Segregation: A Modest Proposal

[semper occultus]

......you could certainly do a similar one about the notable propensity of the liberal elite to send their children to the most exclusive and academically demanding educational institutions ( from which they have usually benefited themselves ) whilst energettically lobbying against and seeking to close off those avenues to the lower orders......

[General Patton]

(Fails to see what sort of ideas the very facile straw-manning of liberals/diversity advocates etc. upthread might actually vindicate).

My critique would start with the fact that we don't really have a solution to this craziness from liberals/diversity advocates. On the other hand much of the thread thus far has been focused on confirming that it is happening. Then, focusing on whether it could be called a failure (does segregation by liberals promote diversity and unity? Is it a success by their own criterion?) Some issues are only on the fringe, others are much more common.

[jakell]

(Fails to see what sort of ideas the very facile straw-manning of liberals/diversity advocates etc. upthread might actually vindicate).

My critique would start with the fact that we don't really have a solution to this craziness from liberals/diversity advocates. On the other hand much of the thread thus far has been focused on confirming that it is happening. Then, focusing on whether it could be called a failure (does segregation by liberals promote diversity and unity? Is it a success by their own criterion?) Some issues are only on the fringe, others are much more common.

Mainly because this craziness (which could be argued to be a logical extension), has been so far touted as a solution, and therefore has received scant criticism. I still think there is going to be plenty of resistance to such a critique though, but possibly this very tardy tide is starting to turn.

You have highlighted AD's own strawman though, and reinforced that this thread has been about confirmation of a situation. He's trying to push you prematurely into an abstract ideological discussion, where there's plenty of potential camouflage (often, but not always, in the form of copypasta)

[FourthBase]

On page 7, 4thB wrote,

Okay, so, in America, only Uncolored People are racist, and everyone else can only ever be "prejudiced", right?

Sorta. Well, everybody's prejudiced to a certain degree about everything and everyone. But yes, for sure only uncolored people can be racist in America. A culture that treats it members differently according to their color is what we are, unfortunately. People who are not uncolored can be bigoted against members of the domineering white class who seek to suppress their every movement.

Were we minorities living in a country not dominated politically or by populace of uncolored peoples we might also find those roles, who in that culture is the oppressed minority, reversed from our current state of affairs.

Okay, so: When exactly was "racism" redefined solely as a political power calculation instead of an attitude/stance, and who decided it? (Whoever it was, they apparently decided that "racism" can never be reversed, i.e., it's a sin exclusively and permanently committed by white people.)

And, somehow, that in itself is not racist, despite the fact that ethical standards are being segregated and hierarchized according to race?

No, not really, not necessarily. It is supremacist, though.

It's supremacist? Racial supremacism? Yeah, that's racism, the definition of which should not depend on which arbitrary racial categories happen to possess more or less aggregate political power at any given moment in history because that could all change in the relative blink of an eye. Hence, the fear. Because your concept of racism will blind people to such a possibility.

I guess my question is: what exactly is the fear here?

The fear is that people will be collectively demonized as a race and that "anti-racists" like you will ignore it, minimize it, or perhaps even justify it.

[tapitsbo]

Maybe part of what is going on here, FourthBase, is the idea mentioned way, way back in this thread in the article by the social justice inflected pagan witch linked to by justdrew which intimated that whites are a "people of nothing" or a "default people" - the attributes that lead her to think this about white north americans are a consequence of universalist western ideas that whites were thoroughly assimilated to, ideas that a certain segment of their population were arguably almost entirely responsible for, as well

For anyone else, becoming equal to them would thus mean reducing themselves to zero - destroying their culture - and there is much truth to this, given the current framework (unless you have a system of your own like Islam to preserve a distinct space within the hegemonic culture by countering its claim to universality). Easier to get rid of whites, at least in political terms, and then work out differences between other groups afterwards.

Your blank, abstract idea of equality isn't unrelated to these conceits as I am sure you realize.

Whether or not anyone has to agree with these ideas is another matter altogether...

[jakell]

Maybe part of what is going on here, FourthBase, is the idea mentioned way, way back in this thread in the article by the social justice inflected pagan witch linked to by justdrew which intimated that whites are a "people of nothing" or a "default people" - the attributes that lead her to think this about white north americans are a consequence of universalist western ideas that whites were thoroughly assimilated to, ideas that a certain segment of their population were arguably almost entirely responsible for, as well

For anyone else, becoming equal to them would thus mean reducing themselves to zero - destroying their culture - and there is much truth to this, given the current framework (unless you have a system of your own like Islam to preserve a distinct space within the hegemonic culture by countering its claim to universality). Easier to get rid of whites, at least in political terms, and then work out differences between other groups afterwards.

Your blank, abstract idea of equality isn't unrelated to these conceits as I am sure you realize.

Whether or not anyone has to agree with these ideas is another matter altogether...

