Non-racialism through race (and class)

By Betsy Esch and David Roediger

Shortly before the end of the apartheid regime in South
Africa, amidst wonderfully frantic activity by newly
legalized and relaunched organizations of struggle, one
of the many keywords being debated was "non-racialism."

Since building a "non-racial" nation was a longstanding
African National Congress goal, the word gave shape to
discussions about how to address racial inequality
amidst other social transformations in a Free South
Africa, especially during considerations of affirmative
action in the draft constitution. Both liberals and
some Marxists argued against stressing the "racial" in
the sophisticated analyses of racial capitalism that
held purchase in that time and place. The former could
claim that capitalism without apartheid would settle
racial inequalities through growth. The latter could
emphasize that ending capitalism was the key, and
perhaps the prerequisite, to a non-racial future. In
this context, a certain phrase used by other militants
struck home as particularly brave, precise and worth
thinking about as a starting place for any discussion
of race and racism: "The way to non-racialism is
through race."

As defenders of this approach we wish to challenge
readers of New Socialist to go beyond considerations of
race and class which begin from - and therefore can't
transcend - an either-or stance. If the 20th century
drove home any point to revolutionaries it is that
oppressions are multiple and cannot be explained
entirely through class relations. Even as we criticize
some Marxists for economic reductionist analyses of
racism, or for failing to see the critical place of
anti-racism in building resistance to capitalism, we
see ourselves as part of the struggle to define a
political economy of racism from within the Marxist
tradition.

Marxist Tools of Analysis

Marxism has produced the best tools for understanding
race and racism. The idea that race is constructed by
society has been best and most articulately explored by
Marxists, and the tradition of the critical study of
whiteness has been led by materialists as pluralistic
in their approaches as James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Oliver Cox, Karen Brodkin, Michael Rogin, Theodore
Allen and Noel Ignatiev.

So, too, was the fundamental refusal to accept race as
scientifically real and measurable a contribution of
Marxism. It is no surprise that the leading de-bunkers
of racist science, most notably the late Stephen Gould,
would be influenced by historical materialism. Among
other brilliant contributions, Gould's analysis of how
race was assumed as it was measured in order to prove
its existence gave us one of the most trenchant
historical materialist arguments against racial
difference as biologically measurable and thus real,
long before the human genome arrived with its "new"
evidence.

These tools have never been more needed than they are
now. Much of the world continues to throw up clear
lessons regarding the continuing significance of race
to the structuring of oppression, to the shaping of
strategies of rule under capitalism and to some of the
contours of resistance.

In Venezuela, opposition to Hugo Chavez and to his
social base includes anti-indigenous and anti-African
characterizations so broad and so racist that the
veteran left-wing journalist Tariq Ali regards the
elite there as the world's most self-consciously white
reactionary force; in Brazil affirmative action has
just begun, while in the US it has grown ever more
clear that powerful right-wing forces promote a
"colorblind conservatism" that seeks to end not only
affirmative action but also the very gathering of
statistical evidence on racial inequality.

In the last presidential election a Bush vote was
equally well-predicted by making over $200 000 a year
and by being a white male. Recently, a top French
politician suffered criticism for his racist attacks on
Muslim youth rebelling against police violence in and
around Paris. His response was to quickly plan a trip
to Martinique designed to emphasize how little colour
matters in the French colonial world. He was so
thoroughly unwelcomed by Martinique's great poet and
theorist of liberation Aime Cesaire and others that the
publicity stunt had to be cancelled.

Class Without Race?

Surprisingly, amidst such realities, we are now
witnessing an attempt by sections of the Left and of
liberalism to distance race from class analysis in a
way that leaves no doubt as to the overwhelmingly
greater import of the latter and indeed calls into
question the very use of race and racism as categories
of analysis.

