NOT BLACK POWER...NOT WHITE POWER...BUT WORKER POWER!

Senior academics and politicians have condemned UK universities for failing to tackle endemic racism against students and staff. Scores of black and minority ethnic students and lecturers have told the Guardian they were dissuaded from making official complaints and either dropped their allegations or settled for an informal resolution. They said white university staff were often reluctant to address racism, with racial slurs treated as banter or an inevitable byproduct of freedom of speech, and institutional racism poorly recognised. University staff from minority backgrounds said the findings showed there was “absolute resistance” to dealing with the problem. Official figures are believed to underestimate the scale of racism in higher education. The vast majority of universities also said they did not record informal complaints, while more than half did not record antisemitism and Islamophobia as racism.

Heidi Mirza, visiting professor of race, faith and culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, said universities’ poor handling of complaints was driving BAME staff and students to quit.

Ilyas Nagdee, black students’ officer for the National Union of Students, said racism on campus continued to be brushed under the carpet. “As students of colour continue to face harassment in their places of study and abuse in their halls of accommodation, universities remain ill-equipped and unwilling to tackle the issue at large,” he said.

The divisive fragmentation of working people, which contains groups of many races and national origins, is one of the strongest props of capitalism. As long as it continues to obscure the lines of class struggle, the policy of divide and rule will pay dividends to the small class that remains unchallenged. There are a thousand ways the profit-system keep our fellow-workers fighting among one another, competing for the scraps from the masters' tables. It keeps workers whose children go to bad schools fighting with workers whose schools are worse. It pits low-paid workers against even lower-paid workers, those with bad housing against those with terrible housing. In each case it is workers who suffer when they fight each other instead of the system that is their common enemy.

Ending racism will take much more than moral appeals to people's tolerance or the passing of anti-discrimination laws. Such approaches leave untouched the root causes of racial division. Recent events has shown how vulnerable and temporary reforms are regards equality are under capitalism. The underlying forces of the profit system, which make poverty, urban decay and unemployment permanent problems, continually overwhelm patchwork efforts to improve the status of African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and other minorities within the working class. The concept of "inferior" and "superior" races that had been fostered by capitalists has persisted. It will take the successful outcome of yet another struggle -- the class struggle -- before workers of all backgrounds will have the power to collectively enforce their claim to "liberty and justice for all."

To eliminate racism effectively requires two things -- a clear exposure of the capitalist roots of racism and the class-conscious unity of workers to oppose it. Only a class-conscious position can expose the decades of racist propaganda. It is impossible to work for a socialist society without fighting against racial divisions among workers. But it is equally impossible to mount any really effective campaign against racism that is not at the same time a fight against its capitalist cause. The Socialist Party appeal to the workers of all colours and national origins, and to all persons who recognise the evils of capitalism, to join with us in our efforts to bring a speedy end to the criminal capitalist system and to create the economic and social conditions for freedom, equality and fraternity by establishing the free society of socialism, thereby extinguishing the cause of racial prejudices. All the evidence proves that the racism arises from the exploitation of the many by the few and that it can be solved in but one way, by the socialist reconstruction of society.