Summing up:
1) The USA arose on the foundation of the genocidal theft of Native American (Indian) lands, and the enslavement of African people. Since that time, the oppression of Black people has been essential to the functioning of this system, changing as that system has changed, but always deeply woven into the very fabric of society. White supremacy and capitalism have proven to be so closely intertwined that, even when millions have risen up, time and again, to fight the oppression of African-American people, the system has in the end responded by re-entrenching and reinforcing, even if modifying the forms of, that oppression. Today’s situation is extreme and dire; and any solution that leaves capitalism intact is no solution at all and, indeed, a damaging dead end.
2) There can be a revolution in this country and this revolution can finally uproot and put an end to the long nightmare of oppression and degradation that has been the lot of Black people in particular, along with many, many others, in this country, throughout its history. During the 1960s, a movement that arose from the struggle of African-American people for freedom ended up spreading throughout society and bringing every pillar of this oppressive capitalist-imperialist system into question and under fire; it seriously shook the foundations of imperialist rule. That it did not go far enough must not obscure what it DID accomplish and powerfully demonstrate; and today a party and a leader which locates its roots in that era but which has developed the theory to meet the challenges of this time not only exists, but is actively working to bring forward a new revolutionary movement.
3) This Party has a deep understanding of what kind of revolution must be made, of how the new state power can back up the masses in transforming every sphere of society and in finally overcoming the wounds and scars of capitalism and all forms of enslavement and degradation—including the oppression of Black people—and how all that can and must be linked to the largest goal of all: the emancipation of all humanity from the chains of class society and all the oppressive divisions, all the institutions and ways of thinking that are bound up with and reinforce those chains.
We are determined to do everything we can to hasten the day when such a revolution can finally be made, and fundamental change can begin for real. The challenge now is posed to you who read this.
Having taken this journey so far, will you now shut your eyes and turn away?
Or will you join with us in deeply grappling with how to bring this about, taking up with us the urgent questions of closing the gap between what could, and must, be brought into being and the obstacles we face today, and uniting in common struggle to overturn this monstrosity and take a giant leap for humanity’s emancipation?
ENDNOTES
1. Amadou Diallo: “New York: The Cold Blooded Police Murder of Amadou Diallo—41 bullets end the life of an African immigrant,” Revolutionary Worker #994, February 14, 1999
Nicholas Heyward Jr.: “Interview with Nicholas Heyward Sr. on Oct. 22: ‘There’s So Many Innocent People Being Killed by the Police,’” Revolution#66, October 22, 2006
Sean Bell:: “Cops Fire Over 50 Shots, Protests Planned—NYPD Guns Down Sean Bell on his Wedding Day,” Revolution #71, December 3, 2006
Tyisha Miller: “Riverside, California: The Police Execution of Tyisha Miller,” "Revolutionary Worker #989, January 10, 1999
Abner Louima: “The System in Effect: The Police Torture of Abner Louima,” Revolutionary Worker #925, September 28, 1997 [back]
2. See Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 108, Number 5, March 2003, pp. 937-75. Interviews with white managers are in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, Knopf, New York, 1996. See also “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2003. [http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf] [back]
3. See Community Service Society of New York press release, February 23, 2004. [http://www.cssny.org/news/releases/2004_0223.html] [back]
4. See Douglas Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2007 and Amaad Rivera, Brenda Cotto-Escalera, Anisha Desai, Jeannette Huezo, and Dedrick Muhammad (Institute for Policy Studies), “State of the Dream 2008: Foreclosed.” United for a Fair Economy, January 15, 2008. [http://www.faireconomy.org/files/StateOfDream_01_16_08_Web.pdf] [back]
5. Tavis Smiley, editor, The Covenant with Black America, Third World Press, Chicago, 2006, as cited from David Satcher’s essay at the book’s website covenantwithblackamerica.com. [http://www.covenantwithblackamerica.com/covenant/health_wellbeing/] [back]
6. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, “Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies,” Civil Rights Project, UCLA, August 2007. [http://www.civilrights.org/assets/pdfs/aug-2007-desegregation-report.pdf] [back]
7. “The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island.” Jonathan Kozol, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Harper’s, September 2005. [back]
8. “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006”, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. [http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim06.pdf] [back]
9. Massey, Categorically Unequal [back]
10. September 5, 2005, Barbara Bush told NPR’s MarketPlace program, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/09/05/PM200509051.html][back]
11. Charles Babington, “Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina,” Washington Post, September 10, 2005. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901930.html] [back]
12. William H. Frey, Audrey Singer, and David Park, “Resettling New Orleans: The First Full Picture from the Census.” The Brookings Institution, September 12, 2007. [http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2007/07katrinafreysinger.aspx] [back]
13. Julia B. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” The Brookings Institution, November 2007.[http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/11_blackwhite_isaacs.aspx][back]
14. Milton Meltzer, Slavery: A World History. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993. [back]
15. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford University Press US, New York and Research Triangle, North Carolina, 2006, p. 99. [back]
16. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin, Viking, New York, 1985. [back]
17. Bob Avakian, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2008, pp. 16-17.[http://revcom.us/Comm_JeffDem/Jeffersonian_Democracy.html] [back]
18. Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862. [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm] [back]
19. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, New York, 2008. [back]
20. Between 1882 and 1964 the Tuskegee Institute kept records of 4,742 people being lynched, 3,445 were Black. Statistics from the Tuskegee Institute Archives, posted at University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law’s website. [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html] [back]
21. Dolores Barclay and Allen G. Breed, “Torn from the Land: Landownership made blacks target of violence and murder,” an Associated Press investigation, December 3, 2001.
