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Black/Red View by John Alan
May 2001
Race and the census
The 2000 census created a great deal of discussion about the United States
as a nation composed of diverse races and ethnic peoples. Some of the new
celebrated facts are, for example, that in California, the largest state in
the Union, Latinos are the largest ethnic group; African Americans are
moving into suburbs and seven million of them have identified themselves as
"bi-racial" people.
Such statistical analysis of the American society as multiethnic, implying
that it is moving naturally and peacefully toward absolute social
integration, is both false and an abstraction.
The mere numbers of the 2000 census say nothing about the antagonistic
social divisions of race and class in American society. The Cincinnati
revolt against the unconscionable killings of African- American youths by
police officers has once again challenged the concept that there has been
any radical shrinking of the Black-white divide. In other words, racial and
ethnic diversity, by itself, can still be full of racism.
Hector St. Jean Crevecoeur, a Frenchman who lived in America in 1782 when
racial diversity was very obvious, posed the famous question: "What then is
the American, the new man?" He answered: "a mixture of English, Scotch,
Irish, French, Dutch, German and Swede... He is either a European or a
descendant of a European." Crevecoeur wrote this racist observation when
African slaves were one-fifth of the population.
John Hope Franklin, the African-American historian, in his book RACE AND
HISTORY considered the ethnic composition of the U.S. as "one of the
salient features" of American civilization. If we closely examine American
civilization, we find that the actual origin of that "salient feature" is
rooted in slave labor and not in its ideological concept of freedom and
diversity. The truth is: there could hardly have been a successful
development of capitalism in America without African slave labor. There was
no other available abundant source of labor power to cultivate the sugar,
rice, tobacco and cotton. Thus, American capitalism, at that moment in its
history, grafted the barbarism of slave labor onto the production of
commodities for the world market which essentially made American slave
masters the new capitalists.
Moreover, American capitalism did not end its exploitation of Black labor
in the post Civil War era. It was inherently driven to accumulate an
unprecedented amount of capital and to create the technology to accomplish
that accumulation. Therefore, the American 19th-century industrial
revolution and economic expansion to the Pacific coast during the post
Civil War period opened the door for working class immigrants from Europe
and China to come to America to build railroads, bridges, to work in the
factories, the mines and the mills.
This "uprooting" of European and Asian labor from their original homes
began in the latter decades of the 19th century and became a torrent by the
first decade of the 20th century when upwards of 1.4 million immigrants
came to America each year. This is one of the reasons why America appears
today as a nation of diverse races and ethnic peoples.
We should note that the "diversity," as it is present in the 2000 census,
is simply a reflection of capitalism's exploitation of labor and has
nothing to do with the ideal of a human unity in diversity. American
diversity emerged out of and continues to contain contradictions and
strife. For example, the Mexican laborer is only welcome in California as
long as she is working hard in the fields of the growers, but if she gets
sick or seeks to go on relief, the political cry becomes, send her back
across the border.
The African-American people have been around on the North American
continent since the first Europeans colonized it. Then as now, the
socialization of labor is structured according to the needs of American
capital, which means new immigrant labor without any rights and the
unleashing of the criminal (in)justice system against the rebellious
African-American population. There can be a new beginning in the very
meaning of diversity when the different groups find a commonalty in their
opposition to the inhuman capitalist accumulation.
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