"How Not To Fight Racism" Response

This is a response to this article http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2012/04/05/how-not-fight-racism

            Co-option, flagrant privilege, and denials of oppressive systems are not shows of solidarity.  Solidarity is something that must be done with conscious listening to the needs and wants of the group at issue, and acting only in accordance with those.  Suggesting that you are Trayvon as a white person is totally and absolutely missing the entire point.  It isn’t solidarity, it’s reinforcing the problem.  If you are white, Trayvon was not killed for the ways he may be like you or the white kids in your family, he was killed for the ways in which he is different.  If you need to whiten him and deny that he was a black child, the very reason he was killed, in order to try to “empathize” or “sympathize” with him, then you are supporting the social systems which have led to his death and the deaths of uncounted other young black people and reinforcing the notion that the more black a person is, the less human they are.

            Showing that you oppose the system that killed Trayvon Martin and Troy Davis absolutely requires showing that you have some fucking inkling of the fact that they were killed because they are not white like you.  If that child and that man were white like you, they would not have been killed.  So the fact that you give no pause to announcing that you are them is extremely indicative that you are not acting in solidarity, you are acting because you want to be seen as a ‘good white person’ not because you actually want to end racism.

“Isn’t it possible, even likely, that people protesting racism wearing these t-shirts actually oppose racism and don’t seek to justify it? If not, then everything we do is called into question as possibly its opposite; nothing we do matters, nothing we say or argue has any validity, but must be suspect as meaning its complete opposite.”

          Except that is patently not the argument put forth in the video.  If you cannot think of a single thing to do to oppose racism other than a clueless co-opting t-shirt, you really are not actively working to end racism.  You are engaging in a strawman argument here, nowhere did the person in the video or almost anyone else ever present the argument you are attributing to her.  Her argument was that this specific act, wearing an “I am Trayvon” t-shirt as a white person, reinforces the very racist systems and patterns of thought that lead to the murder in the first place.  Suggesting that if a person says one type of ineffective or oppressive ‘activism’ is invalid then they believe any activism at all is invalid is a patently absurd argument.

“Racism, according to this thinking, is not the result of a ruling class’s need to structure oppression in order to gain profits and spread crappy ideas that divide the working class majority from itself.”

          This is an extremely over-simplistic analysis of the way class systems work.  Racism is a system designed to support the exploitation of black labor and black bodies (as well as the labor and bodies of other people of color) and to justify brutalities against them.  It is not simply some post-hoc attempt to divide the working class, though systematically it is effective in doing so.  Divisiveness is one of the means of perpetuation of the system, it is not the root goal.  Oppressive social systems interact with each other in people in complex ways, your analysis erases the ways in which people face multiple forms of marginalization and oppression.  There exists decades of scholarship on these matters from marginalized women around sexist oppression, bell hooks, Kimberle Krenshaw…do a bit of reading critical feminist race theory and black feminism. 

  “Third, according to her “white privilege” argument, there are no distinctions between whites in positions of power and the majority without.”

          This is not what white privilege means, and there are libraries of scholarship on that matter.  Are you being deliberately clueless, or are you just this grossly ignorant of critical race theory and black scholarship around racism?

 “She refers to “the system,” but has no class outlook in which to analyze how the system works and in whose interests. Because if all white people benefit— which includes the majority of people on food stamps, on unemployment and living in poverty in the United States — then these benefits are rather illusory, aren’t they?”

This is flat out false.  As a blond haired, blue eyed person who grew up in poverty and has done anti-racist education with poor white people, it is hard to even begin to say how wrong this statement is.  Poor white people benefit materially from white privilege. Granted, not in the exact same ways as rich white people (again, see intersectionality).  Poor white people find employment easier than their black low income peers.  This is true even when the white person has a criminal record and the black person does not.  Employment discrimination against black people is rampant at low wage levels as well, which feeds the extremely high unemployment rates in black communities.  Poor white people find housing easier than their poor black peers, because housing discrimination against black people is rampant at all income levels.   Poor black students are beaten and punished within the education system more than poor white students.   Poor black people are murdered by the police more than poor white people.  Poor black communities are over-policed and subject to police search polices more than poor white communities.  Poor white students get MORE need based scholarships than poor black students, both by numbers and percentages.   In every area of life, poor black people face additional discrimination on top of what poor white people face.  And that’s not even getting into wider colonialist systematic benefits and damages.

