"The Point is Not to Interpret Whiteness But to Abolish It"

["David Altman" <altman_d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am posting here another article from "Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine"
http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/, and I would highly recommend this on-line
publication to List subscribers.  Every issue has a lot of thought-provoking
articles and letters about race relations, the African Diaspora, or whatever
Reed feels like putting in it. Any thoughts on this article?

Dave Altman


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The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It

by Noel Ignatiev

Talk given at Conference "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness" Berkeley,
California,
April 11-13, 1997




Now that White Studies has become an  academic industry, with its own
dissertation mill, conference, publications, and no doubt soon
its junior faculty, it is time for the abolitionists
to declare where they stand in relation to it.
Abolitionism is first of all a political project: the
abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish
it.

Various commentators have stated that their
aim is to identify and preserve a positive white
identity. Abolitionists deny the existence of a
positive white identity. We at Race Traitor, the
journal with which I am associated, have asked
some of those who think whiteness contains
positive elements to indicate what they are. We
are still waiting for an answer. Until we get one,
we will take our stand with David Roediger,
who has insisted that whiteness is not merely
oppressive and false, it is nothing but
oppressive and false. As James Baldwin said,
"So long as you think you are white, there is no
hope for you."

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish
culture and Italian culture and American
culture--the latter, as Albert Murray pointed
out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and
the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is
youth culture and drug culture and queer
culture; but there is no such thing as white
culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with
culture and everything to do with social
position. It is nothing but a reflection of
privilege, and exists for no reason other than to
defend it. Without the privileges attached to it,
the white race would not exist, and the white
skin would have no more social significance
than big feet.

Before the advocates of positive whiteness
remind us of the oppression of the white poor,
let me say that we have never denied it. The
United States, like every capitalist society, is
composed of masters and slaves. The problem is
that many of the slaves think they are part of
the master class because they partake of the
privileges of the white skin. We cannot say it too
often: whiteness does not exempt people from
exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for
those who have nothing else.

However exploited the poor whites of this
country, they are not direct victims of racial
oppression, and "white trash" is not a term of
racial degradation analogous to the various
epithets commonly applied to black people; in
fact, the poor whites are the objects of race
privilege, which ties them to their masters more
firmly than did the arrows of Vulcan bind
Prometheus to the rock. Not long ago there was
an incident in Boston in which a well-dressed
black man hailed a taxi and directed the driver
to take him to Roxbury, a black district. The
white cab driver refused, and when the man
insisted she take him or call someone who
would, as the law provided, she called her
boyfriend, also a cabdriver, on the car radio, who
showed up, dragged the black man out of the cab
and called him a "nigger." The black man turned
out to be a city councilman. The case was
unusual only in that it made the papers. Either
America is a very democratic country, where cab
drivers beat up city councilmen with impunity,
or the privileges of whiteness reach far down
into the ranks of the laboring class.

We are anti-white, but we are not in general
against the people who are called white. Those
for whom the distinction is too subtle are
advised to read the speeches of Malcolm X. No
one ever spoke more harshly and critically to
black people, and no one ever loved them more.
It is no part of love to flatter and withhold from
people what they need to know. President
Samora Machel of Mozambique pointed out that
his people had to die as tribes in order to be
born as a nation. Similar things were said at the
time Afro-Americans in mass rejected the term
"Negro" in favor of "black." We seek to draw
upon that tradition, as well as--we do not deny
it--an even older tradition, which declares that a
person must die so that he or she can be born
again. We hold that so-called whites must cease
to exist as whites in order to realize themselves
as something else; to put it another way: white
people must commit suicide as whites in order
to come alive as workers, or youth, or women, or
whatever other identity can induce them to
change from the miserable, petulant,
subordinated creatures they now are into freely
associated, fully developed human subjects.

The white race is neither a biological nor a
cultural formation; it is a strategy for securing
to some an advantage in a competitive society.
It has held down more whites than blacks.
Abolitionism is also a strategy: its aim is not
racial harmony but class war. By attacking
whiteness, the abolitionists seek to undermine
the main pillar of capitalist rule in this country.

If abolitionism is distinct from White Studies, it
is also distinct from what is called
"anti-racism." There now exist a number of
publications, organizing programs and research
centers that focus their energies on identifying
and opposing individuals and groups they call
"racist." Sometimes they share information and
collaborate with official state agencies. We
stand apart from that tendency. In our view, any
"anti-racist" work that does not entail
opposition to the state reinforces the authority
of the state, which is the most important agency
in maintaining racial oppression.

Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist
plot, so racial oppression is not the work of
"racists." It is maintained by the principal
institutions of society, including the schools
(which define "excellence"), the labor market
(which defines "employment"), the legal system
(which defines "crime"), the welfare system
(which defines "poverty"), the medical industry
(which defines "health"), and the family (which
defines "kinship"). Many of these institutions
are administered by people who would be
offended if accused of complicity with racial
oppression. It is reinforced by reform programs
that address problems traditionally of concern
to the "left" -- for example, federal housing loan
guarantees. The simple fact is that the public
schools and the welfare departments are doing
more harm to black children than all the
"racist" groups combined.

The abolitionists seek to abolish the white race.
How can this be done? We must admit that we
do not know exactly, but a look at history will be
instructive.

When William Lloyd Garrison and the original
abolitionists began their work, slavery was the
law of the land, and behind the law stood the
entire machinery of government, including the
courts, the army, and even the post office, which
banned anti-slavery literature from Southern
mail. The slave states controlled the Senate and
Presidency, and Congress refused even to accept
petitions relating to slavery. Most northerners
considered slavery unjust, but their opposition
to it was purely nominal. However much they
disapproved of it, the majority "went along," as
majorities normally do, rather than risk the
ordinary comforts of their lives, meager as they
were.

The weak point of the slave system was that it
required the collaboration of the entire country,
for without the support of the "loyal citizens" of
Massachusetts, the slaveholders of South
Carolina could not keep their laborers in
bondage (just as today without the support of
the law-abiding, race discrimination could not
be enforced). The abolitionists set to work to
break up the national consensus. Wendell
Phillips declared that if he could establish
Massachusetts as a sanctuary for the fugitive,
he could bring down slavery. They sought to
nullify the fugitive slave law, which enlisted the
northern population directly in enforcing
slavery. They encouraged and took part in
attempts to rescue fugitives--not, it must be
pointed out, from the slaveholders, but from the
Law. In all of this activity, the black population
took the lead. The concentrated expression of
the abolitionist strategy was the slogan, "No
Union with Slaveholders," which was not, as has
often been charged, an attempt to maintain
their moral purity but an effort to break up the
Union in order to establish a liberated zone
adjacent to the slave states. It was a strategy
that would later come to be known as dual
power, and neither Garrison's pacifism nor his
failure to develop a general critique of the
capitalist system should blind us to its
revolutionary character.

John Brown's attack on Harpers' Ferry was not
an aberration but the logical application of the
abolitionist strategy. The slaveholders
retaliated for it by demanding new guarantees
of loyalty from the federal government,
including a stronger fugitive slave law,
reopening of the slave trade, and especially the
expansion of slavery into the territories.

As Phillips said, Brown "startled the South into
madness," precipitating a situation where
people were forced to choose between abolition
and the domination of the country as a whole by
the slaveholders. It was not the abolitionists but
the slaveholders who, by the arrogance of their
demands, compelled the north to resist. From
Harpers' Ferry, each step led inexorably to the
next: Southern bullying, Lincoln's election,
secession, war, blacks as laborers, soldiers,
citizens, voters. The war that began with not
one person in a hundred foreseeing the end of
slavery was transformed within two years into
an anti-slavery war, and a great army marched
through the land singing, "As He died to make
men holy, let us fight to make men free."

The course of events can never be predicted in
other than the broadest outline, but in the
essentials, history followed the path charted by
the abolitionists. As they foresaw, it was
necessary to break up the Union in order to
reconstitute it without slavery. When South
Carolina announced its secession, Wendell
Phillips was forced into hiding to escape the
Boston mob that blamed him; two years later he
was invited to address Congress on how to win
the war. He recommended two measures, both
of which were soon implemented: (1) declare the
war an anti-slavery war; (2) enlist black
soldiers. Has ever a revolutionary been more
thoroughly vindicated by history?

The hostility of white laborers toward
abolitionism, and their failure to develop a labor
abolitionism, was not, as some have claimed, an
expression of working-class resentment of
bourgeois philanthropists but the reflection of
their refusal to view themselves as part of a
class with the slaves--just as a century later
white labor opposition to school integration
showed that the laborers viewed themselves
more as whites than as proletarians.

