The Gates arrest and the “national conversation on race”

[Hannah Bell]

The controversy stemming from the arrest of prominent African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home on June 16 has dominated the media for a week....The media, Obama, and other politicians have used the controversy surrounding the Gates arrest — which they themselves inflated into a major story — to argue...that the nation has not moved beyond its racial past, in spite of the election of the first African American president. They insist that what is needed, and what the Gates arrest might initiate, is a new “national conversation on race.”

...The “national conversation,” such as it is, raises the concept of race to an independent social category, outside and apart from class and the very economic structure of society — a viewpoint promoted for decades by layers of the academic elite, for whom race is a fixation.... The “conversation” is very much determined by powerful interests, who promote it in politics, media, and the universities.

The effort to abstract race from class inequality came to the fore in the 1970s only after the ebb tide of the Civil Rights movement had set in. Right through the 1960s, it was broadly accepted that what was once called the “negro question” could not be addressed outside of a recognition that the exploitation and the repression of black workers were ultimately class issues bound up with the social structure both in the South and the urban areas of the North...

This was the perspective that underlay Martin Luther King Jr.’s launching of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. King sought to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor.” He had determined that the struggle for economic equality was the second, and decisive phase of the Civil Rights movement. A month before the Poor People’s Campaign was to march on Washington, King was assassinated...


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/gate-j28.shtml