The late activist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his
co-thinker Loic Wacquant, for example, have attempted
to portray aspects of the analysis of the racial axis
of power in the world, and particularly the rise of
affirmative action in Brazil, as the terrible result of
the heavily funded export of "cunning" and
"imperialist" US ideas. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo
Torres hold that the "problem of the twenty-first
century" is the use of concepts like "race" and
"whiteness," echoing US socialist Eugene V. Debs's
claim a century ago that (assumedly white) socialists
properly had "nothing special" to offer African
Americans except a place in the class struggle.

To these people, concerns about the racialization of
power or structural analyses of whiteness allegedly,
and even by design, provide a "smokescreen" to
"successfully obscure and disguise class interests."
While Darder and Torres allow that "racism" is still a
problem worth addressing, the recent writings of the
radical political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. are done
even with all that. "Exposing racism," he argues, is
for activists "the political equivalent of an appendix:
a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment
that's usually innocuous but can flare up and become
harmful." Echoing Debs, Reed maintains that class is
the "real divide."

This kind of one-sidedness and dismissiveness arises
out of the fact that class and race are different kinds
of categories, out of the distressing continuing
popular associations of race with biology in the face
of decisive scientific evidence to the contrary, out of
the tacit acceptance of ethnic cleansing as a tool of
warfare, out of the decades of defeat for anti-racist
movements in some nations and out of the difficulties
in bringing the worldwide struggles against what
participants call "racism" closer together. But this
context does not provide an excuse.

In this article we argue that the way to both non-
racialism and to anti-capitalism is still through race
and class analysis as well as anti-racist action. The
editors of New Socialist have given us not just the
task of explaining our method but of offering some
thoughts on the nature of racism today. In doing that
we hope to touch on several aspects that we think are
particularly vital to an anti-racism that is
sophisticated without being jargonistic, and militant
while realizing that the slogan "Black and White Unite
and Fight" is, as the Trinidadian-born revolutionary
socialist CLR James once said, "unimpeachable in
principle ...But... often misleading and sometimes even
offensive in the face of the infinitely varied,
tumultuous, passionate and often murderous reality of
race relations."

There is an overriding Marxian tendency to reduce the
cause of racism to labour market competition among
workers for jobs. Yet the idea that racism is produced
always as a result of labour market competition cruelly
disregards the possibility that racist acts are
sometimes or maybe often acts of racial empowerment,
rather than of class disempowerment. The existence of
all-white schools and neighbourhoods originates now
less than ever in patterns of job discrimination, as
workplaces and residences are geographically separated
sometimes by great distances. And if we acknowledge
that some of the most white places in society are
untouched by multi-racial labour market competition
then we have to grapple with the idea that race and
racism grow and develop beyond the specific relations
of production or reproduction.

Drawing inspiration from Lenin's understanding that
ideology is real and Du Bois's that race gives white
workers a psychological wage, we understand that race '
like gender ' organizes relations of power in multiple
ways. Understanding racism necessitates a separate and
distinct perspective on power relations beyond the
terms of class. The history of death row in the US
makes it clear that killing a white person is
considered a more harshly punishable crime than killing
a Black person in US society, highlighting the need to
understand the state's role in not just overseeing but
creating social rules based on race.

Learning from Australia

A brief account of the recent travails of the Left and
labour in Australia shows why it is so urgent to raise
the call for continued focus on race as well as class
relations of power. In early December 2005, the right-
wing Liberal Party government rammed through, largely
without debate, a harrowing series of laws that put
that nation in the front ranks of reaction worldwide.
John Howard's government passed a draconian new labour
code squarely in the tradition of Thatcherism and an
anti-terrorism act that rivals the US Patriot Act.

The centerpiece of the triumph of neoliberalism, and
the focus of the most successful left and labour
opposition, lies in the dramatic reverses in labour
law. The massive and euphemistically named
"WorkChoices" bill abolishes unfair termination appeals
in all businesses with less than 100 workers and in all
of the sure-to-be-many cases where the employer claims
that layoffs reflect "operational requirements." It
guts overtime premium pay and enables forced overtime
work in a way that will be the envy of Bush
administration anti-labour strategists. It severely
restricts union access to workplaces while sharply
limiting and increasingly criminalizing the right to
strike. The bill allows for unilateral termination of
expired agreements by management. Minimum wage
settlements are put in the hands of a commission
mandated to make economic competitiveness - not the
living and fair wage ideas so prominent in white
Australian industrial history - the benchmark in
setting standards. In the run-up to the bill's passage
its opponents mobilized hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators in what were, with the anti-Iraq War
protests of 2003, the biggest in the nation's history.

