Thomas Riggins
"What this means [i.e.,only putting projects and funding in minority neighborhoods] fair-housing advocates say, is that the government is essentially helping to maintain entrenched racial divides, even though federal law requires government agencies to promote integration." This is an example of the system's structural racism: the racial divide is automatically perpetuated due to the economic "laws" of supply and demand plus the function of bourgeois democracy within a pre-existing racist cultural environment. The democratic rights of upper income people living in a specific area have to be curtailed (their rights to vote on the zoning rules and building codes enacted in their area) since their pre-existing cultural prejudices lead them to vote for discriminatory laws that curtail the democratic rights of low income people to be able to choose where to live. Under capitalism the two rights are in conflict. The solution involves a lessening of income inequality and a strengthening of public state controlled education to ensure equal educational opportunities for all. These two factors, at the present time, are exactly the opposite of what the capitalist state is promoting. The solution can only be provided by a socialist alternative and that is why the struggle to change the present top leadership within the Democratic Party and replace it with a progressive working class leadership is so important as one of first steps (along with other progressive civil society movements) in the direction of a truly enlightened democratic socialist solution (based on Marxist principles) to the structural racism in the United States.
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