Nature of Racism and Sexism – The Multiracial Unity Blog

Fighting Zionism in Education

By Karyn Pomerantz, April 9, 2024

Introduction

Education has a powerful influence in our lives. It prepares students to become workers, parents, and soldiers. It indoctrinates us with a country’s values and history. For example, every country teaches an “origin” story of its founding. The US presents its Pilgrims benevolently breaking bread with Native American tribes; Israel celebrates its founding as “a land without people for a people without land.” These stories present the conquest of lands as normal and justified, whether the West Bank or the Wild West. They are strongly ingrained and difficult to unlearn. Education can also liberate workers from stereotypes and distorted histories.

This article presents the ways capitalist, specifically Zionist, education pushes capitalist lies and racism, and the repression of educators who resist. It begins with a struggle of public-school teachers in Maryland, other examples of repression, and the role of racism in curriculum. It ends with visions of education under communism.

Anti-Racism as Communism, a Book Review

by Ellen Isaacs

March 16, 2024

Retired philosophy professor and communist Paul Gomberg has written a truly revolutionary book about racism. By this I do not mean just that he believes the revolutionary destruction of capitalism is necessary to destroy racism, but that the breadth and depth of his presentation is truly unique. Gomberg not only describes the historical development of racism, but shows how capitalism cannot survive without it. He focuses primarily on anti-black racism as the dominant paradigm in US history, but the analysis carries over to other marginalized groups and nations.

Letter to a Daughter

Dad, 11-20-2023

This is a letter from Dad to his daughter. She had received a racist message about Gaza from an elderly cousin, Cousin S.

Dear daughter,

Cousin S is about 95 years old. He lived through the Holocaust in the USA and is old enough to remember when Jewish kids might get harassed or even beat up in the USA. It happened to me but not very much. He very likely has relatives, perhaps some that he knew face to face, who were killed during the Holocaust.

His closest friends belong to the Jewish temple. For that generation, Israel was seen as a safe haven from the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that still plagued Europe after the war.

The grotesque slaughter by Hamas of hundreds of civilians including 200 kids at a concert sent him and many others over the edge.

They see this conflict as “WE versus THEM” rather than what it is: “THEM versus THEM.” Nationalists only want power for their political group whether Zionist or Hamas, neither of whom care about the common people and see Israel’s pretty much genocidal attack on tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians as equivalent to US bombing Berlin in 1945.

It isn’t of course.

Israel truly is an apartheid state which has discriminated against Arabs for decades and, even as we speak, encourages right wing Jewish settlers far away from Gaza to physically drive Arabs out of their homes.

And this. I have a good friend, an anti-fascist Jewish man who spent 7 years in an Israeli jail including being beaten after being falsely charged with espionage.

Israel supported Hamas because they saw that as opposition to the Palestinian Authority, another Palestinian nationalist group.

The following quote is from The Times of Israel (10-8-2023), an Israeli, pro-Jewish, newspaper:

“For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state (https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/)”.

But in moments like this, people’s somewhat suppressed racism comes bursting to the surface, a much much more intense similarity to the USA Summer of 2020, only by analogy and not nearly as severe, of course. How many white folks said “Just start shooting at the black protesters?” Although even then almost nobody proposed bombing the neighborhoods and killing 4,000 kids.

Nationalism and racism go hand in hand. Muslims are mistreated in China and driven out of Myanmar by the hundreds of thousands. The current government of India is making life miserable for many Muslims as well as lower caste Hindus. There’s mass expulsion of people from Congo right now. Hundreds of thousands are trying to flee Syria and often are attacked when they attempt to find safe haven in Europe. Sudan is experiencing another mass slaughter of innocent people. (Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw some similar aspects.) And all these have been recent without even going back into the past very far.

There are hundreds of thousands of Jews and people who have Jewish ancestry, strongly opposed to horrors the Zionist government is bringing to innocent Arabs.

Kindly, insightful caring Cousin S has let his fear and his anger and lack of knowledge, or unwillingness to see reality, control his otherwise kindly self.

That’s what fear, and group solidarity based on ethnicity, race, or religion or even same-state citizenship push people to support the horrific oppression of others and divide us from sisters and brothers all over the world. Blind fear and anger combined with usually dormant racism lead to the kind of racist rage that some Jewish people are expressing.

I use the term “racism” even though it’s not adequate. None of the intense, severe massive problems that humans face from war to climate change to poverty to pollution to pandemics will be solved until there is a massive movement to reject and actively oppose all these different kinds of racism and nationalism.

My friend from Malaysia once told me “There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic timelines.” That helps keep me grounded.

In some ways it feels like, as an analogy, that we are trauma nurses at the scene of a massive train wreck and we have to do two things at once. Do our best to make a better world for those in the present, and building a movement to find out who is causing these goddam train wrecks and force them to stop.

Love,

Dad

French Rebellion Against Racist Police Killings

Karyn Pomerantz, 7-3-2023, KP

French teens, mostly black Algerian and Moroccan, have exploded with rage over the police murder of Nahel M., a 17-year-old teen killed by police after a traffic stop in the northern city of Nanterre on June 27, 2023.

