Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

[American Dream]

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... 4191934954

WHO LOST AN AMERICAN?

by Joel Gilbert, as told to Noel Ignatiev

I was born in 1973, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, a town of thirty thousand people. The north end of town was pretty much for the wealthy or the upper class, and the south end, where I grew up, was mostly white, working-class people. There were some black folks, some Hispanic folks, but not many. I have one older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother.

One of the first things I can remember is my father beating my mother. My father had a good job as a truck driver for the local dairy, and he was making pretty good money. He was trying to establish a middle-class life, and he just couldn't deal with the pressures, so he would take it out on my mother. We had a big family and we ate a lot. My mother went shopping and spent a lot on groceries. My father was upset at her because she bought this four-dollar box of cereal. It was sugarcoated and he had this thing about sugar. She came home, and he saw this box of cereal, and took the box of cereal and smashed it and threw it down the stairs, and then beat my mother, screaming that we couldn't afford it, and that us kids shouldn't have that kind of cereal. The next morning when we woke up, we saw him sitting at the table. He had gone to the basement and got out the cereal box and was eating the cereal. Seeing that just twisted my insides. It made me hurt so much.

I can always remember seeing my older brother getting beaten. Once my father told him to take out the garbage. My brother was maybe seven or eight at the time. While he was trying to drag the big garbage bags, my dad yelled at him to bring him his wallet. My brother did that, but he got distracted and forgot to take out the garbage. When my father saw that, he picked my brother up by the neck, and dragged him down a flight of stairs, and stuck his face in the garbage, and started screaming at him. Then he threw him up a flight of stairs and started kicking him into the bedroom. He took out his leather belt and beat him. That stuck in my head for a long time.

From the moment I was born I knew my father hated me, but I knew my mother loved me. I recall an incident, from when I was about five. My father was burning the trash in the back yard and I had this little twig—you know how little kids are fascinated by fire—well, I was trying to get this twig to catch fire, and he kept screaming at me, "Get away from the fire," and I wouldn't get away. There was a plastic Crisco bottle in the fire, and it blew up, and spattered hot oil on my hands and face. I was scared and thought I was going to die, and he told me to shut up, and took me up and put cold water on my hands and face. My mother wanted to take me to the hospital, and he said no, it was my own fault, and he couldn't afford another hospital bill. For five hours they were putting ice on me and finally my mom wrapped me in a blanket and sneaked me out of the house and took me to the hospital. They said if I hadn't got there I would have been scarred permanently.

When I was in first grade, my mom got a divorce and we movedto a different house. My father would come around and bug her and demand that they get married again. I remember coming into the room from my bedroom and he was standing above her and she was sitting there with tears running down her face. He had a monstrous grimace, and she told me to go back to bed. One night he came to the house when my mother was listening to the stereo, and she wouldn't let him in. He forced his way in and threw the stereo out the window. I heard all this, but I was too scared to get out of bed.

My mom got a court order to keep him away, and the police would come and sympathize with my father. Those policemen weren't out to protect us. The courts wouldn't do anything. He owed my mother a lot of money that we could have used to eat.

My mom knew she had to get away and we moved to Ann Arbor, two hours from Port Huron. There was no way he could drive down there the way he used to. We would visit him every other week, and he would buy us clothes and toys, but he wouldn't let us take them home when we left.

While we lived in Ann Arbor, my mom had two different jobs. She worked at an insurance company and also at a bar. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, not much space or privacy, not too much to eat. We had good times, though. Our family got really close, and my older brother and I looked after each other, and after our younger brother and sister. We didn't have a television so we went garbage-picking and found one. When we wanted snacks we would scrounge up change in the house and buy candy. We entertained each other, and would go for walkstogether. I learned to cook and scrub pots and pans when I waseight years old. My mom was always good to us when she could be. But she started drinking and developed a problem with alcohol. We lived with her in Ann Arbor for about two years, and then she couldn't afford to keep us any more. At that time my father owed my mother about five thousand dollars in child support, and she essentially traded us to him. They worked it out with the court so that she wouldn't have to pay any child support but would get us back after two years. A lot of this I found out later.

So we moved back from our mother to our father, and that's when things got really bad. When we moved in with him, he was working a lot too, so the system we had set up when we lived with our mother continued. My brothers, sister, and I were all very close. We had to watch over each other. We cooked, we cleaned, we entertained each other. I looked up to my brother more than I did my father. I had little respect for my father. He had never been able to control us when we were all together and we thought he had no right to now. So he beat us. Most of it was directed against my older brother and me, because we knew what was going on and hated him. My younger brother and sister were too young to understand and he left them alone.

He'd beat me every day, for anything from not cleaning a dish properly to not getting a grade in school. After the physical beating was over, the emotional abuse would start. He would tell me that he loved me and that I was a bad kid, and that he didn't want to do what he had to do, but he did it because he loved me. So I was very confused about myself, and what this man represented to me. I didn't understand who gave him the authority to treat me the way he did. And that whole time he was taking us to church each week. He was a devout Christian. Tothis day he seems like the nicest person you could meet, in public. But behind closed doors, he's a monster.

I had always been rebellious in school. When I moved in with my father that rebellion continued. I was in a new school, and I didn't like the situation I was living in, and so I was a troublemaker. I was an outcast because I was a little on the weird side. Essentially I went on my own, and did my own things and stayed to myself. My brother had a paper route and I would help him with that. I would hang with some of the older people on the route, and talk to them.

