Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:54 am

What America Taught the Nazis

In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.

IRA KATZNELSON
NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE


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OLIVER MUNDAY

Pushing back against scholarship that downplays the impact in Nazi Germany of the U.S. model of legal racism, Whitman marshals an array of evidence to support the likelihood “that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect direct American influence.” As race law’s global leader, Whitman stresses, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.

Especially significant were the writings of the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” who spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Seeking to deploy historical and legal knowledge in the service of Aryan racial purity, Krieger studied a range of overseas race regimes, including contemporary South Africa, but discovered his foundation in American law. His deeply researched writings about the United States began with articles in 1934, some concerning American Indians and others pursuing an overarching assessment of U.S. race legislation—each a precursor to his landmark 1936 book, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”).

Whitman’s “smoking gun” is the transcript of a June 5, 1934, conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The record reflects how the most extreme among them, who relied on Krieger’s synoptic scholarship, were especially drawn to American legal codes based on white supremacy. The main conceptual idea was Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction. In both America and Germany, the importance and meaning of race for the most part had been determined less by scientific realities or social conventions than by political decisions enshrined in law.

but even indisputable evidence of the Germans’ intense interest in American models doesn’t clinch a formative role for U.S. racial law, as Whitman himself is careful to acknowledge. After all, Nazism’s intellectual and political leaders may well have utilized American examples merely to make more legitimate the grotesque designs they already planned to pursue. In any case, answering the question of cross-national influence is ultimately less important than Whitman’s other goal, which is to examine the status of racial hierarchy in the United States through Nazi eyes. “What the history presented in this book demands that we confront,” he writes, “are questions not about the genesis of Nazism, but about the character of America.”

His disturbing report thus takes its place within the larger history of the United States as a polity founded on principles of human equality, Enlightenment reason, and constitutional limits on state power, yet molded by the prodigious evil and long-term consequences of chattel slavery based on race. To read Hitler’s American Model is to be forced to engage with the stubborn fact that during the 1933–45 period of the Third Reich, roughly half of the Democratic Party’s members in Congress represented Jim Crow states, and neither major party sought to curtail the race laws so admired by German lawyers and judges.


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... is/540630/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 30, 2018 6:57 am

Overcoming Identity Politics Paralysis

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The history, through the eighties and nineties, of the use of the words identity politics is a really complicated one which is going to take another book to explain. But the term saw a real mainstream resurgence with the 2016 primaries, and I make a historical jump in order to show the instability of the term. That is: it was initially introduced as an emancipatory, radical term, but recently, in a lot of the discourse around the Hillary Clinton campaign and the opposition to the Bernie Sanders campaign, the term was used as a way to specifically undermine any challenge to the hegemonic ideas of the mainstream of the Democratic Party. In this context, it became totally uprooted from its origins.

We could identify two different ways that people meant the term. One would be that it’s anything that has to do with race or gender, and is either seen as in opposition to class or as something that has to be added to class. The other is what we’ve already been discussing, the idea that your politics emerge from the foundation of your identity. Every time the term was used in the mainstream media, in thinkpieces and so on, it seemed to take on a different meaning—sometimes different meanings within the same article! But neither of these meanings was resonant, obviously, with the specific meaning that the Comahee River Collective had in mind.

Since it’s become a floating term, now, it can used in a weaponized way to attack political adversaries. The fact that Clinton represented a continuation of a neoliberal and militarist legacy of not just the Obama years but also the preceding Bush years and the Bill Clinton years before that—that became suppressed. That was hidden underneath the discourse of identity politics and the equation of identity politics with some kind of civil rights agenda. So the 2016 primaries were the turning point in many respects, when a politics that had to do with opposing racism and sexism became separated from, and even opposed to, a politics that was about overcoming economic inequality. That’s not how it was conceived before.

