Wells/Goodfellow is one of the neighborhoods of north St. Louis. According to 2000 census data, 8,193 people lived there, nearly 30 percent fewer than a decade earlier. Ninety-eight percent were black. Of 4,063 housing units, 27 percent, nearly 1,100, were unoccupied.
Admittedly, this was one drive-through and no doubt there are nuances I didn't see. But all in all it was a desolate-looking scene, and an outrageous indictment of the richest country in the world leaving whole areas and whole sections of the people to rot, unable to provide the most basic needs of life. The look and feel was a glaring example of how the old Jim Crow has become the New Jim Crow, with black people still suffering horrific national oppression, just in somewhat different forms.
Not far away, and not unconnected from life in north St. Louis, is a 175-acre factory complex that from 1954-1981 was the Union Boulevard General Motors Assembly plant. It once employed 13,000 and churned out the Chevy Caprice, Impala, pickup trucks, and the Corvette. It's now a business park, but was stone silent the night I drove by.
St. Louis was once second only to Detroit in auto employment, 35,000 at its peak. These were manufacturing jobs that provided workers, including some bBlack workers, with something of a stable, "middle-class" income. But those days are long gone; by 2010, not only was GM gone, but the Ford planet in Hazelwood and the Chrysler planet in Fenton were shuttered as well. The workings of global capitalism demand that the auto industry, like all others, pursue the highest rates of exploitation and profit possible, or be eaten alive in cutthroat competition with rival capitalists. And beyond the loss of these jobs, many more workers in factories that supplied the auto plants with parts and services were made "unnecessary" in the outlook of the capitalist class,. In 2011, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that GM's 1981 closing "seemed to kick open the door to a mass migration of manufacturing jobs, automotive and otherwise. In the years since, a cornerstone of the regional economy has slowly crumbled, shedding middle-class jobs to largely nonunion, right-to-work states and, more recently, emerging economies overseas."
U.S. capitalism now has no place and no future for millions of black people, creating what the capitalists consider to be a surplus, and superfluous, population that it has been trying to suppress through prisons and police terror.
Expressions of white supremacy aren't, of course, ancient history. When the NAACP went through the town of Rose Bud on their civil rights march from Ferguson to Jefferson City, the Missouri state capital, they were met by a crowd of some 200, including openly racist whites flying a Confederate flag and shouting racist vitriol. Some among them had put out on the street a bucket of fried chicken, a melon, and a 40-ounce beer bottle. One white youth had a sign saying "go home."
On Wednesday, December 3, a white man aggressively drove through a crowd of protesters in downtown St. Louis and then started waving an automatic pistol at them when they surrounded his car. Being an armed white man, as opposed to an unarmed black youth, he was detained by police, but without being shot and killed.
A growing number of white people are awakening to the ugly, intolerable reality of white supremacy and the oppression of black people in America, and hollow talk that it's "moved beyond" race. One young white woman I met at a protest had a sign reading "My life changed when I started listening." She talked about not having realized what was going on, but being awakened by the murder of Mike Brown and the uprising against it. She now feels compelled to speak out. Another, at another protest, carried a sign reading "White Silence Is Violence."
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