We have the classic race vs. class debate going on in the comments. I have also received (and not published) a mind-boggingly absurd comment arguing that slavery was not a fundamentally racist institution.
Let me say first that in my view it really isn't possible in the United States to separate the issues of class and race. The basic reason why we have never developed an effective workers' party and had a relatively weak labor movement and a very limited socialist tradition compared to most of western Europe is because the working class has been divided by race. Yes, there have been attempts to organize along class lines and across racial lines, from the CIO to ACORN. As a former ACORN organizer, I can tell you that the racism of poor white people is absolutely vicious and it is agonizingly difficult to get them to see past it. I'm talking Philadelphia here, not Birmingham, by the way. Yes, there are exceptions and there are occasional cases of the scales falling from people's eyes, but at a large scale this is really the fundamental problem of U.S. society. It should go without saying that class also correlates with race, albeit far from perfectly.
As for the history of racism, that is actually interesting and may come as a surprise to many people. The concept of a white race or white racial identity is fairly modern. In an important essay in The Guardian, Robert P. Baird lays out the history of whiteness.
Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in “the discovery of personal whiteness” took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What’s more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed [W.E.B.] Du Bois’s suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, “slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.
In short, plantation owners in the British colonies depended on indentured labor, including that of white people; but Christians could not be kept in perpetual bondage. Africans, who were not Christian, could be. But then, to ward off uprisings:
The plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
This happened because Christian leaders insisted on converting the Africans to Christianity. But this "required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called “a screen of racial contempt”. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white."
And with the concept of whiteness came the concept of white supremacy. Who counted as white expanded over time. It didn't originally include Irish or eastern European people, for example. And the ideology of white supremacy required evocation of Biblical and scientific authority. You should read Baird's entire essay, I can't do it justice by summarizing. So read it. It's important.
7 comments:
Oooo...thank you for the long read. I've read a great deal similar but nothing quite so succinct.
What drives much of my (highly visible) frustration is observing race relations and minority economies actually decline over the past 40 years while middle class liberals retreat into a Utopia of Scolding. Race and class are inextricably interwoven in america but class came first and, more importantly, you won't make one bit of headway by focusing on the former. No one since the invention of dirt has anyone responded positively to being told that they are wrong, bad, dumb, or uncouth. Focusing on that is nothing but an in-group signaling device, no different from a "Trump 2020" flag flying from a truck.
This wouldn't be bad in itself except that it is used to shut down class analysis in liberal spaces and foreclose any possibility building alliances with "those people." Yes, it is hard work but it can be done, as numerous movements throughout american history have shown. It is made exponentially more difficult today by the need to constantly fend off attacks from the left. One of the reasons I like Montana so much is that most of the people here are objectively poor and thus more open to seeing things through a class lens. It helps immensely that this is a mining state with a long history of labor exploitation, strikes, and capitalist violence. Of course, I have to overcome generations of race propaganda and 40 years of anti-union propaganda as well.
On the plus side, the Dems are finally starting to come around on the idea of universal programs such as M4A even if hampered by their means-testing reflex. We just have to wait until the party gerontocracy dies off.
Again I think this is something of a false dichotomy. Progressives want a higher minimum wage, full employment policy, universal access to higher education and preschool -- all sorts of things that don't mention race. I don't see the left attacking class based organizing and politics. But you have to do both; structural racism and inequality are real and raising the minimum wage or putting people to work building the smart power grid isn't going to make them go away. I don't see any contradiction, if it's done adroitly.
As I say, trying to get those poor white people in Fishtown to see that their problems weren't The Coloreds ("They're all on welfare, and they're taking all the jobs") was like pissing into the wind, and maybe talking about racism turns them off, but you still have to do it.
That's the thing about it, estemado Cervantes, you are just plain wrong. You really don't have to talk about it. Not at all. I have no trouble getting people to focus on the Kochs, or Wall St, and simply sidestepping talk of race. Don't argue with them about The Coloreds, just refuse to engage on the subject; you'd be amazed how fast that talk dies away when it falls on deaf ears. You, like many liberals, think they'll keep banging that drum but it gets dropped like a hot coal when you offer their parents and children medication and don't scold them in the process.
