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<font size=3>WHY THE EMPHASIS ON WHITE-SKIN PRIVILEGE IS WHITE
CHAUVINIST: THE PROBLEMATIC OF “RACE” NEEDS TO BE REPLACED BY THE
RESTORATION OF THE NATIONAL QUESTION/S. <br>
<br>
Speech by Fred Ho, June 5, 2008, State University of New York-Stony
Brook, Conference on Class in America and Tribute to Ted Allen, organized
by Michael Zweig<br>
<br>
My essay is a challenge to everyone in this room and at this
conference.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
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.”
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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 <br>
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. <br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
1. White skin privileges both are byproducts of and
contributors to white settler colonial national construction.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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”. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br><br>
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