First Published: The Workers’ Advocate, Vol. 7, No. 2, May 12, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The TV and book versions of Roots by Alex Haley have been widely promoted by the capitalist news media as telling the true "story" of the Black people in the United States. The bourgeoisie is showering praise on Roots. The Senate, whose members are top political representatives of the monopoly capitalist class, voted unanimously to commend Roots. Sequels to the TV production and book are being prepared by the monopoly corporations, while other TV shows, movies and books are rolling off the assembly line right and left, all claiming to tell the "story" of the Black people.
What is all this fuss about? Have the monopoly capitalists, the rich exploiters who rule our country through their armed state machine (government), suddenly become "concerned" to tell the true story of the Black people? Have the bloodsuckers whose ancestors enslaved the Africans and brought them here in chains, who clamp the Black people today in a vice of racial discrimination and violent repression, brutally exploit the working class and commit countless wars of aggression against the people of the world--have these American Hitlers, the Rockefellers, Nixons, Fords and Carters, suddenly put down their butcher knives and become friends of the Afro-Americans?
No--on the contrary. Hidden behind Alex Haley's tracing of his ancestry back to Africa, concealed under the deceptive cover of an "exposure" of slavery, the monopoly capitalists are promoting the real message and aim of Roots. This message amounts to telling the Black people not to fight the bourgeois government under the hoax that white people in general, not the Anglo-American bourgeoisie and its government, are the enemy of the Afro-Americans. The whole purpose of this line is to take the heat of the Afro-American struggle off the government and the bourgeoisie and turn it against the white workers, splitting the working class and disrupting the revolutionary struggle. It aims at suppressing the class war of the poor against the rich by promoting a race war between Blacks and whites.
This is the line of bourgeois Black cultural nationalism,which went bankrupt in the 1960's and is being revived again today by Haley and his masters, the big bourgeoisie and its state, headed by Jimmy Carter. Their purpose is to sow the spirit of splittism and capitulation in the Afro-American movement. This line and Roots aims at dividing the working masses by inciting the Blacks against the white workers, undermining the Black people's struggle against racial discrimination and violent repression and for complete emancipation, prettifying slavery and the capitalist system and government which were and are responsible for the oppression of the Black people, and thus to prevent united revolutionary struggle of the Black and white masses against the government of the bourgeoisie. Just at a time when the government is organizing racist and fascist mass movements through the mass media and directly to attack the Black people on the questions of busing and crime, the government is now giving its line on what the Afro-American movement should do. And this line is a line of betrayal, capitulation and defeat.
Roots is part of the whole "human rights" barrage of liberal and social-democratic political deception coming from the Carter administration, a campaign aimed at preparing public opinion for the all-round fascization of the government and the whole society by monopoly capital. While placing a few "Black faces in 'high places" and swearing undying devotion to "civil rights" for Black people, the Carter administration is working hard to undermine and liquidate the Afro-American movement from within. During his campaign for office, Carter reassured the white fascists of his basic stand by raising the Hitlerite racist slogan "ethnic purity". Now he promotes the line of cultural nationalism represented by Roots in order to smash the struggle of the Black people against racial discrimination and violent repression. Roots is the government's Sermon on the Mount which it hopes will "inspire" the liquidation of the Afro-American struggle and split the workers' movement, the main targets of the fascism of the big bourgeoisie.
While exposing a few of the most extreme abuses of chattel slavery and showing the actual ancestry of one Black family, Roots sneaks in the real message of the monopoly capitalists to the Black people. That message amounts to:
1. Slandering the Black masses. Portraying them as people who capitulate to the oppressors, who bow down rather than fight. Depicting the few acts of resistance shown as acts of isolated individuals, not of the masses. In this way, Roots hides the Black people's real history of heroic mass revolutionary struggle, claiming instead that the memory of Africa, not resistance to oppression, is salvation for the Afro-Americans.
2. Inciting the Black masses against the white working people by hiding the division of whites into oppressor and oppressed classes and blaming whites in general for the persecution of the Afro-Americans. ThusRoots takes the heat off the bourgeoisie while hiding the real history of united Black and white revolutionary struggle against slavery and capitalism embodied in the Marxist movement, the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the Reconstruction Struggles, and so forth.
3. Prettifying slavery, capitalism and the bourgeois government. Exposing a few "outmoded" aspects of the oppression of the chattel slave system such as whipping, rape of women and outright selling of people, while concealing the economic exploitationand political oppression suffered in common by the slaves under chattel slavery and by the workers under capitalist wage-slavery today. Further prettifying capitalism by hiding the vicious, semi-slave national oppression, the racial discrimination and violent repression, imposed on the Black people by the monopoly capitalist government after their emancipation from chattel slavery. To hide all this, Roots claims that President Lincoln freed the slaves and that after the Civil War Blacks were "free at last".
