When asked about an incident in Baghdad in which a U.S. helicopter bombed a position near an immobilized Bradley military vehicle, killing at least 13 civilians including Mazen al-Tumeisi, a Palestinian journalist working as a correspondent for the Al Arabiya news organization, an American military spokesperson said that the attack was executed for “the safety” of the people that were near the vehicle – i.e. the very people that were injured or killed by the strike. The “logic” of the Pentagon’s statement runs along the same mystifying lines as that of the overall Bush imperial agenda: “We free the ‘Iraqi people’ by killing them and denying them basic services”; “we support ‘democracy’ by installing puppet governments and censoring or killing the press.”

Of course, Black folks and people of color in general in America are all too familiar with this sort of white washing of racist and murderous policies. In Oakland, New York, Detroit, Cincinnati, etc., we are facing an everyday war at home. Just listen to both Republicans and Democrats (including Kerry and Edwards) continue to beat the “homeland” war drum of being “tough on crime,” which is of course coded language for racial profiling and the mass detention of people of color. In speech after speech, Kerry continually attacks George Bush from the right citing the fact that Bush has neglected to put more police on our city streets. In the case of America’s prison industrial complex the “tough on crime” war rhetoric of both major parties translates as: “We protect urban communities by destroying them”; “We serve disadvantaged youth of color by allowing the public school system to rot, and by racially profiling and jailing them.”

While there are many factors that underlay America’s global wars and its de facto war on women, men, and youth of color at home, one of the more crucial ones is that of America’s perennial problem of deep-seated racism. Even if they will not say so publicly, many American politicians and citizens believe that middle to upper class white American life is more valuable than that of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Haiti, other Third World countries, and immigrants and people of color in the US. This devaluation of non-white life was a key factor in the tortures of Abu Ghraib. But, as those of us familiar with the US criminal “justice system” know all too well, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are merely exports of what has gone on for years in American prisons such as Pelican Bay and Attica, and Louisiana’s “Angola” prison/slave plantation.

In the case of Iraq, American white supremacy laid the groundwork for prison torture, and in massacres such as the initial siege of Fallujah (where over 600 Iraqi civilians were killed). Indeed this mass murder happened around the same time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but went virtually unquestioned in the corporate media. The massacre of civilians was somehow portrayed as “clean” and “legal,” while prison torture was considered scandalous only because of the PR problem of the photos being released. Those familiar with the Rodney King police brutality video should be very familiar with this dynamic.

One of the more vexing aspects of the current devaluation of the lives of people of color around the globe and at home however is the fact that, in America, a great many of the “likely to vote” public believes that racism is a thing of the past. A key component of this belief has to do with a phenomenon whereby the violent effects of American racist politics on a global and domestic scale are submerged under the optical illusion of conservative “multi-culturalism.”

The days have past when tokenism is the sole operation of “liberal politics.” We are now confronting a moment in the American empire when right wing ideology has successfully marketed itself as “compassionate conservatism” and "multi-culturalism” - a time when the Bush administration can trot token Black people in front of the public as examples of conservative inclusiveness. Examples of this modern spate of tokenism include reactionaries such as Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Lt. Governor Michael S. Steele of Maryland. The abominable lengths to which the “new Black tokens” will go in their support of right wing policies was evidenced by Steele in his speech at the Republican National convention, when he actually had the nerve to use the name of Ronald Reagan in the same sentence with those of Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

In spite of the almost comic nature of modern conservative tokenism, it contributes greatly to the contemporary myth that racism is a relic of days gone by. However innervating this scenario may be to those aware of the veiled omnipresence of structural racism, we shouldn’t be surprised by such “smile in your face” tactics. This is the same country where the daily appearance of Black athletes, actors, and singers, in the mainstream media is flaunted as proof that everything is now equal, and that America has successfully wiped its hands clean of “the sins of the past.” This is a country whose president dared to travel to a slave fort on the Western Coast of Africa preaching reconciliation while refusing to address African/Third World debt forgiveness or reparations for slavery, and while over one million Africans in America sit in prison cages in the most “free” nation on the planet. This is the same administration that preaches global security while forwarding a policy of cowboy diplomacy and imperialism redux. This is the same world leader who continually speaks of  “compassion” while virtually ignoring the AIDS pandemic in Africa and elsewhere (despite promises to the contrary). Finally, this is an incumbent presidential candidate who attempts to court the Latino vote through brief outbursts of something sounding vaguely akin to Spanish while pushing an anti-immigrant domestic agenda.  

One must point out however that current American racism and jingoism have little to do with what side of the aisle the American political representative happens to sit. Although I do sincerely hope Bush is voted out of office (AGAIN) – and that grassroots mobilization to this end leads to an invigoration of progressive politics in the U.S. – let me remind the reader of a couple of key points. John Kerry is a man who, like most other Democrats, voted for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq based on the bogus excuse of “faulty intelligence,” who supports the internationally condemned apartheid wall in Palestine, and who – just before the debates – stated that even if he would have known about the faultiness of the WMD claim, he still would have voted to invade Iraq.  