...It’s extremely illuminating to understand whiteness as one of the primary forms of race, because that shows us exactly how constructed these categories are, how they simply the the expression of some individual’s characteristics. Different groups that in Europe were part of racial hierarchies—like the English and the Irish, or Germans and Poles—migrated to the United States and over a long process all became integrated into one entity called the “white race.” That’s what Theodore Allen called the “invention of the white race.”

That shows exactly how delusional the white supremacists and the alt-right are today when they talk about this category of whiteness. They are talking about a fictive construction: one that is real in the sense that it has real social effects, but has no basis in human physiology or even culture.

Often there’s a tendency to simply take what the right says and invert it, but this just accepts the basic category. To respond to what the alt-right is saying by accepting the category of white people and whiteness as though it’s a real thing ends up reinforcing the ideological structure that they are using to put forth a highly misleading rationalization for a very dangerous political agenda. We have to be able to question the racial ideology, the empty abstraction of race, and that applies to whiteness first and foremost.


More: https://antidotezine.com/2018/06/30/ide ... paralysis/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 09, 2018 7:12 am

Kevin MacDonald and the Elevation of Anti-Semitic Pseudoscience

From Undark: “Of course, there are many ideas — some with passionate followings — that don’t receive much attention in academic journals. These might include flat-earth theory, for example, or the belief in unicorns, or the theory that the federal government stages school shootings. To debate a theory like MacDonald’s is both to legitimize it and to tacitly accept some of its premises — namely, that there’s such a thing as a distinct, subtle ‘Jewish agenda’ or ‘Jewish psychology’ that exists in tension with white European society.

That idea, as Pinker, Tuchman, and others point out, is not radical or new. It’s perhaps the single most influential anti-Semitic concept of the past few centuries.

But that’s the real bind here — one that confronts not just scientists, but journalists and other citizens in an era of rising white nationalism. Are bad ideas permitted to flourish when we simply ignore them? Or is it the debate — the open back-and-forth and public rebuttals — that actually gives them oxygen and legitimacy?”


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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 12, 2018 1:52 pm

The dialectics of breathing together:

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“It was so much easier to believe in the conspiracies than just look in the mirror.”

Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2018 8:20 am

As His Trial Approaches, Christopher Cantwell Laughs Off Last Year’s Violence In Charlottesville

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The interview touched on a wide variety of topics, including Cantwell’s radicalization and last year’s rally in Charlottesville. In discussing how he gradually became red-pilled on race, Cantwell said he was influenced by videos on race and IQ by Stefan Molyneux as well as Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, which he read while he was in jail and which he intends to sell through his website.

“What you find out,” Cantwell explained, “is when you control for IQ, all these disparities of outcome with socioeconomic status and every other stupid ass excuse that they come up with for people goes away. And IQ is exactly what’s causing the problems in the black community, and it’s undeniable scientifically.”

Jett went on a tangent about Jean-Philippe Rushton, another academic racist, who was obsessed with the size of black men’s penises. (At a Toronto shopping mall Rushton paid customers to answer questions about their sexual habits, which is definitely a normal thing to do.) Jett explained to Cantwell and Hardmous that Rushton believed black people have “compressed brain[s]” and “crushed” neurons, resulting in lower IQs.


More: https://angrywhitemen.org/2018/07/18/as ... ttesville/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 19, 2018 9:23 pm

Proud Boys founder McInnes calls for "a big memorial for all the whites" and laments "all the whites in history who have suffered from Blacks"

Jesse Lee Peterson hosted Gavin McInnes to celebrate "white history month" and ask whether it was a "mistake to allow people of color into white countries"


From the July 18 edition of The Jesse Lee Peterson Show:

JESSE LEE PETERSON (HOST): Happy white history month.

GAVIN MCINNES: So that's the deal now, July is white history month?

PETERSON: Yes, I started it this year and it's the first time that white people have been appreciated in a long time and I figured that you know, we have so-called Black History Month, homosexual history month, women history month, Chinese history month, Mexican history month -- everything but white history month. And if it wasn't for white folks there would be no America and it's just time to realize that and start dealing with it.

