Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

[Searcher08]

I think MLK would have been rolling in his grave to see the Berkeley students refusing access for white students to cross a bridge but letting non-white through, all because "someone moved their "safe space"".

I think dead people are dead, myself.

"Enjoy a month off, Searcher", I self-talked, and did.

[Wombaticus Rex]

MLK, Lincoln and Orwell should all be spared any further speculation about their corpses rotating.

[norton ash]

Although Bach, Beethoven and Wagner will continue decomposing.

[Sounder]

Thank-you Kuan so much for that “Keepers of the World“ vid.


What can we westerners gain by having more respect toward the words of the elder brothers?

Could the whole world of younger brothers really live in a steady state relation to the environment, rather than the extractive mentality that currently drives ‘modern’ man?

The trouble is, it’s hard for the younger brothers to take a dose of humility when they seem clearly superior because of their command of intellectual categories.

But what if that command were shown to be no more that submission to bad assumptions?

We created and accepted a split model of reality because we thought it would bring needed control over the physical world. Yet the bouncing baby has grown into a monster because it can never get enough to eat.

The hallmark of western exceptionalism is manipulation. White people were its hit men for awhile, but they will be sacrificed if better ways of extending the manipulation are found.

[Iamwhomiam]

Unfortunately, the gate has been opened and more outsiders have come to be welcomed by the tribe since this was aired in 1991, having been filmed in he late '80s.
,
The film helped to draw attention to and to popularize the indigenous peoples rights movement around the world, and was somewhat instrumental in the development of what was to become the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples , which was adopted by the UN member states in late 2007. A majority of 144 states approved it, although Canada, New Zealand and the US voted against its adoption. (see wiki fir more.) Just this past May, Canada reversed its position, and the other 3 objecting states seem to have now done the same.

Here's the latest that hasn't to do with Standing Rock. It's from 14 months ago:
http://www.villageearth.org/pages/global-affiliate-network/maloca/ve-affiliate-maloca-brings-kamayura-chief-to-un-to-tell-of-crisis-in-amazon

I believe most know how very poor the soil is in cleared Amazon lands that were formerly a jungle. Once cleared and planted, it's nutrients are quickly exhausted and within a few seasons or less, it becomes useless for farming without intensive use of chemical fertilizers. Most land being cleared is used to graze cattle, because relatively, farming in the Amazon is futile.

There is no law to speak of in these wild areas and "settlers" freely exterminate Indians objecting to their illegal expansion and the theft of their lands, no matter where in the world that might be.

Edited to add,

I watched another video, I feel sure it was a BBC nature TV show, but I cannot locate it. It was a trip some 15 years later taken by another PhD, but not Aluna. Anyway, here's one you might enjoy. It is a record of the first contact a stone age Amazonian tribe has had with a white man.

[Luther Blissett]

My homeboys said it best. Also, exponents of Privilege Politics are basically the same people that far right partisans use to strawman leftist positions when they complain about "SJW's"....

It is not just the far right and it is most certainly not a straw-person. The threat of SJW groupthink / safespace / microagression culture to freedom of speech is very real - the case of the treatment of Jordan Petersen is not a one off, it is pretty illustrative.
Segregating areas/ spaces because of race is coming back in vogue among those circles- and that is a Very Very Bad Thing.

I think MLK would have been rolling in his grave to see the Berkeley students refusing access for white students to cross a bridge but letting non-white through, all because "someone moved their "safe space"".

lol

[American Dream]

Yeah whiteness, but never in isolation:

Trump victory: revolt of the NCO’s



November 17, 2016
By Barry Finger

The US Presidential election is the culmination of the long-standing economic and cultural grievances of America’s non-commissioned officer class, a subclass largely composed of white men from the rust-belt, whose factories have been asset stripped and sent abroad and whose unions or small businesses, pensions and prospects have been decimated. They are not the poorest of the poor – not even the poorest of the white poor.

But neither was this a revolt led by the white working class rank and file, the many who never fully shared the benefits of life in the skilled trades and ascendant key industries of a dominating economic power. From this platform, they had assumed a quasi-social leadership role over the traditional working class and, through their unions, often fought for broad programs of social remediation within the existing social order that they also jealously defended.

This election was a revolt headed by those who had acquired a modest stake in middle class life and now find that life, and the institutions that made that life possible, disappearing. It is led by white working men whose fortunes have fallen, afflicted by wage stagnation and an ever-widening social disparity in income and wealth that has consigned them to the wrong side of the divide. They prided and deluded themselves that they and they alone had reliably done society’s heavy lifting and were, in turn, entitled to certain expectations. Above all they had the expectation of a well-run and stable social order, an order in which they would continue to enjoy a place of respect and authority and a rising standard of living, which could be passed down to their children.

They had, above all, placed their confidence in the ruling class, who had historically indulged this self-estimation only to find themselves abandoned in an increasingly globalizing economy. This sense of free-fall has been massively reinforced by a shift in equality’s center of gravity owing to greater racial and gender inclusiveness, with which it coincided. That abandonment has become the crucial factor in the increasingly polarized and caustic political conflict, a conflict that can be resolved in a progressive or reactionary direction.