The friends I had were all into playing war games. We'd go and get plastic guns and play in the woods, and talk about military strategies. I started getting interested in World War II. I read a lot about it. Reading was an escape for me. I think it was history that drew me to reading, because I loved to go into another time. I started reading about Nazis, and the more I got into that the less I focused on the other parts of the War. I got interested in the different things Hitler was doing. The more I read about Hitler the more powerful he seemed to me. I could relate to that power. I felt helpless, like I had no power, and I felt that through his message I could get power.

I knew that Germany and the U.S. had fought on opposite sides in the War, but that didn't matter. I didn't like the American way of life. I was unhappy with what I saw. At that age I had realized that my father was working a lot. He would come home from the day's work and wanted to see things clean. And if they weren't clean he would take it out on us. I didn't understand why my father had to work so much, and why whateverhappened at work made him angry enough to come home and hit me and my older brother. Also I didn't like being pushed around and humiliated by my teachers because I was different. I had trouble learning and they called me dumb. I realized that school wasn't going to do anything for me, my father and mother weren't going to do anything for me, the community I lived in wasn't going to do anything. So I looked to other places. I would watch TV documentaries on Hitler and they would talk about how he built the autobahns, and how he and Dr. Porsche produced the Volkswagen bug, which really fascinated me because I liked that type of car. They were able to put everybody to work, and give everybody a car, and build themselves up to the point where eventually they could take on the whole world in a war. I studied about how they went into Russia, and how they were able to roll in there until the cold and the Russian fighters fought them back. It seemed like they had so much power. Like at the Nuremberg rallies, where it seemed that they had hundreds of thousands of people doing the same thing—their right hands to Hitler, and he wasable to command them to do anything he wanted. I would daydream about that being me, here in America, about being Hitler or somebody of his strength and power.

I realized through my studies that he had killed six million Jews. But at that point I was starting to get connected with the grandfather of one of my friends. He lived alone a few blocks away from my house, and I'd go over and talk with him. He was an anti-Semite. He had a whole room full of books and magazines of different white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups. Even though he didn't claim to be a Nazi—he actually disliked the Nazis—he liked to read up on what they were doing. He talked about the Establishment, by which he meant international Jewry controlling the world through capital. He said that there weren't sixmillion Jews killed. He gave me a pamphlet that said there was no Auschwitz, that during the War it was a factory that produced clothes for soldiers, and that towards the end of the War Hollywood flew into Germany and turned this wrecked factory into a filmset with gas chambers to make it look like six million Jews were killed. I was thirteen or fourteen and I didn't know what to believe. This guy said that the Jews controlled Hollywood and had faked the whole thing. He sculpted a lot of my ideas to what the Nazi Party believed, that the capitalist system was createdby the Jews and that they were doing that to get rich. He started giving me books about the Rockefellers, and he traced how DuPont was all Jews, and I went along with it because I wanted something to believe in.

I knew one kid from a Jewish family. We were living in Ann Arbor, and he was one of my friends, and I would go over to his house--this was maybe in the third grade--and he was an only child and lived in this huge house. His mother and father were gone all the time and he had a maid, and video games, and big models of dinosaurs. I loved dinosaurs and I asked him where did he get all this stuff, and he said his parents just bought it for him. I couldn't believe it. One of his toys amounted to all my toys and I was amazed at all the shit he had. When Christmas time came he celebrated Hanukkah, and I would go over his house and for every day of Hanukkah he would get a box of toys, and all I would get for Christmas would be a few toys, and I only had one of these days and he had seven of them. That was in the back of my head when I began hearing all the anti-Semitic shit.

I don't think I hated black folks. One of the people on my paper route was black. The family was so nice to me, and I would give them free papers because they didn't have much money, and they would give me coffee or cookies. They were in the same economic situation my family was in and I would hang out with the son. I didn't hate black people but that kind of fit into the whole Nazi idea. I was supposed to hate them.

This period of my life developed over two years of living with my father and being beat around by him, and the school, and just fed up. I thought this was a way out. I had only one other friend who was into Nazism. He was a kid in high school in the ninth grade, and he was from a worse situation than mine. He would come to school dirty, with his hair messed up--so did I, but not like this kid. He had only one pair of pants. His father beat him openly, black and blue marks. My father wasalways smart enough not to leave any marks. This kid and I started talking. He liked to use the word nigger more often than I did, and he hated Jews, even though he didn't know any Jews either, and he said that his uncle was a white supremacist. He was a lot like me: he hated his folks, he hated school, he hated the town we had to grow up in.

I watched Oprah Winfrey on TV and there were skinheads on her show and I was cheering them on. In the back of my mind I realized that they were fools, but I wanted to get in touch with them. I didn't have any names or addresses of people to contact, but if I did I would have. At that point in my life I could have become a full-fledged Nazi. I was ready for it. If there had been some group around I could have joined, I would have.

What turned me around? At the time I was getting interested not only in the Nazis but in other things, like the Weathermen and the Chicago 7. People were telling me about SDS, because I grew up in Port Huron and people knew that the founding statement of SDS was adopted there, in the park my family used to go to in the summer for picnics. I knew I was radical, that I disliked the system, that I disliked my parents and the school system. I got interested in Charles Manson, because I knew he was radical, and killed people, and wanted to tear down the system. I was looking for alternatives to the Nazis, because there was something inside me that told me it was wrong. A lot of that was my Christian beliefs, that asked me why would I hate black people? I mean, my next-door neighbor was black, and he was a good guy. And then I didn't know any Jews, so why would I hate them? Even if the world was run by Jews, what did that have to do with me?

