[News] The Invention of the White People - a blatant mechanism of power and domination

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/invention-white-people-170824095046840.html 



  The Invention of the White People

Hamid Dabashi - August 28, 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are no white people. There are no black people. There are no red, 
yellow, brown, blue, purple, crimson or any other colour people. These 
are all socially constructed delusions. Delusions though with real, 
frightful, murderous, and genocidal consequences.

None of these facts have been hidden to us. There is a vast body of 
scholarly literature on the social construction of race, gender, and 
ethnicity.

In his monumental two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race 
(Revised edition, 2012), as early as in the 1960s Theodore W Allen had 
documented the manner in which the ruling elite in the United States 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/united-states.html> had devised 
the category of "white people" by way of economic exploitation of the 
African slaves and the social control of the emerging polities. More 
recently, in her Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People 
and Its Relevance Today (2013), Jacqueline Battalora has offered an 
examination of the enduring issue of race in the US tracing it back to 
when "white people" were invented through legislations and enactment of 
laws.

The problem with this scholarly body of literature is not only the fact 
that its erudite message does not get through the thick skulls of 
illiterate racists like Donald Trump 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/people/donald-trump.html>'s white 
supremacist supporters. The problem is that such archaeology of hatred 
does not erase the fact that a massive body of humanity has suffered 
precisely because they have been branded as "black" or "red," or 
"yellow" or "brown". Racially constituted to divide and rule, those 
colourful delusions have become social facts.

Central to all such socially constructed delusions are the relations of 
power they entail and sustain - whether colour-coded, classed, 
racialised, or gendered. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman", 
Simone de Beauvoir declared in her path-breaking book The Second Sex 
(1949). In later, critical expansion of this idea, scholars like Judith 
Butler have shown how varied social practices are definitive to the 
social constitution of gender. The same is true about race or ethnicity. 
One is not born, we may extend de Beauvoir's insight, but rather becomes 
white, or black, etc.

The gross spectacle ofracist terrorists 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/charlottesville-attack-170813081045115.html> 
in August in Charlottesville, US, and President Trump's unabashed siding 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/welcomes-trump-charlottesville-reaction-170816040107587.html> 
with the proto-Fascist white supremacists have now brought this solid 
streak in American politics to global attention. However limited or 
extensive this "base" of Donald Trump's presidency might be, the 
politics of white supremacy has now become openly integral to the racial 
imagination of the US.

Taking their cues from their president and his chief advisers like 
(until recently) Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka in 
the White House, a small but increasingly vocal armed militia calling 
itself "white nationalists" (a euphemism for white supremacists) march 
with torches like the KKK, saluting like Nazis, and chant xenophobic 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/issues/xenophobia.html> and 
anti-Semitic slogans through Charlottesville. These are the driest and 
deepest layers of racial hatred from the time of the first slaughter of 
Native Americans, from the time of mass slavery of African Americans, 
now finding the right environment to come up to surface.

As a society and a polity, the US has never been cured, never been 
treated, and it has never resolved its murderous racist history. It has 
just kept shoving it under a thin veneer of liberal hypocrisy and 
bourgeois etiquette at home and projected it outward in the form of 
warmongering abroad. From the Korean, to Vietnam, to Afghan and Iraq 
wars the US invasions and occupation of other countries are underwritten 
by racial hatred. The Israeli occupation and systemic land theft of 
Palestine <http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/palestine.html> is an 
extended chapter in the same book.


    *The Racist Nexus of US/Israel *

The affinity of neo-Nazi white supremacists for Zionism and Israel 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/israel.html> is a match made in 
the racists' heaven. Self-delusional liberal Zionists act surprisedthat 
a nefarious white supremacist like Richard Spencer 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/white-nationalist-richard-spencer-talks-al-jazeera-161209184916999.html> has 
openly admitted on an Israeli TV show that Israelis "should respect him" 
for he is "a white Zionist". But the world at large is not surprised at 
all. Of course, he and his ilk are all "white Zionists" - a phrase that 
is in fact redundant. What the liberal Zionists do not wish to admit 
(for it exposes their own racism) is that the white supremacists' 
Zionism is integral to their anti-Semitism and vice-versa.

