I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary about prominent Black author James Baldwin, directed by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. It opens with James Baldwin’s notes about the influential lives of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Baldwin then describes himself, detailing who he is not; he is not a militant Black Panther. He is not a Muslim nor a Christian, who have their segregated churches. He says he doesn’t hate all whites for he had a white teacher who took him to plays and concerts. He isn’t in the NAACP, for “shoe shine boys like himself are repelled” from that organization and its elitist, pro-capitalist Black membership base.
That however is the closest we ever get to a class analysis, and the rest of the film shows “whites” as a general mass, without class distinction, to be the oppressors. The film cuts back and forth through history. The history of school integration portrays crowds of angry white youth, who Baldwin says represents the vast, unthinking cruel “white majority.” In one scene, the U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s brother and Attorney General at the time, Bobby Kennedy, is asked if he will urge his brother to accompany a Black student to school. Kennedy says that’s a “meaningless moral gesture,” and the screen shows crowds of racist white workers chanting “Keep Alabama White.”
The film jumps forward to the Ferguson fightback. We see frame after frame of white riot cops and national guard with heavy weaponry. The footage doesn’t focus on the hundreds of militant Black and white workers and youth fighting back. Victims of police murder—Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Jones and other youth are named, but Baldwin says that white people, like the response to the Black children killed in the Birmingham church firebombing in 1963, are “astounded” by such murders. He states that whites surround themselves with merchandise and fantasy movies to try to celebrate their own captivity in mindlessness. At the same time, they imprison one part of their own humanity—the Black people.
He talks about the two faces of America: the first face is of actor John Wayne. At the height of U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century, Wayne was the capitalist media’s personification of “white manhood” for his movies where he is most famous for his roles as a heroic “cowboy” on the U.S. frontier. In these films, set in the 1800s, the genocide against the indigenous are ignored, they are portrayed in racist stereotypes, and are even played by other white actors. The other face Baldwin contrasts against this racist capitalist mythology is the reality of the U.S. government’s massacre of hundreds of indigenous members of the Lakota Sioux tribe at Wounded Knee in 1890. The only “way out”, says Baldwin, is that the two “faces” within all American whites have to confront one another. To do this, whites must face their own fears and need for superiority.
Capitalists Push Privilege Politics
A liberal movement called “Beloved Conversation Training”—often held in churches nationwide—shares Baldwin’s view of ignoring the fundamental class opposition between white workers and white capitalists. Instead, capitalism is ignored almost entirely, and they treat “whites” as a giant oppressor group that shares the “dominant culture,” implicitly affirming that white workers as well as white capitalists benefit from the oppression of Black workers. Thus, white workers have “white skin privilege.” The training costs $350, and proposes that white workers examine their own “micro-racism,” or micro-aggressions, and how they participate in  maintaining the systemic racist and genocidal oppression of Black workers.  
These schools last an entire weekend and are followed by an eight week curriculum.
It’s no mistake that this documentary on Baldwin dovetails with this ideology of “white skin privilege.” Neither the film’s subject, James Baldwin, nor white skin privilege theorists discuss the history of white and Black strikers gunned down side by side by the police. They don’t talk about the relationship between Black unemployment and unemployment for the entire working class. They leave out the wage differentials between the northern U.S. states and the south, and the point that the lower the bosses can get away with paying Black workers, the lower the standard of living is driven for all workers, until everyone is hit with massive layoffs and outsourcing of jobs to workers in even lower wage countries for the capitalists to maintain their profit margins.  I Am Not Your Negro repeats the same propaganda as the capitalist class: racist institutions, from banks to local Boards of Education that reinforce school segregation, are the fault of all “whites,” and all “whites” rest on the oppression of “Blacks.”
Both viewpoints ignore the real history of racism. The ruling class in the 18th century of plantation owners and others invented race because, following periodic rebellions like Bacon’s Rebellion that threatened their rule, they feared the power of Black-white unity. From that time on as capitalism matured in the U.S. and grew in its lethal genocidal power, race served as a necessary tool by the capitalist ruling class to keep down all wages.
