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Racism-- The Stink of the Slave Market
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by Joe Brandt

Racism is a legacy of the slave market. Its continued existence must be exposed and it must e eliminated from the social fabric of our nation and people.

The veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (VALB) volunteered and continued the struggle against racism with arms in hand when they gave battle to fascism in Spain.

Between 80 and 100 Black Americans with the other American volunteers, took up arms and staked their lives on Spain's battlefields. They left limb and life in the Spanish earth, dipped their heroism in their own blood and in that of the wounded and carried others off the battlefields-- Black and white-- and some died from bullets while doing so.

These Black volunteers knew that a fascist victory would enhance the fascist danger and with it intensification of racist oppression at home.

The Black volunteers in our brigade had known the lash of exploitation and oppression. These men had suffered the stink of the slave market long before they confronted the fascist racists. They were determined to help stop this madness.

By their heroic action they played a unique role in raising the level of understanding by all veterans of fascist barbarism.

* * *

Racism had emerged as a weapon of exploitation and oppression in the early years of our country's development as an independent nation-- witness the genocidal history of our relations with the Indians, robbing them of their lands, natural resources, livestock and personal possessions.

Racism continued as the chief weapon in the history of slavery in the U.S. when the oppressors used the state force, and its superstructure-- including religion, the imposed illiteracy, and the most terroristic forms of physical torture-- above all, extreme expoitation-- to try to impose slavocracy on the entire young nation.

Racism from the beginning was a built-in pillar of the superstructure of capitalist society.

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Racism in the stage of monopoly capitalism, controls the economic, political and social power in defense of its class interests. Racism keeps the people divided on racial, national, ethnic lines, competing for jobs, for educational facilities for their children, for professional training and job upgrading.

In 1970, Irving Sloan, a social studies teacher, educational consultant at Columbia University Teachers College and author of "Our Violent Past," published a survey on "The Treatment of Black Americans in (9 leading) Current Encyclopedias." Needless to say, the survey showed distortions, misinformation and omissions of important facts in Black American history.

According to Lerone Bennett, Jr., a leading Black historian, this academic "treatment" has had terrible repercussions, and can be described as the fourth "R" in American education-- racism. This racism, Bennett said, "is expressed in terms of segregated classrooms, but also in terms of learning materials which omitted altogether or distorted information and ideas about the Black Americans. The price for this in American education now cannot be calculated, while the crisis continues unabated." (emphasis mine--JB)

There are other racist aspects of our social system:

*racist attacks on affirmative action-- Bakke, Weber, and now Fullilove;

*racist fire-bombings of Black families' homes; -- widespread KKK terrorism.

*racist outright murders of Black children and youth by racist killer-cops racist killer-cops then declared "innocent" by "law enforcement" agencies;

*racist job practices-- Black workers last to be hired and first to be fired;

*racist campaigns against integrated education, whether via busing or other means, exacerbated by the media and by public officials, including congressmen and senators.

The press and other media are used to poison people's minds, featuring examples of senseless violence, drug addiction, degeneracy and corruption, and using such incidents to slander all Black youth and other oppressed people. To this day we still hear the racially derogatory terms applied to Blacks and to different national-minority groups. Such racist and national-chauvinist slurs pit one group against another--native against foreign-born, white against Black-- and operate against any developing unity of Blacks and whites in the struggles for Black liberation and for a better life for all people.

Racism, regarded by the apologists of the status quo as being eternal, they unashamedly orate about "our way of life" as being superior to other ways of life.

In doing so they defend the damnable system of exploitation and

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