The anti-terrorism bill, passed without similar mass
protest after gag orders to curb reporting on its
contents, authorizes detentions without evidence of
criminal involvement and without disclosure of
incarceration. Even the disclosure of facts regarding
these irregular seizures and interrogations of persons
is itself made a crime both for journalists and others.
The bill grants "shoot to kill" immunities in pursuits
of possible detainees. It opens the way - in a manner
chilling to aboriginal activists who necessarily build
their campaigns for land rights and "stolen wages" on
searching and vocal criticism of government policy - to
prosecutions on charges of "urging disaffection" with
the state.

The great South African novelist JM Coetzee, now living
in Australia, put the new law's inhumanity squarely in
human terms. He offered a scenario in which "someone
called a reporter and said 'Tell the world - some men
came last night, took my husband, my son, my father
away, I don't know who they were, they didn't give
names, they had guns.'" And he spelled out the results:
"the next thing that would happen would be that you and
the reporter in question would be brought into custody
for furthering the aims of a terrorist [and]
endangering the security of the state." Coetzee
continued, "All of this [was done] during apartheid in
South Africa in the name of the fight against terror. .
. I used to think that the people who created [South
African] law that effectively suspended the rule of law
were moral barbarians. Now I know that they were just
pioneers ahead of their times."

While elements of the Labour Party fought relatively
hard on the trade union legislation, its historically
racialized perspective on labour allowed it to define
class interests separate from what it believed to be
its security interest. Thus Labour voted with the
Howard government on the anti-terror bill, even as the
United Nations warned of the possibility that the
legislation would ratify anti-immigrant racist hysteria
and victimize asylum-seekers. In an angry post-mortem
when the law passed, the Law Council of Australia held,
"Unlike the Labour Party, we've put up a good fight."

Within a week of the legislation's passage, many
Australians mobilized in a militant demonstration in
the Sydney area, though not of the kind for which we
would hope. At the time of these historic legislative
defeats for the working class and the Left, what in
Australia is called "talkback radio" became saturated
with political exchanges and calls to action. The
popular populist radio host Alan Jones strongly urged
the need for "a rally, a street march, call it what you
will. A community show of force." Radical groups joined
in building the protest. When thousands gathered at the
week's end the policing was so hesitant as to suggest
broad sympathy with the demonstrators. Nonetheless the
crowd of between five and ten thousand embraced
extralegal tactics, and violence lasted for many hours.
The early December actions absolutely galvanized press
attention with giant headlines clearly distilling the
crowd's message.

But, as the blaring headlines showed, that message did
not include a murmur of protest against the week's
legislative barbarisms. Instead it urged "RACE HATE"
(Herald Sun) and threatened to begin "RACE WAR" (The
Australian). Jones, the talkback radio riot organizer,
was a racist populist of the variety so familiar on US
airwaves. The radical groups building the mob were
white supremacist ones. The victims of the extremely
bloody and well-photographed militancy were the few
Arab youths on beaches that organizers and the mob had
declared off limits. Arab swimmers suffered taunts and
attacks as potential bombers, as threats to Australian
women, and as puritans opposed to bikinis, nudity and
beer on the beaches. On Cronulla Beach, the white crowd
could see itself as the beleaguered combative essence
of the Australian nation. "And the mob," as one
newspaper put it, gesturing towards The Pogues' great
antiwar anthem, "sang 'Waltzing Matilda.'"