This is the real message of Roots. It amounts to a furious attack on the common revolutionary cause of the Black people and the entire working class. It is servile praise for the enemy of the entire people, the Anglo-American big bourgeoisie and its government.
The message promoted by Roots to the Black people is not new. In the 1960's, at the height of the Afro- American struggles, the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie used the ill-gotten riches it plundered throughout the world to finance an army of cultural nationalists, poverty pimps and opportunists of all stripes to push the cultural nationalist line to disrupt the Afro-American movement. Alex Haley, a Black bourgeois descendent of the favored house slaves and a "lifer" in the U.S. military, is the latest star to emerge from this sell-out stratum among the Black people.
In the 60's, the Afro-American people waged a great movement of revolutionary mass struggle against the bourgeoisie, such as has never been seen before in the history of our country. Advancing from sit-ins to mass marches to massive armed rebellions, the heroic struggle of the Afro-Americans against racial discrimination and violent repression thoroughly terrified the "powerful" U.S. government. This struggle destroyed some of the most vicious features of Jim Crow segregation used to suppress the Black people and keep the Black and white masses divided. It re-invigorated and inspired the class struggle of the entire working class, youth and students and all oppressed people in the U.S. against the rule of the reactionary monopoly bourgeoisie. The Afro-American struggle aimed squarely at the rich and their government.
But in hopes of liquidating this struggle, the Black traitors and their monopoly capitalist masters pushed the line given by the Kerner Commission, set up by the government in 1968, the line of cultural nationalism. This line held that Black people should give up their struggle against the government and the rich because their real problem was not its program of racial discrimination and violent repression but was "white racism" among the white working people. The government of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie and the capitalist system was not to blame; the white workers were to be the target of the Black people. Blacks could only find salvation by reviving outmoded forms of African culture and "African-ness", by wearing dashikis and learning Swahili, rather than following the real road the African people were traveling, the road of revolutionary struggle against the common enemy of the world's people, U.S. imperialism. With this as a justification, the opportunists tried to undermine the Afro-American struggle with the capitulationist slogan of "Black Capitalism", the slogan of Richard Nixon. Thus cultural nationalism opposed the armed mass resistance to the violent attacks of the bourgeois state practiced by the Black people in the great rebellions of 1963-70, opposed the developing revolutionary unity between the oppressed Black and white masses and prettified the capitalist government and capitalist system.
Today the Black masses are becoming increasingly impoverished due to the ongoing economic crisis. Racist attacks by the police and government-organized fascist anti-busing movement are intensifying. This threatens to provoke a new upsurge in the Afro-American struggle. Consequently, the Roots extravaganza has been produced by the bourgeoisie to push cultural nationalism to liquidate the struggle, just as the opportunists of the 60's worked to liquidate the struggles of that time.
The monopoly capitalists sorely need such a weapon against the Black masses as Roots. The world capitalist system is deep in crisis -- economic, political, military, cultural. The big bourgeoisie in the U.S. is shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto the masses through increased exploitation. This takes the form of massive unemployment, runaway inflation, escalating taxes, intensified labor, longer hours, etc., a burden falling especially heavily on the super-exploited Afro-American workers. To escape from its crisis and keep its profits intact, the bourgeoisie is preparing for aggressive war against its main imperialist rival, Soviet social-imperialism, and against the oppressed nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The U.S. imperialists aim at grabbing markets, sources of raw materials and strategic territory in order to achieve world domination. To launch a war the bourgeoisie must first attack the American people. It must divide and suppress the workers' struggles against the shifting of the burden of the economic crisis, the Afro-American struggle against racial discrimination and violent repression, etc. To suppress the masses, the bourgeoisie is rapidly fascizing its armed state machine (government, including the armed forces, police, courts, jails, etc.) while covering this up with the political deception of the Carter administration. The bourgeoisie is stepping up its direct attacks on the broad masses and organizing fascist mass movements among the people so as to split and weaken them. In hopes of driving the Blacks back to the most backward Jim Crow segregation, the government has organized the fascist anti-busing movement. Centered in Boston and Louisville, this movement incites the white working masses to oppose the democratic right of the Blacks to attend integrated public schools, to physically attack the Black people and thus to split the masses and drown the cause of united struggle against the bourgeoisie in racism, white chauvinism and blood. But the Afro-Americans and progressive whites have stood up to this vicious movement, dealing it serious set-backs.
