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Title: White Supremacy Author: Joel Olson Date: February 2012 Language: en Topics: white supremacy, Lexicon, Institute for Anarchist Studies Source: https://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-pamphlet-series/lexicon-white-supremacy/
Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve
tried, scientists have never been able to come up with an adequate
definition of it. Yet the social and political effects of race are very
real. Race is like a dollar bill—a human creation rather than a fact of
nature that has value only because people say it does. And like money,
people give race “value” because it serves a function in society. That
function in the United States is to suppress class conflict.
In the United States, the system of race (what we now call “white
supremacy”) emerged in the late 1600s to preserve the land and power of
the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if
indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew
them. Through a series of laws, they granted the English poor certain
rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native
American descent: the right to be excluded from enslavement, move about
freely without a pass, acquire property, bear arms, enjoy free speech
and assembly, change jobs, and vote. For their part, they respected the
property of the rich, helped seize indigenous lands, and enforced
slavery. In accepting this arrangement, the English poor (now called
“whites”) went against their class interests to serve their “racial”
ones, and thereby reinforced the power of the rich.
This cross-class alliance between the ruling class and a section of the
working class is the genesis of white supremacy in the United States. It
continues to this day. In this system, members of the cross-class
alliance get defined as white, while those excluded from it are
relegated to a “not-white” status. By accepting preferential treatment
in an economic system that exploits their labor, too, working-class
members of the white group or “race” have historically tied their
interests to those of the elite rather than the rest of the working
class. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy ever
since.
As this white alliance grew to include other ethnicities, the result was
a curious form of democracy: the white democracy. In the white
democracy, all whites were considered equal (even as the poor were
subordinated to the rich and women were subordinated to men). At the
same time, every single white person was considered superior to every
single person of color. It was a system in which whites had an interest
in and expectation of favored treatment, in a society that claimed to be
democratic. It was democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone
else.
In the white democracy, whites praised freedom, equality, democracy,
hard work, and equal opportunity, while simultaneously insisting on
higher wages, preferential access to the best jobs, informal
unemployment insurance (first hired, last fired), full enjoyment of
civil rights, and the right to send their kids to the best schools, live
in the nicest neighborhoods, and receive decent treatment by the police.
Even white women, who were otherwise denied full citizenship, enjoyed
the benefits of white democracy, such as the right to legal
representation, favored access to certain occupations (teaching,
nursing, and clerical work), easier access to better housing (including
indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, and time-saving household
appliances), and/or the all-important guarantee that their children
would never be enslaved.
In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du
Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation,
genocide, reservation, and other forms of racial oppression. The result
was that working-class whites and people of color were oppressed because
the working class was divided. The tragic irony is that many poor whites
often did not get to make use of these advantages, yet despite this,
they defended them bitterly.
The white democracy continues to exist, even after the end of slavery
and legal segregation. Take any social indicator—graduation rates,
homeownership rates, median family wealth, prison incarceration rates,
life expectancy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer rates,
unemployment rates, or median family debt—and you’ll find the same
thing: in each category, whites are significantly better off than any
other racial group. As a group, whites enjoy more wealth, less debt,
more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more
safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police
brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites
have a better work ethic. But U.S. history tells us that the white
democracy, born over four hundred years ago, lives on.
The white race, then, does not describe people from Europe. It is a
social system that works to maintain capitalist rule and prevent full
democracy through a system of (relatively minor) privileges for whites
along with the subordination of those who are defined as not white. The
cross-class alliance thus represents one of the most significant
obstacles to creating a truly democratic society in the United States.
This is not to say that white supremacy is the “worst” form of
oppression. All oppression is equally morally wrong. Nor is it to imply
that if white supremacy disappears, then all other forms of oppression
will magically melt away. It is simply to say that one of the most
significant obstacles to organizing freedom movements throughout U.S.
history has been the white democracy, and that it remains a major
obstacle today.
In a global economy (and a global recession), corporate elites no longer
want to pay white workers the privileges they have historically enjoyed.
Instead, they want to pay everyone the same low wages and have them work
under the same terrible conditions.
Generally speaking, whites have responded to this attempt to treat them
like regular workers in two ways. One is through “multiculturalism.”
This approach, popular in universities and large corporations, seeks to
recognize the equality of all cultural identities. This would be fine,
except multiculturalism regards white as one culture among others. In
this way, it hides how it functions as an unjust form of power.
Multiculturalism therefore fails to attack the white democracy. It
leaves it standing.
The other response is color-blindness, or the belief that we should “get
beyond” race. But this approach also perpetuates the white democracy,
because by pretending that race doesn’t exist socially just because it
doesn’t exist biologically, one ends up pretending that white advantage
doesn’t exist either. Once again, this reproduces white democracy rather
than abolishes it.
There are right- and left-wing versions of color-blindness. On the
Right, many whites sincerely insist they aren’t racist but nonetheless
support every measure they can to perpetuate their white advantages,
including slashing welfare, strengthening the prison system, undermining
indigenous sovereignty, defending the “war on drugs,” and opposing
“illegal immigration.” On the Left, many whites assert that race is a
“divisive” issue and that we should instead focus on problems that
“everyone” shares. This argument sounds inclusive, but it really
maintains the white democracy because it lets whites decide which issues
are everyone’s and which ones are “too narrow.” It is another way for
whites to expect and insist on favored treatment.
Multiculturalism and color-blindness (on the Right or Left) are no
solution to white supremacy. The only real option is for whites to
reject the white democracy and side with the rest of humanity. Fighting
prisons, redlining, anti-immigrant laws, police brutality, attacks on
welfare (which are usually thinly disguised attacks on African
Americans), and any other form of racial discrimination are valuable
ways to undermine the cross-class alliance. So are struggles to defend
indigenous sovereignty, affirmative action, embattled ethnic studies
programs in high schools and colleges, and the right for people of color
to caucus in organizations or movements. All of these struggles—which
people of color engage in daily, but whites only occasionally do, if at
all—seek to undermine whites’ interest in and expectation of favored
treatment. They point out the way toward a new society.
We can see this in U.S. history, when fights to abolish the cross-class
alliance have opened up radical possibilities for all people. Feminism
in the 1840s and the movement for the eight-hour day in the 1860s came
out of abolitionism. Radical Reconstruction (1868–76) very nearly built
socialism in the South as it sought to give political and economic power
to the freedmen and women. The civil rights struggle in the 1960s not
only overthrew legal segregation, it also kicked off the women’s rights,
free speech, student, queer, peace, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American
Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble,
everything is possible. An attack on white supremacy raises the level of
struggle against oppression in general.
Even today, the white democracy stands at the path to a free society
like a troll at the bridge. The task is to chase the troll away, not to
pretend it doesn’t exist or invite it to the multicultural table. Of
course, this doesn’t mean that people currently defined as white would
have no role or influence in such a society. It only means that they
would participate as individuals equal to everyone else, not as a
favored group.
Political movements in the United States must make the fight against any
expression of white democracy an essential part of their strategies. The
expansion of freedom for people of color has always expanded freedom for
whites as well. Abolishing white interests is not “divisive,” “narrow,”
or “reverse racism.” It’s the key to a free society.