I bought Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, and read that, and I was starting to get into the Black Power movement, and my mom asked me if I had ever read Malcolm X. And she asked, why didn't I get a copy of that? And so I saved up some money and bought a copy. This was before the whole Malcolm X craze, and I sat down and read it. I read about the white supremacists who burned down his house, and killed his father, and tore apart his family, and I thought, if these folks could do that just because of his skin color, then that couldn't be the answer at all, no way. The more I read about Malcolm X and his life, the more I identified with him. I felt so bad that whites had treated him the way they did, but at the same time I knew that whites were treating me the same way. The funny thing is, at that time I didn't finish the book. Since then I've read the whole thing, but at that time I had the habit of starting books and not finishing them, and I didn't get past the part where he returns from Mecca.

From there I considered myself a black nationalist. I started looking for people who were like Malcolm X. Maybe I could hook up with them, and find a way to escape from the oppression I felt. I hated whites. I would talk about the god damn honkies, or whatever. I hated the little town I grew up in, and I thought that when I grew up I would move to Detroit or Chicago and join up with some people and come back and wipe the place out.

I was always in trouble, and my father didn't know how to handle it. When we were still living in Ann Arbor, my mom wanted to help us deal with everything that was happening, so she started taking us to family therapy. When I moved in with my father he took me to the school therapist and then he took me to psychologists. I would tell them what was happening. And then they would organize family sessions, and I would sit in the room, with the therapist in the middle and my father on the other side, and they would make me repeat what I had told them in private. And I would do it, and my father would just shake his head, and they would believe him and not me. And so I was this rebellious kid who was making up lies. And after the sessions he would scream at me for saying things that were not true. He was in his own denial. I knew I didn't want to be a man like my father. He wasn't a man, he was a coward. I later found out that his father did the same thing to him, and who knows what his father did to him. This is the kind of thing that goes on and society just doesn't see it. And the thing is, I had several differentfriends in school who had the same problems. I knew one kid who killed himself because his father beat him.

I moved back with my mother when I was about sixteen. I switched schools and had to make new friends. I was a complete outcast because I was different. I tried to fit in but I couldn't. People would make fun of me and I was depressed all the time. I stopped going to school. I began seeing a new therapist. Finally I put myself into the hospital. I told the therapist that I needed a place where I could be safe. So she worked it out so that I could go to a mental hospital in Detroit.

I was there for three weeks and that screwed me up worse than before, because they put me on all kinds of medications—the first one was prozac, then they put me on lithium, then on haldol, and another drug. The drugs gave me neck spasms, and I couldn't swallow, and I could hardly breathe. Just recently have I learned that these drugs have killed people. They were about to send me to a bigger institution where I would have been for at least a year, where I would have been doped up more on their shit. I cleaned up my act and played straight for a couple of days, and then I went to my psychiatrist and said I was ready to go home. I promised to continue taking my drugs, and he let me go home. I went back home and kept getting more depressed.

I was suicidal from age twelve on. My older brother actually attempted suicide when he was seventeen. And then he went into the army and that really fucked him up. So there were all kinds of things that could have happened to me. I could have killed myself, I could have become a Nazi, I could have been in a mental institution for the rest of my life. I dropped out of school and was working at different jobs which didn't last. I was still living with my mom, but I would spend a lot of time at friends’ houses, staying drunk and getting high. We were living on the north side at that time, where a lot of the rich kids lived, and I would see them driving Mercedes, and wearing expensive clothes, and that didn't make any sense to me, because I had only three or four outfits and got most of my clothes from the Goodwill. Finally, when I was justturning seventeen I decided I couldn't go on like this anymore, and that I was going to understand why my life is so fucked up, and do what I needed to do to destroy the church, to destroy the family, to destroy the cops, the courts, the schools, and to destroy psychiatry. I turned vegetarian, because I realized that the meat I was eating represented so much of the system. People beat their wives, beat their children, and kill animals and eat them. When the Gulf War was building up, I marched together with some people from the local community college, on a peaceful march from the town hall to the local recruiting station. Looking back, I wish I had stormed a cop the way I wanted to. At the same time I was scared, because I knew that seventeen-year-olds could be drafted, and I didn't want to go to the army or have anything to do with that war.

I was looking through the Detroit and I saw ads from a peace group for people to canvas against the Gulf War. I called the office and told them I was good at knocking on doors and talking to people, because of my paper route, and that I wanted to move to Ann Arbor. They told me to come down for an interview, and so I packed up my bags, told my mom I wasn't going to live off her any more. I said goodbye to my family and moved to Ann Arbor, with twenty-five dollars in my pocket. I didn't say goodbye to my father because I didn't want to have anything to do with him. That was on January 18, 1991, two days after the Gulf War started--a cold Michigan winter, and I gave five bucks to a friend to drive me there.

I had a place to live, with five guys who were friends of a friend, students at the University of Michigan. The first day I got there I found a girlfriend. She was going with this guy who lived there, and I was only seventeen, and we hit it off and began hanging around together. The second day I got a job, and the third day I found an apartment. It was a shared apartment and didn't last long, because I couldn't pay the rent, but I moved in with a friend after that.