While trying new ways to revive the anti-busing movement, the monopoly capitalists headed by Carter have turned to other means to attack the Afro-Americans. Lately a big hysteria has been whipped up in Detroit (in which a major role has been played by Carter's close crony, the Black mayor Coleman Young) and nationally over the question of crime supposedly committed by Black youth, in hopes of inciting not only the white masses but also the older Afro-American workers against the most volatile section of the Black revolutionary masses, the youth. And now the monopoly bourgeoisie has produced the Roots extravaganza, aiming at disrupting the Afro-American movement from within.
Roots and the barrage of propaganda about it has been developed in a most cunning way by the bourgeoisie. By tracing the actual ancestry of one Black family back to Africa and by exposing a few of the most flagrant abuses of the system of chattel slavery which was overthrown over 100 years ago, Roots gives the impression to some that it does tell the true "story" of the Black people. The long suffering of the Black people as an oppressed slave class and then as an oppressed nationality, their heritage slandered and denied, their ancestry obliterated, their extreme physical oppression and exploitation, has given the Black masses a burning desire to investigate, bring to light, proudly uphold and defend their true history before the whole world. But it is just this desire that the monopoly capitalists deceptively feed upon to gain popularity for Roots. Without tracing the Blacks' ancestry, without exposing a few abuses of chattel slavery, Roots would never have caught the attention of the Black people and would never have been able to parasitize on the desire of the Afro-Americans to stand up for their true history. "Our" monopoly capitalist rulers are not only bloodthirsty wolves but are also crafty foxes. They know that to catch something they must put out a little bait. That is what the exposures by Roots are -- bait. Once you are caught, the real message of Roots is slipped in without your noticing it. This is the method used by all the social-democratic TV shows, movies and books produced by the monopoly capitalists -- show a little of the oppression of the masses in order to arouse their anger, then distort the nature of their struggle in order to mislead and smash it.
Let us look at the message of Roots more closely to see how it attempts this feat.
THE BLACK MASSES ARE FIGHTERS, NOT CAPITULATORS!
Does Roots, as Alex Haley claimed in an interview with Time Magazine, February 14, 1977, tell "all of our (Black people's -- ed.) stories"? No! The Black masses and their genuine leaders were and are fighters, not the capitulators portrayed in Roots. While Haley has traced the lineage of his family, he has concocted various crucial incidents for the TV version of the book which portray gross capitulation by Blacks in the face of the enemy. Haley portrays the Africans as not fighting the slave-catchers; Kunta Kinte as capitulating under a whipping to adopt the slave name "Toby"; a broken Fanta pleading for Kunta Kinte not to run away from slavery and then betraying him; Kunta Kinte as an older man capitulating to the pressure of his wife Bell not to flee to freedom but to remain a slave in order to preserve his family; Chicken George agreeing with Kizzy not to kill the slave master Tom Moore when she tells him Moore is his father; Kizzy, who was sold from her parents and raped by Moore, persuading Chicken George not to kill him; Chicken George's son, Tom, betraying the struggle against the Klan night-riders by going to the sheriff for "help" against the will of the other Blacks; and Tom refusing to whip the leader of the Klan after the Blacks have captured him. At nearly every crucial point, the Black people are shown as capitulators in the face of the oppressor. Especially disgusting is the role Haley gives to Black women, who are made the strongest promoters of capitulation. According to Roots , the Black masses did not fight for their freedom.
This blatant promotion of capitulation can't be defended by claiming that it actually happened and that Haley is merely giving a "true" "historical" account. In fact, all of the major incidents of capitulation mentioned did not even occur in the book (which is also lacking in militancy) but were deliberately created for the television version (Kunta Kinte's whipping, Fanta's very existence, Bell's persuasion, Chicken George's failure to kill Moore, Tom's reliance on the sheriff, Tom's failure to whip the Klansman). This shows that Haley was not even recording the actual history of his own family but arbitrarily created these incidents of capitulation in order to slander the Black people on the widest scale possible, before a TV audience of many millions.
Haley's picture of alleged Black capitulation is the grossest of slanders. Let us compare it to a few examples from the real history of the Afro-American people. A stark contrast to Kunta Kinte's capitulation to the demand to use a slave name is the stand of the 35 slaves and free Blacks who led the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 9000 slaves to revolt in 1822 and were caught and hanged. They went to their deaths with the greatest heroism, uttering not a word. One of them, Peter Poyas, set the tone, saying: "Do not open your lips. Die silent as you see me do." This is the fighting attitude which has always characterized the Black masses and their genuine leaders. Examples of this stand abound throughout history and were commonplace in the heroic I960's. It will suffice to mention the martyr's deaths of Malcolm X, the great uncompromising Afro-American fighter, of Jonathan Jackson gun in hand, of Bobbie Hutton who also took up arms, of George Jackson, the indomitable fighter inside the fascist prisons, who sacrificed his own life to prevent a massacre of his fellow inmates, of Fred Hampton, assassinated by the Chicago police, and many others. If they were alive today, they would spit on Roots. Should their memory be dishonored by believing the anti-Black slanders of Roots? No! The Black masses are not capitulators. They were and are, first and foremost, fighters against oppression, against racial discrimination and violent repression, against the bourgeoisie and all reaction.
