Why the Emphasis on White-Skin Privilege is White Chauvinist

north america / mexico | migration / racism | other libertarian press Wednesday June 11, 2008 07:14 by illvox.org posting Fred Ho - APOC

I shall argue for the replacement of the “race” formulation and the over-emphasis upon “white-skin privilege” with a “return” to the national question(s) framework and argue that no separate politics or forms of organizing that centers and emphasizes its focus upon whites is correct or efficacious, but arguably, harmful and hurtful to the cause of building working class unity and power within the U.S.

My essay is a challenge to everyone in this room and at this conference.

First, I will argue for a replacement view of American history that rejects the inevitability of a white majority population, the sanctity of the presently configured borders of the U.S.A., and reject any notion of a white working class whose interests are special or distinctive for being white.

Second, I shall vigorously critique the emphasis given to “white-skin privilege” as the dominant characteristic in the conceptualizing of the oppression of so-called “peoples of color” in the U.S., and for its odious contribution to reinforcing white chauvinism within the U.S. left and working-class by delimiting the struggle of “oppressed nationalities” (what I prefer to call so-called “peoples of color”) to the goal of integration (with the white oppressor nation).

Third, I reject the dominance, centering, emphasis or assumed leadership of any struggles for revolutionary change in the U.S.A. to be based upon whites or white workers.

I shall argue for the replacement of the “race” formulation and the over-emphasis upon “white-skin privilege” with a “return” to the national question(s) framework and argue that no separate politics or forms of organizing that centers and emphasizes its focus upon whites is correct or efficacious, but arguably, harmful and hurtful to the cause of building working class unity and power within the U.S.

I propose that Leftists must center and concentrate their efforts upon the actual political and structural dismembering of the U.S.A. by building the multiplicity of national liberation struggles among the oppressed nations and nationalities, the destruction of the American nation-state as it has been constructed and construed, with the replacement of a multiplicity of new national identities and political energies that centers the U.S. revolutionary struggle among the workers of these national liberation struggles.
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The U.S.A. has a peculiar historical development. Founded by European settler colonization, the U.S.A. grew to its present borders through military force, the purchasing of vast land territories that were the spoils from former colonial powers (viz., the Louisiana purchase from France and the $7.2 million purchase of Alaska from Russia), the military annexation of northern Mexico and the Hawaiian islands, the expansion of settlements and industries to the Pacific Ocean, and the acquisition of islands and territories throughout the Caribbean, central America (eg., the Panama Canal) and the Pacific Islands (eg., Guam, America Somoa, etc.). Concurrently, via the manipulation of immigration laws, a concerted campaign to repopulate the continent of North America in favor of European-descended peoples and disfavoring all others, continues to the present.

Before the consolidation of the United States of America could occur, the Native peoples who inhabited the land that we now call “the lower 48″, with a rough estimated population range at the beginning of the 16th century to be between one to 10 million, had to be driven off their lands to make way for the new settlers, and ultimately, given the resistance by the Natives, nearly annihilated.

At first, the early European settlers were at the mercy of Native benevolence and assistance. However, as the settlers grew in number, their capitalist appetite for land and resources intensified. The Natives were unwilling to participate in the construction of a capitalist economic and social order. Social stratification and private ownership of land and resources was completely alien to them, and once experiencing the cruelties of exploitation and oppression, resisted such incursions and assaults upon their way of life and homeland.

The Christians brought the Devil to the “New World” and the Devil was them. So-called primitive peoples did not subscribe to the monotheism and anthropocentrism of the Europeans. It was not possible for these societies to regard even their enemies as sub-human or without a soul. It was not possible for them to regard nature as not a living being for which they, as humans, came from and belonged to. The Europeans, however, slaughtered and enslaved them as if they were logs to be felled, and their land and ecology nothing more than objects from which money could be made.

