Barack Obama’s inauguration as president of the USA is a historic milestone.
It was not just American people who celebrated when Obama won the election. For billions of people across the world, the fact that a black man is now the leader of the most powerful state is a vindication of the struggle against racism.
For hundreds of years, Western powers sought to justify first slavery, then colonialism and finally modern imperialism with pseudo-scientific lies about the supposed superiority of white people. For racists, Obama’s victory creates a dilemma. Some will shift their ground, claiming they never said ‚all‘ black people were inferior. Others will wait for the first sign of Obama’s policies failing and then use that to blame his mistakes on the colour of his skin.
In this situation, we should all hope that antiracists everywhere will be emboldened to take up the fight against oppression and discrimination with renewed confidence. However, two questions are inevitably posed: what does the Obama presidency mean for the fight against racism in America? What does it mean for the world?
Racism in America
As Kam Kumar explained in Workers Power 329, (October 2008), citing the National Urban League’s 2008 Report on Socio-Economic Conditions in Black America, racism lives on in the USA today. Its roots lie in more than 150 years of slavery. There is systematic discrimination against African-Americans in the criminal justice system, in the prison system, in housing, employment and pay.
The same report revealed that more than 80,000 Black Americans die every year because of lack of health insurance. Yet Obama does not call for universal healthcare. Instead, he wants existing healthcare insurers to provide a new plan, which campaigners say will leave 15 million Americans without cover: and a disproportionate number of them will be black.
On the intensely contested issue of police brutality, Obama has, frankly, sat on the fence. More than 20,000 people demonstrated last year against the police frame-up of the Jena 6, a group of black teenagers charged for the „attempted murder“ of a white schoolmate after challenging local racists who hung a noose on a tree as a warning to blacks. Obama called the charges „excessive“ but failed to back the campaigners unambiguously. He even said the Jena issue was not „a matter of black and white“.
Racism and the world system
The ideology of racism is an expression of the world economic system. In the ancient world, before capitalism, while prejudices, discrimination and oppression existed in countless brutal forms, there was no generalised idea that one whole „race“ was somehow inferior to others. This idea arose as world trade developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular with the development of the Atlantic slave trade.
In Europe, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment and of rising capitalism began to promote the notion that all citizens should be equal. In place of the divine right of kings and the privileges of the feudal aristocracy, the revolutions in America (1776) and France, (1789) proclaimed that all men are equal before the law. Yet, both the American and the French republics relied on slavery. A new ideology was needed to explain why some people were „less than human“ and racism provided it.
By the late 19th century, this had even become formalised in so-called „Social Darwinist“ theories, pseudo-scientific claptrap that purported to show that „negroes“ were physically and psychologically less advanced than white Europeans.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the defeat of Germany served to discredit the Nazis‘ extreme version of such racist „theories“, the world saw a process of „decolonisation“. Under the worldwide domination of the USA, the old imperialism changed its form. Powers like Britain were forced to give up direct rule over their colonies but the richest capitalist powers, the USA, Britain, France, continued to dominate less developed countries.
These, despite their formal political independence, remained weak and dependent on the rich countries for their development. The former colonies became semi-colonies, weighed down with debts to the West, their economies open to Western exploitation.
The ideology of racism changed to match this development. Now, Western „experts“ blame the poverty and underdevelopment of the semi-colonial countries on the „mismanagement“ of the post-colonial regimes. The myth of the „white man’s burden“ has turned into the insinuation that the peoples of the former colonial world are incapable of governing themselves, and that the poverty caused by the global financial system is really a consequence of their innate inferiority.
Modern racism is not merely a hangover from a more backward past. It is an ideology rooted in the inequality between states in the modern world. It is an ideology of modern imperialism.
As President of the world’s leading imperialist power, Obama is compelled to defend and champion the USA’s world domination. He has threatened Iran with war if it develops nuclear weapons; he has backed the racist Israeli claim for eternal rights to occupy and dominate Palestinian East Jerusalem; he supports the USA’s occupation of Afghanistan. He has said nothing to support scrapping the vast debts owed by underdeveloped countries.
Conclusion
Obama’s victory raises confidence that racism can be overcome. At the same time, it will test the idea that racism can be defeated without challenging capitalism and imperialism.
The task of socialists is to take up this challenge, joining with other antiracist campaigners to fight racist discrimination and prejudice, and linking this to the fight for the one thing that can uproot racial oppression for good: a world social revolution that destroys the very foundations of inequality everywhere.