To first define what it is, I am going to go over a brief history of whiteness in the United States and then bring it up to the past election.
Whiteness is a protection racket that used to provide material bonuses. It is a minimally advantageous deal that the ruling class continuously renegotiates with a part of the working class, and the first such deal happened before the founding of the United States. I am thinking of the Virginia Codes of 1705, in response to Bacon’s Rebellion, during which black and white colonists united against a governing aristocrat. The carrot was material advantage, and the stick was basically death by official hanging or lynching through the 1960s. The vast majority of white people are not personally malignantly prejudiced, but they are still more or less aligned with white supremacy, and enjoy their privileges, such as they are.
Whiteness has gone through several large renegotiations, like the integration of the Irish and the civil war, the resolution of which required the sacrifice of the democratic hopes of the radical abolitionist vision for the country and therefore those of the freed slaves in the compromise of 1877. Those Romantic Southern gentlemen would be ideologically redeemed over the next couple of decades. That settled, some new immigrants, who would be part of the newly recomposed “white working class” went on the offensive in the railroad wildcat strikes of that very same year. Like the Tammany Hall had served for the Irish, the Knights of Labor served as the organizational expression of this part of the working class, and there was a struggle over the race question—they were willing to allow some blacks to join, but they were reluctant and ambivalent, and they were totally anti-Chinese.
Then there was Sam Gompers’s unambiguously racist American Federation of Labor. You could say that the afl took the skilled workers from the Knights, and the unskilled were unrepresented until the appearance of the Wobblies, during the transition from craft to industrial unionism. The Wobblies were openly anti-racist, and they were the only labor organization not to fall victim to white supremacy in the manner of the Knights and the others that followed. Their anti-racism was not an ideology, though they were passionate about it, but a necessity of their open and aggressive anti-capitalist, pro-revolutionary, pro–class struggle stance. Revolution requires the organization and mobilization of the whole working class, period. Appropriately, one of the founders of the iww was a black woman, Lucy Parsons. In any case, the final acceptance of workers’ combinations and the repeal of Prohibition were the last major expansions of whiteness, and we know that these took place during the Great Depression and World War II. We can clearly see that whiteness is the product of class struggle that hasn’t challenged white supremacy. It is not bound to ethnicity or culture, though it does carry an identity of a sort, a blankness and an obliviousness that is “normal” in the context of a thoroughly commercial, fully capitalized American culture. White ethnicities of origin become mostly decorative.
The potted history above is the story of “White Man’s Democracy.” Small-government “Populist” and Indian-killer Andrew Jackson epitomizes this vision of American life—free white men competing in the free market on a continent under a manifest destiny and a divine dispensation, in which political parties reward their loyal allies when in power. This sounds familiar, because it’s mother’s milk in the United States.
Like I mentioned above, the New Deal was the last major component of “White Man’s Democracy.” It worked for a while, particularly to cultivate a layer of business-friendly union officials and to exclude radicals from the labor unions. That was the bright midday of us imperialism, and whiteness was a kind of state-subsidized illusion of Jeffersonian/Jacksonian independence, individualism and stolid self-reliance. But “White Man’s Democracy” came under attack in the transition from the postwar boom to the new era we live in today. I mean the civil rights and black power movements and later the women’s movement, and the most intense period of class struggle since the end of World War II. We can call this era postwar too, if you mean Vietnam, or we can call it “neoliberalism.” The defining characteristics of this new era are the assault on the public sphere, including all the gains of “White Man’s Democracy,” and thereby the contraction of social reproduction. Developed-world capitalism goes cannibalistic.
This attack of the ruling class on the working class in motion—the whole working class, and sometimes under black leadership in auto—from the wildcat strikes in auto factories in Detroit, across the country in trucking and civil services like the post office, and agriculture, like the grape and lettuce fields, was necessitated by the economic crisis resulting from three things: (1) international competition with us capital, (2) wartime deficit spending and (3) higher wages, which were the fruit of working-class militancy. The crisis took the form of consumer goods inflation and weak economic growth, and then layoffs, unemployment, and industrial reorganization, including factory relocation to the South and other countries. Life in the ghettos was that much more precarious, because black workers, migrants from the South in the 1920s and during WWII, were already the last hired and first fired.
Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” inspired by George Wallace’s 1968 populist campaign, provided the ideological script for what came next: a reassertion of whiteness, by which he meant patriotism, war and reaction, as a neglected public value, and white folks as neglected citizens, “the silent majority.” There were no longer material benefits to expect, just wrongs to right and property to defend.
The economic crisis did the rest. Social disintegration from this economic transition manifested in crime, drug use, and public disorder, and so white flight from city centers to suburbs, formerly incentivized by New Deal mortgage policy, continued throughout the 1970s. Racial discrimination, segregation, and oppression is ok as long as money is the mechanism, and this has become a major theme of American life. It didn’t take long for, say, the openly racist Boston anti-busing movement to become the slick conservationist and economistically framed BusStop movement of the San Fernando valley in Southern California, which was run by the same core group of people behind the so-called “tax-revolt” Proposition 13. They defeated busing in 1979. The Sunbelt, and the “New South,” saw its boom here, as factories relocated to anti-union states. Some workers followed.
A sort of siege mentality foreshadowed by Nixon’s script took hold. Capitalists were having a hard time making a profit, and therefore it was harder to get a job, let alone a good paying job. Those that had them wanted to hold on to them. Ecology and the “new movements” took hold on what passed for a left, and elsewhere various formations such as “citizens,” “consumers,” “concerned parents,” “Christians” and “red-blooded Americans” dug in. These defensive identities sought to preserve the advantages, such as they were, of whiteness. I mean house prices, school budgets, tax dollars, family wages, business opportunities, pensions, union seniority, etc. No new material benefits, just defense against them.
The end of stagflation didn’t restore the good old days. Volker’s interest rate hikes and super-strong dollar put more manufacturers out of business and more workers out on their ear. The “unskilled” part of the working class has never recovered.
This defensive hunkering down remains the basic posture of whiteness and its associated identities. The ideological script Nixon introduced and Reagan reiterated remains in effect. But the declining economic prospects for white workers have required innovations in victim-blaming and self-loathing. These have formed justifications for the nastiness and brutality of public policy since the late 1970s, like the end of desegregation policies, the war on drugs, a wave of “reverse racism” lawsuits, mandatory minimums, the defunding and destruction of public housing, welfare reform, the attacks on public employees and all the rest.
Without getting too psychological, I want to emphasize what I think is the most important aspect of whiteness today, given the fact that the positive material benefits have been declining. I guess it has to be called a privilege, but it is hard to make the case ultimately. The plight of white workers is just the same as that of the working class in general: dire. Consider that the decline in material benefits is not only evident in job prospects and economic security for “unskilled” workers, but also the wealth lost by white families in the two bubbles and the generally out of control indebtedness of workers. That’s the New Deal heritage out the window, and that’s the last positive piece of “White Man’s Democracy,” given that capital is reaching deeper into workers’ lives and pockets than ever before. Now that I have said that, here’s this last so-called privilege, a deadly poison: it is the sine qua non of whiteness, and it is the annihilation of solidarity: this is the privilege not to know and therefore not to care.
This know-nothing ignorance is defended vigorously and often, and it seems like most current ideology has this as its aim. I have had a couple of conversations recently in which people wanted to impotently bash Trump in some sort of virtue-signaling circle-jerk. In one of these I started instead with how terrible Obama had been. I mentioned his despicable use of the civil rights legacy to legitimize himself, and I said something to the effect of “Like Martin Luther King and Obama are somehow on the same continuum.” My interlocutor said he didn’t know enough about mlk to make a judgment, and therefore foreclosed critical discussion. This is a guy who has no problem having political opinions about all kinds of things, but somehow he doesn’t know that mlk would have been against drone bombings. This is a 50-plus year old man, by the way.