Native Americans could not be coerced into American plantation society or indentured servitude. Their completely non-capitalist mode of production, which had proven to be self-sufficient and stable for eons, were devoid of highly developed state repression structures, which could not be appropriated by and made to service the formation, facilitation and social control needs of a capitalist economy. The capitalist mode of production was as inimical to Native peoples as the diseases that the Europeans brought. Not predicated upon nor driven by profits and its concomitant social and cultural precepts of individualism, private ownership, monotheism, repressive state institutions, patriarchy and the nuclear family, etc. large scale social production was both completely foreign and toxic. Never had the Native peoples experienced such pandemics on the order introduced by Europeans: both biological and sociological.

Once it became clear that Native submission wasn’t going to happen, American settler-colonialism proceeded full force with genocide: the destruction of the native mode of production, a horrific “ethnic-ecological cleansing” that cleared natural and human life, which had existed and evolved for tens of thousands of years, an unprecedented ecocide, genocide and matricide waged for a few centuries, all for the purpose of the imposition of a new settler-colonial society that would become the U.S.A.

Once the process of ecocide-genocide-matricide was underway, and settler-colonialist society expanded, endeavoring to build a capitalist mode of production foisted upon a continent that neither needed nor engendered it, the newly expanding U.S.A. proceeded with the importation of a foreign-originated labor force, to at first supplement the already-existing indentured labor force of former Europeans, and then once the cotton gin revolutionized the instruments of mass production, for large scale agrarian labor.

Why were enslaved Africans more suitable? African feudalism and proto-capitalism (the production of commodities for exchange and the social and class relations needed to facilitate that exchange) had similarities to European feudalism and emerging capitalism: Large scale social production, huge surpluses, huge repressive state apparatuses (often used to facilitate slave trading among other Africans, Arabs and Europeans), widespread use of precious metal currency and also non-metal symbolic currency (eg., cowry shells), development of large sectors of production for exchange (textiles and food production), rich resources for luxury items coveted by the European market (precious metals, ivory, etc), elaborate infra-structure from centuries of inter-continental trade with Europe and Asia.

Imported Africans didn’t arrive as a ready-amalgamated nationality or people. They were valued precisely because they were so disparate and ethnically-culturally-linguistically so varied, and with the forced splitting of kinship and family ties, made even more conducive to organized exploitation for capitalist plantations. Hence U.S. capitalism necessitated this ironic amalgamation of Africans in the U.S.A., erasing particular African national or tribal identities for the new, amalgamated oppressed nationality identity as African Americans.

During the entire 19th century, the expansion and consolidation of the U.S.A. nation-state included massive land acquisitions that included the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France battered by the loss of Haiti and strained from its foreign wars and domestic revolts; the military conquest of 2/3rds Mexico which became incorporated as the U.S. southwest; the ongoing pacification wars against the Native peoples; the acquisition of territorial spoils from the Spanish-American War; and the illegal military annexation of the Hawaiian islands, 3000 miles from the Pacific shores of the U.S.A. In the early 20th century, the vast territory of resource-rich Alaska, purchased from a war-and-revolution-battered Russia for a measly $7.2 million in 1867, would be conferred U.S. territory status in 1912. By 1959, two lands, completely disconnected from the other 48 states, would become the 49th and 50th states of the U.S.A. (respectively, Alaska on January 3, 1959 and Hawaii on August 21, 1959).

From the 18th to mid-19th centuries, during the consolidation process of the U.S.A. nation-state, the American bourgeoisie had constant external conflicts primarily from England and France, as well as a growing internal conflict between the southern agrarian capitalists with the northern industrial capitalists. The Civil War was the consolidation of a unified nation-state under the political and economic leadership of the northern industrial capitalists, who victorious, and in control over the surplus profits of the internationally-traded southern-produced cash crops (cotton, tobacco, etc.) could now begin the formation of American finance capital and expand throughout the Americas and to the rest of the world (exporting either direct U.S. colonial rule and/or financial domination). As this unprecedented and exponential expansion of capital was occurring, huge labor needs had to be filled with the importation of labor from around the world and this period of the late 19th century is really the emergence of a U.S. multi-national proletariat, tho fitted into a constantly shifting racial matrix. This shift is primarily characterized by the increasing binary categorizing of “race” as “white” and “colored”. The price of the ticket to settler-colonial Yankee American society was to become “white.”

