Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Is Capitalism Racist?

St. Louis, according to the blurb on the Amazon webpage for Johnson's book, "Exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past." Through Johnson's looking glass, he sees the city near where he grew up as a microcosm of the nation's inherent evils.

Johnson's thesis is that enslavement of blacks in the United States did not end with the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery.

To support his narrative that such exploitation of blacks by a racially capitalistic system continues into the 21st century, Johnson perpetuates the fiction that Ferguson Missouri police murdered an unarmed black man who was about to surrender himself, Michael Brown.

In an article he wrote for a forum in memory of Robinson that appeared in the Boston Review in 2018, Johnson asserted, "The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as well as blackness, of 'freedom' as well as slavery."

Johnson, in other words, does not believe there are any differences of consequence in the conditions that blacks have faced in America before and after the Civil War, because blacks, he argues, remain the slaves of racial capitalism.

As far as Johnson is concerned, black slavery will only end when the current capitalist system and white privilege are replaced by his radical notion of a just society.

Walter Johnson is the typical leftwing professor ashamed of his own "White privilege." He ignores the success of the many black entrepreneurs, past and present, who have thrived in our capitalist system.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/leftwing-historian-pitches-racial-capitalism-joseph-klein/

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