addictinginfo
Noam Chomsky dropped a huge bombshell during Tuesday’s interview with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, when he called the late President Ronald Reagan an “extreme racist” and claimed he re-enslaved blacks.
Whoa. As cartoon character Yosemite Sam often warns Bugs Bunny, “them’s fightin’ words.”
The much-loved (and much-hated) liberal scholar, activist, and political commentator has always had strong views about how our society works (and about Reagan), but Chomsky also always has the research and deep knowledge of US history to back it up.
In fact, Chomsky and Flanders had just been talking about Douglas Blackmon’s 2008 book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” The book explains how gains made by blacks in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era reversed into a state of “neoslavery” caused by an unfair and discriminatory system.
Chomsky explains that, due to chronic racism, blacks have only had brief times of relative freedom throughout our nation’s history, and only two decades in the 1950’s and 1960’s that offered some a chance to move up into the middle class.
“This is a very racist society, it’s pretty shocking. What’s happened to African-Americans in the last 30 years [after the post-World War II economic boom] is similar to what [Blackmon] describes happening in the late 19th Century [after the Reconstruction].”
In the mid-20th century, unions and a strong job market helped blacks make some gains, but these trends reversed with the “Reagan Revolution.”
“African-Americans had about two decades in which they had a shot of entering [American] society. A black worker could get a job in an auto plant, as the unions were still functioning, and he could buy a small house and send his kid to college. But by the 1970s and 1980s it’s going back to the criminalization of black life.”
Why can’t we achieve racial equality? Because our nation’s political and business leaders have always depended on slave labor to fuel our economy. As Chomsky mentions earlier in the interview, “Our economy was built on the backs of African slaves.”
How did Reagan and his fellow conservatives snatch back the fragile gains blacks had made, and re-enslave them? By criminalizing their communities through his “War on Drugs” and forcing blacks into our privatized prison system, as Chomsky explains:
“It’s called the drug war, and it’s a racist war. Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist — though he denied it — but the whole drug war is designed, from policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for black men and, increasingly, women to be part of [American] society. […] They have been re-criminalized and turned into a slave labor force — that’s prison labor.”
Global Research adds that the 2 million newly-enslaved people in the US prison system — most of whom are blacks or people of color — are then forced by corporations to work for ridiculously low wages:
For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
An earlier Addicting Info post reports blacks make up just 14 percent of “regular” drug users but comprise 37 percent of people who get arrested for drug offenses. That’s because Reagan’s “War on Drugs” targets mainly low-income urban neighborhoods — where more blacks live — instead of the suburbs and rural areas where more whites live.
Oh, and guess who’s paying for all these prisons and heavily-armed police squads? We are! It all comes out of our taxes.
Chomsky explains how Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ helped re-enslave blacks.
Watch Noam Chomsky explain how Reagan’s War on Drugs has helped the process of re-enslaving blacks. The video should start playing at the 16:44 mark, where Chomsky discusses how Reagan’s policies have re-enslaved blacks, but you can rewind to watch from the beginning.
Unfortunately, the black community as a whole, does not want to better themselves. They want the hand outs to have more stuff i.e. the cars, clothes, furniture, houses that the rich white man has. They don’t want to earn it. They don’t want to struggle for it. The middle class white man has done both and will continue to sit in middleclassdom, until the government slowly takes this status away thru higher and higher taxes and healthcare.
How about having the successful blacks, invest their money back into their communities, to create jobs and self supporting income streams for their communities and work with their self proclaimed religious leaders to encourage education and seeking full time employment.