The white race is a club. Certain people are
enrolled in it at birth, without their consent,
and brought up according to its rules. For the
most part they go through life accepting the
privileges of membership, without reflecting on
the costs. Others, usually new arrivals in the
country, pass through a probationary period
before "earning" membership; they are
necessarily more conscious of their racial
standing.

The white club does not require that all
members be strong advocates of white
supremacy, merely that they defer to the
prejudices of others. It is based on one huge
assumption: that all those who look white are,
whatever their reservations, fundamentally
loyal to it.

For an example of how the club works, take the
cops. The natural attitude of the police toward
the exploited is hostility. All over the world cops
beat up poor people; that is their job, and it has
nothing to do with color. What is unusual and
has to be accounted for is not why they beat up
black people but why they don't normally beat
up propertyless whites. It works this way: the
cops look at a person and then decide on the
basis of color whether that person is loyal to the
system they are sworn to serve and protect.
They don't stop to think if the black person
whose head they are whipping is an enemy; they
assume it. It does not matter if the victim goes
to work every day, pays his taxes and crosses
only on the green. Occasionally they bust an
outstanding and prominent black person, and
the poor whites cheer the event, because it
confirms them in their conviction that they are
superior to any black person who walks the
earth.

On the other hand, the cops don't know for sure
if the white person to whom they give a break is
loyal to them; they assume it. The non-beating
of poor whites is time off for good behavior and
an assurance of future cooperation. Their color
exempts them to some degree from the criminal
class--which is how the entire working class was
defined before the invention of race and is still
treated in those parts of the world where race,
or some functional equivalent, does not exist as
a social category. It is a cheap way of buying
some people's loyalty to a social system that
exploits them.

What if the police couldn't tell a loyal person
just by color? What if there were enough people
around who looked white but were really
enemies of official society so that the cops
couldn't tell whom to beat and whom to let off?
What would they do then? They would begin to
"enforce the law impartially," as the liberals
say, beating only those who "deserve" it. But, as
Anatole France noted, the law, in its majestic
equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep
under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread. The standard that normally governs
police behavior is wealth and its external
manifestations--dress, speech, etc. At the
present time, the class bias of the law is
partially repressed by racial considerations; the
removal of those considerations would give it
free rein. Whites who are poor would find
themselves on the receiving end of police justice
as black people now do.

The effect on their consciousness and behavior
is predictable. That is not to say that everyone
now regarded as "white" would suddenly become
a progressive, any more than everyone now
"black" is. But with color no longer serving as a
handy guide for the distribution of penalties and
rewards, European-Americans of the
downtrodden class would at last be compelled to
face with sober senses their real condition of life
and their relations with humankind. It would be
the end of race.

When it comes to abolishing the white race, the
task is not to win over more whites to oppose
"racism"; there are "anti-racists" enough already
to do the job. The task is to gather together a
minority determined to make it impossible for
anyone to be white. It is a strategy of creative
provocation, like Wendell Phillips advocated
and John Brown carried out.

What would the determined minority have to
do? They would have to break the laws of
whiteness so flagrantly as to destroy the myth of
white unanimity. What would it mean to break
the rules of whiteness? It would mean
responding to every manifestation of white
supremacy as if it were directed against them.
On the individual level, it would mean, for
instance, responding to an anti-black remark by
asking, What makes you think I'm white? On
the collective level, it would mean confronting
the institutions that reproduce race.

The abolitionists oppose all forms of segregation
in the schools, including tracking by "merit,"
they oppose all mechanisms that favor whites in
the job market, including labor unions when
necessary, and they oppose the police and
courts, which define black people as a criminal
class. They not merely oppose these things, but
seek to disrupt their functioning. They reject in
advance no means of attaining their goal; even
when combating "racist" groups, they act in
ways that are offensive to official institutions.
The willingness to go beyond socially acceptable
"anti-racism" is the dividing line between "good
whites" and traitors to the white race.

A traitor to the white race is someone who is
nominally classified as white but who defies
white rules so strenuously as to jeopardize his
or her ability to draw upon the privileges of
whiteness. The abolitionists recognize that no
"white" can individually escape from the
privileges of whiteness. The white club does not
like to surrender a single member, so that even
those who step out of it in one situation can
hardly avoid stepping back in later, if for no
other reason than the assumptions of
others--unless, like John Brown, they have the
good fortune to be hanged before that can
happen. But they also understand that when
there comes into being a critical mass of people
who look white but do not act white--people who
might be called "reverse oreos"--the white race
will undergo fission, and former whites, born
again, will be able to take part, together with
others, in building a new human community.

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