Don Imus and Racism U.S.A.

Capitalist America: Hell for Black People

Don Imus, the foulmouthed multimillionaire “shock jock” who has talked racist, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim trash for years on his “Imus in the Morning” show, was canned this month by both MSNBC and CBS. Public outcry over his nasty racist slur against the mainly black Rutgers University women’s basketball team sealed his fate, after initial attempts by Imus and his network bosses at damage control. We say good riddance to Imus and his swinish sidekicks. But for all the liberal angst that dominated the media for about a two-week news cycle, his firing does nothing to address the material reality of racist oppression in this country.

On April 6, two days after Imus and executive producer Bernard McGuirk (also subsequently canned) made their grotesquely racist and sexist comments, with Imus referring to the Rutgers team as “nappy-headed hos,” the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) led the attack, issuing a press statement demanding first an apology and then his firing. The NABJ was joined by others, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. When MSNBC finally pulled the plug on its simulcast of the Imus program, followed shortly thereafter by CBS radio broadcasters, it claimed that the pullout of sponsors such as American Express, Sprint, Staples, Procter & Gamble and General Motors was not the tipping point. Rather, pressure by MSNBC employees—black and white, men and women—had played the decisive role.

In a Washington Post (13 April) article, Eugene Robinson wrote: “Two of the network’s on-air stars—‘Today’ weatherman Al Roker and NBC correspondent Ron Allen—authored strong anti-Imus posts on NBC blogs.” He noted further that women and minorities who worked at NBC told management “they felt the sting of Imus’s attacks personally.” Alexander Cockburn, writing in CounterPunch (14 April), was to the point: “People finally got mad and the networks blinked. That’s good, even though it won’t change anything.”

The history of racist, sexist garbage spewed by Imus & Co. is long and well documented. (Imus is hardly unique; one could add the likes of Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a few in a long list of reactionary, racist mouthpieces, offending all the way to the bank.) Imus’s nauseating and frequent use of such language—and the tolerance of it—reflects the reality of racist oppression in capitalist America, reflections flourishing in a retrograde political climate. The broadcast equivalent of the gutter press, the “shock jocks” promote open vile racism, all-sided bigotry and American chauvinism on behalf of this country’s capitalist rulers.

The long list of political officeholders and aspirants of both capitalist parties and media and literary luminaries—mostly white and male, but not exclusively so—who appeared regularly on Imus’s program have made quite a nauseating spectacle themselves. They opined that the incident had called forth a “national conversation” about race and sex, a claim laced with crocodile tears about their own respective roles as “enablers.” The networks, and not only Imus’s employers at CBS and MSNBC, suddenly discovered “disparity” in the situation of black and white people in the U.S. and quoted relevant statistics to that effect—at least for the duration of the news cycle.

One need only look at Hurricane Katrina for an indelible image of the reality of life for black people. The black and poor of New Orleans were left to suffer, left to die, through sheer ruling-class contempt and incompetence on the part of not only the Bush administration but the Democrats on the state and local level as well. Over Imus, however, Democrats, white and black, piled on with their practiced hypocrisy, their cynical posture as “friends” of the oppressed. Thus, Hillary Clinton promptly posted material about the scandal on her Web site and eventually made her way to Rutgers to speak. (The Clintons have an ax to grind, as Imus & Co. repeatedly referred to Hillary Clinton as “Satan.”) Barack Obama, who had appeared some years ago on Imus’s show to plug one of his books, announced that he would not be a guest in the future. Democrats Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton also latched onto the Imus affair in order to shore up their credentials as “black leaders.”

The real deal is that the Democrats, while occasionally mouthing something about “diversity” as they trawl for votes and to cash in on the enormous unpopularity of the demented Bush regime, are up to their necks in the oppression of the black masses. Democratic president Bill Clinton, who managed to conjure a reputation as a “friend” to the black population, implemented the ending of “welfare as we know it,” accelerated the use of the racist death penalty and carried out hideous imperialist attacks against Iraq and Serbia, among other crimes against the world’s oppressed and working masses. Such, of course, are the normal workings of capitalist “democracy.”

For his part, Jesse Jackson’s job has been and continues to be winning back to the fold blacks and other minorities who become discontented with the Democrats. Jackson egged on the racist “war on drugs,” the results of which are counted in the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth. He has also acted as the bourgeoisie’s fireman in dousing the flames of class struggle, demobilizing black workers, including from the ILA longshore union, who were marching in defense of school busing in the early 1980s in Norfolk, Virginia, and playing a key role in defusing the L.A. transit strike in 2000.

Then there’s Al Sharpton, a demagogue and hustler who wore a wire for the Feds in the 1980s. In 1986, Sharpton led boycotts in Harlem against Arab shopkeepers. He further served the racist exploiters by pushing bankrupt police “reform” schemes in order to squelch struggle against the acquittal of the cops who pumped 41 bullets into unarmed black African immigrant Amadou Diallo. Sharpton even fronted for the Ku Klux Klan in October 1999 by going to court on their behalf in opposition to the Partisan Defense Committee-initiated labor/black mobilization against the Klan in New York City.

