On the Cover

Last issue, we used our cover to ask about the motives behind the “humanitarian” U.S. mission in Somalia. This month, the images on our cover directly address the racism and imperialism of the “humanitarian” U.S. government.

The political cartoon from 1898 shows that this is nothing new. In 1898, it was the Philippines and the lynching of blacks; in the 1990’s, as the Filipino government kicks out U.S. military bases, the U.S. government moved on to former client state Iraq, first with a “Desert Storm” which killed hundreds of thousands (yellow ribbons, anyone?). Meanwhile, the U.S.’s imprisonment rate per capita for blacks is twice that of the “racist” state of South Africa, people of color are routinely the victims of police brutality, and a white male has yet to be convicted of the rape of a black woman.

Then, while the U.S. occupied Somalia in a “humanitarian” mission, elsewhere, the “peaceful transfer of power” —the presidential inauguration— served as an intermission to the bombing of Iraq: on Tuesday, the Bush administration bombed, Wednesday the U.S. partied, and on Thursday, the Clinton administration resumed the destruction. Clearly, as far as people of color are concerned, the presidential inauguration was not a “New Beginning”, as the democrats claimed, but a mere changing of personnel. As Clinton said, “We are going to stay with our policy. It is an American policy.” Just like it was with Somaza in Nicaragua, Noriega in Panama, Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran, ad nauseam.

Racism in America has its roots in the imperialism of the slave trade. The fight against racism in the U.S. is incomplete to the extent that it doesn’t understand the intimate connections between the oppression of people of color in the U.S. and abroad. As Marx stated over a century ago: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”

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