Background to Baldwin’s Era
James Baldwin lived and wrote during a sharp era of antiracist struggle, when Black working class fighters such as W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Claudia Jones, and many, many others fused their art and, especially in Jones’ case, cultural work, with calls for multiracial working class unity against capitalism and racism, sexism and imperialism. These fighters knew their real enemy was not white workers, it was the capitalist class that created racism itself.
The impression one gets from I Am Not Your Negro was that Baldwin was somewhat of an outsider from these struggles, with frequent name-dropping of major figures of the 1960s like Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Baldwin participated in several marches, including the 1963 March on Washington (which Malcolm X sarcastically labeled the “Farce on Washington”), yet maintained his personal “independence” from the movement. In philosophical terms that frequently manifest as literary themes throughout his writing, Baldwin, like Richard Wright before him and Ralph Ellison as represented in the 1952 novel, Invisible Man, isolated himself from international working-class struggle. In this way, through physical presence but mental aloofness, Baldwin misrepresents his true enemy: capitalism.
The struggles ahead will reveal our class enemy more clearly, and it is up to communists to struggle to build a mass working class movement and party, PLP, for communism. Unlike Baldwin’s unscientific belief that “whites” are generally oppressors, we fight for workers all over the world to face that the struggles of Black workers are the struggles of their sisters and brothers.
Then, and only then, can a new world be built through violence of a communist revolution forged in the unity of the whole, united international working class.

LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA, March 18—Today, this southern town known primarily for the college started by arch-racist Jerry Falwell, held its first protest over the next imperialist war! Over 50 Lynchburg residents marched against Trump’s proposed budget that would slash environmental protection and education funding and add over $52 billion to the U.S. war budget.
Under the leadership of the Seven Hills Progressive Society, marchers started at the African American Legacy Museum and marched through the neighborhood to the circle. This action built on an earlier rally (CHALLENGE 3/8) that protested Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants and his fascist wall to keep out Mexican workers.
Friends and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) helped ensure the success of the march with leaflets, chants and stirring music pumped through the bullhorn. The music of Bob Marley and Phil Ochs helped the marchers up the Virginia hills. A range of chants against war and racism energized the march, “System Change— Not Climate Change” and “Health Care is a Right—T hat is Why We Fight!” Drivers honked their horns in support of the militant calls for workers to fight back while pedestrians eagerly reached for leaflets. Workers here are woke and ready to fight. We can reach workers everywhere!
Marchers also circulated a petition to the Governor demanding that the Virginia Prison System re-institute “parole” to reduce the racist impact of mass incarceration. In the mid-1990s, the Virginia government abolished parole, meaning that all incarcerated people, disproportionately Black, had to serve their entire time, even for minor drug offenses.
The protest, made up of mainly white workers, many of them retired, reached out to Black workers to ensure multi-racial unity in the fight against the bosses. PLP members discussed the upcoming May Day March in New York City on April 29 with many marchers. It seems likely that we will have a Lynchburg contingent at that march.
Dare to struggle, dare to win! The entire working class can move forward to revolution!

The Donald Trump administration’s move to replace Obamacare is a move to replace a severely weakened and inadequate healthcare system with an even worse one. The inability of the wealthiest country in the history of capitalism to provide healthcare for the working class exposes that healthcare for profit is incompatible with providing for the needs of the working class.
Healthcare, A Profit Industry
Health insurance cannot be both comprehensive and profitable. The health insurance companies make money by signing up young healthy people to buy policies, while limiting the costs they spend on care for the sick who require more services. This formula has been extremely profitable. United Health, one of the five largest insurers in the country, announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare plans because they made less money than anticipated. Their profits for the year were “only” $11 billion, record breaking, but $850 million less than expected, with the bulk of the difference coming from losses associated with policies linked to the Obamacare plans. (Consumer Affairs, 11/1 2016).
If a company making that much profit won’t provide care to people, it is futile to expect health insurers to provide comprehensive healthcare to the working class.
