Globalization And Racialization
by Manning Marable
ZNet - August 13, 2004
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=6034In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du
Bois, predicted that the "problem of the twentieth
century" would be the "problem of the color line," the
unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker
races of humankind. Although Du Bois was primarily
focused on the racial contradiction of the United
States, he was fully aware that the processes of what
we call "racialization" today - the construction of
racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by
dominant and subordinate social relations between
groups - was an international and global problem. Du
Bois’s color line included not just the racially
segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of
South Africa; but also included British, French,
Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia,
the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the
Caribbean among indigenous populations.
Building on Du Bois’s insights, we can therefore say
that the problem of the twenty-first century is the
problem of global apartheid: the racialized division
and stratification of resources, wealth, and power that
separates Europe, North America, and Japan from the
billions of mostly black, brown, indigenous,
undocumented immigrant and poor people across the
planet. The term apartheid, as most of you know, comes
from the former white minority regime of South Africa.
It is an Afrikaans word meaning "apartness" or
"separation." Apartheid was based on the concept of
"herrenvolk," a "master race," who was destined to rule
non-Europeans. Under global apartheid today, the racist
logic of herrenvolk, the master race, still exists,
embedded in the patterns of unequal economic exchange
that penalizes African, south Asian, Caribbean, and
poor nations by predatory policies of structural
adjustment and loan payments to multinational banks.
Inside the United States, the processes of global
apartheid are best represented by what I call the New
Racial Domain or the NRD. This New Racial Domain is
different from other earlier forms of racial
domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and
ghettoization, or strict residential segregation, in
several critical respects. These earlier racial
formations or domains were grounded or based primarily,
if not exclusively, in the political economy of U.S.
capitalism. Anti-racist or oppositional movements that
blacks, other people of color and white anti-racists
built were largely predicated upon the confines or
realities of domestic markets and the policies of the
U.S. nation-state. Meaningful social reforms such as
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 were debated almost entirely within the context
of America’s expanding, domestic economy, and a
background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies.
The political economy of the "New Racial Domain," by
contrast, is driven and largely determined by the
forces of transnational capitalism, and the public
policies of state neoliberalism. From the vantagepoint
of the most oppressed U.S. populations, the New Racial
Domain rests on an unholy trinity, or deadly triad, of
structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive
structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration,
and mass disfranchisement. Each factor directly feeds
and accelerates the others, creating an ever-widening
circle of social disadvantage, poverty, and civil
death, touching the lives of tens of millions of U.S.
people.
The process begins at the point of production. For
decades, U.S. corporations have been outsourcing
millions of better-paying jobs outside the country. The
class warfare against unions has led to a steep decline
in the percentage of U.S. workers.
Within whole U.S. urban neighborhoods losing virtually
their entire economic manufacturing and industrial
employment, and with neoliberal social policies in
place cutting job training programs, welfare, and
public housing, millions of Americans now exist in
conditions that exceed the devastation of the Great
Depression of the 1930s. In 2004, in New York’s Central
Harlem community, 50 percent of all black male adults
were currently unemployed. When one considers that this
figure does not count those black males who are in the
military, or inside prisons, its truly amazing and
depressing.
This July, labor researchers at Harvard University
found that one-quarter (25 percent) of the nation’s
entire population of black male adults were jobless for
the entire year during 2002. What these nightmarish
statistics mean, is that for most low- to middle-income
African Americans, joblessness and underemployment
(e.g., working part-time, or sporadically) is now the
norm; having a real job with benefits is now the
exception. Who belongs to unions, dropping from 30
percent in the 1960s down to barely 13 percent today.
With the onset of global capitalism, the new jobs being
generated for the most part lack the health benefits,
pensions, and wages that manufacturing and industrial
employment once offered.
Neoliberal social policies, adopted and implemented by
Democrats and Republicans alike, have compounded the
problem. After the 1996 welfare act, the social safety
net was largely pulled apart. As the Bush
administration took power in 2001, chronic joblessness
spread to African-American workers, especially in the
manufacturing sector. By early 2004, in cities such as
New York, fully one-half of all black male adults were
outside of the paid labor force. As of January 2004,
the number of families on public assistance had fallen
to 2 million, down from five million families on
welfare in 1995. New regulations and restrictions
intimidate thousands of poor people from requesting
public assistance.
Mass unemployment inevitably feeds mass incarceration.
About one-third of all prisoners were unemployed at the
time of their arrests, and others averaged less than
$20,000 annual incomes in the year prior to their
incarceration. When the Attica prison insurrection
occurred in upstate New York in 1971, there were only
12,500 prisoners in New York State’s correctional
facilities, and about 300,000 prisoners nationwide. By
2001, New York State held over 71,000 women and men in
its prisons; nationally, 2.1 million were imprisoned.