It is not surprising that Alex Haley is the mouthpiece for the monopoly capitalists' cultural nationalist line of capitulation. As Malcolm X himself pointed out, the house slaves and their present-day Uncle Tom counter-parts, who receive favored treatment from their masters, have always been used by the master to control the Black masses and undermine their struggles. Haley's bourgeois cultural nationalist line that all "toubobs" (whites) are bad isolates the Afro-Americans from the over 150 million white working masses who face the same enemy. In this way presenting the Afro-American cause as hopeless, the cultural nationalist line necessarily leads straight to capitulation to the government and the bourgeoisie.
Contrary to the picture presented in Roots, not only did the Black masses fight, but they fought as masses, they fought revolutionary mass struggle against their oppressors. Malcolm X expressed the sentiment of the Afro-American masses for revolutionary mass struggle as follows: "...you and I don't want anybody to keep us from getting out of control. We want to get out of control. We want to smash anything that gets in our way that doesn't belong there." (Malcolm X Speaks, p. 118)
But according to Haley, the highest forms of struggle Blacks used were purely individual attempts to run (Kunta Kinte, Noah), to buy one's freedom (Chicken George's attempts, which failed), an individual fight (Tom) with a Confederate army deserter, and a bloodless, trick getaway from the plantation and the Klan after emancipation in order to settle on their own land (and this entire trick getaway and the Klan itself did not appear in the book but were concocted for the TV version).
This, too, is a gross slander on the Black people and their history. In reality, things were quite different. The African people fought many wars against the slave-traders. In America, the slaves, free Blacks and progressive whites organized an extensive Underground Railroad through which they collectively brought about the escape of thousands of slaves from chattel slavery. The greatest leader of this mass activity was the valiant Black woman Harriet Tubman, who personally led 300 slaves through the greatest danger out of slavery. The greatest omission in the TV version, barely referred to in the book, was the role of the massive Slave Revolts which constantly shook the South. Only Nat Turner's Rebellion is mentioned in the TV version, and it is distorted into a question of Blacks massacring whites, not slaves killing their oppressors. Major slave revolts the size of the Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser Revolts took place in 1672, 1687, 1710, 1722, 1730 and 1741. In the decade of 1850-1860, just prior to the Civil War, the rebellions reached a peak and the terrified slave owners and their lackeys turned the South into a garrison against them. But this decade is passed over in silence in the TV production, with Chicken George spending it in England.
Roots gives Blacks no role whatsoever in the Civil War; they watch passively as the Confederate soldiers ride by. In reality, despite restrictions by the Northern bourgeoisie on joining the Union Army, Blacks participated vigorously on all fronts of the struggle, not only as heroic fighters in the Army, but as guerrilla fighters in the South itself. In North Carolina, Henry Berry Lowry, a Lumbee Indian (mixed Indian and Black) led a band of fighters including escaped slaves which attacked some of the most "powerful" plantations in the South and fought the Confederate Army independently of the Union Army during the Civil War. But according to Roots, it was "Massa Lincoln" who freed the slaves! This is a vicious insult to the Black people. Contrary to Roots, in reality the Black slaves were their own liberators.
Finally, Roots passes over the Reconstruction period in total silence. From 1865 to 1876 the freed slaves, together with the working whites, carried out repeated powerful mass revolutionary struggles for land and democratic rights. They were only defeated in 1876, after which the semi-slave share-cropping system was imposed on the Blacks (and many whites). But in Roots Chicken George's family never fights for land but in- gloriously accepts the share-cropping system immediately after the War is over and finally runs away from the struggle to become "free at last" on land they have purchased in Tennessee.
The Black people's heritage of revolutionary mass struggle, arbitrarily kicked aside by Alex Haley, is one of the most glorious accomplishments of the entire history of revolutionary movements in the U.S. and the world. It includes not only the examples mentioned, not only the many struggles in the 20th century against Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, but, most outstandingly, the 20 years from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the present, including the Civil Rights Movement and the heroic Black Rebellions of the I960's. But nowhere in the entire book or TV production of Roots, this so-called "story" of the Black people, are the great struggles of the past 20 years even mentioned. The bourgeoisie wants desperately to forget them and to have the masses forget them too. But this history of struggle is the true history of the Black people -- a magnificent epic of revolutionary mass struggle. It is only by means of such struggle, by forcibly defending themselves and giving tit-for-tat against all odds, that the Afro-Americans have "survived" and have moved history forward to the present, when they stand at the threshold of complete emancipation. This true emancipation will be accomplished by the struggle of the revolutionary Black masses together with the entire working class and oppressed people of the U.S., in an anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution, a revolution to overthrow the monopoly capitalist state machine and capitalist system and replace them with the rule of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will end all oppression of nationalities and will provide, for the first time, genuine democracy for the working masses. Then, the Black people will accomplish their own complete liberation.