Society’s NCOs asserted themselves. But they did not assert themselves in a vacuum. Nowhere in the developed capitalist world has the left acquired traction. Our manifold debacles need not be rehearsed. Suffice it to say that the left has not provided an oppositional center of gravity that could capture this white working class disenchantment and channel it into a progressive direction.

No one expecting to extract a concession from the system could reasonably vote for the Greens. There are perfectly honorable and noble reasons to cast a protest vote, to put a place marker on a vision of liberation that may yet be. But this is not where concessions are realized absent a massive movement surge from below. And that, unfortunately, does not describe the current American scene.

But the liberal wing of the American ruling class, having neutralized the Sanders’ insurgency, effectively corralled this discontent into the Trump alt-right pigsty, where, they thought, it could be contained. Clinton had something to offer Wal-Mart and fast food workers: a raise in the minimum wage, subsidized childcare, a modified Obama plan. She could offer a path to citizenship to the dreamers and subsidized public tuition. But by failing to derail voter suppression through the South – and even in Wisconsin, and by failing to offer a grand inclusive program of economic reconstruction to restore the white working class and sweep up the multiethnic poor and near poor into co-prosperity, she could not counterbalance the appeal of the far right.

Clinton was perceived, and correctly so, as being the agent of global financial and corporate interests, the very interests that had inflicted this protracted social setback to white workers. She was the face of the status quo.

This is a neo-fascist moment and it is bleeding into advanced economies throughout the world. It was all but announced here by the open intervention of the deep state, in the form of the FBI’s bombshell intervention on behalf of Trump barely two weeks before the election. And make no mistake about it. Neo-fascists, unlike traditional reactionaries and conservatives, are unencumbered by economic orthodoxies and can run an economy. They, like the far left, fully understand that capitalism is not self-correcting and place no faith in markets. They fully appreciate the need for massive doses of state intervention and are fully prepared to blow a sky-high hole through the deficit.

That is why, contrary to Paul Krugman and others, the stock market, after an initial shortfall, began to boom. Massive tax cuts, a protective wall of tariffs, relaxation and elimination of environmental and Wall Street regulations, huge public works in the forms of infrastructural renovation, the promise of a border wall and the spend-up on military hardware all herald and shape the state-led investment boom to come. Caterpillar and Martin Marietta soared. As did Big Pharma, soon free to price gouge without fear of criminal investigation. Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin had field days. Private Prison corporations are licking their chops at the prospect of the FBI and police being let loose on immigrant communities and communities of color. Student loan services and lenders, no longer facing government competition, got a new lease on life. Even too big to fail banks stocks rose with the prospect that Dodd-Frank being repealed. Increasing after tax incomes will stimulate working class demand and in the hands of the wealthy drive up share prices.

Paradoxically, gun manufacturers saw a drop in stock prices. Speculators shorted gun stocks presumably because the threat of gun regulation has been removed thereby eliminating the perceived urgency on the part of gun enthusiasts to stockpile arms in anticipation of that threat.

The Trump insurrection, fueled by this NCO revolt, effectively defeated the two political parties, the Republicans no less than the Democrats. It appealed to white workers equally on the basis of anxiety over economic decline but also on the basis of prejudice, the loss of class status and the promise of a return to class collaboration, a new deal –if you can pardon that usage, with a responsive nativist-oriented ruling class. It promises, in other words, rule by like-thinking CEOs who can be relied upon to restore prosperity within the confines of a retro 1950s-like social order that erases the gains of women – right down to basic bodily autonomy — and minorities. In that regard, Trump will refashion the civil service, the permanent government bureaucracy, on a purely political basis, essentially ending the primary path to upward mobility on the part of minorities who cannot be relied upon to pass a political litmus test. If proof is needed, see how an tea-party Republican such as Scott Walker could decimate the civil service in Wisconsin and then tweak that example to fit Trump’s outsized predilections.

The nominal Republican Party has been effectively transformed into a white nationalist party and if it succeeds in raising rust-belt white incomes and economic security on that basis, while checking the aspirations of Blacks, Hispanics and women, it will have legitimized and institutionalized that transformation.

The Democratic Party has discredited itself. It is an empty vessel, unable to defend the living standards of the multi-ethnic American work class. It is a party of split loyalties, in which workers, women and minorities take a back seat to corporate interests. And the corporate interests they take a back seat to are precisely those global, financial and tech sectors that are decimating living standards and feeding the revolt.

Trump has started the political realignment in this country. Social movements, central to which is labor, can stay loyal to the Democrats and cave, or they can find their way to political independence and make a credible appeal to Trump workers to jump ship on the basis of class solidarity.


Barry writes for New Politics magazine

https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2 ... -the-ncos/

[kool maudit]

This thread, which calls for the genocide of the European peoples and evades the consequences of such rhetoric by employing the flimsiest of Critical Race Theory obfuscation, has again been bumped to the top of the feed by its originator, who finds some appeal in calling for this genocide.