This willful ignorance and callousness was the object originally purchased by the material benefits, but now it seems to function as an asset in itself. To make this concrete beyond the anecdotal, this is not only about consciousness and psychology. I am thinking about geography and spatial racial and economic segregation. Most of the country is not laid out anything like New York City. Most of the country is like here in Los Angeles, where one can drive from one’s subdivision to the freeway, to a major thoroughfare and to the office, and never see anything else. The “white bubble” was made physical a long time ago, before the crisis, and people still live in that material space. And of course suburbs are often racially segregated via class mechanisms. This ignorance is the general anesthetic that allows one to cut off one’s own nose to spite one’s face, and not notice. Later, bleeding to death, one has forgotten what happened, and seeks to blame others. This breeds the currents of nastiness and vulgarity we hate among our class brothers and sisters, and it has to be addressed, in some way. It might not be possible to address it directly. I don’t know. But to maintain a large number of workers in this state of callousness and brutality is the whole point of whiteness, after all.
So Trump has been running the same script as Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan, but after almost 4 decades of economic decline, it seems to me not to pack the same punch. Reagan won in a landslide, remember. I am not convinced that Trump voters are more reactionary than Clinton voters. As Black Agenda Report has been saying, the Democrats are the more effective evil. I am not convinced that there was even a substantially racist swing in the vote in those areas that were decisive to the election, if by “racist” we mean personal prejudice. There’s evidence that many of Trump’s general voters would have voted for Sanders. I think what most likely happened is that a decisive portion of Midwestern voters decided to throw a stick of dynamite into Washington.
I am not even convinced that Trump’s racism and misogyny was even an added bonus to this “fuck you,” except insofar as it made him even more offensive and unacceptable to limousine liberal types. That is not the same thing as agreeing with him or cheering him on in those particular bits of backwardness. My point is that Trump’s victory may look like the silent majority rising, it may look like voters choosing “morning in America,” but I don’t think it actually is. There was no positive referendum on anything here—just a condemnation of the Democrats among a certain section of Midwestern voters. I think trade and xenophobia were more important to those voters, while, however, the basic posture of white identity and white supremacy have not changed, and the us working class divisions are still in place. This is a reason to criticize Trump voters for their foolishness. “America first” protectionism, immigrant bashing, visa-revoking and all the rest is not going to protect them from the market anyway, and anyone should be able to think that through. In the United States, whiteness is the reason they can’t.
Comments
correction: I meant to write “homogenization.” For convenience, here is my comment, corrected (sorry):
In the cover letter he sent out announcing the new issue of IN, John Garvey described your essay as “ground breaking.” Since the first part of the essay is a recapitulation of history covered previously by others, I assume he was referring to the following excerpt:
“Without getting too psychological, I want to emphasize what I think is the most important aspect of whiteness today, given the fact that the positive material benefits have been declining. I guess it has to be called a privilege, but it is hard to make the case ultimately. The plight of white workers is just the same as that of the working class in general: dire. Consider that the decline in material benefits is not only evident in job prospects and economic security for ‘unskilled’ workers, but also the wealth lost by white families in the two bubbles and the generally out of control indebtedness of workers. That’s the New Deal heritage out the window, and that’s the last positive piece of ‘White Man’s Democracy,’ given that capital is reaching deeper into workers’ lives and pockets than ever before. Now that I have said that, here’s this last so-called privilege, a deadly poison: it is the sine qua non of whiteness, and it is the annihilation of solidarity: this is the privilege not to know and therefore not to care. . . This willful ignorance and callousness was the object originally purchased by the material benefits, but now it seems to function as an asset in itself.”
You describe the spatial segregation that allows white people not to see the sufferings of others, and then summarize: “This ignorance is the general anesthetic that allows one to cut off one’s own nose to spite one’s face. . [T]o maintain a large number of workers in this state of callousness and brutality is the whole point of whiteness, after all.”
