The Racism I See Today ...

Oct 13, 2014

The following is another selection from Sam Johnson’s book, A Fighter All My Life, reprinted with permission from the author.

The racism I see today doesn’t look the same as what I grew up with. It’s at a different level. But it’s still there.

There are no jobs for black workers. In Detroit, in other cities, they moved the jobs out of the city. They moved them out where most black people don’t live. And there’s no transportation. Kids in the city can’t get out and back if they get a job. And the schools in the city don’t train the kids so they can get a job.

They don’t say they don’t hire blacks. But the way it’s set up, black workers can’t get hired. It’s the whole capitalist system that is racist.

The cops may not be KKK today, although some might as well be. But they have gotten much worse the way they treat people. The situation in the streets is tougher. And the cops are tougher. And when you see a cop kill someone, they may say he shouldn’t have done it, but the courts don’t do anything to him. They say he was just doing his job.

The cops kill a young black kid quicker than a young white kid, especially if the black kid speaks up. And a lot of them out there in the streets, they do speak up. So what if they go to jail, they’re already in jail—that’s how they feel. So they front off the cops. And sometimes the cops kill them. Or these young kids end up in prison. For what?

This monster of a capitalist system was born in slavery. Slavery may be over, but the racism it produced is not over. And the violence of this monster system against all working people is not over. We’re all of us, the working people, being treated like slaves.