This situation is disgraceful and I will not stop calling it out as such.

[American Dream]

kool maudit, I know that you're smarter than that. "White Genocide" is a phantom of the racists, a hollow pretext of organizing hateful chauvinisms generally and- in specific- supporting White Supremacy.

[NeonLX]

I wouldn't mind seeing the end if it was done all nice and natural-like. I've been dating a woman who is Latina/Native American. If I was younger, I would think about having a kid with her.

On edit: Ironically, my own daughter is from India. She is a "mountain girl" from the north of the country, on the border with Nepal. We didn't adopt her with any "racial guilt" in mind...it was pragmatism on our part. We wanted to adopt and at the time, India's programs were the best to work with.

[American Dream]

The remedy is needed now more than ever:

Z Magazine: An interview with Noel Ignatiev

Q. Let’s talk about your publication Race Traitor, which you call the journal of
“the new abolitionism.” Appearing across its cover is the slogan “Treason to
Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” There’s some pretty provocative language
packed in there. What, precisely, do you mean to covey with all this? And how
does the journal’s purpose relate to your aims in How the Irish Became White?

A: The relationship between the two projects is this. In the book I’m studying
how a group of people who were not white became white, that is, became
members of the white “club.” In the journal I’m trying to explore how people
who now think of themselves as white, or who are white, or who act white,
might become un-white. So in a sense it’s a way of studying how the film
might be run backward

Q: Of course this raises the question of exactly what you mean by “white.”

A: Indeed, I’m not referring to people of fair skin, straight hair, or any of the
other physical characteristics which we normally think of as white. No one has
any control over how they were born, how they look, or any of that. So far as
I’m concerned those things make no difference. I’m talking about what’s going
on in people’s minds. To me, being “white” means being part of a club, with
certain privileges and obligations. People are recruited into that club at birth,
enrolled in that club without their consent or permission, and brought up
according to its rules. Generally speaking, they go through life accepting the
rules and accepting the benefits of membership, without ever considering the
costs.

Q: What are the costs?

A: The cost of membership in the white club is that it requires a loyalty and
conformity to official American society in a way that’s making life very un-
comfortable and even dangerous for all of the ordinary folk in this country—
those who are called white, as well as those who are called black. The project
of our journal is to break up that club. Essentially the way we think the club
can be broken up is by disrupting the conformity that maintains it.

In our view, the country needs some reverse oreos: a whole bunch of folks who
look white on the outside but don’t act white. So many, in fact, that it will be
impossible for those in power in this country to really be sure who’s white
merely by looking. When that happens the value of the white skin will dimin-
ish.

Q: What sorts of things might result from this?

A: I think political issues and conflicts and divisions would take place on
normal bases, having to do with people’s interests in terms of wealth versus
poverty, for example, and questions of that kind, which would open the door
for all sorts of social and political changes that haven’t happened yet, because
some people settle for being white rather than take a chance
on being free.

It seems to me that culturally, the United States is not a white country.
Cul turally, the United States is, at the very least, as Albert Murray once put it,
“incontestably mulatto.” Every American, merely by virtue of landing on these
shores, becomes culturally part Yankee, part American Indian, and part black,
with a little pinch of ethnic salt. In a certain sense people know this. Just
think of the music we listen to, the dances we do, the sports we admire, the
dress, the rhythms of speech, certain attributes of Protestantism and even, in
some places, Catholicism—all of these things indicate a black influence in
American life. And Americans by and large enjoy this—although they’re not
quite willing to admit it. They prefer to deny it. But even insofar as it’s ac-
knowledged—and this is crucial—they want to separate all of this from ques-
tions of political rights and citizenship. So what I like to say is that the
United States is the largest country in the world of people who pass for white.
There are a couple hundred million of them who are denying the black pres-
ence within their own souls and hearts.

The result is that people accept a lot of abuse and a lot of suffering—and I’m
talking about so-called white people now. Everybody knows that black people
are oppressed. I’m talking about the white people who accept a lot of abuse
and a lot of mistreatment—from the government, from their employers, from
their landlords, from the people in authority—because at least they have the
consolation of being white, or thinking that they’re white. I want to see that
broken apart.

Q: How could that happen?

A: I think the way to break it apart is to attack and disrupt the structures that
reproduce the color line in the United States.

Q: Which structures are we talking about then?

A: I’m not talking about racists. I assume that there’s a small number a white
people in the United States who are dedicated, ideologically committed white
supremacists. And there’s a small number of white people in the United States
who are really, genuinely against white supremacy and want to overturn it.
And I assume that the majority of white people in this country probably mean
as well as most human beings have since the beginning of time. They lead
their ordinary private lives, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. They don’t
wish ill to people of color, but on the other hand aren’t willing to take chances
to change anything about it. And by and large they function like the “good
Germans” during World War II: they don’t know what’s going on because it’s
more comfortable for them in many ways not to know.

