The black man in America! Renowned American thinker and political commentator Noam Chomsky says the United States is a racist society and that racist Ronald Reagan re-enslaved African Americans. Chomsky made the remarks in an interview with American TV network Grit broadcast on Tuesday while commenting on recent developments in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager multiple times back in August, sparking nationwide civil rights protests. “This is a very racist society; I mean it’s pretty shocking. What’s happened in the last roughly 30 years with regard to African Americans actually is very similar to what [Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II] describes happening in the late 19th century,” Chomsky said. “The constitutional amendments after the Civil War were supposed to free African American slaves, it did something for about 10 years, then there was a North-South compact which simply granted the former the slave-owning states the right to do whatever they wanted,” he said. “And what they did was criminalize black life -- in all kinds of ways -- and that created a kind of slave force… It threw mostly black males, but also women, into jail, where they became a perfect labor force, much better than slaves,” Chomsky noted. “If you’re a slave owner, you have to pay for -- you have to keep your ‘capital’ alive; if the state does it for you, it’s terrific -- no strikes, no disobedience, the perfect labor force. A lot of the American Industrial Revolution in the late 19th, early 20th century was based on that. Actually, it pretty much lasted until the Second World War, when there was a need for free labor for war industry,” he pointed out. “After that,” Chomsky said, African Americans had about two decades “in which they had a shot of entering [American] society. A black worker could get a job in an auto plant, as the unions were still functioning, and he could buy a small house and send his kid to college. But by the 1970s and 1980s it’s going back to the criminalization of black life.” “It’s called the drug war, which was a racist war. Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist -- he didn’t hide it -- and the whole drug war is designed, from policing up to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for the black male community and, more and more women and more and more Hispanics, to be part of the [American] society,” he stated. “In fact, if you look at the American history, the first slaves came in 1619, and that’s half a millennium. There have only been about three or four decades in which African Americans have had a limited degree of freedom -- not entirely, but at least some,” Chomsky continued. “[They have] been re-criminalized and incidentally also turned into a slave labor force --that’s prison labor,” the American philosopher stated. “This is American history. To break out of that is no small trick.”
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 03:11:09 +0000
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