Working with the anti-war movement was an incredible time in my life, because I learned a lot about the lies the government told. I started canvassing door-to-door. We were talking about how since the cold war was over the government should take money out of war and put it into a peacetime economy. I was reaching a lot of people, but I also met some who were pretty negative. I remember one time when I was canvassing a subdivision near Detroit. It was a cold, snowy night©©I almost had frostbite on my fingers—and this guy got out of his car and left his lights on and came up to me. He was about a foot taller than me, and he got right in my face and asked me if I was the one who was going around talking against the War. When I said I was he told me that his mother was at home crying, because his brother was over there and what I said scared her. I told him I didn't mean to scare her, that I was just trying to spread the truth. Well we talked and I don't think I convinced him, but he calmed down. I went to the demonstration in Washington and that was big-time for me, because I got to see this movement happening. I had a good time in Ann Arbor, going to demonstrations--nothing too radical, because I was kind of scared, and I didn't have money for bail, so I just did your normal protesting.

When the War ended I didn't have anything more to rant about, so I got in touch with the local drug scene, and with some local Deadheads, and began hanging out with them. I began to travel, and towards the end of the summer I came to Boston, and my friend from Ann Arbor was living there, and he introduced me to my now-girlfriend. I went back to Michigan, but she and I stayed in touch, and I decided to move to Boston. I moved with four goals: the first was to have a relationship with my girlfriend; the second was to get a job; the third was to find a place to live; and the fourth was to go to college.

It was winter. I don't know why I choose winters to move. I slept on the street in Harvard Square. There was a strong group of kids who would go garbage-picking together, and chip in for food, and take care of each other. Even while I was homeless I had a job, but I would go in to work tired every day. It was a tough time, and I asked my mother to send me money for a train ticket home. She sent it to me, but just as I was about to go back I found an apartment, and so I gave the ticket money to the people I moved in with. And then I found another job, temping for good money, and I found a better place to live, and my relationship with my girlfriend got better.

I still wanted to go to college. I enrolled in Roxbury Community College, expecting to find the black radicals I was looking for, so we could work together and smash the system. I am one of a handful of "white" students at Roxbury. I enrolled in some really good classes, but unfortunately I didn't find the people I wanted to hook up with. It wasn't as radical as I was hoping. In fact, there are hardly any radicals.

I went in with the idea that no matter what happened, I was going to educate myself, and I was going to make friends. I think I've done both of those things. At first I was a little scared. I didn't know how people would take to me, but I went in with a respectful attitude. I never tried to act in any special way, but just to be myself. After a while, people could see that, and started to return the respect. This year I'm on the student government association, and I know a lot of the students and faculty. I spend a lot of time and energy integrating myself into the community. There are people there from all different parts of the Caribbean, from central and south America, from all parts of Africa, and those are people you can learn from. I don't think I represent the normal whites they see. Most of the kids there come from economic backgrounds similar to mine, and we have a lot in common. Never has anyone told me to get out because I didn't belong, or anything like that. People take their time and try to get to know me before they judge me.

I've lived in a lot of different parts of Boston. I lived in Somerville for a while, which is pretty white, and I noticed a lot of racist tendencies from people there, and I didn't like living there at all. I lived for a while in Dorchester, with two roommates. One was from Zimbabwe, the other was from here. He had both black and white family, and had to deal with the white part of his family. I learned a lot from that. I lived for six months on the line between Roxbury and the South End. It's a very poor area, a lot of drugs, with a lot of Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic people. I took the same approach there that I took at RCC. I'd sit on the stoop and smoke with the guys, and shoot the shit. I found we liked the same type of music, and had a lot in common. It got a little too rough for my girlfriend and me, so we moved. I live with my girlfriend now in Jamaica Plain, in a very mixed area—a lot of blacks, a lot of Hispanics, and the whites who live there tend to be cool. It's as much of a community as I've experienced in Boston. Other parts of J.P. have been gentrified, but I'm not part of that. I don't represent whiteness any more, and so there's no way I can gentrify anything. For the most part I feel at home with black people. I've got plenty of black inside me. And I think most of the whiteness I grew up with has washed away.

One of the reasons my girlfriend and I were able to come together is that she saw I'm not like the average white male. I don't want to boast on myself, but I think I'm more mature, because of my experiences, than the average person my age. She is a few years older than I am, but that is just like color—it doesn't mean anything. She isn't as political as I am, but we share a way of looking at the world. I hope that as I evolve politically we can grow together.

I heard about Race Traitor from a friend. He is writing a dissertation on how the fundamentalist right attacks gay people. I was over his house and he was showing me some of their literature. Then he showed me a copy of Race Traitor, the first issue with a picture on the cover of some white kids pushing over a school bus. I looked at it, and I asked, "What is this, more right-wing garbage?" And I started reading it, and I said, "This is insane." And he said, "No that is sanity." I started to read it and I couldn't make any sense out of it. He told me to take it home and read it and make sense out of. And so I took it home, and read the editorial about abolishing the white race, and when I was finished I said, "This is me. I'm a race traitor." That editorial explained a lot of what I already believed.

I read that issue three or four times. I didn't know what I could do, but I wanted to get involved in the publication. So I wrote to the address in the magazine, and gave my phone number, and that's how the connection started. Since then I've read both issues, and I've given it to other people I know.