If I understand you, you are saying that the material basis of whiteness has largely disappeared (I assume you are speaking tendentially, not absolutely), leaving working-class whites like amputees, scratching at the place where the limb used to be. If that is the case, then how does whiteness differ from religion, astrology, conspiracy theories and other beliefs that do not reflect social reality and that can be expected to pass from the scene or decline in importance in the normal development of the capitalist system and the increasing homogenization and immiseration of the world’s non-possessing classes, and why, then, does it require special attention?
Thanks for responding, Noel. I think religion is closest to race in the question you ask, and it has been “racialized” with Muslims now and Catholics/Protestants before. And of course in the United States some conspiracy theories and strains of Protestantism go right along with white identity. The “paranoid style in American politics.” But to get the the meat of the thing, race and racism played a major role in the formation of the US working class (and the US state) and the division of labor and wages, while the others did not. It also forms individual subjectivity in a way only outmatched by religion, I think.
However, and I hint at this in the essay, I am not absolutely sure it requires special attention, if by attention you mean action, political intervention. It may be impossible to address it as a separate thing. It’s certainly impossible to solve it as a thing in itself.
The special attention it requires is theoretical, so we understand our situation.
By the way, the ignorance is not just a spatial residue, geographical leavings occluding clear sight. This is weaponized stuff, with plenty of ideological firepower. I won’t bore you with citations about any of this. I’d get disgusted listing them.
If my rubber was not meeting the road in the above reply, let me be clearer: race and racism were foundational in the creation of the working class, and that’s a large “usable past” for whiteness. Something to make great again. The nose-cutting is evident in things like property tax funding of schools. A race-to-the-bottom doom loop is built into every public good in the United States, and I would argue that this is racism at work; if *they* are going to benefit, then let’s not do it. When the results come to fruition, there’s somehow no similarly usable critical understanding of how it got that way. Witness the opioid epidemic, a “real tragedy” affecting “real people,” according to James Comey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqdmWRExOkQ#t=56s).
It is possible that religion functions similarly, but religion also has its own sphere, unlike race, which is woven into the entire secular world, and is built into material structures and institutions that we still live in. Most believers have what they would call a worldly knowledge, a common-sense, run-of-the-mill, workaday set of beliefs that let them go to work and pay their bills. (I know that there are plenty who try to impose the “spiritual” on all of life, and I also know it doesn’t really go very far.) Any secular topic runs straight into the race problem somewhere, because it was foundational to the formation and reproduction of the working class for a long time.
In my view this is an important discussion. Either the material privileges that underlie white identity among many working-class people are substantial even if they take a form different from the past, in which case they can only be done away with by confronting them directly through “action, political intervention,” or the privileges have been eroded to the point where the “white race” is a zombie still able to foul the air but whose stench can be expected to dissipate with the wind and which therefore requires little or no special attention beyond theoretical. It is not clear to me (or apparently to Amiri either) which view Amiri holds. Karl Marx held the second view when he wrote,
“While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”
Looking back it is clear Marx underestimated the tenacity of the “prerogatives” of whiteness and the possibility that they could be restored to serve as the main pillar of capitalist rule. I am willing, if persuaded, to set aside the politics I have pursued since I wrote The White Blindspot in 1967 (which call for acting against the actual privileges of whiteness as an essential part of class struggle, not merely challenging ideas past their expiration date), but I need to hear more argument that they have indeed become little more than phantoms kept alive by habit—like Wile E. Coyote, who doesn’t know he has run off the cliff until he looks down.