Moreover, I'm not sure what corners of the left you inhabit, but I see a great many attacking "class reductionism" when it's pointed out that black is a class. The article you linked to is essentially the long form of an argument I've made many times, only to have Good White Liberals dismiss it as irrelevant and insulting to minority experiences. For most of them it's easier to write off "those people" as irredeemable bigots than to try to, you know, meet them where they are. People like you demanding that we talk about racism in every single encounter are the reason we can't make headway with these folks. If chattering incessantly about racism worked we'd be in the Color Blind Utopia by now.
As I've said before, all the gains in civil rights were made when most people's personal economy was improving, and were erased as those degraded. The culture, especially popular media, is more segregated now than it was in the 1980's. The only answer that has ever shown the slightest inclination to success is lifting all the boats. Put a few million people to work at $50/hr building a green infrastructure and watch those people change their attitude. It won't be overnight, and they will never come as far as you might like, but they will relax their defenses and stop looking for A Colored to blame. Maybe after a few generations of that...
And that, with any human being, is all you can ever hope for. As Lincoln said "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever built."
Sorry man but I see this as a total straw man argument. You aren't responding to anything I actually said or anything that progressive people in general believe or say. You are tilting at windmills.
Hmmmm... Let's take a look at that.
1. You asserted that we must continue to talk about racism. I argue, and have experience indicating, that we need not and it is, in fact, counterproductive.
2. You asserted that the left does not attack class-based organizing. This is strictly true but falls apart in much practice. I have repeatedly seen it refuse to work with class qualified people who hold retrograde cultural opinions.
3. You asserted that we can successfully address both racism and class issues. I argue, and have experience to indicate, that we cannot. Talk of the former drives away class allies without whom we have zero chance of winning.
4. You reassert that the residents of Fishtown will not accept the formulation that The Coloreds are not their enemy. I argue that the proposition is irrelevant and distracting because broad prosperity makes people less vulnerable to racist appeals.
So no, not a single strawman in sight.
Here's the basic problem: The progressive left that wants M4A and other universal programs is too small and weak to attain them. The mainstream left organs (e.g. democratic party) are actively opposed. A sufficient number of liberals (esp the white middle class variety) support those in principal but don't care enough to do much. This is where movement politics is required, but such a movement needs a shit-ton more people than the prog left currently has, thus requiring a much broader coalition. Whelp, the only place to recruit that coalition is Fishtown, because that's where the majority of neoliberalism's victims reside. Such an alliance requires both that you both (a) work with people you bitterly disagree with otherwise and (b) don't lecture them on their wrong-headed beliefs. Oddly, the righties I have met seem to adapt this far better than the lefties.
During my final incarnation within America's War Machine I neither wore a uniform or gave my real name on deployment. Most of the people I worked with were...unsavory...and I made it a point to never correct any of their assumptions about me or anything else. In fact, unless it would interfere with my mission, I simply did not contradict them at all. The inability to perform this way is a lethal weakness in modern left organizing.
This is a general line some people take, but it seems to me you are too absolutist and tendentious, also somewhat missing an important point. I'd call this Bernie Bro on steroids. The problem with this is at least two-fold. Note that people of color are far more likely to vote for progressive candidates and be active in progressive causes than are poor white people. The people in Fishtown told me they wanted to nationalize the oil companies and have universal health care, but these were abstractions to them that they didn't connect with either political party or particular politicians. They voted for Frank Rizzo because he articulated their racism. That's all they really cared about. They saw the economy and social status as a zero sum game -- either we get it or they do. That's what Trumpism is all about. Trump voters aren't even low income, for the most part. But they see their privileged social status threatened by a more diverse and egalitarian society. They even oppose programs that would benefit them personally because they would also benefit people they see as undeserving and level things out. That's what they don't want. You can't make it go away by ignoring it.
Yes, class is what ultimately matters but in the U.S. it's inextricably wound up with race. You can't pull them apart and just take on one. It doesn't work that way.
I am, indeed, an absolutist, but I don't consider that a bad thing. We're going around in circles here, so I'll simply close with this: Fred Hampton showed us how and was so successful that the FBI assassinated him. That kind of organizing is the only kind they truly fear. Ask yourself why that is.
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