As the howls of anger against black pro football players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson continue unabated, they highlight the bosses’ efforts to divert anger from the biggest abusers, racists and oppressors of women and young people.
Sexism is rampant under capitalism. Driven by the need to force women into low-wage jobs and no-wage labor (to raise the next generation of workers), capitalism has both tacitly and openly encouraged degradation of women. Women are crudely objectified by capitalist culture. Young men are encouraged to use women as if they were commodities.
The National Football League has long been a focal point for some of capitalism’s most racist and sexist ideology. The NFL turns a blind eye to its players’ worst behaviors. It highlights half-naked cheerleaders. It exploits and then tosses away the broken bodies and injured brains of young athletes drawn to the sport as a long-shot escape from poverty. It promotes military flyovers and chants of “USA” as the U.S. ruling class — along with its imperialist proxy state, Israel — murders masses of men, women, and children in the Middle East. Why isn’t the National Organization of Women screaming about these atrocities?
The latest outburst around domestic violence by NFL players only deepens the damage, despite the NFL’s hypocritical show of concern for the players’ families. There is no justification for the actions of Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice. Janay Rice and Peterson’s four-year-old son were harmed and damaged, perhaps for life, and most people know that. Yet why the outrage from so many who say nothing about the massive damage done to black women, children and men by this racist system? On August 30, the New York Times reported that the racial wealth gap in the U.S. is worse than it was in South Africa under apartheid. The average black or Latin household has a mere six percent of the net worth of the average white household. The black-white income gap is 40 percent greater today than in 1967. The average black boy born in the U.S. today will die five years earlier than the average white boy.
The outsized anger at black men who do bad things is one more way that racism infects capitalist culture. What appears on the surface to be criticism of abuse has turned into another attack on black men. Racists are given free reign to unload their hatred. People who are tired of the racist nature of the criticism are silenced or misguidedly try to defend Rice and Peterson and get attacked as excusers. Yet many people are defending Danny Ferry, the general manager of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team who made a racist statement about Luol Deng, an NBA player.
There are vast crimes against black workers in this country every day. Young men are murdered by the police while district attorneys refuse to prosecute racist cops. Schools serving black children are decimated. In fact, by every measure of income, health care and education, black workers suffer disproportionately under capitalism. No wonder that the bosses want to divert our anger toward a pair of football players!
It is no coincidence that the furor directed at Rice and Peterson comes on the heels of the rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. What happened in Ferguson shook the bosses’ system. The image of furious black workers fighting back against the cops and their lackeys exposes the weakness of capitalism’s grip on the working class.
As the mass outrage at the murder of Michael Brown put the bosses on the defensive, they became desperate to look for even more ways to build racism and a fear of black workers. Their aim is to try to undermine the multi-racial, anti-racist anger built by the rebellion. Black athletes, paid millions, are easy marks. But the most brutal abusers of women and children are the capitalists who now sit in judgment. We need to put them out of action — for good.