White People: An Explainer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxnVKIrslkM
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Thu Jan 05, 2017 11:10 am
by American Dream » Thu Jan 05, 2017 3:45 pm
The Safety Pin and the Swastika
Shuja Haider January 4, 2017
If the safety pin has been a controversial symbol on the left, the swastika has been equally contested on the right. In the week after Trump’s election, as the safety pin began to gain traction, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded at least 60 instances of swastika graffiti across the United States. But the ideologues of the alt-right have started to avoid using the symbol. The New York Times reported that in November, the National Socialist Movement, one of America’s leading neo-Nazi groups, discontinued its use of the symbol, in what the organization’s leader called “an attempt to become more integrated and more mainstream.”
But not all racists are as easily identifiable as neo-Nazi skinheads. One of the oldest outlets for the polite racism that the alt-right has brought to the forefront of contemporary politics is American Renaissance, a white nationalist publication started by patrician buffoon Jared Taylor. The euphemistic language of “race realism” dresses their extremism up in a suit and tie, and not without some success. Taylor’s think tank, The New Century Foundation, was just granted nonprofit status by the federal government, along with Spencer’s National Policy Institute and two other white nationalist organizations.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Chris Roberts, an American Renaissance staff writer, recently wrote a blog post suggesting a new recruiting opportunity.An interesting niche in the political Left has appeared over the last 18 months. They are a segment of the Bernie Sanders wing of the Left, socialists wh1 oppose racial identity politics generally and the shaming of poor whites in particular. I call them the anti-anti-white Left.
Roberts goes on to cite a number of articles at Jacobin Magazine as evidence, including one written by this author. He hopes that “Leftist opposition to anti-white thinking could be the first step for young whites towards developing a racial consciousness.”
But Roberts overlooks a hole in his logic. If white nationalism is a form of identity politics, then “socialists who oppose identity politics generally” would, by definition, oppose it. Roberts and his cohort can’t conceive of a politics based on a universal principle, rather than on the opposition of identities. What they fear most is a way of thinking about people that is indifferent to race.
Less refined racists than those at American Renaissance refer to any practice that groups people across ethnicities as “white genocide,” the paranoid fantasy invoked by Ciccariello-Maher. “White genocide” describes not the mass killing of white people, but the advent of a world in which people can no longer be divided into strict racial categories. The phrase was coined by white supremacist David Lane, also the writer of the slogan known as the “14 Words”: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
White nationalists aren’t too bothered by protests of cultural appropriation, given their claim that, as Yiannopoulos puts it, “culture is inseparable from race.” When that underlying assumption remains unquestioned, the rhetoric of mainstream antiracism is itself susceptible to appropriation by the right. This is what leads someone like Richard Spencer to voice approval for incidents like one at the University of Ottawa, when a free yoga class for students with disabilities was shut down for “cultural issues of implication.” A Student Federation statement on the matter went as far as to link it to the threat of “cultural genocide.” At the blog for Radix Journal, an alt-right publication he founded, Spencer could barely contain his excitement. He cited the incident as an example of “racial consciousness formation,” and applauded student activists for “engaging in the kind of ideological project that traditionalists should be hard at work on.”
It should go without saying that left-liberal identity politics and alt-right white nationalism are not comparable. The problem is that they are compatible.
***
In late 2016, MTV News released a video called “2017 Resolutions for White Guys.” The video features several young people, some of whom are themselves white and male, addressing “white guys” in the second person. “There’s a few things we think you could do a little bit better in 2017,” says one of the speakers. “White guys” are held responsible for Donald Trump’s election, the history of American racial inequality, police brutality, and a host of other societal ills. They are collectively blamed for the lenient sentence California Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky gave Brock Turner for sexual assault.
Categorically identifying white men with powerful, corrupt figures like Persky isn’t just an accusation – it’s also an exemption. Taking the logic of allyship to an even further extreme, it calls for their passivity rather than their participation.
This tactic can be useful in winning arguments on the internet, but has less value for real-world organizing. On the contrary, alliances between movements, like coalitions between local chapters of Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15, require participants to take a role beyond allyship. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out in her book on the history of Black Lives Matter, there is a “logical connection” between these causes: “the overrepresentation of African Americans in the ranks of the poor and working class has made them targets of police, who prey on those with low incomes.” With more than half of black workers making less than $15 an hour, the fight for a living wage has become part of a call for racial justice. It also makes a demand on behalf of everyone.
Virginia Waffle House worker and Fight for $15 activist Nic Smith wrote about this kind of collaboration at The Washington Post.In the run-up to the election and its aftermath, politicians, analysts, pollsters and pundits tried to divide the working class along the lines of race. Growing up in Dickenson County, in a community that is 98 percent white, all I knew was the struggle white working-class families faced. But when I joined the Fight for $15, I met people who work in restaurants in other parts of this state and learned how jobs that pay this little are taking a toll on working people in bigger cities, too. And many families in those larger cities face additional threats, like police violence and the risk of deportation.
White, black, brown – we’re all in this together – fighting for a better life for our families.
For Smith, as for groups like the Young Patriots before him, the fight against police violence and deportation is his fight. It’s part of a collective demand issued by “forgotten communities throughout our nation.” Building a movement based on universal principles hasn’t always worked – the trappings of identity have long haunted even the earnest universalism of American socialists. But even when this kind of coalition isn’t successful, it has at least one great virtue: it’s the opposite of the “ideological project” Richard Spencer hopes the left will carry out for him.