After parliamentary defeats and the beach riots, for
many on the Left the tasks seem to be to build
resistance in single-issue campaigns that so
effectively focus on the "real" and "unifying" issues
of class and capitalism as to draw energies away from
the irrationalities that fuelled the Cronulla mob and
to identify and champion alternative national
traditions and values in Australia that could lead to
deep opposition to attacks on both workers and on
immigrants. Yet to follow this seemingly non-racialized
course is to ignore the very real, and distinct,
problem of racism. That the full and excellent website
of the main Australian trade union federation did not
mention the riots underscores this point.

Such a response continues patterns firmly established
in the campaigns against repressive labour legislation.
In the former campaign, the labour federation argued
for the existing laws because "for more than a hundred
years, Australia has had an industrial relations system
that has given working people a share of the benefits
of economic prosperity when times are good and ensured
that there are decent protections... when times get
tough." The left-wing journalist John Pilger worries
that the new labour code has "put paid to Australia's
tenuous self-regard as the 'land of fair go.'" He
recites a litany of firsts that gave reason for such a
self-image: women's suffrage, the minimum wage, Labour
Party government, the eight-hour day, the Australian
ballot. "In the 1960s," Pilger concludes, "with the
exception of the Aboriginal people... Australians could
boast of the most equitable spread of national income
in the world." Such appeals ignore, or in Pilger's case
literally bracket, the decimation of aboriginal people,
land seizures, stolen wages, stolen children and
exclusion from the very social goods for which the
nation is extolled. Similarly disappeared is the
unambiguous grounding of Australian social democracy
and women's suffrage in white supremacy and Asian and
Pacific Islander exclusion.

Right-wing victories are not explicable without
understanding the dynamics of white supremacy exposed
by the beach riots. While the Howard government does
not generally more than flirt with openly vulgar racism
- the prime minister's response to the riots was that
Australia is a colorblind society - its attacks on
indigenous land rights, stalling of the reconciliation
process without even a symbolic apology for settler
colonialism and setting up of offshore compounds in
which asylum seekers are indefinitely detained as a
precondition of entry speak powerfully. As radio talk
shows turned the conversation away from class, labour
law and civil liberties to beaches and Arabs, the
Howard government announced a study of the alleged
pathology and waste of small aboriginal settlements,
with a view to the withdrawal of government services
and support from them. The Labour Party's feeble
colorblind response was to suggest that small white
settlements also be investigated.

Such sidestepping cannot work. In Australia, right-wing
politics has successfully won votes by uniting
nationalism and an individualism leavened by male-
bonding around the image of the "battler," the hard-
working man struggling indomitably in a hostile and
changed world. Made up of elements of frontier
mythology, imperial sport and "mateship," the battler
is distinctly white. The important indigenous
Australian scholar of whiteness Aileen Moreton-Robinson
has recently written that "representations of mateship,
egalitarianism, individualism and citizenship" are
presented as if they have no "connection to whiteness,"
but that in fact at every turn they do connect with it,
and with right-wing political success.

The literal wrapping of those in the beachfront mob in
flags and flag headbands, the avowals of defense of
Australian womanhood and the claiming of the high-
ground of talkback radio commonsense before the show of
force all tie Cronulla to everyday politics of race and
gender. Editorial cartoons in the wake of the bloodshed
were far more acute than written editorials. The best
of them, in The Australian, showed in extreme closeup a
gaggle of flabbily fierce white men, brandishing
weapons and sporting t-shirts that read "Muslims Out!!"
"Bash Lebs!" and "Kill Wogs!" The caption read
"Howard's Battlers."

Potent in its linking of racial violence to the
policies of the Howard regime, the cartoon accomplishes
what the Left should. With racist demonstrators
themselves rationalizing their attacks on immigrants
and non-white Australian citizens as a direct response
to Howard's legislative victories, leftists need to
think about the timing of such events. That the most
militant expression of rage to follow the passage of
the WorkChoices legislation as well as the anti-terror
bill was a demonstration of white power - notably aimed
at recruiting working-class youths, but not led by them
- should inspire leftists to creative and innovative
thinking about the explanatory power of race in
people's lives today.