Against this glorious history and this revolutionary perspective, Alex Haley's Roots promotes a gross slander of the Black people. Roots goes so far as to promote the old racist catchwords and stereotypes of Blacks repudiated by the masses in the I960's. Roots is filled with the use of the foulest slave term for Black people, a term massively rejected by Blacks and progressive whites but now being revived by Black traitors like Haley and their big bourgeois masters. In the same vein, here is how Haley writes about the Black slaves in his book. Kunta Kinte says: "These black ones seemed to have no concern in their lives beyond pleasing the toubob (whites -- ed.) with his lashing whip. It sickened him to think how these black ones jumped about their work whenever they saw a toubob, and how, if that toubob spoke a word to them, they rushed to do whatever he told them to. Kunta couldn't fathom what had happened to so destroy their minds that they acted like goats and monkeys. Perhaps it was because they had been born in this place rather than in Africa..." (page 186). Thus Kunta Kinte, himself a capitulator according to Haley's "story", is made to slander the Black slaves in terms which few white racists today would dare utter in public!
Thus, on all the most important points, Roots is just the opposite of the true "story" of the Black people. It is a slander and distortion of the Black people and their heroic history. While Haley has gained fame by the fact that he helped write Malcolm X's Autobiography and has traced his own family back to Africa, the lessons he draws from this are just the opposite of those Malcolm X drew. For example, Haley's family preserved the tradition by word of mouth of the memory of their forbearer Kunta Kinte, the African "who called a guitar ko, who called a river Kamby-Bolongo and who told of how he was surprised and captured while he was cutting some wood to make his little brother a drum". The fact that this tiny shred of the history of Haley's family was all that survived the slave system is itself a penetrating exposure of the barbaric nature of that creation of Anglo-American capitalism. But rather than use this fact as a weapon to expose the criminal nature of the oppressors, Haley instead uses it to spin a tale of capitulation and opposition to mass struggle. Malcolm X, however, was no capitulator and he loved mass struggle. About Afro-American history, he pointedly refuted the viewpoint of people like Haley, saying, "We need to be taught about people who fought, who bled for freedom and made others bleed." (MalcolmX on Afro-American History, p. 68) These words, not the slanders of Roots, touch on the true story of the Black people.
UNITY AGAINST THE COMMON ENEMY IS THE REAL TRADITION OF THE BLACK AND WHITE WORKING MASSES
Is the story of Roots really the "story" of the Black people in another regard -- the question of unity with the rest of the working class and other oppressed sections of the people against common enemies? No. Contrary to the picture presented in Roots, the exploited and oppressed sections of the white population, the workers, small farmers and others, vigorously participated in revolutionary movements against slavery and capitalism. But in Roots no class distinction is drawn in the white population, so poor whites and slave-owners are painted with the same brush. The lower classes of whites are either portrayed as racist degenerates or as cast-off individuals who have nothing to do with the white working population and with revolutionary struggle by the Black and white masses. This, again, is the bourgeois cultural nationalist line of splitting the Black and white masses in order to induce Blacks to capitulate to the bourgeoisie.
In the TV version, most of the poor whites are portrayed as slobbering idiots at the cockfights, while one, Tom Moore, has become a slave-owner. In the book, Haley gives a graphic and disgusting description of a poor white family in which the "lazy" husband lies under a tree sleeping with his flea-bitten hound dogs and drinking corn liquor, etc., etc. -- a picture even more backward than the class stereotypes presented on the TV show Hee-Haw! Two poor whites, George and Martha, are presented sympathetically, but they are portrayed as freaks and exceptions, utterly cut off from the rest of the white population (in George's speech to the slaves at the burial of his daughter, he says that the slaves are the "only friends" he has ever had). These poor whites are not portrayed as representatives of an oppressed social class, the southern white small farmers who fought slavery militantly.