I'm interested in history. Right now I'm reading a book on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That blows my mind, how people came together and started a revolution, and were able to develop workers' councils that were so powerful that the government was nothing compared to them. They had found something that doesn't come up too often. They had learned how to organize themselves instead of having somebody else organize them. If it hadn't been for Khrushchev sending in the Russian Army and massacring thousands of people, the workers' councils would have carried Hungary out of the mess it was in. I'm also reading stuff by C.L.R. James, who I knew of before because of my class at RCC on the Caribbean. I'm getting into reading Marx and Engels, tryingto understand their point of view. I read a lot of things about them before, but now I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. It's tough to read. Because I'm interested in revolutionary ideas, I'd like to form a collective with other folks who have ideas similar to mine, so we can study together, organize together, and tear some shit up.

In another year I'll have my associate degree from RCC. From there I'd like to go to U.Mass for my B.A. Eventually I'd like to go on and do a doctorate. The pieces of paper don't mean that much to me, but they are things I can use to take care of myself, and besides, I'd like to have the knowledge. I'd like to get involved in community organizing. I've gotideas for a small publication, to share the knowledge I've acquired with kids my age who haven't had the opportunity to study. And I'd like to establish contact with other people around the country who feel the same way I do.

Race Traitor has already helped me do that. I want to learn more about what the Nazi organizations are like in Boston, and around the country, and even in the world. They are getting organized too, and I'dlike to do some damage to them. I can understand where a lot ofthe young Nazis are coming from, because I was at the same place. I would also like to confront them directly.

I like to watch movies for entertainment. Thee are a lot ofmovies out there that address some of my political beliefs. Ijust recently saw "Blue Collar." It takes a look at three workers at an automobile plant in Detroit. I think it does a good job at showing how plant management and the unions fuck with people's lives. Music is very important to me. I grew uplistening to all kinds of music. Some of my favorite bands wereThe Dead Kennedy's and Crass. I still listen to a lot of the same music, but I tend to listen to more hard core rap now. One of my favorite rap groups is The Goats. They're very political and share a lot of my views. Sometimes I watch MTV, and I can see how they try to socialize kids, by taking subversive bands and commercializing their music.

I want to destroy this so-called white society. I don't want any more kids to grow up like I did. I don't want to see psychiatry being used to hurt people. I don't want to see cops beating down anybody, black or white. I don't want to see families destroyed the way mine was. The kid this society gave birth to and tried to socialize has rebelled.

[Searcher08]

Stories like these will be read in front of halls filled with those being re-educated.

I imagine that Spencer Sunshine will be on hand to see that the agreed process is followed and all the collectively agreed boxes are ticked and that everyone's privilege has been checked at the door. Members of the Antifa Protection Collective will patrol the hall, administering corrective taserings (and thinking of themselves as offering service Zen Master style) for those not paying enough attention.

[Luther Blissett]

Right at the end he throws it out that he likes The Goats? Wow. He's not the same Joel Gilbert who's currently a right-wing documentarian?

[American Dream]

He seems to be a different person:

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee at six years old. My upbringing was characterized by the beautiful outdoors of East Tennessee at the foot of the Great Smokey Mountains. Musical influences of my youth included all the great country music legends, as well as Elvis Presley and bluegrass music. I now live in the Los Angeles area.

http://www.americansongwriter.com/2009/ ... l-gilbert/

[Morty]

NAACP leader who pretended to be black resigns

By Danika Fears

June 15, 2015 | 12:25pm


The embattled president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP said Monday she is stepping down from her post.

“In the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP,” Rachel Dolezal wrote in a post on the organization’s Facebook page.

“It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the Presidency and pass the baton to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley,” she wrote.

“This is not me quitting; this is a continuum,” she added.

Dolezal, a part time professor in the Africana Studies program at Eastern Washington University, came under fire after her parents revealed last week that she was pretending to be a black woman.

On Monday, her parents accused their daughter of telling lies and attempting to “destroy her biological family.”

“She was obviously misrepresenting herself,” her mom, Ruthanne Dolezal, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“We did not pursue exposing her. It was only after the press came to us that we were willing to answer their questions.”

http://nypost.com/2015/06/15/naacp-leader-who-pretended-to-be-black-resigns/

[semper occultus]

Dead, White, and Blue

The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites

By Barbara Ehrenreich

www.tomdispatch.com

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity -- 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women -- though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor -- from waitressing to construction work -- tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The Wages of Despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back -- and better yet, a strong union -- could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “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.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent -- mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.

The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working class parents like myself, sting with condescension.

Of course, there was also the election of the first black president. White, native-born Americans began to talk of “taking our country back.” The more affluent ones formed the Tea Party; less affluent ones often contented themselves with affixing Confederate flag decals to their trucks.

On the American Downward Slope

All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.

If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap -- perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

Acts of racial aggression may provide their white perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort -- and a strong stomach -- to paint a racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place near the bottom of an undependable economy.

While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to those who express it -- after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived quite nicely -- the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those -- of any color or ethnicity -- who are falling even faster.



Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular and founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword) and most recently the autobiographical Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything.

Copyright 2015 Barbara Ehrenreich

[semper occultus]

Why The Working Class Must Come In From The Cold

POSTED BY 107COWGATE ⋅ NOVEMBER 23, 2015

http://107cowgate.com/2015/11/23/why-the-working-class-must-come-in-from-the-cold/

Last month Gary O’Shea, a founding member of Anti-Fascist Action, delivered the keynote address at Connolly Conference 2015 in Edinburgh. Introducing the speech Gary said ‘Liberal piety surrounding immigration must first be rejected in order to allow the working class movement to develop it’s own analysis’. We are delighted to publish, for the first time, the whole conference address.


