VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
Fully support the US people’s struggle against racist oppression
Racism, which is structurally embedded in US society, arose with the invasion and theft of the lands of northern American First Peoples and the enslavement and transportation to Southern cottonfields of Africans.
On August 8, 1963, at the request of Afro-American leader Robert Williams, Mao Zedong issued a “Statement Supporting the American Negroes In Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism”.
After referring to a recent series of repressive measures against black Americans, ranging from the 1957 Little Rock, Arkansas, struggle against the barring of black children from public schools, to the June 12 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Chairman Mao said, in part:
The fascist atrocities of the U.S. imperialists against the Negro people have exposed the true nature of so-called American democracy and freedom and revealed the inner link between the reactionary policies pursued by the U.S. Government at home and its policies of aggression abroad…. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.
Afro-Americans have yet to win their complete emancipation. Fascist atrocities against people of colour continue.
Now, nearly 50 US cities are burning or are convulsed in what is inaccurately called “race riots”. Four thousand have been arrested and five shot by police. Another seven were shot in a protest against the police killing of innocent 26-year old black emergency health worker Breanna Taylor a few days ago in Louisville, Kentucky. No-one has been charged and suggestions are made that white supremacists and neo-Nazis are inflicting their own violence against protesters.
Trump blasts State Governors for being weak in the face of the protests and threatens to unleash “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen” on protesters outside the White House, and to call in the US army if the police and National Guard cannot “dominate” the streets.
We should really thank Trump for exposing the reactionary and racist thinking of the US ruling class. But we should also issue a warning: You are lifting a heavy rock only to drop it on your own feet, Mr Trump. Mao quoted this Chinese folk saying to “describe the behaviour of certain fools…The reactionaries of all countries are fools of this kind.” Repression by Trump will only lead to better, wider and more intense resistance, lifting it from a spontaneous, “movementist” character to a more conscious and ideologically aware character.
As Trump bemoans the awakening of the US people and the united struggles of white and coloured people, whinging that it is “terrible, it’s terrible”, we raise Mao’s banner that such struggles, for any faults that might be levelled at them are “fine, they’re fine”!
Racism, which is structurally embedded in US society, arose with the invasion and theft of the lands of northern American First Peoples and the enslavement and transportation to Southern cottonfields of Africans.