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<h1 id="reader-title">The Invention of the White People<br>
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<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Hamid Dabashi - August
28, 2017<br>
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<p>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. </p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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.</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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
<a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/united-states.html"
target="_self">United States</a> 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 </span><span lang="EN-US">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. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/people/donald-trump.html"
target="_self">Donald Trump</a>'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. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">The gross spectacle of<a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/charlottesville-attack-170813081045115.html"
target="_self"> racist terrorists</a> in August in
Charlottesville, US, and President Trump's <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/welcomes-trump-charlottesville-reaction-170816040107587.html"
target="_self">unabashed siding</a> 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.</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/issues/xenophobia.html"
target="_self">xenophobic</a> 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. </span></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/palestine.html"
target="_self">Palestine</a> is an extended chapter in
the same book. </p>
<h2><strong><span lang="EN-US">The Racist Nexus of
US/Israel </span></strong></h2>
<p><span lang="EN-US">The affinity of neo-Nazi white
supremacists for Zionism and <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/israel.html"
target="_self">Israel</a> is a match made in the
racists' heaven. Self-delusional liberal Zionists </span><span>act
surprised</span><span lang="EN-US"> that a nefarious
white supremacist like <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/white-nationalist-richard-spencer-talks-al-jazeera-161209184916999.html"
target="_self">Richard Spencer</a> 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. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/asia.html"
target="_self">Asia</a>, Africa, and Latin America -
to all of which Israel is now a last bastion. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US"><a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/country/israel.html"
target="_self">Israel</a> today is a perfect model,
an aspiration in fact, for neo-Nazi white supremacists
in the US and <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/europe.html"
target="_self">Europe</a>. That these neo-Nazis are
also anti-Semitic and Zionist is exactly the
recognition that now stares American Jews in the eye.
</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US">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 </span><span>calling</span><span
lang="EN-US"> 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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/issues/xenophobia.html"
target="_self">xenophobic</a> anti-Semites. </span></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US"><span lang="EN-US"><span>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. </span></span></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">"Charlottesville," as a result, "is
moment of truth for empowered US Zionists," as it has
been </span><a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2017/08/charlottesville-empowered-children/"
target="_blank"><span>pointedly suggested</span></a><span
lang="EN-US">, 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. </span></p>
<h2><strong><span lang="EN-US">The Almost Whites</span></strong> </h2>
<p><span lang="EN-US">The distinguished novelist and Nobel
Prize laureate Tony Morrison </span><a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/making-america-white-again?mbid=social_facebook"
target="_blank"><span>has keenly observed</span></a><span
lang="EN-US">: "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."</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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. </span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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.
</span></p>
<h2><strong><span lang="EN-US">Towards a Dialectic of
Emancipation</span></strong></h2>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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. </span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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 <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/subjects/racism.html"
target="_self">racism</a> 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. </span></p>
<p class="ReadMoreContentSeparator"><a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/02/alt-stand-170218115042196.html"
target="_self"> READ MORE: What is the alt-right and
what does it stand for? </a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span lang="EN-US">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. </span></p>
<p><strong><em><span lang="EN-US">Hamid Dabashi</span><span
lang="EN-US"> is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of
Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University in New York.</span></em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em><span lang="EN-US"><em><strong>The views
expressed in this article are the author's own
and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's
editorial policy.</strong></em></span></em></strong></p>
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