Furthermore, the problem of the Democratic support of a militarist agenda is not just a matter of the shortfalls of their current presidential candidate. All we have to do to understand this is flash back to when Bill Clinton oversaw the sanctions against Iraq – a policy that led directly to the deaths of over 500,000 children – and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's comment on 60 Minutes that these deaths were “a hard choice” but were “worth it.” As progressive thinkers and activists such as Arundhati Roy have pointed out, the American corporate/military agenda operates according to Orwellian political and rhetorical sorcery no matter whether the imperial figurehead is called a “republican” or “democrat.” We live in a system where up is down, where two plus two equals billions of dollars to Dick Cheney’s former company, and where leaders of the “free world” actually have the gall to refer to a situation in which tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered as “democratic progress.”

Through this theater of the absurd, many “well-intentioned” Americans buy into the notion that structural racism has been replaced by reverse (anti-white) racism as the country’s most prevalent “race problem.” That is, of course, unless one pays heed to the chorus of reactionary complaint in regard to the other major racial ill that is supposedly befalling the country – i.e. those dark-hued complainers who refuse to “just get over the past” and be more like Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, or Bill Cosby. Both of these stances actually relate directly to the potent fantasy of American “color-blindness,” a mythology whereby many white Americans take psychological comfort from the Disney-Land-delusion that racism as a politically and economically crucial issue has vanished from the American scene – that it is now only the stuff of “race cards” and pathological victimhood. These modern social mythologies depend on the disavowal of the fact that racism in general, and American white supremacy in particular, have never been simply about the dislike of one person by another, nor simply about southern men in white hoods burning crosses and people. In the now and yesterday of the American empire, racism has functioned as a social, economic, and political structure that negates the life-chances of millions of children and adults a year in a variety of ways which are invisible to some and painfully obvious to others.

To see racism as a structural rather than merely individual phenomenon is to see through the fog of historical amnesia to everyday realities rarely covered in the corporate media such as de facto educational apartheid, criminalization and incarceration of masses of people for mostly non-violent drug-related offenses, and a system where the basics of life such as health care and adequate shelter are made into privileges instead of rights. This is a vantage point that unveils the mechanisms that feed homeless shelters, unemployment lines, prisons, and the military infantry. But to talk about such things is to deal with the causes of social problems, and American profit-driven society never wants to deal with causes of problems for then it might actually be placed into a position where it has to contribute to sustainable global and domestic solutions instead of the comic-book politics of “us vs. them” or the corporate chicanery of profits over people. It might then be forced to consider the realities of those beyond its borders and those within its own confines who are not a part of the political or economic elite.

Despite these facts on the ground, the color-blind myth and the political dumb show of multi-culturalism allow much of America to see racism as something that died during the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As revealed in his last speeches in regards to the genocidal practice of the U.S. in Vietnam however, Dr. King felt that American empire was just beginning to reach the full reach of its destructive powers against non-European peoples around the globe at the very time it was paying lip service to civil rights at home. This oft-ignored internationalist aspect of Dr. King’s vision led him to describe American imperialism as the greatest threat to the health and security of the planet just before he was assassinated. Even though world opinion (the thing that Bush the lesser now glibly refers to as a “focus group”) was decidedly against the war in Indochina, and even as America got submerged in a quagmire and eventually “lost” for the first time in armed conflict, three to four million Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians were killed under the narcotic-like banners of democracy and saving the world from an “ism” that was hiding around every corner.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

If America ever will realize the full scope of Dr. King’s dream, and if we do not want more re-runs of Vietnam, progressives and radicals will have to work to dismantle structural white supremacy even while struggling against corporate globalization, patriarchy, environmental destruction, and homophobia. None of this will be accomplished by modern day “Step-N-Fetchits” parading themselves as “successful” Black folks while comparing Frederick Douglass and Dr. King to a right wing want-to-be cowboy president. As Gill Scott Heron said in “B-Movie,” his classic song about Ronald Reagan, the actor turned imperialist, “it ain’t really a life, it ain’t nothin’ but a movie.”

Free Palestine!!! Free Iraq!!! Free Haiti!!!

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!!!

Free Dr. Mutulu Shakur!!!

Free Leonard Peltier!!!

And the remaining 2 of the Angola 3!!!

FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS and the millions who never would have been imprisoned if given real life chances!!!    

Dennis Childs received his Master's Degree in African American Studies at UCLA in 1998. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. in English at the University of California at Berkeley. Child’s most recent publication is an essay, "Angola Prison, Convict Leasing, and the Annulment of Freedom," which appears in an anthology called Violence and the Body edited by Arturo Aldama (Indiana University Press, 2003). He can be contacted at [email protected]