December 2002/
January 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Global Apartheid in the Twenty-first Century

Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, at Columbia University. This speech was given, in slightly longer form, under the title "The War on Terrorism and US Hegemony--What We Have Learned" at the AFSC-sponsored conference "Paths to a Just and Secure Future: Resisting Washington's Endless War" at Simmons College, Boston MA, on October 11, 2002. Audiotapes of this speech and other conference presentations are available from AFSC, 2161 Mass. Ave., Cambridge MA 02140; 617/661-6130.

Manning Marable. Photo: Skip Schiel

At the First Pan-African Conference in 1900, the great African-American social justice activist and scholar, W.E.B. Dubois, made a prediction. He said, "The problem of the 20th century [would be] the problem of the color line, the relationship between the darker and lighter races of men in Africa, Asia and in the islands of the sea."

Today, with both the tragic and triumphant experiences in transforming and challenging race of the 20th century behind us, perhaps we can say that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of global apartheid. To understand the war against terrorism, we must first address the question of global apartheid.

The origins of global apartheid

Many people in the United States argue that everything fundamentally changed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. What did change? Well, yes, there was an upsurge of public patriotism and national chauvinism. Yes, there was an understandable desire to avenge the innocent victims of the Al Qaeda network's terrorism. Perhaps these terrible events marked the real beginning of the 21st century and the new "crusade" against fundamentalist Islam and "terrorism."

Or perhaps this does not really mark a radical departure into some uncharted political territory. Perhaps instead, it should be understood as the culmination of deeper political and economic forces that have been set into motion over the last several decades around the issue of global apartheid. You see, the core ideology of Reaganism--free markets, unregulated corporations, the vast build-up of nuclear and conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad, the suppression of civil liberties and civil rights at home, the demagogic campaigns against both terrorism and Soviet communism--have actually been central to the current Bush administration's policy initiatives in its pursuit of a war against Iraq today.

Former President Ronald Reagan attempted to establish a national security state where the legitimate functions of government were narrowly restricted to matters of national defense, public safety, and tax subsidies to the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many economists have termed military Keynesianism, that is, the deficit spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as Star Wars. This massive deficit federal spending was largely responsible for the US economic expansion of the 1980s.

Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pressured into an expensive arms race it could not afford. The fall of Soviet communism transformed the global political economy into a unipolar world characterized by US hegemony, both economic and military. The result was a deeply authoritarian version of US state power, with increasing restrictions on democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated dismantling of trade unions to the mass incarceration of racialized minorities and the poor.

All of us now know the phrase "the prison-industrial complex," because by the end of the 1990s, more than two million American were behind bars. So when we look at what happened in the United States, beginning with the election of
Reagan in 1980, we see an acceleration of globalized racism--that is, apartheid--and a war against the Third World abroad. But you must link that to the expansion of the prison-industrial complex and structural racism at home. We cannot understand one without the other.

All of these things simultaneously unfolded with a war against women of color as well. The commitment by the past administration, former President Clinton's, to "end welfare as we know it," was a radical restructuring which pushed hundreds of thousands of women, householders and their children, down into poverty.

Once again, one can see the impact of these policies of racialization as they related outside of the United States to the Third World. It was in this context of Reaganism that the US government was largely responsible in the 1980s for creating the conditions for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to flourish.

The roots of terrorism

The Taliban regime consolidated its authoritarian rule in the mid-'90s in close partnership with Pakistan's secret police (which the CIA had supported to equip and train tens of thousands of Islamic fundamentalists in the tactics or guerrilla warfare) and ruling political dictatorship. The Clinton Administration was virtually silent when the draconian suppression of women's rights, public executions, and mass terror became commonplace across Afghanistan. As writer Katha Pollitt wrote several years ago, under the Taliban regime, women could not work or attend school, "had virtually no health care, could not leave their houses without a male escort." The Bush administration's current allies in Afghanistan are basically not much better. As Pollitt later observed, both fundamentalist groups, those who were in power prior to the war and those in power now, are equally violent, antidemocratic, and misogynist.

