Page 145 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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Gradually, overt racism and institutional
expanding U.S. influences in the world.”
violence were legally challenged. But, again, the racialized social structure limited
the impact of the Black struggle by intellectually, ideologically, and militarily sup-
pressing the transformative aspects of the struggle, such as the cultural and revolu-
tionary wings of the movement. However, in the process of the struggle, racial
dictatorship was replaced by racial hegemony, and the reformist wing of the Black
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movement was incorporated into the White establishment.
There were other outcomes of the Black struggle. The Black middle class ex-
panded.The gap between the Black middle class and the poorer masses widened. In-
stitutional violence and discrimination flourished in the forms of the prison industrial
complex, crisis, unemployment, poverty, and underdevelopment. Prior to the African
American struggle of the 1960s, racial segregation forced all African Americans to live
in the same geographical areas and to feel a sense of collective oppression and group
identity.The African American movement and the Civil Rights laws changed these
conditions and expanded “the potential base of the African-American middle class,
which was located primarily outside of the neighborhood confines of the old ghetto.
By 1989, one out of seven African American families had incomes exceeding $50,000
annually, compared to less than $22,000 for the average black household. Black col-
lege-educated married couples currently earn 93 per cent of the family income of
comparable white couples.” 15 Manning Marable asserts that “affirmative action was
largely responsible for a significant increase in the size of the black middle class; it
opened many professional and managerial positions to blacks, Latinos and women for
the first time. But in many other respects, affirmative action can and should be criti-
cized from the left, not because it was ‘too liberal’ in its pursuit and implementation
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of measures to achieve equality, but because it was ‘too conservative.’” The Civil
Rights Act of 1964,the Voting Rights Act of 1965,and the affirmative action programs
were the main outcomes of the Black movement. Civil Rights laws legally dismantled
racial segregation and allowed middle- to upper-class Blacks to access economic, ed-
ucational, and political opportunities to a certain degree.This had the impact of dif-
fusing the movement. Consequently, the progress of the movement was stopped.
While Civil Rights laws were passed to legally destroy racial segregation, affirma-
tive action programs were designed to allow qualified Blacks, other minorities, and
women to get access to education, employment, and other economic opportunities.
Since it was not intended to uproot institutional racism and White privileges, affirma-
tive action “sought to increase representative numbers of minorities and women
within the existing structure and arrangements of power, rather than challenging or
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redefining the institutions of authority and privilege.” Affirmative action “was . . . a
series of presidential executive orders, civil rights laws and governmental programs re-
garding the awarding of federal contracts, fair employment practices and licences, with
the goal of uprooting bigotry. Historically, at its origins, it was designed to provide
some degree of compensatory justice to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow segregation
and institutional racism.” 18
Of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and affir-
mative action programs that followed them could not solve the problems of the Black
majority, as the following indicators demonstrate. In the 1990s, the infant mortality
rate was 17.7 deaths per 1,000 births. Children who live in poverty account for 43.2
percent.The functional or marginal illiteracy rate was about 44 percent. Explaining
how the condition of inner-city Blacks was worse in the 1990s than in the 1950s, D.