NOAM CHOMSKY ON AMERICA: ‘THIS IS
A VERY RACIST SOCIETY’
RT Published time:
December 13, 2014
Professor Noam Chomsky said it would be “no small trick” for
the Ferguson protests to turn into an anti-racism and social justice movement,
considering America’s founding principles are slavery and the extermination of
the indigenous population.
In a sweeping interview covering everything from Iraq and
Syria to China, capitalism, and the protests in Ferguson, MIT linguistics
professor Chomsky told GRITtv’s Laura
Flanders that events in Ferguson and the protests that have followed show
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 Baptist (Edward E. Baptist in The Half Has
Never Been Told: Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism) describes
happening in the late 19th Century.”
Chomsky said constitutional amendments were supposed to free
African-American slaves, which they did for about ten years. Then, he said, a
North-South compact granted former slave-owning states the right to do whatever
they wanted.
“And what they did was
criminalize black life, and that created a kind of slave force,” said
Chomsky. “It threw mostly black males into jail, where they became a perfect
labor force, much better than slaves.”
Chomsky explained that as a slave owner, the concern was
keeping the “capital” alive. When the states were able to exert greater
control over black lives, it became their responsibility to handle strikes and
disobedience. Since African-Americans couldn’t effectively fight back against
this increased state control, Chomsky said it led to a subjugated labor force.
He said that was the backbone to the American Industrial Revolution in the late
19th and early 20th Century, and it didn’t end until World War II.
“After that,” Chomsky told
Flanders, “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.”
Chomsky blamed the drug war, describing it as a racist war.
“Ronald Reagan was an extreme
racist – didn’t hide it – but the whole so-called drug war is designed, from
policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for the black
male community and, more and more, women, and more and more Hispanics to be
part of [American] society,” he said.
READ MORE: ‘Overtly
racist’ South Carolina exit poll asked if blacks are ‘too demanding’ of equal
rights
“In fact, 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.”
Chomsky said there are some
privileges for black elites, but not for the mass of the population.
“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.”
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