[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

OK - but do you want judicial sentencing to be EQUALIZED so that whites get the same bullshit life sentences for weed (exaggeration i know but you get my point) that whites do?

No. The opposite. We want the "justice" system to acknowledge the racism inherent to the system and begin to retroactively commute sentences and change sentencing policies for the future towards equality.

that is not the answer. "y'all" have a quasi slave state running in your prisons, lock em up and get em to perform menial labour for pennies.

Agreed, and part of the prison-industrial complex is the inherent structural racism which thrives on the black and brown male as the new slave. It is the DIRECT legacy of convict-labor and vagrancy laws of the early-20th century South. They quite literally CRIMINALIZED simply being black, and now we are dealing with the structural consequences of 60-75 years of that shit.

i DO NOT believe that anti racism is strong enough a concept to fight against the human tendency to exploit others for profit.

Considering what we ended slavery AND chased away Jim Crow I think history disagrees with you.

the entire left IMO is paralyzed by trying to apply this anti racist heuristic to everything. its not something that can be abandoned - ultimately i am pessimistic for a reason only the far right would dare express -

That is why its not about partisan politics or even the current political machinery. Its about grass roots, everyday people changing their MIND and then their BEHAVIOR and this will change the inequities and iniquities of American structural racism.

i dont think things will get much better for blacks until they are the majority.

Well, that will never happen so we need to work a different way. I prefer to build on what worked in the past, which was the advocacy and policy shifting efforts of the abolitionists who Frederick Douglass called the greatest generation of whites ever on the earth, and the later Civil Rights' movement.

equality is a problem here. we can all be equally screwed over by the system. i dont think its threatened by the call to stop using race as an excuse for oppression. i think its very comfortable talking about race, but never CLASS.

The problem in America is race and class are intertwined like in medieval India. Being black and brown IS a lower class, and there are accompanying economic and educational gaps that are embedded structurally around race. When we eliminate THAT, then we can begin to disassemble the class distinctions in America. However that is also a tall order, because America THRIVES on class distinction, it is the American way to be better than your neighbor.

anyway, we are talking in circles here. i dont see how anti racist struggles have necessarily solved the problems that we've had for centuries.

We are, but its been a good discussion all the same. How did anti-racist struggles NOT solve problems? 150 years black people were fucking slaves, and half the country fought the bloodiest war in our history to preserve that. Then later, Jim Crow had black folks shackled in poverty and victimized routinely by violence and even death (lynching. Now? Those are not quite a distant memory, but this is not 1956, there has been miraculous progress, which is hope we can build on for a better future so long as we keep up the fight, never backing down to the pains of internal nihilism.