MCINNES: Yeah there's a museum in Ottawa, Canada, in my hometown. It's called the Museum of Civilization and it's all about the people who built Canada.

PETERSON: Yes.

MCINNES: Which is probably 80 percent Scots. And they have everything but Scottish people there. They at one point they've rebuilt a Cambodian laundromat in Calgary. So it has these mannequins folding your laundry as an integral part of what built Canada, and then a bunch of Native American art, which you know was pre-Canada.

PETERSON: Yeah.

MCINNES: It's it's bizarre how much animosity there is towards white people in the Western world these days.

PETERSON: I know, it's amazing. So what do you think of white history -- July as white history month? And I picked July because as I've said over and over July just seems white, you know, you have the Fourth of July is in the air -- is everywhere, vacation time. It's like you worked all year, and now, July. It just feels white.

MCINNES: Yeah, you're right. I love it. And I think we should have a moment during white history month to talk about all the people who died. The 620,000 who died ending slavery in America --

PETERSON: Yeah.

MCINNES: -- all the Irish slaves who died, all the children of the Industrial Revolution who were forced to work in the coal mines -- we should have a big memorial for all the whites. And how about this? How about all the whites in history who have suffered from Blacks? Like when Hannibal and the elephants came up from Africa and took over Italy, or the Moors taking over Spain -- all the horrible oppression whites have suffered over the years.

PETERSON: Amazing. Why do you think there is an attack upon white people not just in America but Europe and other areas. Why are white people so hated but yet, these people want to come to their country and take over?

MCINNES: I would say it's racism against Blacks. This constantly insulting white people is actually the bigotry of low expectations and it's saying that Blacks, especially Black women, can't handle criticism. They're too fragile, they're not good enough, so we'll attack the patriarch, the white male because he can handle it. So by having this double standard you're actually saying that whites can't handle the same criticism that -- I'm sorry, Blacks can't handle the same criticism that whites can.


Later on the show, Peterson claimed he believed "it was a mistake to allow people of color into white countries:"


More: https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018 ... ave/220734
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 23, 2018 9:57 am

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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Fri Jul 27, 2018 6:21 am

Hawa Allan, July 26

Of Many Minds

Why identity politics is so vexing for so much of the left

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IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, “identity politics” is what fuels clashes on college campuses over the diversity and inclusivity of curricula and discourse. It’s dangerous, by these accounts, because it spreads beyond the ivory towers to wreak havoc in workplaces and domiciles throughout the wider United States, where humble, hardworking Americans live in terror of not being sufficiently woke. Yet you don’t hear the term used to describe immigration policies that target Mexicans, Haitians, Central Americans, Somalis, other non-white immigrants and/or Muslims whose targeted exclusion is rooted in a Trumpian fetish for white identity and supremacy. “Identity politics,” in other words, is for all those whose identities are supposedly suspect. Rallying around a white nationalist, patriarchal agenda, by contrast, is just plain old “politics.”

In Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider considers a more nuanced and multifaceted debate about identity politics, one that critiques the mass-media version while being cognizant of the larger threat posed by the identity politics being trafficked from the White House. A PhD candidate at the University of California Santa Cruz who is also the editor of Viewpoint magazine, Haider writes about the ways identity is a critical site of political awareness and reform, as well as a source of endless argument and division—at once a boon and burden to leftist causes.

He traces his concerns to experiences some years ago as an activist on campus. In encounters with the Occupy movement in Northern California, for example, Haider got into discussions with white Marxists who discounted the need to directly struggle against racism because “the real problems of people of color could be explained by the contradictions of the economic base.” He contrasts this position—as well as the overall failure of the Occupy movement to adequately diversify—with the fact that black Americans had disproportionately suffered the effects of predatory lending and the recession. Moreover, according to Haider, though the larger Black Lives Matter movement that initially united to protest police brutality “did not draw an artificial boundary between class and race,” he was again frustrated—when protesting privatization at UC Santa Cruz—by the rift he saw among groups that elevated one issue over the other.