Aha! OK, I see. Thanks, Noel. I just re-read your essay on the White Blindspot, and I want to agree with you. I do agree with you. But what immediately jumps out at me is a lack of arenas in which to directly tackle white supremacy in the working class. There are no unionized industrial plants employing tens of thousands of people in Watts (there’s Amazon distribution centers 50 miles away in the Inland Empire), there are no candidates running on platforms even of affirmative action, let alone proportional representation (“quotas”), and the analogues of the “lily-white assemblers” (top-tier employees in “historically” segregated lines of work) are no longer reproduced, because new workers, even with the same skills, are on a second or third wage tier.
The recent UAW no vote in Canton, Mississippi, may show the new labor situation better. There was nothing going for the town, except that Nissan plant. It employs about 3,500 workers, and it is 80 percent black already. The workers feel like Nissan treats white workers better, but all the workers are scared of losing their good jobs. The UAW explicitly raised these black issues during the union drive. The UAW union drive failed, most likely because of threats that the union would cause “problems” that might make Nissan leave Canton. It’s also entirely possible the UAW was just insincere and unbelievable, and this along with fear could easily produce a no vote.
What about services, the tertiary sector? Several things immediately come to mind: the May 2006 general strike of Latino workers, Justice for Janitors, and the Fight for $15. The first two were Latino-led, and directly concerned mostly Latino workers. The Fight for $15 concerns more white workers, while about half of fast-food workers nationwide are black, Latino, or Asian, and certainly more in the major cities. Leaving aside the obvious fact that all three struggles concern large numbers of oppressed “minorities” asserting their rights, what within these struggles can can challenge white supremacy within the working class?
The Fight for $15 is probably the best example for your position, because the SEIU is going city by city, state by state, and the city in which it has had the greatest effect, Seattle, already at the $15 mark now in 2017 (as opposed to 2020, 2022, and other pie-in-the-sky timeframes in other locales), is the second-whitest major city in the country (Portland, Oregon, is first). So the terrain of battle would be within the SEIU. But now we’re back to reforming unions?
When I say I don’t know that white supremacy can be tackled directly, I mean that the working class is so lacking in institutions and so precarious in position that any working-class activity anywhere is going to mobilize everyone or fail miserably. The fact that Seattle of all places has the highest minimum wage is a direct result of white supremacy (“of course it’s Seattle and Sweden and Denmark”; “studies show” that “diversity” leads to lower “social cohesion”), but how does one directly challenge this in St. Louis or Houston or in any particular struggle where service workers are fighting for $15 and the right to unionize?
Meanwhile, what about other challenges to white supremacy, like Black Lives Matter? I am not referring to the spokesmen or the leadership, but to the people who hit the streets in Ferguson, Baltimore, and all over the place. They are almost entirely working class, and they have expressed no obvious class perspective nor have they acted in class-struggle fashion, with strikes or boycotts even. This is because they are marginalized and precarious. The closest BLM has come to a class perspective was the other way around: in the Fight for $15 mobilizations starting in fall 2014, when fast-food workers staged die-ins to protest the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. This has been an ongoing development, with fast-food workers unofficially making connections in their words and actions. SEIU has had nothing to say. Recently, a BLM organization in the Bay Area made a statement in support of the Fight for $15, and this has deepened recently: there’s an article in the American Prospect about a series of teach-ins called “Fight Racism, Raise Pay,” which seems to be a joint project of individual SEIU leaders (the union holds itself apart officially, still) reaching out to people around various BLM organizations.
But this is “extra,” right? This is voluntary, arbitrary, unnecessary, an appendage of whatever class struggle is going on with the Fight for $15. The Fight for $15 could continue without this connection between BLM and Fight for $15 growing. I don’t see why it couldn’t succeed without this connection, even though half of fast-food workers know they are subject to summary execution by the state.
Can you tell me how it is possible to act against the actual privileges of whiteness in these class-struggle situations?
Amiri
Thanks, Amiri.
In “Whiteness Again” you wrote “The plight of white workers is just the same as that of the working class in general: dire,” adding that “the last so-called privilege. . . is the privilege not to know and therefore not to care.” Seemed clear. But in the next paragraph you wrote “this is not only about consciousness and psychology. I am thinking about geography and spatial racial and economic segregation,” and in your first response to my comment you said “the ignorance is not just a spatial residue, geographical leavings occluding clear sight. This is weaponized stuff, with plenty of ideological firepower.”
