The White Working Class and the Rainbow Coalition
Fred Hampton was a smart and brave young man. He was an activist from his youth, working with the Black Panthers to bring liberation to Black peoples across the country, but mostly in his home area of Chicagoland. However, while nearly every Black leader during the Civil Rights Movement knew that poor White people felt the heel of authority, Hampton’s efforts to include them as allies in the fight against the ruling classes were the most famous. The Rainbow Coalition was an effort spearheaded by Hampton’s Black Panthers to include activist groups of all races together to fight classism, virtual caste systems, and economic inequality, all of which are root causes of the more visible -isms like sexism, anti-Semitism, and of course, racism.
For his efforts, Hampton caught the attention of the federal government at quite a young age, so much so that at the age of 21, a time when he was barely legal to drink alcohol in this country, he was murdered in his sleep, assassinated if you will, by the feds. The official story is that it was an act of self-defense, but no account of the tale by credible sources will make this out to be anything but a government raid in his headquarters. The feds had the decency to wait until Malcolm X was 40 and Martin Luther King, Jr. 39 before they had their patsies murder them. Hampton probably knew his work was going to get him killed. The United States government didn’t take kindly to the order being upset in favor of marginalized classes. The same Republicans today that pay lip service to guys like MLK would’ve been either nascent Nixonian Republicans or Deep South Dixiecrats who changed party affiliations when the roles between the parties reversed, actively plotting for these movements to be snuffed out.
The tricky thing about revolutions though is that if you want to have the best shot of doing it peacefully, you have to include the demographics who look like the people with the most power and money. You could get all the marginalized folks in the world to rise up, but they’re gonna have to fight a war to do it. They might win, but the odds get slimmer and slimmer as the federal power creep grows and grows. The Second Amendment was written at time when some hooligans could probably steal a cannon if they wanted to so you at least had some of what the Royal forces had. You ain’t getting anywhere near Predator drones today. That means power gets more and more entrenched. However, once you start convincing the privileged demographics that their privilege only goes so far and that the same people who are beating back the oppressed are doing the same to them, not nearly as hard but still effectively enough, then you might get somewhere.
Hampton knew that, hence the Rainbow Coalition. The truth is he probably was going to die sooner rather than later, but that Rainbow Coalition probably sped up the timetable on that assassination. The government knew that if it only had to deal with Black people, it could reasonably win. The Rainbow Coalition, however, would spread like wildfire, especially since it was formed before Ronald Reagan got his marching orders from his GOP industrialist handlers that they could save a lot of money by moving manufacturing jobs to countries without pesky things like labor unions or safety regulations.
You wise people up to the fact that their jobs might become precarious, and even if they didn’t, that they weren’t getting their fair share even with the unprecedented protections granted by the Eisenhower Administration, then they turn against you. It was in the interest of the powered elite to keep White people, especially the White working class, on their side, thinking that they were better because of their skin color, so that they could keep them sated. Hampton threatened that. They murdered him because of it.
One would think that resistance leaders today would continue that example. Again, Hampton was smart from a tactical standpoint, even if he didn’t get to stay alive because he put those plans into action. If he couldn’t live to see it to its end, you’d think that people would catch on and that the more and more leaders who adopted the Rainbow Coalition plan as doctrine, the harder and harder it would be to assassinate the movement out of existence. Instead, White liberals decided it would be better to codify tokenism in the form of Affirmative Action, which is good-intentioned, but a band-aid solution to years of social inequity brought upon by centuries of slavery beforehand, a problem that left the misrepresented demographics at an almost impossible-to-make up wealth gap.
Anyway, after the Iran hostage situation pretty much fucked Jimmy Carter’s Administration, Reagan got in office, started shipping jobs overseas, and instead of claiming responsibility like a good economic terrorist, he blamed drugs (Black people), immigrants (Brown people), and AIDS (gay people). The depolarization that Hampton attempted with the Rainbow Coalition had finally been completely wiped away.