Three Issues for Activists

This kind of thinking requires us to accept the complex
but plain notion that race has been created
historically and changes over time. Of course, this
statement is more true at the level of the state than
the individual, but we have to acknowledge that race
and racism, while structurally organized, are created
and reproduced in everyday life. Indeed, this dimension
of race, in which it is created while class is
supposedly "real," is one of the crutches the Left has
leaned on in order to think less hard about how to
combat racism.

Toward the end of creating both anti-racist theory and
practice we want to speak to three issues we think
activists must confront in the process of multi-racial
movement building.

1. Rights and Privileges

In a world in which rights are constructed as
privileges, it is logical to speak of racism in terms
of white skin privilege. But precisely because some of
what exist as privileges are in fact rights it is
imperative that activists understand the difference
between what we are fighting for and what we are
fighting against.

As anti-racist activist and scholar George Lipsitz has
beautifully articulated, "opposing whiteness is not the
same as opposing white people...one way of becoming a
[white] insider is by participating in the exclusion of
others. White people always have the option of becoming
anti-racist...we do not choose our colour, but we do
choose our commitments. Yet we do not make these
decisions in a vacuum; they occur within a social
structure that gives value to whiteness and offers
rewards for racism." If opposing racism means opposing
social exclusion and expanding opportunity and
possibility for those historically and still excluded,
it is critical that we strive to understand the
difference between rights and privileges.

What is it that white people must give up? For example,
white privilege shields white people from much
repressive everyday policing. So, after white
supremacist Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal
building in Oklahoma City, should anti-racists have
demanded that young, white men with short hair be
randomly questioned, stopped and detained? Of course
not! But today when terrorism comes up and people think
they are only talking about security and not at all
about race it's worth pointing out that young white men
weren't singled out after McVeigh's bombing in the way
that young men of colour have been since Sept. 11,
2001. Should we argue for more policing of white youth
because immigrant and Black youths are more harshly
policed? No, though we should creatively and with
conviction develop language to talk about how skin
privilege does shape life experiences without urging
personal guilt as a solution.

Knowing the difference between rights that should be
expanded and privileges which should not be taken for
granted is essential in building genuine multiracial
organizations and societies.

2. Understanding Racism

Theoretically-informed writing, even when the language
is tough-sledding, can help inform our practice. Thus
when Lisa Lowe writes in Immigrant Acts that capital
often profits "not through rendering labour 'abstract'
but by... creating, preserving, and reproducing the
specifically racialized and gendered character of
labour power" she speaks to what happened in
Australia's labour law and on its beaches. She shows us
that race is no "fixed essence" but a convergence of
contradictions. She models how Marxist insights can be
both deployed and extended. Developing as it does out
of so many different kinds of intersections, so many
different kinds of state actions regarding citizenship,
and so many different degrees of unfreedom, race must
constantly be specifically situated, which means that
racism must also be. One task of activists should be to
continue developing new language for understanding the
myriad actions and ideas that fall under the heading
"racism." As the freedom movement in South Africa gave
us the concept of non-racialism, as the Civil Rights
and Black Power movements each expanded our
understanding of the difference between legal and
extra-legal discrimination along with the importance of
understanding and taking on both, and as women of
colour feminists challenged and fundamentally
transformed national liberation movements with regard
to gender roles, so, too, do today's activists need to
understand the systems of oppression we confront and
need to shift. If the UN Conference on Racism proved
one thing it is that there are multiple racisms in the
world and thus there must be multiple strategies for
resistance.

3. What Should We Do?

We must support every small effort, including
especially demands for reparations for people oppressed
by racism that potentially educate white people about
the ways in which capitalism, settler colonialism,
slavery and racism developed together in the past and
about how serious anti-racist actions can benefit all
of us today. We must expand participation, resist
complacency and demand reform while opposing top-down
reformism. We must insist that quiet desperation is the
best we can expect without direct action for
transformation.


newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php

[Note: New Socialist is published by New Socialist
Group in Canada]
__________________