Student activists and community groups convened to devise anti-privatization tactics, which included drafting slogans and platforms. “It seemed to be most effective, in terms of rallying the troops,” Haider writes, “to say that rising tuition ‘hits students of color the hardest.’” However, he notes, expressly opposing tuition hikes because of racial bias could imply that “racially equitable university privatization would be somehow acceptable.” Disagreements ensued. In the end, Haider describes the dissolution of the anti-privatization coalition into mostly People of Color and non-POC groups—a separation that intensified as protests against police brutality grew across the country. “The latest trends of identity politics,” writes Haider about this time, “made a bridge between issues like police violence and access to higher education functionally impossible.” He further describes watching black-identified activist groups staging die-ins as their counterparts “dwindled in size.”

Haider writes about the ways identity is a source of political awareness and reform, as well as argument and division—at once a boon and burden to leftist causes.


The valuable contribution of Mistaken Identity is that Haider gives himself room to explore his own double consciousness when it comes to identity politics, a subject that has been weaponized against the progressive causes for which he fights. Aren’t we all familiar with the terms of the mass-mediated debate? If you’re for identity politics, you acknowledge that political and socioeconomic forces act on different identities in differing ways. A serious reckoning with identity—whether, religious, racial, gendered, sexual, etc.—is fundamental to advocating for rights and remedies that would benefit members of a given group (or cross-section of groups) who have been harmed on account of who they are. Identity, so the thinking goes, isn’t inherently political but was politicized in the first place via state-sanctioned acts and omissions that bred discrimination. Targeted groups saw their identities as points of political mobilization against such oppression. How can you expect to have a serious discussion about mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, for example, without examining the systemic racism of a criminal justice system that has been more than five times more likely to imprison black than white people even though both groups statistically use illicit drugs at similar rates?

If you’re against identity politics, you might deem identity-based advocacy as a “distraction” from “more important” issues, such as class—(the sub-divisions of which, according to this view, curiously do not constitute identity groups); you might also believe that identity politics prevent broader-based coalitions on the left from gaining traction, dividing a potentially potent political base into off-shoots that are much easier for a right-wing political movement to conquer. You might contend that identity politics have forsaken a mass movement for justice for a war of words, prioritizing political correctness over “politics,” sacrificing macrostructural reform in order to call out microagressions. You might, moreover, for all of the above reasons, argue that identity politics largely turn off a white middle-class voting base, who is also curiously devoid of any “identity” and whom you implicitly deem the norm—the default bloc to whom all these “other” groups should cater and cajole into inadvertently supporting their tangential causes.

Such is the back-and-forth we’ve heard since the late 1980s, when the so-called “culture wars” began to sweep across college campuses and into media awareness throughout the country. What is notable and refreshing about Haider’s approach in Mistaken Identity is that he develops a progressive critique of identity politics. He doesn’t outright dismiss the importance of identities; but he asks whether collective action can be harmonized from the cacophonous cries for various forms of justice. Haider’s take, further, is not hot but cool—a well-composed and intellectually rigorous consideration that situates the current understanding of identity politics in historical context.


Continues: https://thebaffler.com/latest/of-many-minds-allan
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Sun Jul 29, 2018 1:58 pm

By Samira Shackle , Friday, 13th July 2018

The problem with identity politics

Q&A with Asad Haider, author of "Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump"

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Identity politics has critics and proponents everywhere. In the US, the very idea has been blamed for deepening political divisions. Some blame Hillary Clinton's presidential loss on her discussion of identity and inequality in her campaign. Others point out that identity politics are not the preserve of ethnic minorities - white nationalists such as Richard Spencer call themselves "identitarians". Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. And among groups who should readily find common ground, there is little agreement. In his new book "Mistaken Identity" (Verso) Asad Haider draws on the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists to argue that identity politics in its modern sense is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralisation of these movements. Here, he discusses his arguments.