To our reformist opponents in the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Imus affair “highlights how liberal journalists, supposedly committed to objectivity, nod and wink at the most outrageous, hateful and bigoted behavior, as long as it serves their careers—and how racism has been made respectable in the mainstream media” (Socialist Worker online, 20 April). No kidding! The ISO gloats that Imus’s dumping shows “a shift in the political climate—reflected in, but going far beyond, the ouster of the Republican Congress last November and the ever-worsening crisis of the Bush administration.”

Such liberal “Anybody but Bush” gushing only serves to obscure the reality that the Democrats are the other party of racist American capitalism. It was in the context of the horrific conditions for the black population today—conditions reinforced by the betrayals of the self-proclaimed (Democratic Party) black “leaders” and the (largely pro-Democratic Party) trade-union misleadership—that Imus’s disgusting racial slurs hit a raw nerve. Enough has become more than enough, and this was one head that had to roll, with forces far more powerful than that of the Rutgers team clamoring for action, however token. But “cleaning up” the airwaves by getting rid of this particular bigot or adding a few more black executives—Jesse Jackson’s timeworn refrain—won’t bring about any amelioration in the condition of the black masses, much less the fundamental social overturn required to smash the racist oppression endemic to American capitalist society.

As Marxists, our interest is in changing material reality, in forever destroying the social basis for black oppression in this country by welding the anger of the ghetto poor to the power of labor and effecting a proletarian socialist revolution. We do not hold that this can occur by sanitizing social reality through “politically correct” discourse or moral appeals to the “conscience” of the racist rulers, including their corporate media mouthpieces.

Black oppression is embedded in the foundation of American capitalism. The chains of black chattel slavery were shattered only by iron and blood in the American Civil War, the second American revolution. Following emancipation and the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction through a compromise by the Northern capitalists and the former Southern slavocracy, the shackles of institutionalized Jim Crow segregation lasted well into the mid 20th century. While the struggles for civil rights resulted in the end of legal segregation in the South, under their liberal, pro-Democratic Party leadership they did not and could not address the fundamental material conditions of the mass of the black population, North and South. The black population constitutes an oppressed race-color caste, segregated in the mass at the bottom of American society. At the same time, militant black workers have historically played, and continue to play, a leading role in the struggles of the labor movement.

The decades-long rollback of the gains wrested by the civil rights movement and other social struggles in the 1960s underlines the fact that it will take a third American Revolution—a socialist revolution—to bring about full social equality for black people. The college campuses have been the targets of a virtual racist purge as affirmative action programs are slashed and tuition skyrockets. Just in the last few years, infant mortality rates in Mississippi and other Southern states have jumped sharply, particularly in impoverished black households. In many ways today, conditions for the black masses are worse than at the time of the civil rights movement.

With a massive decrease in good union jobs, mainly as a result of the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy and the supine response of the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, generations of black youth have been thrown on the scrap heap. “By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons,” according to an article on “The American Prison Nightmare” in the New York Review of Books (12 April). Even black children as young as six years old can be hauled away in handcuffs, as was the case in Avon Park, Florida, where Desre’e Watson was charged with a felony for a kindergarten tantrum and booked at the county jail, her fingerprints and mug shots duly taken. And this was no isolated event.

Grotesquely, some of Imus’s defenders sought to equate his language with that of black rap musicians who routinely use the “N” word as well as gross anti-women and anti-gay lyrics. They do not equate. Only the most “colorblind” could fail to see the difference between the use of racist epithets in rap lyrics and the spewings of Imus and his coterie of backward wise guys.

There is certainly an ugly side to the “message” rap conveys, reflecting wide-spread backward attitudes in the ghettos, where anti-Semitism, sexism, anti-gay prejudice and anti-immigrant bigotry are noxious by-products of oppression. We oppose the use of racist epithets by anyone, black, white or other. In our article “The ‘N’ Word in Racist America” (WV No. 807, 1 August 2003) we explained:

“Far from being a sign of a subversive assault on the language of oppression, the pervasive use of the slave masters’ epithet by black youth reflects a profound, if unconscious, demoralization and self-hatred, an internalization of the demeaning view of black people propagated by the capitalist rulers and the mass media. Its use represents a retreat from the fight against racism and within the working class and can only offend and divide.”

No tinkering with the present system, no amount of combat against “bad ideas,” can accomplish the historic task of black emancipation. Our perspective is that of revolutionary integrationism, based on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. Our inspiration and model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the October Revolution of 1917, the greatest act of social liberation in all history. In placing the working class of Russia in power, it opened the door to the emancipation of women, the many oppressed nationalities and the long-suffering Jewish people. Our aim is to emulate the Bolsheviks by building a revolutionary party with a significant black leadership component that will lead the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in the struggle for workers power. For black liberation through socialist revolution!