So I’m not talking about Tom Metzger or hard-core white supremacists repro-
ducing racial oppression. I’m talking about the ordinary mainstream institu-
tions of this society—the labor market, the school system, the police and the
court system, the social work industry, the housing authority. All of these
various social mechanisms, which in many cases are operated and adminis-
tered by well-meaning folk who would be horrified at the suggestion that they
are, in fact, reproducing the structures of racism.

Q: How are they reproducing the structures of racism?

A: Well, for instance, tracking in the public schools, which has a clear racial
characteristic. We are not dealing here with two groups of people who are
coming out of the same history. It becomes an excuse for dividing black from
white. People are channeled, even from the first grade; they get sent directly
onto one track that’s going to lead them into skilled jobs, into better situa-
tions, into a certain kind of occupational future. And on the other hand, we
have people who are being sent, being channeled, directly into the army,
prison, the warehouse, or the most menial jobs available. The schools do this
under the guise of what are considered to be objective, fair kinds of testing.
But, as a whole number of people have pointed out, these standards and these
tests are race-loaded.

Another example is the job market and the implication of the unions in con-
trolling the job market and maintaining a kind of father-son system of conti-
nuity—particularly in some of the remnants of the skilled trades industries,
where plumbers and carpenters, and so forth, can pass on what amounts to
the right to work in these industries from father to son, uncle to nephew, in a
way that excludes black people. And again, it’s not done openly as a matter of
color—it’s done through the family—but the result of it is that there are still
many of these trades that are restricted to people who are called white.
Another example, of course, is the courts and the criminal justice system,
which has attracted the most attention recently. The institution which in-
volves the greatest amount of participation of black males—in particular,
those in their twenties—is the criminal justice system, far outweighing the
higher education system. Drugs provide the most illuminating case study on
this score. The penalty for using even a tiny amount of crack are far more
severe than the penalty for using or possessing a similar amount of powder
cocaine—crack cocaine being the drug of choice for black folks in the ghetto,
powder cocaine for white folks in the suburbs.

The result is the prisons are filled with people who are in for a paltry amount
of crack, while the folks in the suburbs enjoy impunity. Drug use has now
filled America’s prisons with poor, by and large black, people.

Congress, in fact, voted down a law that would have eliminated this discrep-
ancy in the severity of the respective penalties—although the words “black”
and “white” were never mentioned in the law—thus making it clear that young
black men will continue to be channeled into prison, while the law will wink
at cocaine use by white folks in the suburbs.

Q: The other day you described a poignant example from your own experience
of this apartheid-like double standard so deeply entrenched in our legal cul-
ture. Would you share it again?

A: That sort of experience poses us with a question: How do we break out of
this? The last time I was in New York, I made an illegal right turn on a red
light. I didn’t know that you can’t do that in New York City. A cop stopped me.
I gave him my license. He looked at it courteously and admonished me, told
me not to do it again, and let me go.

I tried to say to myself, what was going on here? It seems to me that they
looked at me—I look white—and they said, okay, we can let this guy go, he’s
not a danger to us, he seems okay. He violated the law, but no big deal, we’ll
cut him a little slack, give him a break.

Q: He’s part of our club.

A: Exactly. Now people know that had I been black, the outcome might have
been different. I might have gotten a ticket. I might have been taken down to
the station and been worked over. I might have been Rodney King by the time
they were done with me. Most black Americans have anecdotes—it’s a stan-
dard thing, the cops stopping black people for the well-known crime of DWB:
Driving While Black.

This was a small example of the maintenance, you see, of the white club.
Recruiting me. Holding me. It works subtly. It’s a reward to me for assumed
past good behavior, and an incentive for assumed future good behavior. So I
think to myself: What am I gaining and what am I giving up? What I gain from
it, obviously, is that I don’t get a ticket; I get released with a little bit of
courtesy. But what I gave up is my ability to struggle against those people:
the cops and the judges and the landlords and the employers and the political
officials, who are reducing the American economy to a shambles and destroy-
ing the quality of American life—all because at least I have the privileges of
club membership.

So I say to myself, well, what could I do to get out of the club? How could I
break apart the club? What would make the cops treat me differently?

What would make them treat me differently is if they couldn’t be sure whether
I was white merely by looking at me. And what would make them think twice
is if there were enough people who were acting—in a public way—defiantly,
flagrantly un-white. Then the cops really could no longer be sure. They’d have
to start examining each person’s individual behavior. Or else they’d fall back
on the standard that governs police conduct all over the world where race is
not the issue-that is to say, social class: speech, dress, the usual tokens.