The myriad forms of national inequality conjoined with white supremacy to consolidate the U.S.A. as a racially defined nation-state in which an American or anything American became synonymously white.

Both for the purposes of social control, detailed in the important work of Ted Allen and others, and for what I’ve argued as the necessity of nation-state identity and structural formation and consolidation, the separation of peoples into “white” versus “others/foreigners/oppressed” in the U.S.A. was facilitated by the virus of “race” as a bio-social pseudo-scientific/cultural construction, extended from its original applications by European colonization.

The privileges accorded to “whites” (i.e., those accorded the status/identity as Americans) were consequently rooted in the conquest and subjugation of entire peoples, and reproduced and consolidated by a matrix of ideological, political and socio-cultural privileges granted to those who were accorded the status and identity of being “American” (which meant white). Those deemed white/American had the benefits of glorification and “manifest destiny”, whereas complete dehumanization was the condition for all those deemed “non-white” and excluded from consideration as Americans. White racism and white supremacy thus become normative. That which is American is equated as white. That which is or who is not “white” are NOT American.

Large influxes of Europeans to the U.S.A., including those who suffered national oppression in their homelands, such as the Irish, or faced harsh persecution, such as Jews and other religious-ethnic groups, were accorded the opportunity to join white American society, and share in the spoils of white-settler colonialism and expansionism. Though such European groups encountered initial discrimination, overall, the access and possibility for white assimilation was far preferable as participants in the consolidation of the Yankee nation-state than the perpetual wretchedness of exclusion and oppression for non-whites.

The unprecedented opportunities of settlerism, both real and hyped, included such privileges and enticements as the possibility for ownership of small plots of land, relative freedoms including voting rights for white males, small business ownership, and a host of other opportunities. What was required to access these real or propagandized privileges was a dedication to and support for the Yankee American way of life: kill off the Indians and take all of their land, disallow citizenship and competition from formerly enslaved Africans, remove and exterminate the Asiatics, keep the Mexicans subjugated. All “white” immigrants were given relatively unrestricted access to American citizenship. With the Chinese exclusionary immigration laws, tantamount to genocide, the Chinese were the only immigrant group which steadily decreased in number for nearly a century. Racist immigration exclusion and persecution extended to all Asian/pacific groups until 1964. Asian/Pacific peoples were the first and primary targets of racially-explicit immigration quotas and restrictive laws.

The formal history of the U.S. is the narrative of oppressor nation building. The counter-narrative is the history of the oppressed nations and nationalities. The American multi-national proletariat emerges during this historical process, beginning after the Civil War with the unification of American capital, the integration of a common national market (greatly facilitated by the trans-continental railroad for which super-exploited
Chinese labor outperformed the higher paying Irish workforce, and for which the Chinese workers were both barred from the ranks of U.S. organized labor as well as the annals of American history), the promotion of a white supremacist American historico-cultural narrative and identity with a full repertoire of Yankee Doodle Dandy mythologies and grand master narratives from song to scholarship.

To conclude my analysis of the historical development of the American nation-state, I want to summarize the concomitant white oppressor nation building process and the process of national oppression as indelible to American society:

1. White skin privileges both are byproducts of and contributors to white settler colonial national construction.
2. White privileges, as partial, tenuous and minor as they may be for poor and exploited whites, exceed the condition of national oppression relegated to those not conferred as white: genocide, terror, extreme restrictions, exclusion and constant brutal oppression.
3. In many cases whites have not been the majority population in “American history”, but became dominant both numerically and socio-politically through genocide, unjust immigration laws, forced exodus, ghettoization and marginalization, all practices aimed at the repopulation of the continent to ensure the hegemony of white supremacy.

