>Yet, listening to a great majority of the contributors to this (and
>kindred) lists leaves one with the impression that US is the most racist,
>sexist, and bigoted society in the world.
-But since the U.S. is the world's chief -imperialist power, and since a good bit of imperial power is -justified on racialized grounds, on a world scale no one rivals the -U.S. for creating racialized categories and abusing the racialized -inferiors.
It's also worth emphasizing that while racism may be as bad or worse in many other countries, in the US racism has been probably the key historic organizing principle for dividing the working class and maintaining capitalist power. It is the fact that racism in the US is not personal prejudice but an organizing principle of capitalist power that makes it so critical for leftists to squarely address and challenge it. This historical reality of institutional racism is one reason why W.E.B. Dubois said the "color line" was THE issue of the 20th century, and no doubt of the 21st.
Anthony Lukas's BIG TROUBLE about the mining battles of the far west at the beginning of this century is a wonderful case study in this reality, as the capitalist class had to send in national troops from outside the region to suppress the largely white unionists- and in order to guarantee no racial solidarity between soldiers and workers, they used black troops who had cut their teeth in the US imperialist wars in the Caribbean. The subordination of black workers in the South and the white privilege of white workers there was complemented by the sending of black strikebreakers to break Northern strikes - the 1919 Steel Strike being one example of that.
These are only the grosser examples of how the color line divided workers through ideologies of racism and status subordination that prevented class-based mobilization. No-Nothing attacks on immigrants of all races is of course just an additional tool of division that has been pervasive.
Now, some leftists think the best way to overcome that racial division is to promote a color-blind movement that is nonracist internally but avoids tackling racism directly, for fear of alienating white members of their organizations. The greatest weakness of the Debsian socialist party was that this was largely their position - as Debs said, they had nothing for black workers specifically except as part of the broader class struggle.
To its credit, the US Communist Party's large advance on the Socialist Party was to make directly addressing racism a key part of the class struggle. I think the CPUSA screwed up on a lot of other areas that undermined the Left over the long-term, but on that issue they were dead-on.
-- Nathan Newman