Racist ideology transcends class

Sunday Monitor columnist Musaazi Namiti provocatively argued last Sunday, thus: ‘My own view is that racism against Black people in the US and other parts of the world is driven mainly by the fact that Blacks are the world’s poorest people, the race that contributes the least to medical, scientific, technological advancement and global trade…’

Initially, Mr Namiti does not say the empirical and historical basis of his view. But as a parting shot, he says: ‘In my opinion, Black people would not be facing racism if they were the founders of companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. Now they have to continue relying on laws to fight racism, but laws in many places tend to work for the powerful and rich, not the poor and underprivileged.’

This assertion is both simplistic, bewildering and ahistorical. Simplistic because it supposes that economic success and wellbeing are measured by the founding of big tech companies. Bewildering in the sleight of hand that conflates the economic fortunes of individuals with the social status of a race, spread all around the globe.

How would the founding of Apple or Facebook by an African-American have dramatically changed the socioeconomic status of the Black race?
Among the richest and most famous in the sports and entertainment industries in the US are Black people.

Yet Mr Namiti blithely believes that racism is primarily directed at the poor and underprivileged. Wrong! Black sports persons and stars in the entertainment industries who earn big and command large personal profiles nevertheless are amenable to precisely the kind of racial prejudice and ridicule that any other Black person faces.

The racist birther movement against Barak Obama, the most powerful man in the world at that time, emerged not because Obama was underprivileged and impoverished, but precisely because he had beaten the odds and entered the White House through sheer brilliance.

Many had hoped or anticipated that Obama’s election as the first Black president of a country, hoisted as the oldest democracy, would move America in the direction of equal access to opportunities for all races and eradication of centuries old racial prejudices. By the time Obama left office, arguably quite the opposite had happened, at least among sections of America - a surge in white supremacist ideology.

We can reposition Mr Namiti’s argument and consider its converse. Today, China is a world power that has unsettled the heretofore-global system yet none of the tech companies named above is Chinese.

China has powered itself on the world stage through an approach that is completely different from the model of innovation and invention. In fact, one of the points of animosity between the US and China is that the latter has benefitted from unfettered ‘stealing’ of American technology and disregarded a supposed sacrosanct law of respect for property rights.

Finally, Namiti’s argument is ahistorical to the extent that it either glosses over or is unware of the history of racism around the world and race relations in America. Until the 16th Cntury, slavery was not a racial basis.

Rather, enslavement was on other grounds such as loss in war, community crimes, religious persecution, etc. The rise of capitalism in England and continental Europe triggered a new process that culminated in the tri-continental global capitalist complex with Africa as the source of slave labour, the Americas as the land reservoir and Europe as the supplier of capital.

The reasons why African became ensnared in this system and Africans became the race of enslavement, which birthed racism on a world scale, had nothing to do with economic status. I would like to invite my brother Namiti, who confesses to being a realist and an objective seeker of the truth, to inquire into this history, unblinded by the impressions of presentism.
There is a nuanced argument that Mr Namiti could have considered which Booker T. Washington made more than a century ago. Washington was among the earliest successful Black entrepreneurs in America.

In his famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, he made the case for Black economic success as key to Black emancipation even as he privately funded civil rights activism. In the intervening years, the US faced an acceleration in racial segregation and discrimination. The antidote to this era, known as Jim Crow, was the civil rights movement that delivered changes in laws, something that Mr Namiti frowns at!

Mr Khisa is assistant professor at North Carolina State University (USA).
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