Street offers a valuable dissection of American racism that has become very complicated due to the obfuscation of it by all the indoctrination/propaganda agencies of the ruling capitalist class by transforming its more overt forms into more indirect, but still effective, forms that serve to preserve racism. Now with a more hardcore racist in the White House, many white Americans have been deceived by agents of the ruling class to see themselves as victims, and are now being encouraged to foment racist-based actions .
In my opinion, Street wastes far too much time (and ours) by listing details about what should happen to overcome racism, and far too little time developing his last paragraph in which he suggests that all the "shoulds" (expressed as "we need") will likely not change anything simply because those who rule our nation, under a system their ancestors created, will not permit such reforms to be made.
Unlikely under capitalism….
Can reparations (due also to Native Americans and nations abroad where untold millions/billions of people have been devastated by U.S. imperialism) be properly and meaningfully introduced under the existing U.S. regime of class rule called capitalism? Almost certainly not – as with the demand for a shift to an ecologically sustainable economy and society. It must therefore be considered a revolutionary demand and be combined with multi-racial working-class struggle to remove the “One Percent” (a catchy euphemism for the capitalist ruling class) not just from its wealth but also and above all from its command of the structuring and purpose of “our” (their) political economy. It must be interwoven with the struggle for the broad redistribution of wealth and power and for peoples’ socialism. This is very different from the reactionary, “divisive,” and zero-sum way in which reparations is advanced by its bourgeois champions both white and Black.Racism along with poverty, powerlessness for the vast majority, never-ending wars, environmental destruction, and all the other evils of capitalism will not change until we, the people, change the system that supports all those evils. We need to study and execute a revolution before our masters with their addiction to profits and power make humans extinct. Time is fast running out.
