The purpose of racial discrimination in the South was to foment mistrust between the two races: the blacks distrusted the whites because the whites went along with the racial discrimination and the whites distrusted the blacks because they feared that blacks would work for the employer for lower wages whenever they had the chance (i.e., if the Jim Crow discrimination were ended). Solidarity to force the employers to pay higher wages would have required white workers to be in the same organization with blacks, which would have required them to break the Jim Crow law against blacks and whites being in the same organization.

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Here is an example of how the upper class in the South preached racist contempt for black people for the precise purpose of preventing blacks and whites from developing solidarity. In the 1940s a notoriously reactionary Texan named Vance Muse had "wealthy sponsors, ranging from Texas oil and cotton magnates, to northern petrochemicals titans like the DuPonts and the Pews." Muse warned whites not to join labor unions with these words, “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

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The whites who mistakenly believed that the Jim Crow laws benefited them were not of a mind to break those laws. The result was that the white workers had to accept lower wages than whites in the North. Racial discrimination--in particular the refusal of the whites to see it as an attack on them as well as on the blacks, and their refusal to join blacks in fighting to abolish the racial discrimination--created so much mistrust between black and white workers that solidarity between them was impossible. This harmed the white workers. It did not benefit them at all, despite the upper class argument that "Jim Crow is good for the whites." (There were working class white tenant farmers who united with black tenant farmers in the Deep South during the 1930s, and who broke the Jim Crow laws by meeting and going on strike together. This was the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. They won important gains.)

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In the United States today the ruling plutocracy uses racial discrimination to create mistrust between whites and non-whites. Blacks and Hispanics know from first hand experience how they are discriminated against. Because whites don't experience this discrimination they are less aware of its existence and are susceptible to being persuaded by lies saying that the discrimination is a myth (e.g., "The police don't single blacks and Hispanics out for worse treatment; it's just that they're all a bunch of low life criminals.") Some whites may even believe the lie that they benefit from racial discrimination against blacks and Hispanics. (The Left, after all, tells them they benefit from it, calling it "white privilege" as if it were a "privilege" [the word means a benefit, by definition] to have one's solidarity with other working class people destroyed.)

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Naturally the failure of whites to join blacks and Hispanics in demanding an end to the racial discrimination causes blacks to mistrust whites, even in some cases to view them as their enemy. By the same token, whites who think blacks and Hispanics are criminal races tend to fear them. All of this results in the destruction of solidarity between working class people of all races. This is precisely the purpose of racial discrimination: Divide-and-Rule.

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This divide-and-rule is what enables the Big Money class to rule over us. It is why the 400 richest Americans are able to own more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Divide-and-rule is what lets the rich get away with this injustice despite the fact that virtually all ordinary people think it is morally wrong. Working class people--of ALL races--suffer greatly from this terrible economic inequality. Because the lion's share of the wealth we produce goes to benefit a Billionaire class living in unimaginable luxury (as described here), ordinary people of ALL races live in economic insecurity. One big medical bill that the insurance policy won't cover or a job layoff or firing is all that it takes to drive many into missing a mortgage or rent payment and being homeless. For fear of being unemployed working people of ALL races put up with terrible abuse on the job. None of this is necessary. But to end it we must have the solidarity and mutual trust that it takes to remove the rich from power and have real not fake democracy with no rich and no poor.

 

What to Do?

 

The solution to this Big Problem--rampant racial discrimination being used as a weapon of social control to protect a dictatorship of the rich--is a Big Solution: egalitarian revolution as discussed here. This Big Solution will require enormous solidarity, which in turn will require that ALL ordinary people work to abolish racial discrimination. Wherever racial discimination exists everyone should denounce it and work to abolish it, no matter what their race. This is how we can make our society truly equal, with no rich and no poor, with an economy based on the principal of "From each according to ability, to each according to need."

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Reject the Left's "white privilege" guilt tripping (that is pushed by Big Money)

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This doesn't mean (as the Left preaches) that whites should feel guilty for being white or feel obliged to apologize for having white skin and "white privilege." Ordinary whites do not benefit from this system of racial discrimination and they were not the ones who created it. It was--historically--the wealthy tobacco palantation owners in the Virginia Colony who invented it. Specifically they invented the idea of making all Africans, no matter how much property they owned, inferior under the law to all people of European descent no matter how little property they owned. This was a complete break from centuries of British common law, which accorded rights under the law based on property, not skin color.

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To appreciate just how extreme a break this was, read what the British Attorney General, who had to approve of all laws that the Virginia Colony rulers wanted to enact, wrote in 1723 when he first read their proposal to enact a law with these words:

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'...no free negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever.'

 

The Attorney General was shocked that skin color, not property, was proposed to be the basis for one's status under the law. He wrote:

 

'I cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon account of his complexion..., to vote at elections of officers, either for a county, or parish, etc., is incident to every freeman, who is possessed of a certain proportion of property, and, therefore, when several negroes have merited their freedom, and obtained it, and by their industry, have acquired that proportion of property, so that the above-mentioned incidental rights of liberty are actually vested in them, for my own part, am persuaded, that it cannot be just, by a general law, without any allegation of crime, or other demerit whatsoever, to strip all free persons, of a black complexion (some of whom may, perhaps be of considerable substance,) from those rights, which are so justly valuable to every freeman.'" [from The Invention of the White Race, Volume II, by Theodore W. Allen, pg. 241]

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The Virginia Colony plantation owners eventually prevailed and made it the law that no African person had rights under the law that any person of European descent had to recognize. This created--for the first time--a new category of people under the law: people of European descent. Such people came to be known as "white." Prior to this nobody was known as or considered themselves to be white; the concept did not exist. People were British or French or Irish or African or Scottish or of this or that native American tribe, etc., but never "white."