The roots of Zionism as the dominant ideology of a settler colony are in 
European white supremacy, evident in their much more universal colonial 
culture in Asia <http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/asia.html>, 
Africa, and Latin America - to all of which Israel is now a last bastion.

Israel <http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/israel.html> today is a 
perfect model, an aspiration in fact, for neo-Nazi white supremacists in 
the US and Europe <http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/europe.html>. 
That these neo-Nazis are also anti-Semitic and Zionist is exactly the 
recognition that now stares American Jews in the eye.

Today, American Jews find themselves at a momentous crossroads where 
their historic struggles against racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism 
place them face to face with Israel and the racist ideology on the basis 
of which it was founded. Benjamin Netanyahu's son openly calling Black 
Lives Matter and the Antifa "thugs" and "scum" and dismissing the 
significance of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville speaks voluminously of the 
racist foundation of Israel. The young Mr Yair Netanyahu speaks openly 
and without the diplomatic finesse of liberal Zionists or the 
intellectual sophistication of a New York Times columnist. He says it as 
it is: the structural hostility of Zionism to any emancipatory civil 
rights movement, and its equally foundational affinity with xenophobic 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/issues/xenophobia.html> anti-Semites.

Today, Israelis have absoletely no moral authority, not an iota, to 
denounce the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, for the neo-Nazis intend to 
do in the United States what the Zionists have already done in Israel: 
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a model for the white supremacists 
in the United States. Mass expulsion of Palestinians, the massacre of 
Palestinians in Deir Yasin and elsewhere: those are the Zionist 
trademarks the Neo-Nazis hope and wish and strive to replicate in the 
United States.

"Charlottesville," as a result, "is moment of truth for empowered US 
Zionists," as it has been pointedly suggested 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2017/08/charlottesville-empowered-children/>, 
especially for those boldfaced conquerors of Palestine "who name their 
children after Israeli generals". The militant nexus of US/Israel is 
today the transatlantic prototype of racist white supremacy that 
sustains and advances the murderous myth of the white people civilizing 
the world.


    *The Almost Whites*

The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has 
keenly observed 
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/making-america-white-again?mbid=social_facebook>: 
"All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want 
to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to 
their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order 
to emphasize their whiteness."

But the question is not fealty to any "native country". The question is 
rather the systematic subordination of all immigrants, regardless of how 
they have been colour-coded, to the myth of the "white people" and the 
violent fantasies of their civilizing missions. No brown, black, or any 
other thus coloured person can ever be completely "white". But their 
trying to pass as white is a mechanism of humiliation and denigration 
they willingly play to presume they are part of the power structure and 
a more "normal" human being.

In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America 
(1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to how 
since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform themselves as 
"white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of course. Upon 
their arrivals and one generation into a successful economic status, 
other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have also sought to 
posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.

Becoming white has always been the most potent way for racialised 
"minorities" to overcome their violently alienated personhood in order 
to become something they could (and should) never be.


    *Towards a Dialectic of Emancipation*

By replicating and reenacting the racial politics of their European 
origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in general and the 
Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living testimonials as 
to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as means of political 
domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by Zionists for 
Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of European racism 
carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions.

Struggle for racial justice must commence and continue with the full 
knowledge of how racial divides were socially manufactured and 
politically sustained before we can learn how to overcome them. The full 
acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/subjects/racism.html> in the US and 
Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No postmodern or 
poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the sustained 
history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It must 
acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.

READ MORE: What is the alt-right and what does it stand for? 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/02/alt-stand-170218115042196.html>

Here, we need a "double consciousness" of a different sort than the one 
WEB Du Bois famously theorised. This "double consciousness" is not 
between a universalised white and a reified black consciousness. It is 
between the false "coloured" consciousness on one hand and on the other 
the liberated consciousness for a democratic uprising. The vast, 
beautiful, and ennobling consciousness of all racialised people must 
here come together to empower a new liberation poetics that no longer 
partake in but sublate the false consciousness of the racialised minority.

The invention of the "white people" was a blatant mechanism of power and 
domination. Dismantling that murderous myth will break down the backbone 
of a racist ideology that has kept a settler colonial consciousness in 
power for too long.

*/Hamid Dabashiis Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and 
Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York./*

*//*The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.*//*

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20170829/43d71522/attachment.htm>