What is NOT particularly helpful with regard to Ferguson

[KingCharlemagne]

66. I apologize that it has taken me so long to respond. I should say first of

all that nothing I say can nor will trump your experiences with your African comrades.

What I can do, though, is at least provide you with the theoretical reason why Socialism and Socialists are implacably opposed to racism (and most of the other 'isms I listed).

Before I do, though, the person (a member of the Communist Party-USA) who trained me in how to think about race and racism defined "racism" as a means of defining and classifying people according to what he called a 'non-essential chacacteristic,' meaning one's skin color or the amount of melanin in one's skin.

Why is this important? Because Socialists and Communists believe that the essential characteristic of all people is their relationship to the means of production and not their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Thus, I am white and (I assume) you are black. But I also think both of us are 'workers' (or what Marx referred to as the 'proletariat'), meaning that you and I do not own or control the means of production, i.e., the factories or farms, and must subsist by selling the one thing we do own and control, i.e., our labor.

So racism tends to be anathema to Socialists and Communists because, as defined, it divides workers according to a non-essential characteristic when the thing that unites them, i.e., their relationship as workers to the means of production, is the essential characteristic.

As the other comrade acknowledged, this does not mean that one will not encounter racial bias in various Socialist states. In fact, it would be surprising if one never encountered such racial bias among comrades. But Socialism as a system stands opposed to such non-essential garbage. And, from what I've heard, post-revolutionary Cuba has pretty much eliminated racism (if not all instances of racial bias) from its society.

Finally, I don't think it's any coincidence that leading members of the Black Panther Party, e.g. Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, called themselves 'Socialists' or 'Communists.' In fact the BPP represented a revolutionary threat precisely because the BPP made outreach to the white working class (for example, in the form of the Young Patriots, poor Appalachian white working class comrades). The ruling class had to resort to outright assassination and armed attacks (thinking COINTELPRO) to smash them up and still the BPP remain as a potent reminder of the power of revolutionary socialist ideals.