White liberals, in response, didn’t attack the Republican overlords, because they wanted to be Republican overlords but with better optics. The Democratic Party in its top levels had no real plans on disrupting the social order, because hey, they wanted to be rich, but woke. Again, it’s all about letting a few minorities into the club, and everyone else could make their living with jobs! Skills! Training! It didn’t matter if those jobs existed, mind you. Whether or not you’ve got a D or a R next to your name, if you’re an industrialist who sent jobs to Bangladesh for pennies on the dollar, you’re not bringing them back, even if the party you donate to is supposed to be built upon economic liberalism to some degree.
But these Democratic lawmakers, man, if given the choice between forcing one of its megadonors to bring living-waged employment to tens-of-thousands of people whose skills would fit the jobs they brought back or telling a bunch of its potential voting base to forget about coal mining or steel processing and take out loans to learn how to code, guess which option they’re going to choose 101 times out of 10. I’ll give you a hint — George Soros’ paychecks ain’t going to protesters for disrupting Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos events now, but they are going somewhere.
So, if you can’t blame the people taking jobs out of the country for real, and if your need for great optics can’t make you blame a minority scapegoat the way Republicans have, your last bastion of blame falls on the White working class. They are the people whose jobs were lost, and their existence is framed as one of anger. That anger is then framed as racist or orchestrated by Republicans to lash out at the establishment, who are always “coastal elites,” and vote for these homespun Midwestern “aww shucks” racists who always promise jobs to come back but never deliver. It’s great.
No one seems to want to really talk to a disaffected coal miner from West Virginia to get his point of view, but man, they’ll definitely talk to the political megadonor who’ll totally shift the blame from themselves to said coal miner for the state of the country. For Democrats, it’s easier than self-reflecting on flaws and maybe examining the fact that listening to money doesn’t win elections when it works half as hard for you as it does for the Republicans, who fuckin’ worship it, man. For Republicans, it’s about treating the poor as a battered partner in an abusive relationship, knowing that you sell out the people in those areas who DO vote for you and can’t retaliate at all for various reasons rather than your actual base, the rich, mostly White suburbanites who have champagne wishes and caviar dreams of going from their low six figure salaries to high eight figure ones through some kind of magic called the American Dream.
So on one side, you have “good” White liberals like “Movie” Bob Chipman, whose entire raison d’etre of talking about movies on the Internet is built upon the foundations laid in part by the White working class (in part, because the working class has always been a multiracial polyglot, but instead of being blamed publicly, the Black/POC/Jewish working classes all get arrested, shot, beaten, and killed for their troubles, fun!). He wouldn’t be able to broadcast his ass to his audience online without the infrastructure laid down by those workers, and unless you stop watching the credits after seeing the actors, you know full well that movies don’t get made without the proletariat doing all the shit you don’t see on camera. My dad, a Teamster, worked on the set of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which the less said about that movie the better, but still, even bad movies have a lot of effort put into them.
Anyway, those “good” liberals will rain judgment upon the White working class for things like “voting Donald Trump into power,” which again, is a fallacy given that his base was always suburbanites with a disposable income who wanted to become socialites with fuck money. Furthermore, this angry hardhat-wearing demon is then used as a cudgel by the good liberals to smash into the heads of bad liberals and leftists who don’t vote straight Democrat in general elections to get them to vote. Of course, the blame is wrongheaded, because in reality, it’s been proven that a) Green Party voters in 2016 wouldn’t have made up the difference to beat Trump in swing states to make up electoral votes, b) Green Party voters vote Green Party no matter what human buttplugs like Movie Bob say, c) Gary Johnson voters were never voting for Hillary Clinton in the first place, d) maybe Clinton should’ve spent some fuckin’ money in those swing states, and, most importantly, e) the people who would’ve made the difference in that election in those states were disenfranchised in totally legal ways. Again, privilege rears its ugly head, because while the White working class only gets blamed for Trump, Black and other POC voters didn’t even get the chance, because voter disenfranchisement is real and is the friend of the establishment.