In a crucial incident in the TV version, Haley's promotion of a split between Blacks and poor whites is clear. The ex-slaves are discussing how to oppose the Klan night-riders. The question of uniting with the poor white George is linked to Tom's line of capitulating to the state machine (going to the sheriff), so that anyone who wants to unite with George must also agree to betray the struggle by going to the sheriff with Tom. At the same time the Blacks who want to fight the night-riders and oppose the state are also presented as the opponents of uniting with the poor whites. So the impression is created that to unite with the poor whites necessarily means to betray the struggle rather than strengthen it, and Tom does in fact betray the struggle by running to the sheriff. Then the poor white Martha is given the lines which certain liberals love to spout today in moralistic "criticism" of Roots: "but not all white people are bad...." Haley's message is loud and clear: to unite with the poor whites means to betray the struggle, yet it is "morally" right to do so because "not all whites are bad", so the uncompromising Blacks are "wrong" for opposing collaboration with the enemy state machine. This completely distorts the real basis of unity between oppressed Blacks and whites and liquidates the struggle against the state of the oppressors. It turns unity from a question of fighting a common enemy into a liberal question of guilt and "morality" divorced from struggle, smashing any real possibility of unity and leading directly to capitulation.
In real history, what took place was quite the opposite. Those who fought the slave-owners and the capitalists united with each other on that basis and that basis alone. They united to wage revolutionary mass struggles against their common enemies. The small farmers in the South opposed secession so vigorously that it had to be carried out as a virtual armed coup d'etat in most southern states. In many mountain areas as far south as Alabama the Union flag was flown and defended with arms throughout the War, and escaped slaves and Union soldiers were conducted through the mountains to the North. Hundreds of thousands of white farmers from the North and Northwest volunteered to fight so as to prevent the slave-owners from conquering the country and reducing all the laborers to the status of chattel slaves. John Brown, the Abolitionist martyr, and his men gloriously took up arms and killed the enemy to free the slaves, sacrificing their lives.
Joseph Weydemeyer and the Marxists taught the proletariat to recognize that its struggle for socialism and the emancipation of all mankind required it to defeat the slave power before it could take on capital as a whole. The working class heroically marched into battle en masse and gave up its lives by the hundreds of thousands to smash the slave-owners. Entire trade unions enlisted at once and were converted into regiments.
It is this tradition of fighting mass revolutionary struggle, Black and white working masses side by side against the common enemies, which brought about the great historical advance of the overthrow of chattel slavery and the development of the modern U.S. proletariat, the grave-digger of the capitalist system. This is the real revolutionary tradition of the Black and white masses, the real "story" of the relationship between the two. Only when the Black and white masses united on a revolutionary basis were these great deeds accomplished. This tradition continued through the Reconstruction struggles, the workers' struggles of the 1930's and the Afro-American and youth and student struggles of the 1960's, to the present. But Roots completely denies this tradition. None of it is mentioned, and the two non-racist whites in Roots are lone isolated individuals.
Since Haley denies the existence of classes and class struggle among whites (and generally) and portrays whites collectively as the enemy of Blacks, what basis is left in Roots' "story" for unity between the oppressed whites and Blacks? Nothing but liberal guilt and supposed opposition to "white racism" detached from class struggle as advocated by the Kerner Commission Report. This shows the close link between white liberalism and Black cultural nationalism, which together oppose the revolutionary struggle of the Black and white masses. But this attempt to falsify history in order to wash away classes and class struggle is always a pitfall for those who try it. The history of the U.S. is a history of class struggles. The U.S. proletariat is a profoundly revolutionary class, of which the Black workers are a crucial part. The other oppressed white masses also face a common enemy with the Black people. All attempts to prevent united revolutionary mass struggle against the rich and for political power will certainly fail. As Chairman Mao, the great teacher and leader of the world's people, declared in 1968: " THE BLACK MASSES AND THE MASSES OF WHITE WORKING PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES SHARE COMMON INTERESTS AND HAVE COMMON OBJECTIVES TO STRUGGLE FOR THE STRUGGLE OF THE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES IS BOUND TO MERGE WITH THE AMERICAN WORKERS' MOVEMENT, AND THIS WILL EVENTUALLY END THE CRIMINAL RULE OF THE U.S. MONOPOLY CAPITALIST CLASS." It is the fear of Haley and his masters of just such a revolution which leads them to slander the white working people in addition to the Blacks, in hopes of splitting the two and preventing the revolution. They hope to use Roots to incite the Black masses to attack the whites, while using the anti-busing and anti-crime hysteria to incite the whites against the Blacks. But these attempts to roll history backward will inevitably fail. By the efforts of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists and the masses of workers and oppressed people, splits will be overcome and revolutionary fighting unity will be forged through a struggle which will end in the complete defeat of the bourgeoisie and the emancipation of all oppressed mankind.