All over the world, cops beat up poor people, That’s their job. What has to be
explained is not why they beat up Rodney King—they do that in all countries
in the world. The question isn’t why they beat up black people, but why they
don’t regularly and routinely beat up people who look white. The reason for
that is this club that exists. Well, whites gain something from this club, as
I’ve pointed out, but they also lose something from it. They also pay a price
for membership in this club, and the price is living in a society which is going
to hell in a hand basket and everybody knows it.

http://racetraitor.org/zmagazineinterview.pdf

[American Dream]

An Invention of White People from Black: the brilliance of a non-color

Alain Badiou
from Black: the brilliance of a non-color


We should definitely begin with a famous question of Jean Genet’s in the preface to his play The Blacks: “What is a Black? And first of all, what color is he?” Indeed. After demonizing black cats, the Devil’s dark powers, crows, witches in black rags, the darkness of death, and the blackness of the soul, we so-called Whites of Western Europe had to invent the fact that the majority of Africa’s inhabitants clearly constituted an inferior “race,” condemned to slavery and then to the forced labor of colonial occupation simply because this enormous population was “black.” Solely on the basis of this so-called color, millions of human beings were transported like cattle to the other side of the ocean and chained in ships’ holds, with the result that a very large number of them died during the passage. The survivors were sold to rich landowners and worked for them under conditions that were absolutely comparable to those of ancient slavery. Large French cities like Bordeaux and Nantes, which specialized in this traffic, owed their prosperity to it. In 1885, well after the superficial “abolition of slavery,” a politician like Jules Ferry, who is still revered by the “left” today, publicly stated: “I repeat that superior races have a right, because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize inferior races...” They “civilized” them all right, with lashes of the bullwhip on the plantations.

For the vast majority of colonized Africans, the most benign solution, available to only a scant minority of them, was to become a servant of the colonists. Every colonist had his “boy,” which is only logical, isn’t it? A civilizer deserves to be well served. Even today, countless Africans risk their lives trying to make it to Europe. To do what there? To be construction workers or dishwashers in restaurants, where the men are concerned, or cleaning ladies or nannies, where the women are concerned. That’s right! Either you’re “inferior” – because you’re black – or you’re not.

In the United States, the so-called democracy that still controls the West, black slavery had become so huge a phenomenon (there were more than 3,000,000 slaves in 1860) that it took a bloody civil war and more than 800,000 dead, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to achieve its legal abolition. And this abolition allowed such strong discrimination in every domain and such deeply-ingrained underlying racism to persist that, today, the “black question” remains a sort of unhealable wound in American society, even though the President is “black.” This is how “black,” precisely during the economic and military triumph of the “Whites,” became a despised epithet, an ineradicable stigma, for humanity.

This set-up, rooted in a phantasmatics of colors, was – and still is – so powerful, and it proved to be so effective as an immoral justification of the worst evil, that the Europeans and their colonialist offspring the world over undertook a hierarchical color-coding of all of humanity. At the top there was the white race, that of the colonial conquerors. Then came the Yellows, who were very inferior, of course, but more complicated, “inscrutable,” tenacious, and difficult to control. Next came the Redskins, who had been exterminated for the most part by the Yankee colonists, so forget about them. And finally there were the Blacks, the negroes, all the way at the bottom. When I was a child I used to consult an illustrated Larousse encyclopedia that dated from the 1930s, from only yesterday, in short. It contained an article accompanied by definitive illustrations “proving” that a black man’s skull was half-way between an ape’s and a white man’s.

A milestone in this whole business is surely the aptly named Black Code, drawn up by the royal administration in France in the seventeenth century to regulate slavery in France’s Caribbean possessions. Contrary to what is sometimes said, this code, which was of course a pro-slavery abomination, was nevertheless ahead, so to speak, of the republican Larousse of the 1930s. It validated slavery and its hereditary nature. But it criticized what it called the “prejudice of color,” namely, the theory of black people’s inherent inferiority. It said that once a black person was freed, he or she had the same rights as a white person. So it is clear that modern colonial racism, which is anti-slavery in principle, replaced an abhorrent form of social relations validated by color (a person, by virtue of being black, could be bought and thus become the property of someone else) by biologized social relations, racism, which to my mind is even more abhorrent (a person, by virtue of being black, is inherently, and not merely owing to his or her social status, inferior to a white person).

The revolt against the hierarchical stigmatization of part of humanity on account of its so-called color – black, in this case – can take two different forms.

The first consists in confirming the role of colors. It will be said that part of humanity is indeed black, but the hierarchy of values will be eliminated, or even reversed: blacks are strictly equal to whites, or anyone else, or even: blacks are more attractive, stronger, smarter, more in tune with nature, sexier, have more rhythm, are more graceful, more ancient, have a more complex symbolic order, are more poetic, more this or more that, than whites. In a nutshell: “Black is beautiful.”
The second consists in denying that color has any relationship whatsoever with any system of valorization or disparagement. This means that any overall judgment, whether positive or negative, of a supposed “community” of color is rationally impossible. Color is of course an objective determination, but it must have no symbolic extension.

I can suggest a more radical version of the second approach. Naturally, I accept its universalist consequences, but I go further: there is not even any objectivity to the judgment of color. In reality, no color can be assigned to a given human being, not black, of course, but not white or yellow or any color identity whatsoever either. An individual can be predicated as black and classified in the “Black people” category only through the use of a very rough and pointless approximation.