I usually try to avoid such words as equal (and equality), mainly because it's a rather mathematical (and hence abstract) term meaning 'exactly the same', ie something unattainable.

I use the term 'equivalent' instead, which is more nuanced and contains both the ideas of parity and difference. Granted, it doesn't make for snappy slogans, mainly because it does introduce nuance.

[American Dream]

Anti-fascist, anti-racist perspectives like this hit the nail on the head.

White Supremacy - Joel Olson



Joel Olson's Lexicon pamphlet outlining the history and practice of white supremacy in the United States.

Biologically speaking,there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to come up with an adequate definition of it. Yet the social and political effects of race are very real. Race is like a dollar bill—a human creation rather than a fact of nature that has value only because people say it does. And like money, people give race “value” because it serves a function in society. That function in the United States is to suppress class conflict.

In the United States, the system of race (what we now call “white supremacy”) emerged in the late 1600s to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. Through a series of laws, they granted the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to be excluded from enslavement, move about freely without a pass, acquire property, bear arms, enjoy free speech and assembly, change jobs, and vote. For their part, they respected the property of the rich, helped seize indigenous lands, and enforced slavery. In accepting this arrangement, the English poor (now called “whites”) went against their class interests to serve their “racial” ones, and thereby reinforced the power of the rich.

This cross-class alliance between the ruling class and a section of the working class is the genesis of white supremacy in the United States. It continues to this day. In this system, members of the cross-class alliance get defined as white, while those excluded from it are relegated to a “not-white” status. By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploits their labor, too, working-class members of the white group or “race” have historically tied their interests to those of the elite rather than the rest of the working class. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy ever since.

As this white alliance grew to include other ethnicities, the result was a curious form of democracy: the white democracy. In the white democracy, all whites were considered equal (even as the poor were subordinated to the rich and women were subordinated to men). At the same time, every single white person was considered superior to every single person of color. It was a system in which whites had an interest in and expectation of favored treatment, in a society that claimed to be democratic. It was democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In the white democracy, whites praised freedom, equality, democracy, hard work, and equal opportunity, while simultaneously insisting on higher wages, preferential access to the best jobs, informal unemployment insurance (first hired, last fired), full enjoyment of civil rights, and the right to send their kids to the best schools, live in the nicest neighborhoods, and receive decent treatment by the police. Even white women, who were otherwise denied full citizenship, enjoyed the benefits of white democracy, such as the right to legal representation, favored access to certain occupations (teaching, nursing, and clerical work), easier access to better housing (including indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, and time-saving household appliances), and/or the all-important guarantee that their children would never be enslaved.

In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, genocide, reservation, and other forms of racial oppression. The result was that working-class whites and people of color were oppressed because the working class was divided. The tragic irony is that many poor whites often did not get to make use of these advantages, yet despite this, they defended them bitterly.

The white democracy continues to exist, even after the end of slavery and legal segregation. Take any social indicator—graduation rates, homeownership rates, median family wealth, prison incarceration rates, life expectancy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer rates, unemployment rates, or median family debt—and you’ll find the same thing: in each category, whites are significantly better off than any other racial group. As a group, whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But U.S. history tells us that the white democracy, born over four hundred years ago, lives on.

The white race, then, does not describe people from Europe. It is a social system that works to maintain capitalist rule and prevent full democracy through a system of (relatively minor) privileges for whites along with the subordination of those who are defined as not white. The cross-class alliance thus represents one of the most significant obstacles to creating a truly democratic society in the United States.
This is not to say that white supremacy is the “worst” form of oppression. All oppression is equally morally wrong. Nor is it to imply that if white supremacy disappears, then all other forms of oppression will magically melt away. It is simply to say that one of the most significant obstacles to organizing freedom movements throughout U.S. history has been the white democracy, and that it remains a major obstacle today.

In a global economy (and a global recession), corporate elites no longer want to pay white workers the privileges they have historically enjoyed. Instead, they want to pay everyone the same low wages and have them work under the same terrible conditions.

Generally speaking, whites have responded to this attempt to treat them like regular workers in two ways. One is through “multiculturalism.” This approach, popular in universities and large corporations, seeks to recognize the equality of all cultural identities. This would be fine, except multiculturalism regards white as one culture among others. In this way, it hides how it functions as an unjust form of power. Multiculturalism therefore fails to attack the white democracy. It leaves it standing.

The other response is color-blindness, or the belief that we should “get beyond” race. But this approach also perpetuates the white democracy, because by pretending that race doesn’t exist socially just because it doesn’t exist biologically, one ends up pretending that white advantage doesn’t exist either. Once again, this reproduces white democracy rather than abolishes it.

There are right- and left-wing versions of color-blindness. On the Right, many whites sincerely insist they aren’t racist but nonetheless support every measure they can to perpetuate their white advantages, including slashing welfare, strengthening the prison system, undermining indigenous sovereignty, defending the “war on drugs,” and opposing “illegal immigration.” On the Left, many whites assert that race is a “divisive” issue and that we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. This argument sounds inclusive, but it really maintains the white democracy because it lets whites decide which issues are everyone’s and which ones are “too narrow.” It is another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment.