I could not tell from the above if you were saying that the material basis of white denial had disappeared and all that remained was the phantom memory, or if the material base was still formidable. You seemed to be saying both. Let me say something about spatial separation: my father (b. 1907) grew up in a neighborhood in Philadelphia that was so Yiddish that he spoke no English before starting public school at the age of six. It made no difference to his life, because there was no presumption of inferiority; he simply learned English, and that was that. The Italians lived in Little Italy, the Poles in Little Warsaw, etc, and so long as the streetcars that carried them to the docks and the SKF plant ran they were able to work together and build the CIO. Not to say that everything was harmonious: growing up forty years later I was aware of three Euroamerican ethnic groups: Italians, Jews and Irish: we fought each other from time to time, but through it all the attitude of the state was, Work it out among yourselves. When it came to black people, things were different: I remember an incident from about the age of ten, when a couple of black kids forced me to hand over my lunch money. I happened to encounter a cop a block away, and told him what had taken place. He jumped into his squad car and with lights flashing and siren blaring took off after them the wrong way down the 4600 block of Walnut Street. (Philadelphians will know what that means.) I don’t know if he caught them, but I was terrified. I hadn’t wanted all that. From being grieved and embarrassed at losing my lunch money I shifted to feeling sympathy for the black kids—what the hell, they were just kids; others might have reacted differently. (Forgive the reminiscing; I am getting on in years.)
In your most recent reply you say you agree with “The White Blindspot.” I take that to mean you agree on the importance of the material base of white-supremacist ideology and the need to confront it politically, in action. I wrote that pamphlet in 1967, the year James Forman called the “high tide of black liberation.” The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was born out of a wildcat strike the next year; it flickered for a while and then went out. Things have been going downhill since, and the movement that once represented the most advanced outpost of the new society is now focused on afropessimism, reparations, cultural appropriation, microaggressions, allyship, VISA cards and other things we need not discuss—and the only thing worse is the movement apart from its black component, which ranges from Sanders (at best?) to Trump and Bannon (at worst?).
Immediately after saying you agreed with The White Blindspot you rightly noted “a lack of arenas in which to directly tackle white supremacy in the working class.” The steel mills and auto plans that brought black and white proletarians together, if not under conditions of equality at least in close proximity, are gone. Maybe the internet has replaced them, or can: the texting by residents of the West Bank to people in Ferguson with advice on how to handle tear gas was a moment of global significance. And there is always the army and the prison bringing together members of the dispossessed classes (a term I may start using in place of working class) of all “races” and all continents.
These are indeed the times that try men’s (and women’s) souls.
I have no idea of how to address the problem you raise, but if we are right that the material basis of white identity still exists, it can’t be sidestepped. I suspect the solution lies in making communism a reality in people’s lives, which demands renouncing all differences of caste and “race.” I am so-o-o ready.
Just wanted to say that the exchange between Amiri and Noel in the comments is an excellent supplement to the text of Amiri’s already excellent presentation.
Noel writes: “The steel mills and auto plans that brought black and white proletarians together, if not under conditions of equality at least in close proximity, are gone”
but this proximity and (limited or otherwise asterisked) equality is reproduced everywhere from fast food restaurants to warehouses to retail to all forms of healthcare facilities and beyond that have supplanted the large factories (well, the factories are still large, just with far fewer workers). I don’t think it’s accurate to equate the decline of the auto plants and steel mills employing thousands of workers with a decline of opportunities to cultivate and nurture class unity on the basis of lived experience.
