Now Is the Time For A New Abolition Movement [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/now-time-new-abolition-movement

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Why? Global race-based capitalism is not a system of the past with lingering effects. It is a living, breathing organism of the present. White racism is as much a part of our structure in 2014 as “free markets,” private property, the jury system, cable TV, Major League Baseball, representative democracy and the Second Amendment.

Thanks to the work of historian Gerald Horne, especially his most recent book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, we have a much better understanding of how thoroughly the creation of the “first apartheid state” set the course we are still on more than 200 years later. Well beyond the nefarious “three-fifths of a man” so-called compromise language in the Constitution, the nation’s core document institutionalized white privilege.

White racism will not just “wither away.” It surely will not disappear just because whites become a minority. It cannot be dismissed into oblivion by calling any discussion of it “playing the race card,” or repeating loudly and frequently that it is “in the past.”

Neither will it be eliminated in the course of achieving liberal political objectives such as the Affordable Care Act or “comprehensive immigration reform,” the decriminalization of marijuana or a reduction in the size of the prison population. Indeed it is the other way around. Until racism is addressed a more humane social contract is unattainable.