One fairly standard definition of terrorism is the use of extremist, extralegal violence and coercion against a civilian or non-combatant population. Terrorist acts may be employed to instill fear and mass intimidation or to achieve a political objective. By any criterion, Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. Most Americans have never experienced terrorism but we have unleashed terrorism against millions of others throughout US history. The mass lynchings, the public executions, the burnings at the stake of thousands of African-Americans in the early 20th century were home-grown domestic acts of terrorism. The genocide of millions of American Indians was objectively a calculated plan of mass terrorism--the use of violence against a civilian population. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities during World War II, resulting in the incineration of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, was certainly a crime against humanity. The US-sponsored coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, culminating in mass tortures, rapes, and executions of thousands of people, was nothing less than state-financed terrorism. There is a common political common denominator, a common political immorality that links Augusto Pinochet, Osama Bin Laden, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They all believe that political terror was justified.

Neo-authoritarianism in the US

The fall of communism transformed a bipolar political conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic "new world order," as the first President Bush termed it. The chief institutions for regulating the flow of capital investment and labor across international boundaries were no longer governments. The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and trans-national treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, took on these roles, exercising significantly greater influence over the lives of working people globally. The political philosophy of globalization, termed neoliberalism, emphasized privatizing government services and programs, eliminating unions, and applying the aggressive rules of capitalist markets to public institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and postal services. The social contract between US citizens and the liberal democratic state was being rapidly redefined to exclude the concept of social welfare, to exclude the concept of social responsibility to the truly disadvantaged. A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of governments was required to explain to citizens why their long-standing constitutional and democratic rights were being taken away from them.

Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, 1998. Photo: Skip Schiel

The leading apologist for this neo-authoritarianism was the former New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. When Giuliani was elected mayor in late 1993, one of the first speeches he gave was about the need to eliminate democratic constitutional rights. And if you don't believe me, let me quote the speech: "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it." The Giuliani administration won national praise for reducing New York City's murder rate from 2000 to about 650 a year. The rate of violent crimes also plummeted. But the social cost for New York's black, brown, and poor communities was far more devastating than anything they had known previously. The ACLU has estimated that every year of Giuliani's administration, between 50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers were subjected to stop-and-frisk harassment by the NYPD. Overwhelmingly, these were Latinos and blacks, generally young women and men. Many white liberals in New York City passively capitulated to this new state authoritarianism, not unlike what we have recently seen in Congress.

As the national media enthusiastically picked up the Bush administration's mantra on the war on terrorism, a series of repressive federal and state policies were swiftly introduced after September 11. In New York, the state legislature and Governor George Pataki signed off on the Terrorism Act, under which anyone convicted of giving more than $1000 to any organization defined by state authorities as terrorist would face up to 15 years in a state prison. Now, when one reflects that not too many years ago, the US considered the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela a terrorist organization; when one considers that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is widely described in the US media as a terrorist organization, it becomes apparent that the danger of being severely penalized for supporting any Third World social justice movement has now become very real. The policy suppressed legitimate activities by US citizens in solidarity with Third World countries and social justice movements abroad.

The links between racism and war

At all levels of our government, any expression of restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our civil liberties is equated with treason. The anti-terrorism bills in New York State Assembly were passed with no debate by 135 to 5. In Oct. 2001, the Bush administration's anti-terrorism legislation passed by 96 to 1.

The militarism and political intolerance displayed in the Bush administration's response to the September 11 attacks created a natural breeding ground for bigotry and racial harassment. For the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the September 11 tragedy was God's condemnation of a secularist, atheistic America. Falwell attributed the attacks to "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the lesbians and of course the ACLU." After a firestorm of criticism, Reverend Falwell was forced to apologize. Less well-publicized were the hate-filled commentaries of journalist Anne Coulter, who declared after September 11 that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity."