Elsewhere, the concept of reciprocal solidarity was developed on exactly that topic as the legitimate recognition of the particular interests of segments of the class and the process of locating potential links within the class struggle, from the facts on the ground as they are as we find them. It’s our collective responsibility to be the agent of the synthesis of these particular interests into actions which reflect the interest of the whole class:
https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/reciprocal-solidarity/
I largely agree with the line of inquiry in Amiri’s last comment, aside from the observation that there are, “a lack of arenas in which to directly tackle white supremacy in the working class,” — which sounds like another way of saying that working-class unity is not a material possibility.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the Canton UAW was explicitly organized against discrimination—unless someone begins their analysis of the events there from one of the innumerable ideological hobbyhorses on the trade union question and tries to shoehorn-in what this explicit opposition to discrimination “really is” (a Machiavellian maneuver, bureaucrats smothering a movement… or just a trade union being what it claims to be and doing what it claims to do?).
Amiri writes, “Leaving aside the obvious fact that all three struggles concern large numbers of oppressed “minorities” asserting their rights, what within these struggles can challenge white supremacy within the working class?”
Isn’t the obvious answer that the existence of these struggles inherently challenges white supremacy in the working-class? That has to be the conclusion drawn from your preceding observation, that, “The Fight for $15 concerns more white workers, while about half of fast-food workers nationwide are black, Latino, or Asian, and certainly more in the major cities.”
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the main motor force of F15 are workers from oppressed minorities, and that it is a movement with significant resonance among working-class whites.
The growing-over of the fight against voter suppression in North Carolina with Fight for 15 also involves the demand by the predominately low-wage public employees in NC and their quasi-illegal trade union, UE Local 150, for basic trade union rights. Out of 80,000 +/- state workers in NC (not counting municipal and public school/college employment), approximately 30% are black and 60% white. Winning collective bargaining rights and associated material improvements would, like F15, disproportionately affect working-class whites; but, like F15, minority workers are in the forefront of the struggle. Recently, NC also attacked the trade union rights of farmworkers, trying to kill the local branches of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in the tobacco fields, which raises the potential to merge opposition to anti-immigrant legislation, resistance to ICE and opposition to xenophobia with the above…
What’s happening in NC are examples of arenas to directly challenge white supremacy, where the slogan of ‘unite and fight’ isn’t hollow sloganeering but has a tangible, identifiable basis and real-existing struggles from which to cultivate class unity. And that’s only focusing on the terrain of the workplace and through the lens of organized labor.
I wouldn’t let go of your thesis in “Black Worker, White Worker” just yet, Noel. One of the futures in Peter Frase’s book Four Futures: Life Beyond Capitalism” is what he calls “exterminism.” As the current global capitalist crisis deepens much of the 99% is likely to become superfluous. This is not a “reserve army of labor” concept. It literally means not needed by the capitalists. And under conditions of scarcity generated by crisis the superfluous are dangerous to the 1%. So what do they do? They hire some of the 99% to protect them from the rest. Those in uniform occupy the communities of some of those perceived to be a danger and those they can’t control go to prison. Such a scenario is already well under way and seems quite likely to me unless we get our act together soon. Under such conditions, I would argue that “whiteness” will become a more important political category. White skin privilege will mean staying out of the occupied communities and out of prison.
As for the demise of the large industrial workplace as an arena for struggle: this does not mean such arenas are lacking. The “Fight for 15” movement, however, is not one of them. This is not primarily due to the “race” of those who will benefit but because it is a fight for a wage that is below the cost of living–a fight for poverty wages. We need to look for arenas of struggle that oppose the whole concept of “exterminism.’ That means posing a different future beyond capitalism as we join efforts to oppose various aspects of exterminism — prison and occupied communities. It is possible to seek working class unity in these arenas.
Thanks, Dave. I thought I was getting at that point when I wrote “If we are right that the material basis of white identity still exists, it can’t be sidestepped. I suspect the solution lies in making communism a reality in people’s lives. . .” Like everyone else, I have little idea how to do that. I agree that unity among the dispossessed cannot be built by fighting for reforms that leave the capitalist system untouched.