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Why did the Virginia Colony plantation owners make this extreme break from British common law? The reason is because they were frightened to death by the recent Bacon's Rebellion in which bonded (indentured or slave) laborers--Africans and British--united and attempted to overthrew the class of plantation owners with a military attack that damn near succeeded. A British naval ship captain, Thomas Grantham, used deception to help defeat the rebellion. His own words indicate the unity of African and British laborers:

 

"I there met about four hundred English and Negroes in Arms who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the Point, saying I had betrayed them, and thereupon some were for shooting me and others were for cutting me in peeces: I told them I would willingly surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from His Majestie, and did engage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their Slavery: And with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand that what I did was by the order of his Majestie and the Governor....Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes, which accordingly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes...."113 [reference: http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html ]

 

The Virginia Colony rulers decided that they had to break up this solidarity, and the method they chose was racial discrimination. The Left calls this system of rracial discrimination "white privilege," but it is no "privilege" to have one's solidarity with fellow working class people destroyed so that the Big Money class can more easily dominate and oppress one! Unfortunately for all the subsequent generations of working class people, Big Money's racial discrimination method of social control has proven all too effective. For this we should blame the very rich, not ordinary people of European descent!

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What About Affirmative Action?

 

There are two ways, short of an egalitarian revolution, to redress the decades of racial discrimination in hiring and school admissions. The first way produces great resentment of whites against blacks and Hispanics and undermines solidarity. The second way produces great solidarity between whites and blacks and Hispanics. Our ruling elite made their choice shortly after the Civil Rights Movement had garnered tremendous support from white working class people on the basis of opposing racial discrimination; the Movement gained so much widespread support for this goal that it was able to abolish Jim Crow's racial discrimination in law. Which way do you suppose was chosen by our ruling plutocracy (in particular by its chief agent at the time, President Richard Nixon)? If you guessed the first way you would be right.

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The ruling class chose what came to be known as Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action sets lower criteria for minorities than for whites to be hired or accepted into a college or university. Instead of being against racial discrimination, Affirmative Action is for it. What has been the result? Terrible! For decades now whites have been hearing employers or schools tell them, "We're sorry. We couldn't give you the position you applied for because we had to give it to a less qualified minority person." Could a better method of creating racial resentment ever be invented? (Furthermore, as the above charts on incarceration, wealth, income and unemployment by race make quite clear, Affirmative Action has not come close to delivering the goods or even moving things substantially closer to the goal of racial equality.)

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The second method, the one the plutocracy avoided like the plague, is this: Make the criterion for being hired to a job or admitted to a school be the same regardless of race: that the applicant has what is really required to do the job or benefit from the school. Stop requiring applicants to get some arbitrary score on a test (like the SAT) that correlates far more with race and economic status than with actual ability to succeed as an employee or student. In addition, bring back on-the-job training (something only older people remember) so that the criterion for getting hired is what really matters--simply the ability to learn the relevant new skills. This alone would dramatically increase the numbers of minorities hired for jobs or admitted to schools.

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In addition, however, the second method would include guaranteeing anybody, regardless of race, this: If you're willing to work reasonably doing something socially useful (that's different from making a profit for a capitalist!) then you'll have the opportunity to do so and to receive in return the same standard of living as anybody else. And furthermore the second method would include this: Create schools sufficient in number and appropriate in type of instruction to enable any person who wants to further their education to do so.

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The second method of redressing past racial discrimination would result in ZERO unemployment among minorities as well as whites and would enable EVERY minority person and every white person who wanted to further their education to do so. If THIS were the solution to making up for past racial discrimination in hiring and school admissions (even just the first part of the method alone) then white working people would be in agreement with it. They'd LOVE it. But no, the plutocracy didn't choose the second solution because it would not have furthered divide-and-rule. Still, the second solution is the kind of solution that we should fight for as a way of ending racial discrimination and making a better world for all of us. It's an egalitarian solution.

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* For more hard data and analysis of the crime/race connection see the following: 

"Incarceration & social inequality" (2010), published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which states: 

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"In the last few decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population.1 America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal institutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Yet the scale and empirical details tell a story that is largely unknown.

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"Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces extraordinary rates of incarceration among young African American men with no more than a high school education. For these young men, born since the mid-1970s, serving time in prison has become a normal life event.

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"The influence of the penal system on social and economic disadvantage can be seen in the economic and family lives of the formerly incarcerated. The social inequality produced by mass incarceration is sizable and enduring for three main reasons: it is invisible, it is cumulative, and it is intergenerational. The inequality is invisible in the sense that institutionalized populations commonly lie outside our official accounts of economic well-being. Prisoners, though drawn from the lowest rungs in society, appear in no measures of poverty or unemployment. As a result, the full extent of the disadvantage of groups with high incarceration rates is underestimated. The inequality is cumulative because the social and economic penalties that flow from incarceration are accrued by those who already have the weakest economic opportunities. Mass incarceration thus deepens disadvantage and forecloses mobility for the most marginal in society. Finally, carceral inequalities are intergenerational, affecting not just those who go to prison and jail but their families and children, too."

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