Throughout France, young people have burned property and fought the police, disrupting business as usual from Paris to Marseille. The police arrested over 800 people by July1st; the government has deployed over 40,000 police. This rebellion results from decades of poverty and discrimination against the children of immigrants. Over the years, uprisings have occurred when police interventions killed other young people. It is heartening to see these young militants’ bold response. We should cheer them on and encourage widespread support.

While these rebellions may win some police reforms on paper, they are unlikely to provide the quality education, jobs, and housing needed to mitigate the deadly conditions embedded in these neighborhoods. The young people provide a cheap source of labor for French business while serving as scapegoats for French anger at increasing unemployment and inflation.

US Supreme Court Recertifies Capitalism’s Need for Racism

by Ellen Isaacs

July 2, 2023

Three days ago, the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at colleges, except for military ones. Justice Sotomayor says it’s “arbitrary” that affirmative action can continue only at military academies; Justice Gorsuch chastised the continued tolerance for “preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty….” But there is nothing new or shocking about this ruling. It is simply the latest blatant reaffirmation of the basic principles on which the US was founded: the protection of rights of white men with property and the super-exploitation of black and immigrant workers in order to maximize profits. As many articles on this blog have reiterated, as is our underlying premise, US capitalism cannot survive without racism, whose ideas and practices need to be periodically reinforced. (see specifically https://multiracialunity.org/2020/10/16/the-racist-history-of-the-u-s-supreme-court-part-1/ and –part-2/)

As the US became wealthier and more powerful in the mid-20^th century, it was possible to begin to ameliorate some of its great injustices. Indeed, the mass organizing of the 1930s, the anti-Vietnam war protests and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s necessitated some concessions. Not too many, but a few. The absurd contradiction of fighting fascism in Europe while maintaining a segregated military necessitated the end of that practice. Then came the ability to vote for black citizens, the right to choose between various representatives of the capitalist class; the right to attend integrated (but actually largely segregated) schools; the right to sit anywhere on the bus. That was the beginning of the impetus to empower black politicians – fool us good. Parts of the trade union movement became more integrated and the stronger for it. The mass anti-racist student movement led to demands for affirmative action. Nonetheless, financial disadvantage and poor secondary schools led to a maximum of 14% black and Latin enrollment at Harvard, which is now predicted to fall by more than half (https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/6/29/23778335/supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-college-admissions-student-effects).

From Turkey to NYC:

This Is What Capitalist Disasters Look Like – This Is What Fight Back Looks Like

By Karyn Pomerantz, 2-16-2023

Earthquake in Turkey

The world is aflame, from the blazing bombs in wars to the fiery heat of global warming. The drivers of empire use our bodies as cannon fodder in Ukraine and Russia and extract our minerals out of the ground in Congo and our bodies from earthquakes.

The huge earthquakes in Turkey and Syria killed over 40,000 by today’s count (2-16-2023). We may say, “well, that’s nature, there’s nothing we can do about that.” But that would be wrong.

Stolen: Native American Children and Lands

by Karyn Pomerantz, 1-14-2023

Stolen indigenous lands, stolen and enslaved people, stolen resources, and stolen elections mark US domestic and global history. Democratic and Republican Administrations have conducted wars and assassinations to annex foreign territories (Hawaii and Puerto Rico among others), oppose imperial competitors (Germany, Russia, and China), and remove pro-socialist governments (Congo and Chile among many others). Beneath its patriotic and racist calls to arms is a rapacious grab for for profits (https://multiracialunity.org/2018/02/02/as-u-s-imperialism-declines-we-must-fight-racism-and-nationalism/).

The US ruling class unleashed one of the worst genocides against the Indigenous inhabitants of the US territories beginning in the 16^th Century. When the settler colonialists arrived, there were 5-15 million Native Americans; by the late 19th Century, only 238,000 remained. Because of 1,500 wars, massacres, the Indian Removal Act that pushed 60,000 people on the Trail of Tears into reservations, 230 treaties that seized Native land, and diseases like smallpox left untreated, rich white landowners and their government grabbed 99% of tribal lands to build their wealth.

THE FIRST BLACK PANTHER MOVIE: A Review

by a retired teacher, 11-14-2022

Yes, movies are entertaining and fun, but they also convey important viewpoints about life.

Undoubtedly, we won’t all agree about the ideas in a movie. I’m sharing this review to offer some thoughts that you may wish to consider while thinking about the implied themes in the brand new Wakanda Forever film. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Here’s the original review:

For sure – as compared to many thousands of movies with no Black characters; or with just a few Black characters, all depicted as subservient; or with many Black characters but none given depth, complexity and leadership on the world scene – Black Panther is a breath of fresh air.

And it’s truly pleasing to hear about that day on the set, with hundreds of Black actors on the mountainside in a joyous mood between takes, celebrating the fact that so many actors of color have been employed in a major film, in a story about the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet. And it’s great to see women in leading roles: powerful, insightful, and on the cutting edge of scientific breakthroughs.