Today about five to six million Americans are arrested
annually, and roughly one in five Americans possess a
criminal record.
Mandatory-minimum sentencing laws adopted in the 1980s
and 1990s in many states stripped judges of their
discretionary powers in sentencing, imposing draconian
terms on first-time and non-violent offenders. Parole
has been made more restrictive as well, and in 1995
Pell grant subsidies supporting educational programs
for prisoners were ended. For those fortunate enough to
successfully navigate the criminal justice bureaucracy
and emerge from incarceration, they discover that both
the federal law and state governments explicitly
prohibit the employment of convicted ex-felons in
hundreds of vocations. The cycle of unemployment
frequently starts again.
The greatest victims of these racialized processes of
unequal justice, of course, are African-American and
Latino young people. In April 2000, utilizing national
and state data compiled by the FBI, the Justice
Department and six leading foundations issued a
comprehensive study that documented vast racial
disparities at every level of the juvenile justice
process. African Americans under age eighteen
constitute 15 percent of their national age group, yet
they currently represent 26 percent of all those who
are arrested. After entering the criminal-justice
system, white and black juveniles with the same records
are treated in radically different ways. According to
the Justice Department’s study, among white youth
offenders, 66 percent are referred to juvenile courts,
while only 31 percent of the African-American youth are
taken there. Blacks make up 44 percent of those
detained in juvenile jails, 46 percent of all those
tried in adult criminal courts, as well as 58 percent
of all juveniles who are warehoused in prisons.
Mass incarceration, of course, breeds mass political
disfranchisement. Nearly 5 million Americans cannot
vote. In seven states, former prisoners convicted of a
felony lose their voting rights for life. In the
majority of states, individuals on parole and probation
cannot vote. About 15 percent of all African-American
males nationally are either permanently or currently
disfranchised. In Mississippi, one-third of all black
men are unable to vote for the remainder of their
lives. In Florida, 818,000 residents cannot vote for
life.
Even temporary disfranchisement fosters a disruption of
civic engagement and involvement in public affairs.
This can lead to "civil death," the destruction of the
capacity for collective agency and resistance. This
process of depolitization undermines even grassroots,
non-electoral-oriented organizing. The deadly triangle
of the New Racial Domain constantly and continuously
grows unchecked.
Not too far in the distance lies the social consequence
of these policies: an unequal, two-tiered, uncivil
society, characterized by a governing hierarchy of
middle- to upper-class "citizens" who own nearly all
private property and financial assets, and a vast
subaltern of quasi- or subcitizens encumbered beneath
the cruel weight of permanent unemployment,
discriminatory courts and sentencing procedures,
dehumanized prisons, voting disfranchisement,
residential segregation, and the elimination of most
public services for the poor. The later group is
virtually excluded from any influence in a national
public policy. Institutions that once provided space
for upward mobility and resistance for working people
such as unions have been largely dismantled. Integral
to all of this is racism, sometimes openly vicious and
unambiguous, but much more frequently presented in race
neutral, color-blind language. This is the NRD of
globalization.
The anti-globalization struggle must confront this New
Racial Domain with something more substantial than
tired ruminations about "black and white, unite and
fight." The seismic shifts have created new continents
of social inequality, transcending nation-states and
the traditional boundaries of race and ethnicity. What
is necessary is an original and creative approach that
breaks with comfortable dogmas of all types, while
advancing openly a politics of civic advocacy and
democratic empowerment for those most brutally
oppressed and exploited. I am not suggesting here that
the anti-globalization movement play a "vanguard" role
for global social change. In the tradition of C.L.R.
James, I am convinced that the oppressed, on their own
terms, ultimately will create new approaches and
organizations to fight for justice that we now can
scarcely imagine. Rather, it is our political and moral
obligation to provide the critical support necessary
for social struggles and resistance that is already
being waged on the ground today. Examples of that
resistance are in every city and most communities
across the country.
The New Racial Domain’s reliance on extreme force and
the continued expansion of the prison system reshapes
how law enforcement is being carried out even in small-
to medium-sized towns and cities all over America. The
terrible dynamic unleashed against prisoners of social
control has expanded into the normal apparatuses and
uses of policing itself. There are now, for example,
approximately 600,000 police officers and 1.5 million
private security guards in the United States.
Increasingly, however, black and poor communities are
being "policed" by special paramilitary units, often
called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams. The
U.S. has more than 30,000 such heavily armed, military
trained police units. SWAT-team mobilizations, or "call
outs," increased 400 percent between 1980 and 1995.
These trends reveal the makings of what may constitute
a "National Security State" — the exercising of state
power without democratic controls, checks and balances,
a state where policing is employed to carry out the
disfranchisement of its own citizens.
The trend toward a National Security State has been
pushed actively by the Bush regime, which is
aggressively pressuring universities to suppress
dissent and to curtail traditional academic freedoms.