Multiculturalism and color-blindness (on the Right or Left) are no solution to white supremacy. The only real option is for whites to reject the white democracy and side with the rest of humanity. Fighting prisons, redlining, anti-immigrant laws, police brutality, attacks on welfare (which are usually thinly disguised attacks on African Americans), and any other form of racial discrimination are valuable ways to undermine the cross-class alliance. So are struggles to defend indigenous sovereignty, affirmative action, embattled ethnic studies programs in high schools and colleges, and the right for people of color to caucus in organizations or movements. All of these struggles—which people of color engage in daily, but whites only occasionally do, if at all—seek to undermine whites’ interest in and expectation of favored treatment. They point out the way toward a new society.

We can see this in U.S. history, when fights to abolish the cross-class alliance have opened up radical possibilities for all people. Feminism in the 1840s and the movement for the eight-hour day in the 1860s came out of abolitionism. Radical Reconstruction (1868–76) very nearly built socialism in the South as it sought to give political and economic power to the freedmen and women. The civil rights struggle in the 1960s not only overthrew legal segregation, it also kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, peace, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible. An attack on white supremacy raises the level of struggle against oppression in general.

Even today, the white democracy stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge. The task is to chase the troll away, not to pretend it doesn’t exist or invite it to the multicultural table. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people currently defined as white would have no role or influence in such a society. It only means that they would participate as individuals equal to everyone else, not as a favored group.

Political movements in the United States must make the fight against any expression of white democracy an essential part of their strategies. The expansion of freedom for people of color has always expanded freedom for whites as well. Abolishing white interests is not “divisive,” “narrow,” or “reverse racism.” It’s the key to a free society.


Published as part of the Lexicon series created by the Institute for Anarchist Studies/Anarchiststudies.org. The Lexicon series aims to convert words into politically helpful tools—for those already engaged in a politics from below as well as the newly approaching—by offering definitional understandings of commonly used keywords.

[jakell]

"...the system of race (what we now call 'white supremacy')..."

Who calls it 'white supremacy' (who's we?). A number of non-whites also seem to recognise the concept of race, something well attested to by the examples in this thread, or are they white supremacists too?

Your personal output here seems to consist of a small carpentry metaphor dwarfed by another wall of copypasta, a familiar juxtaposition.

[tapitsbo]

What you quoted about a cross-class alliance AD was true although it seems frayed right now. Certainly these alliances have existed for a variety of groups in the USA

[Iamwhomiam]

I'll have more later to offer in response to FourthBase, but for now I'd like to thank tapistbo for sharing his synopsis of this thread.

jackell, it's rare I read much of anything AD writes, only because most of its subject matter holds little interest for me. But this I read fully and really can't disagree with much of anything its author wrote. (I did start to drift a bit though, through the last couple of paragraphs.)

But yeah, the suit and tie is the uniform of the white democracy all don after shedding those of their own cultures. It's sorta an initiatory mandatory for all such prospectors.

ALL corrupt systems eventually fail.

[FourthBase]

I'll be blunter: You're not really anti-racists. You're just anti-capitalists translating everything into racial terms for the rhetorical leverage. If in the near/distant future a brutal campaign of racist persecution against white people could topple capitalism and bring about the revolution you fantasize about, you'd find a way to rationalize away that racism as a form of "anti-racism" or "justice"...in fact, those rationalizations are already being prepared, e.g., whites make spaces unsafe, only whites can ever commit certain sins, white peopl...er, "whiteness" is synonymous with evil, all whites are born responsible for centuries of injustice.

[American Dream]

Straw man.

The struggle for a life beyond Capital's domination is deeply intertwined the struggle for a world beyond White Supremacy, State Authority, etc.

The markers of "race" are a visible manifestation of class struggle- just as they have been for centuries of colonization here where I live in North America.


See for example:


Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary" from Race Traitor #1


"The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It" by Noel Ignatiev


"Black Worker/White Worker: Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy" by Noel Ignatiev

[coffin_dodger]

Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary"

"The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It"

Nothing racist about those statements, eh?

[American Dream]

One has to read the articles to even begin an attempt at an intelligent assessment.

[Wombaticus Rex]

One has to read the articles to even begin an attempt at an intelligent assessment.

I actually grew up getting fresh copies of Race Traitor mailed to me (thank you, Whole Earth Catalog) in Vermont. It's definitely more subtle stuff than, say, Tim Wise's whole money-maker dance.

That Joel Olson, dude, though....sheesh.

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race.

Like I always say, the only reason the concept of "race" even persists is all these assholes who insist on walking around with their eyes open.

Edit: I'll revise my opinions of Joel if, somehow, "biologically speaking" implies something different from, you know, scientifically speaking.