[http://www.theauthenticvoice.org/Torn_From_The_LandII.html][back]
22. See Bob Avakian’s searing account of lynching and its effects in the “Postcards of the Hanging” section (Disk 1, Session 1) of the DVD Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, Three Q Productions, Chicago, 2004. [http://threeqvideo.com/] Also see Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, andBarclay and Breed, “Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, Even Murder,” Associated Press, December 2, 2001, [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1202-03.htm] and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. “Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Lynching Law,” New York Times, June 14, 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14lynch.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22senate%20issues%20apology%20over%20failure%20on%20lynching%20law%22&st=cse&oref=slogin] [back]
23. See “40 Lives for Freedom” at the Southern Policy Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center’s website. [http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/40lives.pdf][back]
24. “Harlem (2),” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. [back]
25. “Between 1964 and 1971, civil disturbances (as many as 700, by one count) resulted in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as considerable property damage, concentrated in predominantly black areas.” See “How the 1960s’ Riots Hurt African-Americans,” National Bureau of Economic Research. [http://www.nber.org/digest/sep04/w10243.html] [back]
26. See Notes on Political Economy: Our Analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and The Current World Situation, by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2000, and Raymond Lotta with Frank Shannon, America in Decline, Banner Press, Chicago, 1984.[back]
27. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, Knopf, New York, 1997; pp. 111-146, Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996, p. 95; Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Knopf, New York, 1992. Cited in “Black Youth and the Criminalization of a Generation Part 2: The Political Economy of Racism and Criminalization,” Revolutionary Worker #972, September 6, 1998.[back]
28. Jeffrey S. Passel, “Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S: Estimates Based on the March 2005 Current Population Survey” Pew Hispanic Center, March 7, 2006 [http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=61][back]
29. “Haldeman Diary Shows Nixon Was Wary of Blacks and Jews,” New York Times, May 18, 1994. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE2DA1438F93BA25756C0A962958260][back]
30. “Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population.” The JFA Institute, November 2007. [ http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf][back]
31. It is difficult to find a unified estimate of how many people these “reforms” forced into the workforce. The website Almanac of Policy Issues says that in 1994 5 million families were on welfare and after the new welfare law passed the number dropped to 2.6 million families—this was taken from a website called Almanac of Policy Issues. [www.policyalmanac.org/social_welfare/welfare.shtml] The right-wing Manhattan Institute wrote: “The decline in welfare dependency since then has exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts. Between August 1996 and December 2001, caseloads plummeted. The number of families on welfare declined by 52%. Among families headed by a single mother—the predominant category of recipients—the change was truly extraordinary. Between 1988 and 1993, the welfare participation rate of this group ranged between 30 and 35%. By 2000, it had fallen to 13%; and in 2001, despite the weakened economy, it declined to 10%.” “Gaining Ground, Moving Up: the Change in the Economic Status of Single Mothers under Welfare Reform,” June O’Neill and M. Anne Hill, Center for Civic Innovation, Manhattan Institute, March 2003. By any estimation, this was a massive social change—one which has been extremely under-reported and under-appreciated.[back]
32. Bob Avakian, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, Insight Press, Chicago, 2005. For more writings and downloadable talks by Bob Avakian, go to bobavakian.net. [http://bobavakian.net/]. See also “The Crossroads We Face, The Leadership We Need” in Revolution, #84, April 8, 2007. [http://revcom.us/avakian/crossroads][back]
33. Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, RCP Publications, Chicago, 2008, p. 4. [http://revcom.us/Constitution/constitution.html][back]
34. “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation – in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution,” in Revolution and Communism: A Foundation And Strategic Orientation, a Revolution pamphlet, May 1, 2008, p. 91. [http://revcom.us/a/102/crucial-points-en.html][back]
35. Ibid., p. 91.[back]
