RE: [Marxism] White Skin Privilege

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Lause

>
> It's really not me that injecting what Ethan call "a 35-year
> old windmills" into this discussion.

And who is? I have yet to see you provide any objection to the framework of
"white skin privilege" that is not a

>
> The reality is that I am a historian of abolitionism and the
> American movement.  I regularly write articles and books and
> give papers and talks on how "a system of racial privilege is
> intrinsic to class relations in the US."  Yet, it is asserted
> that I don't want to discuss how "a system of racial
> privilege is intrinsic to class relations in the US" simply
> because I don't think "white skin privilege" as a theory that
> did anything new or good for us.

This is an actual misrepresentation. No one has ad hominized you, rather,
you have ad hominized from the start.

As a matter of fact, you have only provided ad hominems in all your posts,
along with this myth about views on white skin privilege being some sort of
exclusive thing from the SDS. See the archives.

On the other hand, those in opposition to you have responded either with
hard data or responses to your attacks.

And two of the most important books on Race in the USA both are based on an
implicit and sometimes explicit support of "white skin privilege" as a
concept:

Ignatiev's "How the Irish became white" and  Karen Brodkin's "How Jews
Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America"

>
> Rather than to simply misrepresent my tangible and material
> record in addressing these things, wouldn't it be more
> helpful for proponents of the theory to tell us what they
> think it did or does that hadn't already been done?  Just a
> suggestion.

To begin with, it separates "whiteness" from the biological and offers it up
as a social construction. This creates two very important practical avenues
of unaddressed race-related situations within Marxism in the USA:

1) It attacks bourgeoise nationalism within the non-white nations, in so far
as it switches the revolutionary subject of racial liberation from only
self-determination of non-white nations to the need for whites to be "race
traitors", to destroy from within the structure of white privilege, to
refuse to exercise that privilege, and to politicize and problematize their
whiteness to the point of destroying it. Non-whites cannot destroy
whiteness, at least not short of a genocidal race war, something which would
be, needless to say, fucked up. What non-whites can do is assert themselves
against that privilege, but in doing so it opens the way to bourgeoisie
values in the non-whites nation, diminishes class solidarity, and ends up
perpetuating capitalist class relations within the non-white nations. Only
those who posses the privilege can destroy it in a way that sharpens class
relations.

It is similar to the struggle against patriarchy in this sense, the failure
of men to attack patriarchy and the privileges it gives us creates the basis
for bourgeoise feminism and the destruction of class solidarity between
working class men and women.

2) It exposes the objective existence of a whiteness system that must be not
transformed, but destroyed, the revolutionary object is the destruction of
this system of racial privilege. Most of the literature and political
practice around race in the USA has as a basis "integration", that is, the
integration of non-whites into the power system of the USA. Integration
completely ignores the class basis of race relations in the USA, and is at
best and idealist conception of the racial situation of the usa, and at
worse the same old divide and conquer BS. Transforming the whiteness system
is not only not possible, but in essence means integrating a set of
non-whites into whiteness, like the Jews and the Irish where and currently
happens to "Hispanics". Yet integration has not been possible to any real
extent with blacks. Why? Because they cannot hide their non-whiteness as
effectively. Integration is about expanding the limits of what constitutes
white and non-white, but it doesn't transform the system itself, in
particular in its external imperialist expression, and it allows in fact the
system to flourish. When you have Coni Rice justifying US genocide of
non-whites and Clearance Thomas justifying the continued educational
apartheid in the US, it doesn't speak of a more integrated society, but
actually of the exact opposite.

>From both this avenues, the revolutionary subject and the revolutionary
object, have been insufficiently adressed by marxism in the USA, and this
insufficiency has lead to abandoning the fact of "white skin privilege" into
the hands of white-guilters and MIM-freaks, disdain to them we both share.

Your attack in fact is a circular argument, because you discard what the
data points towards the existence of white skin privilege, not because the
data is wrong, but because it fits a model you have already discarded.

It is also an abstention because it refuses to struggle against white skin
privilege not because it doesn't exist, but because you think it doesn't
exist.

Now, since you are such a student of abolitionism and race relations, could
you tell us why is this wrong, and which currently available marxist model
on the class-race relations in the USA fits the reality better?

sks


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