The "N" Word and Racist Terror

Howard Beach Verdict

QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY—On June 9, a multiracial jury convicted Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci, 20, of assault and robbery as hate crimes for the attack on 23-year-old black Army veteran Glenn Moore in the notorious white racist enclave of Howard Beach. Minucci faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for the 29 June 2005 attempted lynching. The “hate crime” charge increases the minimum sentence from five to eight years. The racist thug savagely pummeled his victim with an aluminum baseball bat, leaving Moore with loss of cognitive skills and, as one doctor testified, “dementia as a result of head trauma.” Meanwhile, Minucci’s accomplice Anthony Ench screamed, “This is what you get when you rob white boys, n----r!” (See “NYC: Racist Beating in Howard Beach,” WV No. 851, 8 July 2005).

In fracturing Moore’s skull with a Louisville Slugger, Minucci was carrying out the racist program symbolized by the “N” word—a word that took root on the tongues of the bloody slave-traders, overseers and plantation owners who helped found this country and was carved into the flesh of black victims of Jim Crow lynch mobs. Just a few days ago, on June 26, a black Brooklyn 15-year-old, Winston Johnson, was hit by a car and brutally beaten by a white mob screaming “f--king n----r” after he and three friends inadvertently bicycled into another white enclave, Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn.

While the racist criminal thug Minucci was convicted of “hate crimes,” black people and opponents of racist terror should have no illusions these laws serve to protect them. Unlike liberals and many of our fake-left opponents, we are opposed to the various “hate crime” laws which serve only to enhance the powers of the racist capitalist state. These laws, and the related campus speech codes, give the cops and courts added powers against those who are truly in their cross hairs—blacks seeking to defend themselves against racist terror, antiwar protesters, union militants and leftists. The city’s rulers will undoubtedly use this case to enhance the authority of their racist thugs in blue, who on a daily basis seal the borders of the city’s white enclaves and terrorize the city’s black population to a degree that Fat Nick could only dream of.

Black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism and a direct legacy of black chattel slavery. The capitalist ruling class and its Democratic and Republican parties deliberately foster anti-black racism to forestall, with no small success, united class struggle. For decades, not least through the “war on drugs,” the bourgeoisie has been waging a concerted onslaught against the ghetto masses through the cops and courts. This has led to the imprisonment of up to one million young black men and women at any given time. In every way it can, the bourgeoisie seeks to pit white workers and immigrants against black people, obscuring their shared interests against the capitalist class enemy.

As we wrote in “The ‘N’ Word in Racist America: For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution” (WV No. 807, 1 August 2003): the “N” word “was and remains the white-supremacist rallying cry heralding cross-burnings outside black homes, firebombings of black churches and assaults on black people on city streets. Cops bark it as they rampage through the ghettos, beating down black youth and dragging them off to jail.” Yet in the current backwardly spiraling political and cultural climate, Minucci felt emboldened to claim he used the “N” word as a “term of familiarity and greeting” while beating Moore.

Fat Nick’s defense attorney called black Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy as an expert witness. Best-selling author of N----r: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Kennedy is the most famous of a layer of black intellectuals who have apologized for the widespread casual use of the “N” word by youth of all ethnic backgrounds—use driven in part by the hip-hop lyrics that are a big-dollar revenue stream for capitalist music giants. Kennedy said he had testified as an expert “to advance the aims of justice” since “somebody’s liberties are at stake here.”

The jury did not buy the garbage Kennedy was put on the stand to sell and convicted the racist thug Minucci. Significantly, a key factor for the jury was the revelation that Minucci was also convicted of shooting a paint ball at a Sikh outside a temple—on 11 September 2001—while screaming, “You f--king Indians, you killed our people.” This cut through Minucci’s cynical attempts to portray his bloody attack on Moore as self-defense.

Liberal calls for “hate-crime” legislation are consistent with the false view that the source of racism and oppression is backward ideas. Our article on “The ‘N’ Word in Racist America” cited a contribution by a comrade of the Spartacist League who aptly wrote:

“We are materialists which, with respect to the issue at hand, means our interest is in changing material reality, that is, in forever destroying the social basis for racist oppression in this country by welding labor/black power and effecting a proletarian socialist revolution. We do not hold that this can occur by sanitizing social reality à la...the advocates of ‘politically correct’ discourse. The mirror opposite of such efforts is attempts to make the ‘N’ word hip and thus, according to the proponents of this ‘strategy,’ to erase its racist impact. Either of these idealist pursuits shares the assumption that it is what people think that is responsible for racism and not that racist oppression is the bedrock on which the American capitalist order is maintained.”

Last December, Transport Workers Union Local 100 crippled New York City, the world financial center, with its three-day transit strike. This majority black, multiracial workforce showed the social power of labor in struggle when it struck and defied the racist attacks of the bosses. This same power of organized labor needs to be brought to bear against racist attacks wherever they occur. We fight for labor/black defense to stop racist terror. But unions like the TWU are hamstrung by class-collaborationist leaderships that tie workers to their enemies in the form of the Democratic Party, the cops and the bosses’ courts.

While the trial and conviction of Minucci highlighted that the “N” word is a program of racist terror, the attack on Glenn Moore represents some of the unfinished business of the Civil War in this country. When the Klan tried to march in lower Manhattan in 1999, we built a united-front labor/black demonstration of some 8,000 to stop them. We fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will finish the Civil War through workers revolution!