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Title: What is Race? Author: sub.media Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: race, primer, video transcription, Breadtube Source: https://sub.media/video/what-is-race/ Notes: a transcription of the sub.media film short of the series “A is for Anarchy”
As individuals, our racial identity is so intimately inscribed into the
ways that we see and experience the world, and other people in it, that
it's often taken as a natural and unchanging fact of life. Race is a
social construction, meaning that the stigmas and divisions associated
with it are born out of political and cultural, rather than purely
biological factors. But it's also a material reality – one that plays a
central role in shaping the ways that power operates in a specific
society. Given the current wave of racist and nationalist reaction
sweeping the globe, it is important that anarchists develop a shared
understanding of race, and the role that it plays in constructing and
reinforcing oppressive hierarchies.
So... what is race, exactly, and what do anarchists have against it?
Well, a broad definition would be to say that it's a particular type of
caste system, or a way of classifying people into rigid social
hierarchies, based on perceived ancestry and intimately associated with
notions of nationalism, citizenship and class.
Most commonly associated with the global system of European colonial
dominance known as White Supremacy, race has other close parallels, such
as India's varna system, the ethnic constructions of Hutu and Tutsi in
Rwanda and Burundi, and even religious sectarian divides such as those
found between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland or Sunnis and Shia in
several Middle Eastern countries.
But while race can, and does assume a variety of different forms based
on local demographic and political factors, it has always been, and
remains to this day, a cross-class alliance – a way of binding the
ruling class and a segment of the exploited classes through a compact of
shared identity, in order to project force against those who fall
outside of it. Or to put it simply, it's a way that states manipulate
large groups of people into believing that they have more in common with
their rulers than with the fellow ranks of the oppressed.
An early precursor of modern concepts of race lies in the idea of the
barbarian, which was developed independently by the rulers of a diverse
number of early states, ranging from the Shang Dynasty in ancient China,
to the Greek and Roman Empires of Eurasia, and Aztec and Inca Empires of
modern-day Central and South America. By dehumanizing different ethnic
groups outside their borders as barbarians, rulers were able to mobilize
armies and rationalize the enslavement of captured populations.
Centuries later, the rise and spread of powerful monotheistic religions
added a new dimension to the construction of race, as the ideological
conception of the barbarian was given new weight by the introduction of
the notions of “pagan” or “infidel”. Religious dictates calling for the
forced conversion of non-believers sanctified new wars of conquest,
waged by the armies of Christianity and Islam. Fearing the expansionary
rise of Islam which by the 11th Century had spread deep into the heart
of European Christendom, the Catholic Church teamed up with feudal
elites to launch the Crusades, a series of holy wars spanning nearly
four hundred years and planting the seeds of ethnic, national and
sectarian rivalries that continue to this day.
In the final years of the Reconquest of Spain, the Catholic Church
ramped up popular sentiments of anti semitism and Christian hysteria by
launching the Spanish Inquisition – a bloody purge and forced conversion
of Muslims and Jews that provided a horrific new laboratory for the
development of race as an internal system of division and social
control. The Spanish Reconquest was completed in 1492, and was followed
in quick succession by Christopher Columbus' accidental invasion of the
Americas. Believing the so-called “discovery” of the New World to be
sign of divine providence after their holy victory against Islam, Spain
launched the colonization of the Americas with a brutal religious
fervour, waging a genocidal campaign of extermination against the
continents' original inhabitants, alongside mass forced conversions
carried out by Jesuit and Franciscan priests.
In the decades that followed, Spain was joined in its pillage of the
Americas by Portuguese, Dutch, and French colonialists. They were soon
faced with a labour shortage, however, after working many Indigenous
slaves to death and killing millions of others through diseases like
smallpox. So, beginning in the early 16th century, Portuguese merchants
established the transatlantic slave trade, a grotesque process of racial
dehumanization whereby millions of people were kidnapped from West
Africa and shipped across the ocean to slave-trading posts in the
Caribbean and Portuguese plantations in Brazil.
Britain joined the fray in 1607 and quickly set to work expanding the
transatlantic slave trade, establishing the vast southern Plantation
system and kick-starting a process of unprecedented mass European
migration. Within Britain's thirteen American colonies, a new pact of
racial supremacy was forged between settlers of mixed European descent,
based on their shared experiences of killing Natives and subjugating
Africans.
This new system, white supremacy, provided all white men with a share of
the spoils stolen through genocidal territorial conquest and an economy
built on slave labour. It also happened to make a small number of those
white men unimaginably rich, setting the stage for the rise of
capitalism. Despite ongoing controversy regarding her own racial
identity, one of the most comprehensive descriptions of how white
supremacy functions in the United States was written by Andrea Smith,
who identified its three supporting pillars as: Slavery/Capitalism,
Genocide/Colonialism and Orientalism/War.
bodies, and to their need to be controlled through force and
imprisonment.
to disappear or assimilate into settler society, in order to justify
white people's claims to the lands that they currently occupy.
barbarian, conjures up the image of outside forces seeking to infiltrate
and destroy society, whether they take the form of Islamic terrorists,
hostile foreign states, or simply the spectre of “illegal immigrants” in
general.
Over the centuries, these three racial archetypes have been deeply
ingrained in the white psyche. And so when Black people cry out that
their lives matter, Indigenous people assert claims to their traditional
lands and culture, or refugees fleeing wars and poverty demand their
rights to political asylum, it is unsettling to the power structure that
these pillars prop up. The response of states and rulings elites will
always be to attempt to reinforce these pillars by fanning the flames of
white paramilitary reaction.
For anarchists who seek a new world built on the destruction of the
state and capitalism, our task is to help to knock out the pillars that
these systems rest upon. For some, this will mean severing the false
bonds of whiteness and joining the resistance of those who have long
struggled under its yoke.
Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.