Gary O'Shea, founding member of Anti-Fascist Action, addressing Connolly Conference 2015

By Gary O’Shea

In 1962 Joe Valachi a soldier in the Cosa Nostra was arrested and turned informer. He explained how the organisation was structured, fingered the top men and generally blew the gaff. It was the beginning of the end for the Italian Mafia’s stranglehold on organised crime in America. One man was capable of wreaking such devastation not because he was high-ranking or particularly bright, but because he was an insider. And he broke the code. And he was the first to do so.

David Goodhart is of a different hue, but an insider nonetheless. A liberal academic of impeccable lineage: he founded Prospect magazine, and chaired the think tank Demos. Then he stumbled across an article by Tory Minister David Willetts which argued that mass immigration must eventually undermine the contributory principle of the welfare state. And it got him thinking. Eventually he went public with a 6000 word essay entitled: ‘Too diverse?’ A book, ‘The British Dream: Successes and Failures of post war immigration’, followed. Although widely reviewed, as far as his erstwhile liberal colleagues were concerned, he had breached the code, and in the vernacular ‘ratted them out’. And as with Joe Valachi they hated him for it. He has since been compared to Enoch Powell, accused of being a neo-fascist, and banned from the Hay literary festival. Now, liberals generally support the right causes, just not always for the right reasons. So their sense of dismay is not just because of Goodhart’s apostate views on uncontrolled immigration and its consequences for social democracy, but also, and as importantly, what he might reveal about them and their motivations; mainly their fear of being found out.

As a fellow traveller on the journey after all, he could hardly be better positioned to nail the trademark middle class fallings, (snooty, superficial, self-aggrandising,) which made an ersatz endgame more or less inevitable.

As with many a belief system, it all began with the best of intentions. In the mid-20th century the liberal democratic west began to embrace what the sociologist Geoff Dench called the ‘universalist shift’ – the belief in the moral equality of all people. After the publication of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the principle of moral and political equality came to be written into the constitutions and legal systems of liberal democracies. The baton was picked up by the 1960’s liberal baby boomers (born between 1946 -64) who looked at the history of the 20th century; saw not one but two World Wars, the Holocaust and out of all that a host of post-colonial struggles. Add on the American civil rights movement and they came to the conclusion that love of country in any form, and any vestige of it, including football, must automatically end up on the other side of the barriers. Gradually, the nation state, especially a dominant ones like Britain and the U.S, came to be considered as Goodhart puts it: “old-fashioned and illiberal, an irrational group attachment, that smart people have grown out of.” “These days”, he continues; “intellectual sophistication is more generally associated with transcending the local, the everyday, the parochial and even the national. Replacing the nation with other allegiances seems an attractive, even morally superior alternative chiming with globalisation’s market freedoms.”

Nonetheless this ‘concept of global citizenship’, where ‘people from Burundi or Benghazi are at least as important as people from Birmingham or Bolton, (if not more so) is what many liberals subscribe to. Inevitably, “this global citizen worldview tends to be suspicious of communities. Or rather the idea of community is praised in the abstract but rejected in the particular in favour of a “cruise liner” theory of society in which people come together for a voyage but have no on-going relationship. This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is painted as irrational and racist.”

In summary: “Many of my friends, as they say – in business, the arts and academia – sign up to this global citizen worldview, a sort of mirror image of the strident chauvinism you often hear in right-wing politics and the media.”

Wholly lacking in appetite or desire to provide a meaningful challenge to the social and political hierarchy on which they are part, the smug irrational belief in the innate superiority of their own nation has been replaced by the smug and irrational belief in the innate superiority of their own class. And from their vantage point it is all too easy to see why working class communities, especially when allotted the prefix white (by them incidentally) are cast as illiberal, reactionary and even primitive.

As a consequence of a near unanimity among the liberal intelligentsia in academia and the arts, this global citizen ideology has permeated the media and to varying degrees all the mainstream political parties as well. It might have been expected that the groups from the communist, socialist and anarchist traditions, otherwise soaked in their respective dogmas, would to some degree hold the line, but in actuality were among the first to be engulfed. Which helps explain, why left-wing liberal and indeed neo-liberal arguments extolling the virtues of mass immigration appear to be near identical.

In the real world this uniform emoting is not cost free. On the contrary, the political price is a heavy one. ‘They are coming here for a better life’ they hector at every opportunity, while displaying a casual disregard for how that might sound to the people struggling for a better life who are here already. The people ‘here already’ it should be noted, include previous immigrant communities. Not that the ‘hypocrisy begins at home’ brigade care, but for the reluctant hosts it can all be expressed in one word ‘competition’. Ever greater competition for housing, schooling, health care, wages, along with the all- important, though never flagged, societal esteem; a sense that wider society holds them with something approaching affection or consideration. Ironically all such one-sidedness achieves is to harden suspicion that the chief beneficiary of immigration is the immigrants themselves. And for any liberal lefty worth his salt this is exactly how it should be.