All poor people get a lot of horrible things thrown at them, that’s indisputable, but black poor people and white poor people do not face the same social realities.  Racism and racist oppression are very real in these communities.  White poor people get advantages due to being white.   They get preference in jobs, education, and housing over other poor people.  It is a mistake to say that because poor white people would ultimately be better off if they were willing to trade advantages over poor people of color for class solidarity that poor white people do not materially benefit from white privilege and racist systems.  

“This video reflects a politically confused way of talking about race as if it were simply about bad ideas in people’s heads and not conscious structures of oppression kept in place by the 1% in the interests of the 1%.”

This is a false dichotomy.   There is no reason to think that these two types of racist thinking can’t and don’t coexist.  Racism involves both intentional exploitation and complex systems of social relationships that influence thinking in often unconscious ways.  Social systems of consciousness and understanding are deeply ingrained ways of knowing and perceiving the world, trained into us usually from birth.  The way rich people look at poor people and perceive our lives is certainly not all about conscious decisions to fuck over poor people, though some of it is, it is about ways of thinking and knowing that they have been taught their entire lives.  That all of us have been taught our entire lives.  I am pretty sure that there was no conscious classism board that sat down and handed my mother a curriculum to use to ingrain in us the idea that we should see our lives as shameful because of being poor.  Racism works in similar, though not always directly comparable, ways.  BOTH explicit and implicit bias play a role, BOTH intentionally and unintentional discrimination and systems play a role.

And it’s just flat out racist to suggest that the problems of racism dividing poor communities are found in black people refusing to accept racism and not in white people refusing to not be racist.  Which, for your information, is also the point that even the upperclass ‘talented tenth’ theorist Dubois was making:

“So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.”

Then, as now, too many poor white people chose short term benefits over poor people of color rather than long term benefits of class unity.  You are blaming the victims of racism, he is blaming the perpetrators.  Denying racism and putting the burden on black people to swallow the racism of poor white people (who are not more racist per se than rich white people, but racist in ordinary amounts for white people, in other words, there’s plenty of racism) does not build class solidarity.  In fact, it does the exact opposite.  It trains us not to be critical about the ways in which different sections of poor communities interact.  It trains us to be okay with watching brutality against certain sections of poor people.  It trains us to not critique the ways in which these other oppressive systems are linked together.  Rather than telling poor black people that they should not address racism against them or the ways in which racism harms their communities, building class solidarity would be building an understanding in white poor people that racism is a brutal oppressive system which they should neither tolerate nor participate in.  If we want to search for leftist models of building anti-racist class solidarity, we would be better served to look for guidance to the work of another black man murdered by a racist system, Fred Hampton, of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense than we would be to look to the dismal failures of some early leftist unions on issues of racist policies around black and Asian workers.

Anyways, look, we could have a complex discussion about racialized classism, classist racism, intersectionality, and racial dynamics within poor communities, but this article is not showing even a passing familiarity with the basics of this discussion.

The only thing this article got right is that white people should not wear Zimmerman shirts, but not for the reasons you suggest, but rather because without further context, it might be assumed that a person wearing such a shirt was supportive of Zimmerman’s actions, rather than critiquing social relationships.  However, as a friend of mine noted, you do not have to wear either shirt, you can just wear a regular shirt and participate in work around these issues.  Again, seriously, if an erasing t-shirt is the only idea you can come up with for combating racism and showing solidarity around racist violence, you are already failing at both of those tasks.

“Perhaps the most telling thing about this “white privilege” argument is that many radicals have had their sights for justice set so low that it has come to be thought of as a privilege not to be gunned down in the night on a snack errand while wearing a hoodie because of the color of your skin. Isn’t that simply a human right?”

It shouldn’t be a privilege, just like healthcare shouldn’t be a privilege, but right now, it most certainly is.  White people have the benefit over black people of not being murdered because of their race by our racist system. Welcome to reality.