So to recap, the White working class is blamed for giving rise to Trump by the center-left while reaping none of the benefits from anyone to the right because the United States is a kleptocracy where the rich gain more and more wealth off the labor of the people for less and less money by the day. Why aren’t they fighting? Why aren’t they speaking up? Well, they are. You aren’t listening. You see, leftist movements are springing up in red states like Kentucky, real grassroots shit, whether it be offshoots of the World Workers Party or divisions of the DSA, and they came out en masse for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries.
The line from Donut Twitter is that they voted for Sanders because he’s just like Donald Trump. I mean, c’mon. No. They’re White grandpa-types, but they couldn’t be further from each other. It’s not necessarily that he’s the same as Trump, but he represents something different. Hope. Obviously, the hope Trump offered is false hope, just as the hope that any Republican candidate for any office has been since Reagan. But the hope Sanders offers feels genuine, at least. He offers not just a continuance of the status quo, for them to survive with shitty government welfare programs and opioids, but to live life in some reasonable facsimile to how the other half lives. That is to say, the working classes, White or otherwise, are waking up.
Fred Hampton organized a Rainbow Coalition at time when unions were strong, the rich were taxed, and the United States had manufacturing jobs. The White working class were starting to get woke to the real story of capitalism when things were good for them. Hampton got killed by the actual feds, not by some patsy like James Earl Ray or the Nation of Islam gunmen, but the actual feds because got it, that the key to defeating racism was taking out classism. Why don’t the dorks in the Radical Center get it now, when things are absolutely dire?
The time right now is perfect for a new coalition of all races getting together and kicking down a huge non-starter for the 99 percent. Breaking up the people with all the wealth is the greatest equalizer, because once everyone has the same resources, they have no reason to believe lies about the demographics who don’t have the means. I mean, look at all the ways racists describe Black people who are acceptable to them. They’re “well-spoken,” or they have education that comes with means. They “live well,” or their houses are up to snuff to the White people in the neighborhood. They’re all signs of money.
If Black people immigrated to this country of their own will with the same levels of power and wealth that the English and Spanish did, and developed alongside with similar growth in wealth, the problem of racism may not exist, and the word may not have been invented, at least with respect to White and Black. Hell, the terms Black and White probably never would’ve come into play, as the African immigrants would have been able to trace parentage back to the specific region of the mother continent, and you’d just have demarcations around national lines. However, the deck was stacked against Black Americans from the start, coming over as slaves, being freed with little in the way of material wealth to their names. They continued to live in want, and so when they finally started to demand economic liberation in earnest, they were doing so in a position of precarity.
That dearth is what makes it so easy for the one percent to frame them as taking from White people of similar or just a little bit better off than those Black people. However, the success of leftist movements in the Midwest and other red states shows that this White working class is just as easy to mobilize in the other direction, to allow them to point their knives at the ones with moneybags. Why hasn’t the Radical Center done this and started to create its own Rainbow Coalition?
The answer is that the ones in the rank and file ARE mobilizing it, but the talking heads, the out of touch celebrities, the Hillary-stans, and the people in the media would rather push narratives that will keep any Hashtag-Resistance focused on keeping the status quo. They’re just as guilty as framing Dr. King as a toothless figurehead like the Republicans, because they deny his socialist and communist leanings and think that he thought about bringing about the end of racism through ~*~*~MagIc~*~*~*. They ignore Hampton, because he showed that the way to end always meant eliminating racism through class unification and redistribution of wealth.
People say those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but learning lessons from the past is a key to victory. You don’t defeat the spectre of Reagan and surpass the promise of Eisenhower’s America by trying to be just like Reagan with better optics and a more diverse ruling class. You do it by doing something radical. Right now, courting the disaffected coal miner in West Virginia, the unemployed steelworker in Pennsylvania, the Carrier technician in Indiana whose job was shipped to Mexico despite promises from lyin’-ass Trump otherwise, isn’t obsolete. It isn’t racist. It’s how you make America great for the first time in its dismal history. Fred Hampton showed the way. He died for it, but how many great men turn out as martyrs anyway? If you listen to dipshits like Movie Bob and the like, his martyrdom is for nothing.