Continues at: http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/conten ... -non-color

[American Dream]

http://racetraitor.org/robinkelley.html

The Abolition of Whiteness and Black Freedom Movement

Robin D.G. Kelley

On May 2nd and 3rd, 1997, a conference was held in New York City called by the editors of RACE TRAITOR: Journal of the New Abolitionism. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley gave this talk during the Friday night session. At the conclusion of the conference, the organizers announced the formation of the New Abolitionist Society, a network of groups and individuals wishing to pursue the goal of abolishing the white race as a social category.


What am I here for? The abolition of whiteness is fundamental to the liberation of humankind, including (and especially ) the liberation of black people.

This point not new: DuBois made it in Black Reconstruction, and, in a way, his famous statement that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line was about white supremacy. As James Baldwin and others put it over and over again, the "Negro problem" is a white problem.

Many of you know this; all know by now DuBois's conception of the "wages of whiteness." And you probably know all too well what Sartre meant when he wrote in the Preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: "there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters." So, in a way, to give you a litany of reasons for abolishing whiteness/white supremacy is like preaching to the choir.

The challenge before you/us is how to accomplish this, to dismantle white supremacy. It's not enough to reject your racial designation. After all, your white skin still works for you no matter what you call yourself: it works in terms of how the police treat most of you, where you can live, access to home loans, the way you're treated at work or in the classroom. The only way to really abolish whiteness is to destroy the structures of racism itself and to commit yourself to anti-racist, anti-sexist struggle.

Of course, there are those who believe that to support Black, Latino, Asian-Pacific, women's, and gay liberation movements is to fall into the identity politics trap. The real issue is class. And in some respects, there are those who read the struggle for the abolition of whiteness as an act of taking off the race blinders to discover class struggle. There is much truth to this; and few progressives will dispute the need to build a truly multiracial class-based movement.

Yet, there is a growing trend among certain segments of the left to call on all movements in the name of people of color and women to "transcend" their identity niches to join "them" in the class struggle. (Rarely do you hear these same people asking movements of women and people of color to LEAD the class struggle!) In most cases, they are asking colored people to transcend their racial identities but don't ask the same of themselves. Most of the people gathered here, however, are way ahead of them, recognizing that so-called WHITE PEOPLE are the ones who ought to do the transcending.

But even here, we must proceed carefully. Part of the reason I'm here tonight is to make a simple point that the abolition of whiteness does not mean the abolition of autonomous black movements for freedom and social justice. Some people mistakenly confuse the eradication of white privilege, hence racism, with color blindness (which is where the neo-Enlightenment Left sits uneasily with the neo-Conservative Negroes and their patrons who invoke Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to argue for dismantling affirmative action, insisting that race and gender preferences betrayed King's dream of seeing people valued for the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.)

I want to push a little further and support autonomous movements for social justice - movements in the name of black people, Asian-Americans, Latinos, etc. Just as the abolition of whiteness is fundamental to human liberation, so is black liberation (and other movements of people oppressed by race and sex) fundamental to the liberation of humanity. This is the other side of DuBois's equation.

First, we must establish the fact that many all-black organizations throughout history were not the product of narrow ethnocentrism but white racism, Jim Crow, that kept colored people out.

Second, working inside and in support of multiracial progressive movements has been part of the black radical tradition since we were brought here in chains three centuries ago. That will not change.

At the same time, I do think we have to also re-build a strong, independent autonomous black radical movement that could participate in, criticize, and learn from the organizations that claim to speak for the black community; a movement that would have its own voice and agenda, that could keep its sights on black liberation while helping to shape a broader multiracial challenge to capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy; an independent Black Left that could reconnect with the rest of the world, like Malcolm did, or Walter Rodney, C.L.R. James, Robert Williams, and Vickie Garvin, like delegates to the 7th Pan-African Congress tried to do a few years back. (Indeed, the decline of internationalism left a void that Farrakahn has been quick to fill, to the detriment of democratic struggles in Africa.)

Some might call me essentialist, or claim that we've reached a point in history where black movements are obsolete, old-fashioned identity politics and whatnot. I don't believe that, and as we move into the 21th century it is eerily like the turn of the last century. The Second Reconstruction was never completed and the little gains it has made are being overturned rapidly. At the same time, just as the black freedom movement helped emancipate many others in our century (women, white working class men, other so-called "minorities") I believe it has that capacity in the coming years. I believe C.L.R. James when he wrote in 1948:

[T]his independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement of the Marxist party. We say...that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. In this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights.

Third, the notion that antiracist movements led by black people or people of color are inherently narrow, focused only on "minority rights," completely mischaracterizes these movements. The movement, from Reconstruction to the present, was never simply a parochial struggle for black rights. It was always about fundamental human rights and how the U.S. state defines citizenship. Its successes and defeats touched the whole nation. The fact is, the fight for social justice has been at the heart of the black liberation movement. and their efforts to achieve citizenship on their own terms - if successful - could have transformed the very meaning of citizenship for all Americans. In their vision of citizenship growing out of Reconstruction, the state was supposed to provide economic support to those in need, protect its citizens from violence and exploitation, provide good education, housing, public services, etc., and work actively to achieve and defend equality. Despite their universal appeal, these movements failed over and over again largely because of the achilles heel of racism and sexism - the latter also contributing to the internal collapse of black liberation movements.