Identity politics gets name-checked across the political spectrum. Why do you think it makes people so angry?

We form identities, and our senses of ourselves, as a way of understanding our own experience. It is necessarily a partial understanding, because we can’t have a comprehensive awareness of all the histories and social factors that have gone into constituting our experience. But this sense of self is how we relate to the world, how we form connections with others, how we act in society. So we are very personally attached to our identities.

When we are attacked and oppressed on the basis of particular categories, we often try to affirm those categories as part of our identities, to turn the relation of oppression around, to proudly reclaim whatever term has been used to oppress us. Thus questioning the cohesiveness of that category is very threatening to our sense of self, which has now taken on much more urgency because it is a response to our oppression.

This is in many obvious ways a completely reasonable response. The problem is that it leads us to become attached to categories which are produced by the structure of oppression. While inverting that relation and reclaiming an identity may be a step in coming to consciousness of this structure, actually undermining the structure will also involve undermining the identity. It is not hard to see why people take this personally.

However, if we are able to build new collectivities and new ways of relating each other, perhaps we can begin to be comfortable with the fact, which no sense of self can ever alter, that actually our identities are constantly changing, they are unstable and without any fixed foundation. We might begin to consider this dynamism as something to embrace, rather than reject with anger.

The book incorporates your own experience. How has your own identity informed your understanding of race and identity politics?

I was never able to take my identity as a fixed foundation, though at times I may have tried, because it was always suspended between two countries and cultures, the United States and Pakistan. If I decided between one or the other – assimilation or a return to the source – I would be making a decision to do a kind of self-fashioning, not dissimilar from becoming a goth or a libertarian. It wouldn’t be some kind of natural expression of my essence, it would be a fictive construction.

At the same time, I experienced constant racism growing up in central Pennsylvania, and this made my identity a political problem, which only grew more acute after 9/11. Since I did not feel capable of asserting any stable identity in response – say, by embracing fundamentalist Islam – I instead turned to a study of the problems of racism and imperialism, which is what brought me into contact with the history of black revolutionaries in the US. This convinced me that solidarity across difference was the most important principle in struggling against racism, rather than positing a stable identity as a foundation.

What do you make of "call-out" culture, both in terms of social media denunciation and in activist spaces? Is it useful?

I have always been dismayed when call-outs begin at a political meeting, because it means that the actual project of working for change will be obstructed by a potentially endless process of exposing everyone’s privilege. We are all privileged and corrupted in various ways, and these public performances of trashing and shaming do not address the problem which comes with every coalition, which is that everyone is vulnerable and taking a risk. As the civil rights activist and black feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon said in her speech “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” coalition work is “dangerous.” There are no “safe spaces,” and there’s nowhere you can go where you will just find people who are like you.

People who are reproducing the hierarchies of the existing society in activist spaces – and eventually every single one of us will be guilty of this – should be educated to change their behaviour in a way that builds mutual trust. Otherwise, other people in the group, who are not all white men, will be afraid to speak. When people are at risk of being publicly shamed, and they are afraid of speaking, we miss out on the ideas and contributions they could make. We need all the ideas and contributions we can get.

Social media denunciation is call-out culture on steroids. I am not usually anti-technology, but in this case I believe denunciation is built into the medium, and there is no way to fix it. Because of various features of its format, social media encourages the worst behaviours that people are capable of. My proposed solution is that we all delete our accounts.

Can identity politics, as it is today, return to its radical roots? How?