From those forced into a contest- not of their making – the moral argument carries little weight when they perceive those ‘demanding a better life’ are likely to be doing so directly at their or their family’s expense. Whereas politicians are denounced for making the less well-off pay the price for the banking crisis the liberal left are insouciant about the exact same sector of society visibly carrying the entire burden when the crisis involves refugees or simply immigration. Needless to say such studied indifference effectively destroys the credibility of any Left electoral initiative from the outset (as Jeremy and chums will find out soon enough). On a more serious level, far from fighting prejudice, and reinforcing a sense of common humanity, it more or less insists on a communal tribal and atavistic response, which liberals regard as a vindication of their initial stance: ‘See we told you so’. Clearly, when all jaundiced prejudice from whatever quarter is set to the side, it is perfectly clear that immigrants and refugees, by definition a random selection of society are kind and cruel, lazy and diligent, generous and avaricious, easy going and humble, when weak, assertive and even violent when strong. Immigrants, are in short, as bad as the rest us.

Although predictably sketchy on precisely how, the Left continues to maintain this unprecedented transfer of population is there to “fortify” the indigenous working class. In that case the CBI, and the Institute of Directors, immigration’s most ardent public backers must be an especially enlightened bunch.

Tellingly across the Channel influential French think tank Terra Nova, (advisor to President Hollande in 2012) sees no need for such mendacity. With, in the circumstances, admirable candour it declares “the working class is no longer at the heart of the left wing vote.” Instead the political future will be “younger, diverse and more feminised.” As they see it, the task for the Left is not to amalgamate the existing minorities or new arrivals with their previous base. No. Far from creating a new constituency from the existing parts of the working class, the more or less stated aim, with a hat tip to Berthold Brecht here, is to import another instead. It follows that for this box fresh constituency to take root, the previous one must first be disabled, invalidated and rendered ‘hors de combat’/out of the fight. Provoked, the prestigious social democratic Jean Jaures Foundation recently responded with a withering state-of-the-nation response, which ripped like grape-shot through the left wing salons. Aiding and abetting the Front National, not resisting, was the damning message.

“The Left is trying to make up to what it classes real minorities who it believes are discriminated against. In doing so it has become indifferent, even scornful of the wider French working class. They say to these native French ‘you have not understood, you are racist and sexist, and so these people have said, so be it.” And so they vote Front National.

It is indeed a shrinking world. This is undeniable. Consequently a holistic view is now an imperative. As we have seen ‘immigrationists’ insist on the free movement of labour and juxtapose it with the free movement of capital. Yet, the free movement of labour comes in the wake of the free movement of capital – the former for the most part at the behest of the latter. So while the ‘open borderers’ might like to wrap themselves in the Red Flag while humming the’ Internationale’ all they are really saying is allow the market to find the correct level: ‘let the market decide’.

In previous generations when immigration came primarily from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent it was almost exclusively through the Labour Movement that the new arrivals were politically integrated, and as a direct result, to the chagrin of the Right, class as much as race became their anchor of identity. Today such a facility, in any meaningful way, no longer exists.

Nevertheless as ‘immigrationism’ has it, without for example the NHS being constantly being replenished from abroad it would collapse. But what happens to those far poorer countries that are deprived of the skilled labour they have invested in? For the immigrationist any such concerns are always trumped by their ‘right to a better life’. Medical skills are transferable, so if they want to cross borders to a richer country where they can improve their earning capacity that is their right – even their duty. And their duty to the country that trained them? Or to the people/patients they have left behind? They have little to say about any of it for a very good reason. For them the individual has primacy over society, both in regard to the one he has left and in regard to the one he intends to join. Again, none of it has any bearing on internationalism of Marx and Engels. It is instead the internationalism championed by Friedman and Hayek.

Or as David Goodhart put it: “Mass immigration from poor countries creates a kind of development distortion, the human equivalent of global trade and fiscal imbalances: the best educated people leave countries that badly need them for rich countries that can certainly benefit from them, but do not need them in any proper sense. Some lucky people end up speeding up the development process for themselves and their families, while helping slow it down for everyone else back home.”

Or to put it another way, if international solidarity is to have real meaning it must be about benefitting peoples as a whole, rather than as now, encouraging, indeed insisting, the better heeled or better equipped decamp. Once again a reminder; the ‘global citizens’ liberals are most interested in, are the ones they imagine (“among the migrants were poets, writers and lawyers” – Christina Lamb, Sunday Times magazine) who most closely resemble themselves. Somewhere along the way, they have managed to turn the cry ‘bring me your poor and huddled masses’ on its head.

Exactly a century ago, from her prison cell, the revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg wrote: “Europe stands at the cross roads: either a transition to socialism, or a regression into barbarism.” As we know she was right. And as we know we got barbarism. Today Europe is approaching another sort of cross roads. And in spite of 2008 crash, the neo-liberal philosophy, with an immigrationist lobby serving as buffer, remains in rude health. With the opinion formers; media, liberal elite and big business all on the same side of the argument it is a quasi-nationalist right which steps up to become the default option. Only the working class organised independently can provide the natural opposition to ‘all of the above’. So if the situation is to be rescued the solution must be to bring the working class in Britain and then across Europe in from the cold. But if the working class is to be brought in from the cold it will need someone other than the populist/fascist right telling them: ‘You are the most important. We will fight for you.’