Similar voices of intolerance were also being heard in Europe. For example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi stated that Western civilization was clearly "superior to Islamic culture." He praised imperialism, predicting that "the West will continue to conquer peoples, just as it conquered communism." Falwell, Berlusconi, and others illustrate the direct linkage between racism and war, between imperialism and militarism. The relationship is symbiotic. In a racialized social hierarchy, you cannot pursue a policy of mass coercion, the use of the prisons as a means of warehousing the unemployed and the poor and the working poor in the United States, without constructing an ideology that justifies your actions. The same thing is true in a global context. If you have a global world order of apartheid, globalized apartheid, the haves and the have-nots, as Malcolm X put it at the end of his life, the fundamental division on the global scale, when you pursue war in the interest of maintaining that division--you must utilize the demonization; you must denigrate the cultures of the others. The globalized other, therefore, is demonized. Consequently, we cannot talk about the war against terrorism and the construction of the globalized other unless we also look at its origins in terms of racism.

On college campuses over the last year, there have been numerous instances of the suppression of freedoms, of free speech, and democratic dissent. When the City University of New York faculty held an academic panel presenting a variety of viewpoints about the historical and political issues leading up the September 11 attacks, the university's chief administrator publicly denounced the participants. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, hundreds of Middle Eastern college students were forced to return home from universities across the United States due to racial and religious harassment. Examples of this occurred all over the country.

Perhaps the most dangerous element of the Bush administration's campaign against democratic and civil liberties in this country has been the deliberate manipulation of mass public hysteria. Millions of Americans who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center are still in a post-traumatic state. The American public was bombarded daily with a series of media-orchestrated threats, focusing on everything from crop-dusting airplanes potentially being used for bioterrorism, to anthrax-contaminated packages delivered through the US Postal Service, to random executions by an unknown assailant of people dropping their kids off at school and pumping gas at filling stations outside of Washington, DC. There is a sense of terror. There is a sense of fear that is real for millions of Americans. Whose interest does this serve? Why do we have all of these kinds of assaults on our sense of security? It gives us a sense that we must surrender our constitutional rights, that we should surrender our civil rights to an all-powerful authority that knows best how to protect us. That's the message that millions of Americans are receiving today.

Dissident profiling and false security

Throughout 2002, we saw and witnessed what could be termed dissident profiling: The proliferation of electronic surveillance, of roving wiretapping, of harassment at the workplace, the infiltration and disruption of antiwar groups, the stigmatization of any critics of US militarism as disloyal and subversive. Let us recall the FBI's persistent harassment of individuals, like Martin Luther King Jr., and its efforts to disrupt the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Let us remember the CIA's long history of cooperation with the most egregious violators of human rights, with murderers and rapists, against millions of Third World people.

The principle that no group in the United States should be stigmatized as disloyal and criminal because of race or national origin and religion is too recent and too fragile an achievement to be abandoned because of this war on terrorism. I believe that one cannot preserve democracy by eliminating and restricting the democratic rights of any single person in this country. To publicly oppose the government's policies that one knows and believes to be morally and politically wrong, as Dr. King once put it, is to express the strongest belief in the very principles of democracy. You cannot preserve democracy by destroying democracy.

Those of us who oppose our government's course of action must now clearly explain to the American people that the missile strikes and the indiscriminate carpet bombing we unleashed in 2001 and 2002 against the Afghan people, the indiscriminate carpet bombings of Iraq that are being planned, the plan for a post-war Iraq, based on the model of the US occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur after World War II, will not make us safer as a people. The policies of the Bush administration actually put our lives in greater danger because the use of government-sponsored state terror will not halt brutal retaliation by the other terrorists. The national security state apparatus we are constructing today is being designed primarily to suppress domestic dissent, to suppress racially profiled minorities rather than to halt foreign-born terrorists at our borders. Restricting everybody's civil liberties, hiring thousands more police and security guards, and incarcerating more than 1000 Muslims and individuals of Arab descent without due process only fosters the false illusion of security.

The war on terrorism is being used as an excuse to eliminate civil liberties and democratic rights here at home. This war at home has had a profoundly racial dimension because the US democracy was constructed on a racial foundation. Before there was a Declaration of Independence, there was structural racism in this country. Before there was a Constitution of the United States, there was institutional racism in this country. The state relies on and manipulates latent racism and xenophobia at all levels of the society as it produces and manufactures the need for war. We have always seen this throughout US history. In general, whenever the US mobilizes militarily, whenever it goes to war, white racism goes with it hand in hand. The extreme degree of racial segregation where I live in New York explains the rash of hate crimes committed there over the last year. I won't go through all of them, but there have been several hundred racialized hate crimes in New York City that were driven by this sense of fear, driven by the sense of the racialized other.