This is a terminological question, because many of the political ideas proposed by the Combahee River Collective have been taken up and articulated since then with different terminologies. The way “identity politics” has now come to represent such drastically different political practices and beliefs suggests to me that we do not need to be attached to the term. The term now means many things. I think we should carefully study and learn from its history, but also criticise the practices and beliefs which now go under its name. My impression is that it is extremely difficult to prevent the meaning of a word from changing. This is already true of everyday words which are not politically contested. But in this case we are speaking of a political term which has been appropriated by neoliberal elites who control the whole media apparatus and have far greater influence than a left which has been on the defensive for decades. So I have criticised the neoliberal language of identity politics, while remaining open to the possibility that new terms and ideas may arise from the experience of struggle and political practice. Some people want to reclaim the term and, as you say, bring it back to its radical roots. If that project turns out to be successful, all the better.

You conclude by calling for a “new insurgent universality”. What would this look like?

I want to oppose the classical conceptions of universalism, which are based on abstract individuals who are naturally endowed with rights. This conception of universalism is drawn from European modernity, and it was systematic with the violent domination of the non-Western world, the exclusion of women from politics, and the enslavement of vast populations. Furthermore, it establishes a model in which our only access to politics is to passively request protection from the state when our rights have been violated.

As an alternative, I have drawn on Massimiliano Tomba’s conception of “insurgent universality,” which is the title of his excellent forthcoming book. This is a universality which avoids “isms.” It is not based on the natural rights of abstract individuals, but on the insurgencies of concrete people who reject exclusion, domination, and exploitation, with their active agency. Every movement of this kind, though it arises in specific times and places, among specific people with specific demands, brings into being a general principle: that no one should be oppressed.


More: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/534 ... y-politics
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 30, 2018 6:13 am

Asad Haider
Identity Politics and Mass Self-Organisation


To what extent do you think the Black Lives Matter movement has avoided the kind of separatist identity politics you describe?

AH: First of all, I think it would be highly reductive to understand the Black Lives Matter movement in identity terms. It was a challenge to the violence of the American police state, and by extension the prison system, which had a highly general relevance. Today, the obscene policing and detention of immigrants demonstrates one sense in which this movement challenged the structure of society and could potentially challenge a range of forms of oppression. That this movement arose to respond to the specificity of racism against black people presents no problem; all movements arise in response to specific situations, and sometimes take strategic precedence. They are strengthened by coalitions and by a growth which allows them to put forward a range of demands.

The Black Lives Matter Movement was very heterogeneous, arising often from spontaneous mass actions, and often taking a coalitional character. I was a participant in some actions, and encountered many tendencies: radical, coalitional politics; elite reformism; reactionary separatism. I cannot state with any certainty which tendencies were dominant in specific places or in the country as a whole. What I can say with certainty is that the movement altered the American political landscape, and must be a fundamental reference point for future social movements.

One issue you consider is how identity politics can reduce marginalised identity groups to the status of passive victims, rather than being subjects or political agents themselves. As you put it, ‘when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury, physical or verbal, that group ends up defined by its victimhood and individuals end up reduced to their victimized belonging.’ Is this a core element of modern identity politics? How is it to be avoided?

AH: This is certainly the core problem I identify with contemporary identity politics. Identities become the standpoint from which we can claim to be injured and demand redress from the state. In this sense, identity politics is a politics which locks us into the state and prevents us from challenging it, and prevents us from asserting collective agency which is at a distance from the state. I criticise the language of victimhood not because I believe people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or because I question that this victimisation is real, but rather because I refuse to accept the logic of state power, which says that all of us are passive recipients of its protection who can have no political agency of our own.

As to how we avoid this, I must return to a consistent refrain: the necessity of mass self-organisation. This is the only path to collective subjectivity. Waging an ideological struggle against liberal conceptions of politics may be an important step on this path.

You point out that an important aspect of identity politics is ‘policing of language’, or paying great attention to promoting appropriate terms for addressing different identity groups. What have been the positive and negative impacts of this focus on language for progressive politics? How does it aid or stifle the construction of collaborative political movements?