Healthcare Was a Hard Fought Gain
A system of employer-paid health coverage emerged in the U.S. out of mass struggles. As the working class fought to build unions, healthcare became part of the struggle. Union membership in the U.S. reached its peak in 1954 with about 35 percent of the workforce unionized. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, the ruling class attacked the unions, mainly using anti-communist McCarthyism to divide and terrorize workers.
The trend to de-unionize the workforce was accelerated under Carter and then Reagan to the point where now only about 10 percent of the U.S. working class is unionized (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1/26).
Ruling Class Smash Unions and Healthcare
The percent of people having health insurance rose and fell in an almost identical way as the rate of unionization. Health coverage reached a peak of about 80 percent in 1968. It remained stable until 1980 when it began a steady drop. What was needed was a plan to provide bare-bones coverage and place the cost on the backs of the working class. An imperialist power needs its part of its population to receive enough healthcare to fight wars. That’s when Obamacare came in.
A combination of moving more people onto Medicaid and forcing young healthy people to buy expensive insurance with high deductibles increased the amount of people with insurance. This year, the average cost of the Obamacare Bronze plan (the cheapest) is $311/month for an individual 30 year old. The plan includes over $6000/year in deductible or out of pocket costs. Which means if you are sick, you will be paying thousands more on top of your premiums (Healthpocket.com 10/26/2016). This high cost, low coverage health insurance is nothing like the virtually free coverage unionized workers fought for at the height of the union movement. Obamacare was part of the thrust of reversing social gains won by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle. This is indicative of how important it is to build a mass fighting movement against capitalism, and to build a society based on need and commitment rather than money and exploitation.
Further Decay
As expensive as Obamacare is, it is scheduled to get worse next year with increases in premiums and more out-of-pocket costs. But the deterioration of healthcare under the Obamacare plan is not fast enough for some members of the ruling class.
The United States empire is weaker than at any time since World War II. Healthcare is one arena of struggle that reflects this weakness. The Trump administration is now fronting for the insurance companies and the faction of bosses who want to attack the working class even faster. The new healthcare bill “would eliminate the mandate for most [people] in favor of a new system of tax credits to induce people to buy insurance on the open market. It would also eventually roll back the expansion of Medicaid that has provided coverage to more than 10 million people in 31 states” (NY Times, 3/7). Medicaid serves the poorest section of the U.S. working-class children and parents, as well as many older and disabled workers.
The race to the bottom in healthcare coverage is a symptom of a profit system that cannot provide livable existence for the working class.

MARYLAND, March 21—As the city council in Prince George’s County, was debating whether to be a sanctuary city, some neighbors organized a rally and marched to the public hearing to support Sanctuary City status. Some council members seemed to be for it, but many residents were fearful. We need to organize to dispel these fears by building a strong, grassroots network to support those threatened with deportation. Just voting for symbolic sanctuary status is not enough.
Speaking at that hearing, a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) emphasized the racist nature of deportations and how racism should not be allowed within the city. Our next step was a public outreach rally. Seven neighbors set up a table and talked to shoppers outside a local working class grocery store. The group was multiracial with signs in Spanish and English and speakers included white, Latin, and Black neighbors. Within the hour we made 25 contacts. We planned a potluck dinner on April 1st and another outreach later in April. During the rally we received no negative or racist comments, though some shoppers expressed fear because of their immigration status. The event increased our confidence in the working class.
In follow up conversations, the PL’er has stressed that a Sanctuary City ordinance won’t keep residents safe. Grassroots working class organizing and unity, on the other hand, can defend our brothers and sisters directly. At some point we must break these racist laws. It’s the capitalist racist system that is the root cause of these problems, not just Trump—after all, former President Barack Obama deported 3.2 million people in his eight years in office. Communism, a system run by workers with no wage and profit system and no borders, is the only solution to these growing fascist attacks. Building multiracial, working class unity for communism through outreach, potluck dinners, other gatherings, and sharper class struggle are needed to grow our Party into the fighting organization the working class needs.