Wisdom has it that Jeremy Corbyn will never be PM. And as a consequence Labour will not be in government for the foreseeable future. What critics ignore is that none of his rivals would ever have formed a government either. Not because they are politically timorous, which they are, but because the gulf between Labour’s previous working class constituency and its contemporary base of support is now gargantuan. How can this be, when the commonly held view is that New Labour has been rejected decisively in favour of a return to the politics of the 80’s and Old Labour? Well, Labour may have indeed retreated from neo-liberalism, only to fall into the clutches of it’s sometimes ally, social liberalism, instead. A coalition limited to pulling together the public sector, union activists, and members of the metropolitan middle class, youthful idealist and ethnic minorities will not and cannot ever seriously engage, with the concerns of the working class proper. Liberalism’s in-built antipathies will see to that, and so it will never succeed. What it can do, indeed the only plausible route for Labour into government is alongside the SNP, Lib Dems and Greens. That is achievable. But once again the working class will be as firmly shut out, as shoved to the margins, as it was under Thatcher and Blair. And while it is true that UKIP supporters appear broadly approving of Corbyn’s politics on issues such as the NHS, housing, and the railways, any approving nods and winks will absolutely evaporate once the small print regarding his policy on immigration is foregrounded either by himself or his opponents. At the recent Labour conference the only thing the Labour leader said on the topic was: “In the past there was mass emigration from Britain, now there is some immigration to Britain.” His message to working class communities most directly affected: ‘Get over it’. Of course he wasn’t talking to them, but to, and for his supporters, so presumably saw no reason to mask his disdain. But it’s all too easy to imagine social democrats on the continent, fully aware of the price paid for such dismissive body language (the employment of ‘some’ for example), shaking their heads in despair.

A more public rebuke on similar lines when it matters and the options for many a concerned British voter will be rather limited: a) not vote, or b) like their French counterparts say ‘so be it’ and turn in ever greater anger and numbers to UKIP (who in opportunist fashion will adjust policy to suit) or whatever succeeds it. For Labour the choice is as follows. Take a step towards the working class and narrow the gap, or step the other way and let UKIP, (with bone fide fascists in tow) pour into the breach. Say no to the scenario in France and reverse away from it. Alternatively, demand mass immigration is “celebrated” and accelerate toward it instead. Overwhelmingly liberals will give their backing to the second option. A matter of principle they will say. It might meet with the dictionary definition alright. Yet no matter how you cut it there can be no disguising what we are dealing with here is an elite hand-me-down doctrine. At face value it might sound even noble. But people shouldn’t be taken in. Open borders and the free movement of capital, global citizenship and the free market all chime for very good reasons. In fundamental ways they represent the very opposite – and thus deadly enemy of – the democratic, progressive, anti-racist, much less, anti-fascist values their supporters claim they represent.

One hundred years ago, across Europe the left was organising with the working class against the political establishment. Today, where it matters, the liberal left is just as likely to be shoulder to shoulder with the establishment against them.

So we’re back to ‘either or’ again, but this time, with a twist.

[Luther Blissett]

In "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," the Chris Hedges / Joe Sacco book, they embedded themselves in four "sacrifice zones" in the United States for extended periods of time. Welch, West Virginia, was the primarily white locale that they visited, and it was the one place where the people they met, talked to, listened to stories by and sketched died (a few of them, I believe) while they were still in town. One got the sense that they were witnessing a bleak die-off. It wasn't even that bad on the res, in the picking fields, or in the decaying slum. I think that book was a fairly accurate predictor of this phenomenon. It definitely stuck with me.

[backtoiam]

the fact that this damn thread even exists is a disgrace. american dream is obviously the most fascist person in this forum why he is allowed to exist here? i don't get it? somebody explain it to me please?

he started this thread.

you can bet your ass i wont go pages on this but am just wondering. my mind is more evolved than trifling with this bullshit but i don't understand why this thread can live here.

[seemslikeadream]

can you imagine the fire storm if someone had posted this OP with a different adjective?

Has AD ever said here if he was for or against abolishing the white race?

[backtoiam]

I don't know but i guess spooky action at a distance is working around here because this goes EXACTLY against an anti fascist board and i am starting to notice. what the fuck?

[Wombaticus Rex]

can you imagine the fire storm if someone had posted this OP with a different adjective?

That is why this thread, merely by virtue of existing, is instructive.

Edit: Furthermore, there are all kinds of posts here at RI with inflammatory titles. Aside from our ongoing prohibition of "Fuck X" threads, I don't think we need to restrict that.

[seemslikeadream]

yes I know...I have posted some of those titles....but you must admit a title with a different adjective ...one that shall not be named would never, ever be allowed here

just an observation

[slomo]

the fact that this damn thread even exists is a disgrace. american dream is obviously the most fascist person in this forum why he is allowed to exist here? i don't get it? somebody explain it to me please?

he started this thread.

you can bet your ass i wont go pages on this but am just wondering. my mind is more evolved than trifling with this bullshit but i don't understand why this thread can live here.

Because of my position on free speech, I am heavily against the idea that AD should in any way be prevented from participating on this board. I think he's a douche, but I support his right to copypasta whatever. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to counter his BS.

I would be in support of gentle ... um ... incentives ... for limiting the proliferation of AD threads that seem more or less to be about the same thing.

[backtoiam]

The brain trust at at RI is huge. If were to be allowed unleash itself the potential would be awesome. But the main theme seems to be kill the white man. Really? Shit. There are so many smart people here. Brilliant people. Why is this constant color gender bullshit always on the front page? We should be discussing so many wonderful topics. I don't know. I become jaded.