AH: I believe it is centrally important to educate people on the everyday hierarchies which really exist in our society as a result of social inequalities. White men, for example, generally feel more entitled to speak in political meetings or classrooms. They also often use language which is not sensitive to the experiences of people who have been marginalised in various ways. This is harmful to those who have not grown up with that feeling of entitlement, or experience psychic damage from that language. It also obstructs the self-organisation I have described, because a large part of the collectivity ends up excluded from leadership.

However, ‘calling out’ the white men is no solution, as it turns a meeting which should be about expressing collective agency into a prolonged discussion of the white men themselves. And the policing of language unfortunately makes matters worse. While the white men may have been challenged, it is not clear that this will actually change their behaviour. What is clear is that there is now a climate of anxiety and fear about saying the wrong thing, which affects people far beyond the white men. Anyone is capable of saying something ‘problematic’ and they may be challenged for it in a public, humiliating way.

The tasks of political education require building climates of mutual trust and collaboration, which will in many cases have to include even white men. Good faith one-to-one conversations may be more useful than public trashing. And getting away from a liberal insistence on constant, perpetual dialogue is just as important; working collaboratively in smaller groups on concrete projects, like canvassing or writing flyers, allows people to form different relations with each other. This does not happen in the large meetings and assemblies that too often get prioritised in the urgency of action.

Here we may briefly note an important point about mass self-organisation: self-organisation does not mean pure spontaneity, or an absence of leadership. It means building structures that allow everyone to exercise leadership. This does not simply happen automatically in a political meeting, it has to be built.

At the same time, when discussing language here we may also talk about negative representations of different identity groups in the media or by public figures, whether an objectified depiction of women in a music video or a racist tweet by Donald Trump. In each case, the challenge that results tends to focus on the individual perpetrator rather than institutional issues. Do you think it is important to keep challenging these representations, and if so how?

AH: Issues of representation are very important. I had the personal experience during my childhood of seeing most Muslims on TV represented as terrorists, and most South Asians as objects of ridicule. The situation has improved considerably due to activism surrounding the problems of representation, but it has by no means been completely resolved, and will not be resolved as long as American imperialism continues to produce enemies that correspond to these categories and global capitalism preserves an extreme inequality of wealth between populations. Incremental progress makes a difference in people’s lives, but representation cannot be isolated from the larger social context in which it is situated, and change must take place on a far greater scale.

If we understand that, as you suggest, focusing on individual perpetrators turns out to be at best a poor use of time, at worst a counterproductive strategy. These are both problems when the stakes are so high. Attacking and criticising Donald Trump are obviously worthwhile, but we should not forget that this alone will not stop him from tweeting. He doesn’t care. We should criticise him and counter his message, but this has to be done as part of a bigger project that can actually stop him, which means directly attacking the ruling class he comes from and the capitalist state which allows him to exercise the power of governance.

But part of this bigger project is the slow, patient political education I spoke about before. This political education is aimed at ordinary people, who are not Donald Trump, who operate on the basis of a contradictory ‘common sense,’ which combines progressive and reactionary elements. When engaging in political education, it is necessary to acknowledge that none of us speak from a pure political standpoint. If we live in the advanced capitalist countries, we are already at a level of privilege that far exceeds the majority of the world’s population. While Trump should be openly attacked, there are many ordinary people who have not yet been educated to understand the problems of racism and sexism, or may be aware of them but have not learned the norms of discourse that are de rigueur at liberal universities. While attacking such people may provide a sense of moral satisfaction – especially on social media, where righteous denunciation is a hot commodity – it is not an effective form of pedagogy.

Some protest that it is not our job to educate white people about racism, or that people who do not share the discursive norms of liberal intellectuals are beyond redemption and are thus only worthy of excommunication and damnation. This is essentially a form of religious fundamentalism, and it is highly dangerous. White people are not just going to disappear, and unless they are educated to reject whiteness and embrace an anti-racist politics, they will reproduce white supremacy on a daily basis and its violence will continue. If we are serious about fighting racism and its actual structural effects, we will engage in educating and recruiting people rather than shaming them.