In contrast, the “2017 Resolutions” video doesn’t present much of a threat to the alt-right. The backlash to it was so severe that MTV removed it within 48 hours of posting it. But the statement it makes isn’t just ineffective as political strategy – it also fails as political analysis. While the video names the object (”white guys”) it addresses, effectively aligning them with the right, it doesn’t articulate the identity of the subject making the statement.
The speaking subject is “we.” What’s left unanswered is, who does that pronoun represent? Who does it include? This is the question Richard Spencer has put front and center in National Policy Institute propaganda: “who are we?”
The alt-right has an answer – one that is consistent with the long history of imperialism and white supremacy. As their adoption of the language of identity politics shows, the right takes comfort when the left’s answer merely inverts the one generated by this history. It allows the right to draw the battle lines, marking the territory of their white national fantasy. But if they were confronted by a unified “we” – a subject that refused to recognize the borders, divisions, and hierarchies that are regulated by the logic of identity – the alt-right would be left with nowhere to plant its flag. White nationalists would find themselves in the worst possible position for a nation at war: being unable to identify the enemy.
by kool maudit » Fri Jan 06, 2017 7:43 am
by American Dream » Fri Jan 06, 2017 9:44 am
by 8bitagent » Fri Jan 06, 2017 10:22 am
by American Dream » Fri Jan 06, 2017 10:28 am
by Searcher08 » Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:08 pm
American Dream » Fri Jan 06, 2017 1:44 pm wrote:SJW's (e.g. "liberals) vs. Alt-Right (e.g. crypto-Nazis) is definitely all there is to the abolition of White Supremacy...
by American Dream » Fri Jan 06, 2017 11:48 pm
White Purity
Asad Haider January 6, 2017
“Metaphor is never innocent,” Jacques Derrida remarked. “It orients research and fixes results.” The primordial metaphor for whiteness is the knapsack, introduced by white author Peggy McIntosh in her influential article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
Of course, McIntosh was not the first to try to describe the consequences of whiteness. W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote of the legal and social advantages granted to whites in Black Reconstruction:It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.
However, McIntosh’s article operated at a very different register from Du Bois’s historical investigation of the class composition of the postbellum United States. It is likely that McIntosh wrote with the best of intentions, aiming to reduce barbaric behaviors among whites. Unfortunately, the effect of her article has been to provide whites with new and seemingly progressive ways of centering politics on the white identity.
This is because McIntosh refers throughout her article, interchangeably, to “my race,” “my racial group,” and “my skin color.” The first “white privilege” she names is: “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” Another is that she can “go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented.”
We will set aside what appears to be a lack of familiarity with the history of American popular music. What is significant is the equation of skin color, the category of “race,” and discrete groupings of human beings.
With this equation, white guilt reproduces the founding fiction of race: that there is a biological foundation, expressed in physical phenotypes, for separate groups of human beings which have separate cultures and forms of life.
This idea of race is a delusion, one which nevertheless has a “real” material effect. The “white race” is a more specific formation – a political structure of recent invention.
But the metaphor of the knapsack serves to obscure the reality of whiteness. McIntosh writes: “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”
The knapsack is carried by an individual navigating the open social field. It contains tools which enable the individual to navigate this field with greater effectiveness than those whose knapsacks are comparatively empty. The resources contained in the knapsack constitute whiteness as privilege, because the knapsack is carried by an individual who belongs to the white identity.
If the knapsack of privileges is carried by an individual already identifiable as white, then whiteness must necessarily be understood as a biological trait. The falseness of this notion is evident: the people who are currently described as white have a wide and complex range of genetic lineages, many of which were previously considered to be separate “races” of their own (the well-documented though frequently forgotten racialization of Slavs, Italians, the Irish, etc).
We might conclude that there has only been a minor error of description: in reality, whiteness itself is constituted by the contents of the knapsack. The constitution of whiteness as identity and its constitution as privilege are simultaneous: the knapsack’s provisions confer not only advantages but also identity upon its bearer.
But how do we know, then, that the content of the identity conferred has something to do with “whiteness”? Surely, in addition to the specific items conferring a privilege, one would find in any knapsack of identity an infinity of arbitrary details: hair length, gait, dietary preference, computer skills, etc. That is, in order to describe an individual’s identity, the knapsack would have to contain everything constituting the this-ness of that particular individual. It would offer us no insight as to the organizing principle which constitutes these traits as something which can be called “white.” There would be no way to distinguish “white” characteristics from human ones, Pennsylvanian ones, or heavy metal ones.
This is the failure of liberal thought. A political formation such as whiteness cannot be explained by starting with an individual’s identity – the reduction of politics to the psychology of the self. The starting point will have to be the social structure and its constitutive relations, within which individuals are composed. And it is too often forgotten that decades before McIntosh’s knapsack, the term “white privilege” originated with such a theory.
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jan 06, 2017 11:58 pm
But the metaphor of the knapsack serves to obscure the reality of whiteness. McIntosh writes: “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”
by 8bitagent » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:11 am
by American Dream » Sat Jan 07, 2017 11:25 am
by brekin » Sat Jan 07, 2017 2:32 pm
by American Dream » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:00 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:08 pm
American Dream » Sat Jan 07, 2017 3:00 pm wrote:I think of "SJW" as a term used to taunt people who are feminists, anti-racists, for queer liberation and etc. The most prolific voices on the Internet who are targeted like this are folks who could broadly be classified as liberals. It's easy enough to troll them because it's easy enough to say things to say things that sound bigoted and yet retain some degree of plausible deniability about that. This is a classic ploy of the right.
by American Dream » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:21 pm
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Site design by Likely Arts based on "Deluxe" by Artodia.