In early March 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department’s
Office of Foreign Assets Control stopped 70 American
scientists and physicians from traveling to Cuba to
attend an international symposium on "coma and death."
Some of the scholars received warning letters from the
Treasury Department, promising severe criminal or civil
penalties if they violated the embargo against Cuba. In
late 2003, the Treasury Department issued a warning to
U.S. publishers that they would have to obtain "special
licenses to edit papers" written by scholars and
scientific researchers currently living in Cuba, Libya,
Iran, or Sudan. All violators, even including the
editors and officers of professional associations
sponsoring scholarly journals, potentially may be
subjected to fines up to $500,000 and prison sentences
up to ten years. After widespread criticism, the
Treasury Department was forced to moderate its policy.
In February 2004, U.S. army officials visited the
University of Texas at Austin, demanding the names of
"Middle Eastern-looking" individuals attending an
academic conference on the treatment of women under
traditional Islamic law. Subsequently it was learned
that two U.S. army attorneys working with the army’s
Intelligence and Security Commission had actually
attended the conference without identifying themselves.
How do we build resistance to the New Racial Domain, in
the age of globalized capitialism? It should surprise
no one that the resistance is already occurring, on the
ground, in thousands of venues. In local neighborhoods,
people fighting against police brutality, mandatory-
minimum sentencing laws, and for prisoners’ rights; in
the fight for a living wage, to expand unionization and
workers’ rights; in the struggles of working women for
day care for their children, health care, public
transportation, and decent housing. These practical
struggles of daily life are really the care of what
constitutes day-to-day resistance. Building capacities
of hope and resistance on the ground develops our
ability to challenge the system in more fundamental,
direct ways.
The recently successful "Immigrant Worker Freedom
Ride," highlighting the plight of undocumented workers
who enter the U.S., represents an excellent model that
links the oppressive situation of new immigrants with
the historic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement
forty-five years ago to overthrow Jim Crow. Many
sincere, white anti-globalization activists need to
learn more about the historic Black Freedom Movement,
and the successful models of resistance - from
selective buying campaigns or economic boycotts, to
rent strikes, to civil disobedience - which that
movement established. You are not inventing models of
social justice activism and resistance: others have
come before you. The task is to learn from the
strengths and weaknesses of those models, incorporating
their anti-racist vision into the heart of what we do
to resist global capitalism and the nation-security
state.
The anti-globalization movement must be, first and
foremost, a worldwide, pluralistic anti- racist
movement, with its absolutely central goal of
destroying global apartheid and the reactionary residue
of white supremacy and ethnic chauvinism. But to build
such a dynamic movement, the social composition of the
anti-globalization forces must change, especially here
in the United States. The anti-globalization forces are
still overwhelmingly upper, middle-class, college-
educated elites, who may politically sympathize with
the plight of the poor and oppressed, but who do not
share their lives or experiences. In the Third World,
the anti-globalization movement has been more
successful in achieving a broader, more balanced social
class composition, with millions of workers getting
actively involved.
There are, however, two broad ideological tendencies
within this largely non-European, anti-globalization
movement: a liberal, democratic, and populist tendency,
and a radical, egalitarian tendency. Both tendencies
were present throughout the 2001 Durban Conference
Against Racism, and made their presence felt in the
deliberations of the non-governmental organization
panels and in the final conference report. They reflect
two very different political strategies and tactical
approaches in the global struggle against the
institutional processes of racialization.
The liberal democratic tendency focuses on a discourse
of rights, calling for greater civic participation,
political enfranchisement, capacity building of
community-based institutions, for the purposes of civic
empowerment and multicultural diversity. The liberal
democratic impulse seeks the reduction of societal
conflict through the sponsoring of public
conversations, reconciliation and multicultural civic
dialogues. It seeks not a complete rejection of
neoliberal economic globalization, but its constructive
reform and engagement, with the goal of building
democratic political cultures of human rights within
market-based societies.
The radical egalitarian tendency of global anti-racists
speaks a discourse about inequality and power. It seeks
the abolition of poverty, the realization of universal
housing, health care and educational guarantees across
the non-Western world. It is less concerned about
abstract rights, and more concerned about concrete
results. It seeks not political assimilation in an old
world order, but the construction of a new world from
the bottom up. It has spoken a political language
more so in the tradition of national liberation than of
the nation-state.
Both of these tendencies exist in the United States, as
well as throughout the world, in varying degrees, now
define the ideological spectrum within the global anti-
apartheid struggle. Scholars and activists alike must
contribute to the construction of a broad front
bringing together both the multicultural liberal
democratic and radical egalitarian currents
representing globalization from below. New innovations
in social protest movements will also require the
development of new social theory and new ways of
thinking about the relationship between structural
racism and state power. Global apartheid is the great
political and moral challenge of our time. It can be
destroyed, but only through a collective, transnational
struggle.
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