Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

5THE NATURAL ENEMY OF THE WO RKING CLASSI HAVE NO PARTICULAR LOVE FOR THE IDEALIZED " WORKER " AS HEAPPEARS IN THE BOURGEOIS COMMUNIST ' S MIND, BUT WHEN I SEEAN ACTUAL FLESH-AND-BLOOD WORKER IN CONFLICT WITH HISNATURAL ENEMY, THE POLICEMAN, I DO NOT HAVE TO ASK MYSELFWHICH SIDE I AM ON.-GEORGE OR WELL !TI-IE GREENSBORO MASSACRE OF 1979 REPRESENTED A RACIST ATTACK AGAINSTpeople of color, but it also marked an attack on the rights of working people. The"Death to the Klan" rally was organized as part of an effort to end the harassmentof poultry workers as they fought to form a union, and most of those killed wereunion organizers.2 Such pairings of racist oppression and class exploitation havebeen the historical norm; slavery, for example, was a system of production as wellas a system of race control.Though there are divergences between race and class, the means for controlin each area have always been very closely linked. TIlls connection is perhaps neverclearer than when racist means are used to suppress the resistance workers mountagainst capitalism-as in Greensboro, or, to take an earlier example, as in 1885,when Mayor Joseph Guillote of New Orleans responded to a levee workers' strikeby ordering the police to arrest any Black man who "did not want to work"3Control of the lower classes has been a function of policing at every pointsince the institution's birth, and has served as one of the major determinants ofits development. In the South, the police first approached their modern form aftera long process of experimentation and development in the official means of controllingthe slave population. This mandate was over-determined, required bothby the demands of White supremacy and by the economic needs of the plantationsystem. The mechanisms developed to control slaves eventually expanded in105