The US in the eyes of the Third World

How will this period be observed in American history? The bombing campaign against the people of Afghanistan over the past year and the probable bombing campaign against the Iraqi people in the next several months will be described in US history books as the United States against the Third World. The launching of high-tech military strikes against peasant societies will do little to suppress global terrorism and will only erode US credibility in Muslim nations around the world.

The question the media asked after September 11, "Why do they hate us?" can only be answered from the vantage point of the Third World's perspective on the reasons for widespread poverty, hunger, and economic exploitation. The US government cannot engage in effective multilateral actions to suppress terrorism because its behavior illustrates a thinly veiled contempt for international cooperation. The US owed nearly $600 million in back dues to the United Nations and it paid up only when the September 11 attacks jeopardized its national security status. Republican conservatives demanded that the US be exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. For the 2001 UN-sponsored world conference against racism in South Africa, in Durban, the US government authorized the allocation of a paltry $250,000, compared to more than $10 million supplied by the Ford Foundation. So when the Ford Foundation is--what?--40 times more progressive than the US on the world stage, you've got to ask some questions about the United States.

For three decades, the United States refused to ratify the 1965 UN Convention on the elimination of racism. Is it any wonder that much of the Third World questions US motives? The carpet bombing of the Taliban seems to the Third World to have less to do with the suppression of terror than with securing future petroleum rights in Central Asia.

Now, how did a terrorist Osama bin Laden gain loyal followers trans-nationally, from Northern Nigeria to Indonesia? Well, perhaps it has something to do with America's massive military presence in Saudi Arabia. Can Americans who are not Muslims truly appreciate how spiritually offensive the presence of thousands and thousands of US troops is in Saudi Arabia? There is indeed a clear link between the September 11 attacks and the shameful political maneuvering committed by the United States on the global stage around issues of global apartheid. Our country's refusal to acknowledge the historical and contemporary effects of colonialism and racial segregation on the underdevelopment and oppression of the non-European world caused a scandal at the World Conference in Durban last year.

Passionate discontentment

One of the great capacities of the Black Freedom Movement has been our capacity to link politics with morality. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. sharply confronted the hypocrisy and the contradictions of white liberals who professed their dedication to the principles of universal brother- and sisterhood, yet who were unwilling to personally commit themselves to the politics of racial justice, to the struggle against Jim Crow racism. Martin wrote, "Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill-will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." What Martin is saying here is that how we run the society should in some way conform with our notions of ethics, how we treat others and are treated in return. It is essential for people of conscience who truly believe in a just and democratic society to take a public stand, to challenge the evils they see around themselves every day. As Martin wrote, "I submit that a person who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience over the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law." And so it is time, sisters and brothers, to follow out the creed of Dr. King. It is time for democratic resistance.

Neighborhood leaders, Savannah, GA, 1991. Photo: Skip Schiel

How do we achieve a peaceful, humane, and socially just world? By having the courage to celebrate our passionate discontentment with the way things are. Contented, satisfied people rarely want things to change too much. If we want to find out what new directions history is taking our society, we dare not wallow in the mainstream. We must stand at the edge; we must stand at the boundaries. We must listen to the poets of our society. We must learn from those who have little or nothing to lose. We must understand those who are homeless and hungry and unemployed. We must understand the pain and the tragedy that exists in this country when 46 million Americans, as we sit here this morning, lack health insurance; that a half million Americans this year will be going to emergency rooms at clinics, at hospitals, and will be turned away because they have no insurance. We have to understand the pain and the tragedy of racialization, of mass incarceration, and of racial profiling upon millions of people of color. We cannot fight for peace globally unless we fight for racial justice and peace at home, too.

Global apartheid is linked with the greatest crime in American history, the centrality of American racism. To fight against one or the other means we must fight against both. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. It only bends toward justice if we commit ourselves to the fight for peace to make it so. And without justice there can be no peace. Thank you.

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