White people aren’t supposed to talk about racism. When they do, it is usually discussed as a historical event. To ensure that this week’s events celebrating the life and works of Martin Luther King Jr. do not suggest that racism is a defeated concept, we must examine the racial hierarchy as it exists today, and how it came to be.

Racism in the United States sprouted from the rise of capitalism and chattel slavery. The slave trade was an economic occurrence where the capitalist class extracted maximum profit by exploiting labor. Slavery was even written into the Constitution by Founding Fathers who are now misrepresented as freedom fighters.

Protected by coercion of law, slavery continued to generate profit for the ruling class. Female slaves were often raped to produce new slave labor, creating a crude form of economic surplus value. Families were split apart, and children were sold like cattle. After 250 years of rape and violence, chattel slavery was ended — but not in the name of equality. The Emancipation Proclamation invited confederate states to voluntarily rejoin the Union and keep their slaves or to later face military defeat and abolition. President Lincoln himself stated that his “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”

With the national power structure restored following the Civil War, the southern ruling class created the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups to maintain white power. The “good old boy” network grew and passed Jim Crow laws in the north and south. Controlling the KKK, the banks, the land, the sheriffs and state government, the capitalist class gave black sharecroppers no choice but to submit to thinly veiled slavery, lasting well into the 1940s.

By then, the civil rights movement was growing with social unrest. In response, black churches were bombed, residences burned and nonviolent activists lynched and tortured. Blacks were not allowed to sit at lunch counters — a practice defended by capitalists as a private business right.

Even today, most educational curricula for children and adolescents fails to address slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement in any meaningful way. To silence this history is to say blacks are unimportant and their exploitation is justified. Deprived of history, children are further brainwashed with romantic versions of Christopher Columbus, who committed genocide; of the Founding Fathers, who were pro-slavery tyrants; and of racism, which today is thriving. Instead of learning in school about real heroes like W.E.B. DuBois, the communist co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, children are silently indoctrinated through television. Commercial advertising and for-profit programming quietly teaches white supremacy by systematically depicting minorities in inferior roles. Dark skin and its associated stereotypes are showcased in portraying crime and poverty, while light skin is not.

The accumulated effect of years of constant conditioning is devastating. We can’t afford to pretend that racism can be defeated within a capitalist framework, as capitalist society has decidedly rejected the notion. Created and sustained by class inequality, racism is an expression of hierarchical society. Racism protects the status quo of labor relations by dividing workers and providing a cheap source of labor for capitalists and by providing a scapegoat — blackness — for poverty and crime.

Only a tiny fraction of people, the capitalist ruling class, benefits from racism. Anti-racist action must therefore become synonymous with anti-capitalist action as part of the conscious struggle for equality. That is the key to making King’s dream a reality.