Malcolm X clearly opposed the splittist cultural nationalist line of people like Haley in the last year of his life. Speaking on a radio show January 19, 1965, he said: "I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad had taught it." (Malcolm X Speaks, p. 216)
ROOTS PRETTIFIES SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM AND HIDES THE NATIONAL OPPRESSION OF THE BLACK PEOPLE
Hand in hand with slandering the Black and white masses, Roots actually prettifies chattel slavery and the capitalist system and government and hides the present-day national oppression of the Black people. This, too, is a big service by Haley to his monopoly capitalist masters.
Roots criticizes certain aspects of the system of chattel slavery. The kidnapping of the African people, the trade in human beings, the whipping and later the mutilation of Kunta Kinte, the selling-off of Kizzy, the rape of Black women and the obliteration of the lineage of Afro-Americans are exposed to arouse the hatred of the people for oppression. But these particular forms of oppression were needed only to maintain the system of chattel slavery, and now that this system has been overthrown for 100 years, it is no problem for the monopoly capitalists of today to loudly condemn these "outmoded" practices while carrying on essentially the same things in more hidden forms. When the Black people broke free from chattel slavery, this did not mean that their full emancipation was achieved. New forms of slavery were imposed on them, more sophisticated than before. Those who remained on the land in the former slave-owning areas of the Deep South were compelled, after the defeat of Reconstruction, to labor as semi-slave, semi-feudal share-croppers, handing over half or more of their crops to the landlords and tied to the land by a chain of debt. Those Blacks who left the land, especially in the 20th century, were generally compelled to labor as capitalist wage-slaves, selling their labor-power to the capitalists in return for the barest of subsistence, and became part of the modern proletariat together with the workers of other nationalities. Because of their recent past as chattel slaves and due to the continuing national oppression of the Black people, the Black workers have always been restricted to the lowest layers of the proletariat, the most back-breaking and despised jobs. While the slaves and the workers, before the Civil War, were oppressed by the state of the slave-owners and capitalists, after the Civil War the former slaves and the Black and white workers and small farmers continued to be oppressed by the state of the capitalists. This state became increasingly reactionary as capitalism developed into monopoly capitalism. It practiced the most vicious racial discrimination and violent repression against the Afro-Americans throughout the U.S.
Thus, after the defeat of chattel slavery, slavery in an open form, the Afro-Americans remained enslaved by more hidden forms of slavery, share-cropping and wage-slavery and increasingly oppressed by the U.S. state.
But while Roots exposes "outmoded" aspects of the oppression of chattel slavery, no longer needed by capitalism, it hides the basic status of the Afro-Americans as exploited and oppressed under both slavery and capitalism. In Roots the main characters are the favored house slaves and craftsmen, not field slaves, yet it was the brutal exploitation of the labor of the field slaves which was the foundation on which the entire slave system rested. Under the capitalism of the present, the labor of the vast majority of the former slaves is still exploited, though in a hidden form. Proletarians who own nothing but their hands, the Black workers of today are brutally exploited by the capitalists, as are the white workers. But by ignoring this exploitation common both to the chattel slave system and the capitalist system of wage-slavery, Roots conceals the nature of both slavery and capitalism as systems of exploitation and thus hides the present enslavement of the Black workers and the entire working class.
According to Roots, slavery was caused by some bad white people. But in fact, there would never have been the system of chattel slavery of the Blacks in the U.S. if it had not been for the capitalist system. It was growing capitalism's need to rapidly accumulate wealth in order to build up the factory system in England and America which drove the capitalists to kidnap and enslave the Africans. Thus Anglo-American capitalism is, in a sense, both the mother and the child of the slave system. This shows that to remove the source of the oppression of the Afro-Americans, capitalism must be overthrown. But the bourgeoisie today desperately needs to hide the facts of capitalist exploitation from the Black workers by means of propaganda like Roots, because to expose it would lead them to just such revolutionary conclusions.
The capitalist government, too, is prettified by Roots. According to Roots, it was"Massa Lincoln", the head of the bourgeois state, who freed the slaves, not the masses of slaves themselves. In fact, Lincoln did all he could to preserve slavery until the struggle of the masses forced him to formally proclaim emancipation. Emancipation of the slaves from chattel slavery was won by them and the white working masses on the battlefield, against the wishes of the bourgeois and its government. And once the Civil War was over and Reconstruction defeated, it was this same bourgeois government, whose reactionary character became more and more pronounced as competitive capitalism developed into monopoly capitalism, that increased its oppression of the Black and white working people and drove the Blacks into semi-slavery in the South, forged them into an oppressed nation and imposed a bestial system of racial discrimination and violent repression upon the Afro-Americans wherever they resided in the U.S., a system which continues to the present. But this continuing national oppression of the Black people is also hidden by Roots, and the monopoly capitalist government, which must be overthrown if Blacks are to win complete emancipation, is shamelessly prettified. With chattel slavery out of the way, Haley, the Black bourgeois, has found heaven at last. Out of the mouth of one of Chicken George's family, when they reach their new land in Tennessee, Haley expressed his view of the present condition of the Black people: "Free at last!"