Indeed, the greatest tragedy in U.S. history was the collapse of Reconstruction. Practically every struggle that followed has some roots in the period of slavery's destruction, and it all points to the fundamental role slavery has played in the rise of capitalism, Western hegemony, and white supremacy.

- As a result of black struggle, we got the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; 14th Amendment granting black people citizenship and fundamental rights; 15th Amendment, the right to vote (including poor whites who couldn't vote before Civil war); we got Universal Public Education (indeed, a separate and unequal educational system where black labor, black taxes subsidized white education in the South).

- They wanted massive land redistribution; the re-ordering of work; and full democratic participation on the part of the entire community - including women and children!

- Northern capital ultimately reestablished its ties to the old planter class and sent black folks back to a form of slavery. And they did so through violence and trickery.

Had the white working class supported such an interracial class alliance rather than upholding their color, they could have overthrown the planter class permanently, and possibly even the capitalist. More importantly, they would have dealt a huge blow to racism and set an example for interracial working class solidarity that would have resisted colonialism and imperialism abroad.

A century after the failure of the first Reconstruction, America underwent a Second Reconstruction after World War II. While you're familiar with the basic outlines of the story, the main point I want to make this evening is that the Civil Rights movement offered America another opportunity to remake democracy. Activists in SNCC, SCLC, CORE, as well as other groups, made demands whose impact reached far beyond the black community. The Civil Rights movement not only spurred Second Wave feminism and other ethnic liberation movements, but it gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed (at least on paper) race and gender discrimination in employment, brought in affirmative action policies, War on Poverty programs that helped millions of poor whites, integrated schools at every level, and had a tremendous impact on curricula.

As we face the new millennium and reflect on our country's past, I keep returning to the aftermath of the Civil War, perhaps the world's shining example of what democracy could have become. Imagine what the entire world would look like had the federal government fully empowered ex-slaves, allowed them to keep their guns and the vote, handed over that land on which they worked and allowed them to organize production on their own terms, and dismantled the master class (after all, they were war criminals). Perhaps we would be living in a country that puts working people's needs before corporations. A good-paying, fulfilling job and a strong "safety net" in troubled times might have been a basic right, not a so-called "entitlement."

The death of Reconstruction was a tragedy not only for black people but for American democracy as a whole. While Democracy continues to live in the hearts of black folk and other folk in the U.S. and the world, the problem, of course, was the triumph of capitalism in America meant that the guarantee of good public services, humane housing, safety, security, support during hard times, and power over decision-making was never a right. It always come back to the bottom line: profits before people. And in a system like this, all the personal industriousness in the world won't necessarily result in a decent income if there are no jobs available, no requirements to pay a living wage, or no recognition that raising children is work.

The hope and future of America lay with the very multicolored working class that for so long has been seen as the problem rather that the solution. The new "Wretched of the Earth" are rebuilding the labor movement, reinventing Civil Rights, and reconfiguring scholarship in ways that radically challenge the status quo. While I don't expect many victories in the near future, I do think that the current struggles against class-based racism are laying the basis for new emancipatory social movements that have the potential of transforming the nation. More importantly, will white people - especially white working people - recognize that any kind of emancipatory politics for the class must be built around the desires, experiences, cultures, dreams of all people? In other words, will white workers recognize that the liberation of the ghetto is fundamental to their own freedom?

[justdrew]

of course, if it just said, "Abolish the 'white race' concept" - well, that would be too clear and concise?

[American Dream]

Critical Race Theory was not invented yesterday but the ideas are there for this who care to engage them.

White Supremacy is Rooted in Love

NOVEMBER 18, 2016 / TOBY ROLLO


The panic around Donald Trump being elected President reflects a fear that white supremacy has gained electoral legitimacy and has emboldened white supremacists who are otherwise tempered by a politically moderate national discourse. This view relies on a prevalent but rather limited vision of white supremacy as (a) structured according to a hierarchy of skin colour and physiology in which peoples of European decent are privileged, (b) motivated by fear, anger and hate directed at people of colour, and (c) cultivated in conditions of misinformation and ignorance. As a caricature, this describes the rather thin periphery of vulgar white supremacists while serving to deflect attention away from the majority of liberal white supremacists who occupy the centre.

Most white supremacists are not guided in their thoughts or behaviours by the crude association of dark skin with criminality or evil. Rather, they subscribe to a set of hierarchical binary oppositions that include but are not restricted to: mind over body, reason over emotion, civilization over the primitive, and law over relations. White supremacy has, at its core, employed the doctrinal veneration of European mind, reason, civilization, and law over their corresponding subordinates. The ideological and material violence thrust on the world by European empire, colonialism, and slavery has been rooted in the arbitrary supremacy granted to these qualities. In this context, the ‘white man’s burden’ was formulated in terms of a responsibility to cultivate mind and reason through education of the primitive, to promote literacy and sophistication, to establish a civilized order predicated on universalized ideals of citizenship rather than parochial relations. These ideals have not ceased to drive political, economic, and social life.


