NOAM CHOMSKY: REAGAN WAS AN ‘EXTREME RACIST’ WHO RE-ENSLAVED AFRICAN-AMERICANS

[Charles Brown]

http://kstreet607.com/2014/12/11/noam-chomsky-reagan-was-an-extreme-racist-who-re-enslaved-african-americans/


NOAM CHOMSKY: REAGAN WAS AN ‘EXTREME RACIST’ WHO RE-ENSLAVED AFRICAN-AMERICANS

Professor and Historian Noam Chomsky | No attribution

Noam Chomsky is one of my favorite political truth-tellers…

The Raw Story

In an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders, linguist and political
analyst Noam Chomsky discussed how the events in Ferguson, Missouri
and the protests that followed demonstrate just how little race
relations in the United States have advanced since the end of the
Civil War.

“This is a very racist society,” Chomsky said, “it’s pretty shocking.
What’s happened to African-Americans in the last 30 years is similar
to what [Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name: The
Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II]
describes happening in the late 19th Century.”

Blackmon’s book describes what he calls the “Age of Neoslavery,” in
which newly freed slaves found themselves entangled in a legal system
built upon involuntary servitude — which included the selling of black
men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and changing employers without
receiving permission.

“The constitutional amendments that were supposed to free
African-American slaves did something for about 10 years, then there
was a North-South compact that granted the former the slave-owning
states the right to do whatever they wanted,” he explained. “And what
they did was criminalize black life, and that created a kind of slave
force. It threw mostly black males into jail, where they became a
perfect labor force, much better than slaves.”

“If you’re a slave owner, you have to pay for — you have to keep your
‘capital’ alive. But if the state does it for you, that’s terrific. No
strikes, no disobedience, the perfect labor force. A lot of the
American Industrial Revolution in the late 19th, early 20th Century
was based on that. It pretty must lasted until World War II.”

“After that,” Chomsky said, “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.”

“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.”

“In fact,” he continued, “if you look at American history, the first
slaves came over in 1619, and that’s half a millennium. There have
only been three or four decades in which African-Americans have had a
limited degree of freedom — not entirely, but at least some.”

“They have been re-criminalized and turned into a slave labor force —
that’s prison labor,” Chomsky concluded. “This is American history. To
break out of that is no small trick.”

Watch the entire interview via GRITtv on YouTube below.

The part pertaining to the subject of this post starts at 16:44.

I would recommend viewing the entire video because it gives us an
insight on what makes Chomsky one of the great historians of our time…

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