Not only does Roots hide the fact of the exploitation of the slaves and workers and prettifies the capitalist state, but it even minimizes the brutality of those aspects of chattel slavery that it does expose. For example, while the poor whites are generally portrayed as no good, it seems that the slave traders and slave-owners have a "good" side to them. The Yankee ship captain feels "moral compunctions" at trading in slaves (though he does not refuse to rape one). One slave-trader is a "kindly" doctor who treats Kunta Kinte's mutilated foot, buys him, makes him a house slave and lets his daughter grow up with Kizzy (though he does not hesitate to sell Kizzy the moment she violates his rules). The brutality of the slaves' living conditions is also minimized. For example, with the exception of the sale of Kizzy, the main characters are able to keep their families together, which was not the case with the masses of field slaves. All the major characters in Roots are house slaves or craftsmen. The housing they live in is better than that which is imposed on many Blacks in the South (and North) today. It is even implied that the slaves lived better than the poor whites, since the poor white George comes to live with the slaves because he is starving. All this is shameless prettification of slavery.
In sharp contrast to Haley's love for American capitalism and so-called "democracy", Malcolm X had this to say about what it has to offer the Afro-Americans: "You tell me what kind of country this is. Why should we do the dirtiest jobs for the lowest pay? Why should we do the hardest work for the lowest pay? Why should we pay the most money for the worst kind of food and the most money for the worst kind of place to live in? I'm telling you we do it because we live in one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this earth. It's the system that is rotten; we have a rotten system. It's a system of exploitation, a political and economic system of exploitation, of. outright humiliation, degradation, discrimination -- all of the negative things that you can run into, you are worse than some of the things that they practiced in Germany against the Jews." (By Any Means Necessary, p. 47) Malcolm X's burning hatred for capitalism and its so-called "democratic" state are a sharp exposure of the capitulationist cultural nationalist line of Alex Haley.
As for Haley's prettification of slavery itself, with all the glorification of beatings of Blacks and use of the slave term for Black people, Roots actually amounts to a declaration that the monopoly capitalists, headed by the "faith-healer" of monopoly capitalism, Jimmy Carter, are proud to have been slave-owners. They are so proud of it they are even using the fact in their world-wide program of political deception to serve the aggressive activities of U.S. imperialism. "Look at us", the American monopoly capitalists are shouting to the world through Alex Haley and Roots, "We once enslaved the Blacks, we whipped them, we raped them, we called them names, we did this, we did that -- but it wasn't so bad. Look -- they survived. And now that we have Jimmy Carter, whose 'roots' trace back to the slave-owners, but who 'understands' Black people, now that we have a Black, Andrew Young, in the U.N., our nose is clean and the U.S. is going to clean up the morals of the rest of the world...!!
It is entirely fitting that one of the two most reactionary aggressive imperialist powers the world has ever known, U.S. imperialism (the other being the New Tsars of the Kremlin), should be arrogant enough in the last decades of its life to boast to the whole world of how it revived the ultra-reactionary system of chattel slavery, a system which had gone extinct in the West with the fall of the Roman Empire, and brag of how it had enslaved the African people. Let the bourgeoisie boast about its cut-throat nature! As our fallen teacher, Chairman Mao, has pointed out: "THE EVIL SYSTEM OF COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM AROSE AND THROVE ON THE ENSLAVEMENT OF NEGROES AND THE TRADE IN NEGROES, AND IT WILL SURELY COME TO AN END WITH THE COMPLETE EMANCIPATION OF THE BLACK PEOPLE". That emancipation, the common emancipation of the revolutionary proletariat and all oppressed masses, is not far off!
The U.S. monopoly capitalists will certainly regret having so massively staged Roots, with all its slander of the people and praise for the enemy, because the revolutionary masses are using this opportunity to discuss the real history of the Black people and the real nature of American "freedom" and "democracy". The fascist anti-busing movement gave rise to a militant upsurge of Afro-American struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state, causing it to hesitate in pursuing that particular tactic of fascist suppression. So, too, the production of the Roots extravaganza has made the more politically conscious Afro-Americans and other progressive people extremely angry and will result in a still deeper repudiation of the bourgeois cultural nationalist line of splits and capitulation and lead to a wide-scale wave of hatred for the Anglo-American bourgeoisie and its state and a still more militant upsurge of the Afro-American struggle, with all its inspiring effects on the workers' movement. Let the big bourgeoisie and its state rant and rave and slander the Black and white masses! It is only putting a rope around its own neck.