US: a caste system.

What the white ruling class did here was this: following the mass rebellions and the burning of major US cities in the 1960s, the white ruling class decided on a strategy of divide and conquer. They created a Black middle class almost overnight, largely using government employment to do so, while at the same time they found another way to deal with the millions of people of color who could not fit into the system; mass imprisonment. These developments are 2 sides of the same coin. Ms. Lloyd’s failure to see this is why she can make the kind of mistakes of analysis she’s making.

Interview continues at The Fourth World: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2009/01/obama-king-and-kennedy-empire-and-end.html
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