How would you frame the opposition between identity politics and the populist political right or alt-right that has emerged in recent years? For example, have the deficiencies in identity politics allowed the alt-right to gain greater legitimacy? Or, does this right-wing resurgence represent a backlash because identity politics has been successful in challenging traditional cultural hierarchies?

AH: The idea of a right-wing resurgence should not be exaggerated, because the white supremacist politics of the extreme right have been a consistent feature of American politics for centuries. Thus the ‘backlash’ thesis is clearly incorrect. However, it is also true that political ideas that have been discredited throughout the twentieth century, as an effect of social struggles, are now being heard in the mainstream media, and have a hearing in the White House.

This shift to the right represents two things. First of all, it represents a crisis in the existing practices of governance, of the political parties that ascended in the 20th century and have now shown themselves incapable of managing economic and geopolitical turbulence. Second, it represents the exposure of traditional cultural conceptions of identity – mainly whiteness and masculinity – as socially constructed. Obviously, not everyone believes this, but they are forced to recognise that this position exists, and they have to strain to respond to it. In this context, these identities – white supremacists like Richard Spencer describe themselves as ‘identitarians’ – have to be explicitly asserted, rather than simply assumed, and this means reaching back to the ugliest forms of racialism and patriarchy. Jordan Peterson is able to reach an audience of disaffected young white men because he promises to train them to express their identity, to reclaim the masculinity they feel they have lost.

To respond to this identity politics with a different kind of identity politics is in my view not sufficient, precisely because it neutralises the movements which could effectively respond. When identity politics substitutes for a mass movement, it renders us powerless against the right.

We also see strong criticism of identity politics from academics and writers such as Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, who position themselves as representatives of humanist liberalism and Enlightenment principles. What, if anything, does your critique of identity politics share with theirs? What are its fundamental differences?

AH: I have nothing in common with Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, whose ideologies of ‘humanist liberalism and Enlightenment principles’ are based fundamentally in an uncritical celebration of Europe and an inability to comprehend the possibility of other vantage points. This does not mean that I simply invert their argument and condemn the Enlightenment as a homogeneous expression of European domination. I recognise the heterogeneity of the Enlightenment, which even within Europe contained both revolutionary and conservative tendencies, and encompassed figures who were apologists for colonialism and slavery as well as figures who unequivocally condemned these forms of domination and fought against them.

Furthermore, I recognise the heterogeneity of Europe itself. There is a European identity, which was built on the basis of the exclusion of non-Western peoples. But this exclusion was a contradictory practice. It meant that Europe was actually constructed by the populations that were excluded from its self-understanding, yet were centrally involved in the production of its wealth, knowledge, and culture. Political movements, intellectuals, and artists of the non-Western world intervened in the legacy of the Enlightenment and fundamentally transformed it. Pinker and Harris ultimately practice a European identity politics which ignores this heterogeneity. I reject this European identity politics.

When Pinker and Harris criticise what they perceive to be identity politics, conveniently ignoring their own identities, they do so from the vantage point of an abstract universalism. This is one kind of universalism of the Enlightenment, the universalism of natural rights which is grounded in particular philosophical understandings of human nature, the needs and liberties of the human individual. I do not agree with this form of universalism, which mistakes the specific relations of capitalist modernity for the natural essence of human beings. The universalism I advocate is not one that is based on the foundation of abstract individuals, but is rather based on a break with the existing state of the situation, when people collectively express their agency in opposition to domination and bring about a vision of a new kind of world in which everyone is free.


More: https://stateofnatureblog.com/asad-haid ... anisation/
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 07, 2018 6:22 am

Last edited by American Dream on Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 07, 2018 11:29 am

American Dream » Thu Jul 12, 2018 12:52 pm wrote:“It was so much easier to believe in the conspiracies than just look in the mirror.”


The only two possible options, I agree. I'm glad someone finally boiled this complex topic down to the only two components it really has.

You're either too smart for conspiracy theories...or you're a racist.
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