Perhaps the most dangerous mischaracterization of white supremacy is that it is motivated by fear, anger, and hate directed at people of colour. This may be true for the small segment of vocal white supremacists who adhere to surface-level narratives of colour and race, but structural and institutional racism cannot be explained with reference to seething anger and unremitting hate. It is important to recognize that most white supremacists are motivated by confidence, compassion, and love in their relationships with friends, family, and associates. As individuals they identify our minds as what make them unique, they value their education, their sophistication, their civility, their citizen spirit. They regret those who are uneducated, illiterate, poor, and stateless. These groups are a tragedy. If they are happy, it is the happiness of the fool or the infant.

Most important to the reproduction of white supremacy, perhaps, is how they cannot but honour their parents and grandparents who fought in wars predicated on the preservation of empire; how parents and young children bond at bedtime over the reciting of racist nursery rhymes; how our membership in a particular nation-state is associated with esteem and even virtue, even though its borders compel the most vulnerable to undertake ‘criminal’ acts of migration which often result in death; how the memories that constitute them as individuals often feature a home or home-land, place and space accumulated through the ongoing dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples; how they naturalize parental authority, discipline, and even violence as necessary if they are to be civilized out of primitive childhood, a process they come to associate with love; how laughter over racist jokes and stories brings them closer to their uncles and cousins; how they sympathize with the parent, sibling, or good friend whose job is exported to a developing country; how they enact loving reciprocity through gifts manufactured by enslaved brown and black children; how the success of our business ventures hinges on the ongoing global exploitation of labour and displacement of vulnerable communities.

Simply put, white supremacy and their most intimate identities and relationships are co-constitutive . It is these relationships of intimacy and solidarity that hold structures and institutions of white privilege together. The violence of whiteness is motivated not simply or exclusively by a hate of black skin, but by a loving commitment to the people who are in their lives by virtue of the underlying binary logics of their superiority. It is primarily our fellow-feeling for those who share in the privileging of the mindful, educated, civilized, and lawful self rather than antipathy for the racialized Other, that insulates white supremacy from critique and preserves it in the face of resistance. These dynamics are not exclusive to Trump supporters. We find these virtues and relationships extolled by Clinton, Sanders, Stein, and virtually every other political candidate.



The vast majority of white supremacists, then, are not cartoonish red-necks or skin-heads who are invested in the lies of social Darwinism and scientific racism. Rather, they are moderates, centrists, liberal egalitarians, progressives, and even socialists who reject the explicit racialization of bodies yet tacitly uphold the superiority of European ideals. White supremacists may even fashion themselves as staunch advocates of affirmative action, as allies of Black Lives Matter, as students of postcolonial literature. They can be some of the most vocal detractors of racial hierarchy. Yet they are committed to principles of progress through the education, civilization, and enfranchisement of the subordinated Other. Put another way: the modern solution to vulgar white supremacy has been to displace it with a more refined and sophisticated white supremacy. Whiteness is posited as the solution to the problem of whiteness. Here, we locate the impulse to center whiteness as well as the origin of white fragility. To challenge the value of whiteness is to call into question the substance of one’s most intimate and important relationships. Accordingly, many in academia, the media, and activism have a vested interest in recalling and rejecting the cliché of the angry racist; it precludes any sustained interrogation of our own intimate investments in the underlying logics of white supremacy.

White supremacy cannot tolerate a revaluation of history and contemporary relationships that dissolves the binaries which sustain privilege. White supremacy disposes them in such a way that they are unable to act as if mind cannot be distinguished from the body and its practices, as if reasoning was itself emotional, as if the conceptual movement from primitive to civilized reflects not immutable progress but merely contingent differences, as if intimate relations themselves embodied a legal order. The simplistic characterization of race as skin-deep shields the vast majority of white supremacists from cultivating a liberatory self-understanding and promoting a genuinely emancipatory politics. The rise of Donald Trump and any corresponding rise in overt racist violence can only occur because they exist in the more general context of white supremacist violence that goes unnamed. White humanism and its precepts are the seeds out of which white nationalism grows.

White supremacy is a set of values and practices imbued in them as children by our loved ones, sometimes long before they become conscious of race, yet they prepare them to think in racialized terms. It is not a reasoned hypothesis awaiting contradictory evidence or a philosophical premise that is open to superior argument. Concerns over conditions of misinformation and ignorance giving rise to racism are therefore misplaced. White supremacy is not at its core structured according to a hierarchy of skin colour and physiology in which peoples of European decent are privileged; it is not at its core motivated by fear, anger and hate directed at people of colour; and it is not at its core cultivated in conditions of misinformation and ignorance. Rather, white supremacy is cultivated through the loving relations that actualize particular binary oppositions. If those who benefit from white privilege want to do something about it, their interventions must embody something much deeper and much broader than another stale attempt to educate and vote ourselves out of the problem. They must undertake a fundamental rethinking of our identities, our loving relationships and basic institutions, especially as they relate to children.

http://www.toboldrollo.com/2016/11/18/w ... d-in-love/