The problem of race is that it primarily juxtaposes the political question as one of integration, as one of learning how to get along with one another, and not dealing with the question of returning land and territory and the battle for national equality. So it is about how do we get rid of our racist ideas or how do we deal with white privilege. White privilege is only one phenomenon of national oppression. The privileges happen because of the inequality between peoples, of which the first basis was depriving people of their land, resources and control of the fruits of their labor and innovations. The process of Americanization was the seizure of land and territory and then absorption or assimilation of that territory and those peoples into this mythical white supremacist thing called America. African Americans become Black Yankees when they assimilate the imperialist history and values of the Unites States, as opposed to seeing themselves as oppressed nationalities. Malcolm X demarcated the difference between identifying as oppressed versus identifying with the oppressor values and narrative: “We [Africans in the U.S.] are not Americans, we are victims of America”.

The political logic of “anti-racism” or “fighting white-skin privileges” ironically privileges the target of struggle upon the attitudes and behaviors of whites. It presumes white leadership, the apriori-ness of white numerical majority, the sanctity of the current borders and configuration of the 50 states, and even the presumption of white working class inclusion in the revolutionary struggle to end U.S. imperialism, viz., the domination of U.S. monopoly capital in the domestic aspect of such struggle. And hence, the U.S. left since its formal inception, with the exception of such notable energies as the African Blood Brotherhood, the CPUSA adoption of the Comintern position of the Black-belt Nation thesis, and the revolutionary oppressed nationality movements of the 1960s-early 1970s, has been plagued with the fundamental white chauvinist problem of centering and basing the U.S. multinational working class movement upon the white working class, i.e., the focus and concentration upon the workers of the oppressor nation, rather than centering, focusing and basing the leadership and development of forces among the workers of the oppressed nations/nationalities.

The U.S. multinational working class has erroneously been viewed as necessarily being a white majority (and the attendant chauvinist presumption, with majority white leadership). Rather, oppressed nationality workers are not only the numerical majority relative to their populations, but have, both respectively and collectively, it can be argued, greater political inclination towards radical and revolutionary positions due to the intrinsic nature of their contradiction with imperialism: super-exploitation combined with national oppression and external domination.

Only in the above cited notable exception of focus and concentration upon building the political leadership of the revolutionary national movements have any forces truly respected and grasped the objective reality that the national movements are objectively revolutionary, irregardless of, and with or without, the approval, presence or support of whites and white workers.

Thus the white integrationist-white chauvinist plagued Left has disregarded the importance of building and leading “nationality-in-form” formations, such as oppressed nationality student unions, militant community forces, independent cultural institutions, and the creative labor formations that elevate the role and leadership of oppressed nationality workers. The U.S. left has given scant emphasis upon the struggle to force the U.S. government to honor all treaties made with the Native nations, fighting for national rights, self-government, return of stolen lands and resources, reparations and the dismantling and eradication of all vestiges of white settler-colonialism, including the hegemony of classical music orchestras, white mythologies in education and scholarship, and even the notion of a white identity.

As part of upholding national self-determination, the U.S. left, in engendering the multiplicity of national liberation struggles, would support the dismantling and reconfiguration of the U.S. national borders should the struggle of oppressed nations culminate in forms of independence, autonomy or new federation relations. Asian Americans, for example, in the oppressed nation of Hawaii must choose between siding with the Yankee oppressor nation/identity or with being part of the oppressed Hawaiian nation: electing to identify as “I’m kanaka maoli (Hawaiian) of Japanese descent,” (or whatever new appellation is created in which immigrants to the Hawaiian nation explicitly identify with the Hawaiian nation and not with the Yankee nation-state, for example). A white person must proclaim, “I am a new Afrikan of European descent” or a “Xicano of European descent”, should they reside in what is now Mississippi or Texas, respectively.

Whites must recognize that they owe no special allegiance to white anything, including even the privileged view that the primary role of white leftists or white anti-racists is to concentrate in white communities. Whites have no entitlement to monopolize anything, EVEN THE DRAGS OF ORGANIZING WORK! The best way to “unlearn” whiteness (and be a true race traitor!) is to for people of European descent in the U.S.A. to give their all in exactly the same way as oppressed nationality freedom fighters: liberate stolen and occupied lands, return of resources and wealth, reparations, and to build a new society that will certainly mean the destruction of the U.S.A. as it has historically been constructed and construed, and the coming-into-being of voluntarily-associated liberated peoples and societies.