Good thread that effectively summarizes how capitalism intersects with what's going on right now
I agree and disagree. Most of it is true (except for the standard police-hating nonsense) and the mixing of classism and racism is understandable because, we'll, it's how US culture has mixed it up, of course.
But the idea that racism only can end if you end capitalism is in itself wrongheaded. This is where the intertwingling of class and race takes the American astroll. I mean, yes, class equality would cut racism to the heart, both through increased class travel and because to achieve it the white and black lower classes must united to begin with.
I don't believe this is news, the American clause 22: to end class inequality you must end racism. To end racism you must end class inequality. It's a nice little paradox you've landed in and the people who benefit from it have of course fueled it considerably. Both through curling the racism of the white working class and by fueling the reaction hatred of the black working class (and other minorities too, of course, but you know, historical prominence). When everybody wants somebody lower than them in the ladder to shit on it's easy to point a target on other people.
This is a painful segway because I actually want to take a paragraph and mention something I thought of the other day. It's about the need for the white working class to step on the black lower class so they can say "hey at least I'm above those guys". You know, totempolism, or whatever you call it. Well, I'm not sure how familiar with working class history you are (or how applicable the following description of Swedish working class history is for the rest to the rest of the world) but there used to be a very strict hierarchy to what counted as "working class". And this hierarchy was fiercely gatekept to keep the lower status occupations down. I've forgotten the technical name for them, and I have absolutely no idea what to translate it to, so for the lack of better words I will just refer to them as workers vs labourers for simplicity. Basically the difference was that workers were steadily employed or required skill or good reputation but labourers did menial duties and could be hired and dismissed at will. For example, builders and factory workers were working class but such work as dock workers and herring-wankers, and many female-dominated ways of making pay, were "labour class" (and below them both were the farm labourers of course but that's a whole other story). And the arrogance and disdain concerning the labourers was used fairly frequently to sow distrust and disloyalty in the worker's rights movement both by outsiders who wanted to hurt the movement and by insiders who wanted to keep feeling that they were higher than the next guy on the status totem pole (stotem pole?). Unsurprisingly, rights for labour class workers lagged behind until the working class movement finally said "fuck it, we're going whole hog on this shit and you get to go along" to the labour class (but still left out the farm labourers of course, but that's still another story).
The message I'm trying to get across here is just the parallell of the two Swedish lower classes and the American racially separated lower classes. We didn't have a racial component to those two, of course (though if you could go back and look I'd bet a high deal of money that the labourers class was where you'd find the most non-Swedes and Swedes from outside the local region/culture), and I'm not trying to make the story a lesson, a "just do what we did lol it's so easy" moral. I just wanted to make the parallell of how these two classes was used against each other and how I realised the other day how similar it is.
So, any way. That ended up being a bit longer a roundturn than I had anticipated. So to bring this back on topic I thought I'd get back to the whole "end racism to end classism, end classism to end racism" catch and why despite writing several paragraphs about how it's that way I still began the post by saying it's not necessary to kill capitalism to end racism. This is also, by the way, why I don't think ending class inequality will necessarily end racism. And it's do to with nationalism. I've mentioned before on these forums how I feel that the intermarrying of the socialist spirit and the national spirit into a greater spirit of duty to and sacrifice for the good of your fellow men is what was the key behind the success stories of 20th century Scandinavia and how I see the aspect of greater fraternity to an entire populace as the mortar that will hold a socialist system together. Well, there's a problem for America here in that American culture don't do the fancy was style of European nation-nationalism. America does race-nationalism, and it does race-nationalism to the core of it's culture. I'm not just talking the racial supremacists here either, I'm talking the average culture of the average American. You arrive in America and you get sorted by the Great Sorting Hat into your racial house and it's assumed that your whole identity, history, culture and heritage is just erased, just like that. You're just "white" now. You're just "black" now. You're just "Asian" now. I mean, sure, the ever shrinking basis for what goes as "white" means that some new subcategories have sprung up, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the large groupings of the American cultural subconciousness relate directly to the groupings of Ye Olde Tri-race system (though negroid and mongoloid has fallen out of usage through the years the term of caucasoid is still in use through Caucasian, a term that is nonsensical for its usage unless you look at it through it's racist history). And I think this race nationalism is something that will perpetuate racism by itself regardless of capitalism. See, equality doesn't kill nationalism. Equality just makes shitting on people for being different less close at hand. But the American race nations was not forged by the same standards as national nations. They were not forged through a natural bond between people who have identity and culture in common. They were forged to make sure that you have another group on the totem pole to shit on. They are not defined by anything else than status safekeeping. Hell, if you look at the evolution of parts American culture throughout the 19th and 20th century, such as the history of country and southern music, you can actually see American race nationalism tearing apart what was once culture of both black and white people in the south and filing the remainders into neat, racially segregated little folders of "white people music" and "black people music" just so the white race nation could shit on the black race nation an declare their "white people music" folder better.
So to regain some clarity in my ramblings. The big main hindrance to leaving racism behind in the USA is not the economic inequality, in my eyes, but the cultural geist of race-nationalism that pervades how Americans feel, think, and act, and most importantly, how Americans create their identities and identify each other. And I don't see any way that these highly-based-on-old-literally-racist-philosophy identities can survive if you want to change that. There can be no white culture and there can be no black culture. They both spawn the other from itself. You essentially need to commit geno-suicide and reshape your whole cultural identities or something else unattainably u-/dys-topic like that. Then you could start talking about beating capitalism defeating racist class inequality. Because I don't think it is possible before then.
Some intangible guilt as a controlling mechanism is a kind of inheritence from our intellectual past in the west, one might say.
Sounds to me like you're just trying to deny the part you play in the system.