The following theses are an attempt to understand how the U.S. racial order has changed in recent decades, how it is working at the moment, and what forces may exist in U.S. society today that could destroy capitalism and white supremacy.
1.
The impact of the civil rights and Black Power movements domestically, and the defeat of traditional European colonialism internationally, have shaken the national racial order more profoundly than any event since the Civil War, and the global racial order more profoundly than any event since the Haitian Revolution.
2.
The dismantling of legal segregation after 1954 allowed a small but ideologically significant layer of blacks to enter the non-segregated bourgeoisie and upper middle class, to live, work and learn in the same places as so-called whites. Shortly thereafter, the rise of neoliberalism and deindustrialization destroyed the livelihoods of many working class blacks, and doomed millions to impoverishment and prison. The recent economic crisis has cemented this trend by decimating the black housing base, and cutting the public sector jobs on which many black households rely. Thus the “black community” today is more profoundly split by class differentiation than at any time in its history. Some blacks have “made it” into bourgeois and upper middle class institutions, where they encounter the prejudices of individual whites, but the majority remain structurally barred from even entering these arenas by the police, prison, housing, education and welfare systems.
A stable black working class remains despite the process of “lumpenization,” its members largely employed in the public sector, but it has so far been immobilized by decaying union structures and the aloofness of the black elite. Meanwhile, a volatile sense of disillusionment simmers from below, only temporarily appeased by the Obama presidency. Many lumpen and working class blacks are aware that black “leaders” and the rest of U.S. society have abandoned them, and now live with a mix of nihilism and explosive rage. The state represses and manages these sentiments along gendered lines, targeting mainly (though not exclusively) men with police and mass incarceration, and mainly women with the punitive welfare system. Proletarian blacks nonetheless express their energies in periodic urban rebellions, and daily resentment toward the police force, which with the decline of white mob violence is the most visible representative of their oppression.
3.
Immigration reforms starting in 1965 opened the way for new waves of legal immigrants, many of whom were bureaucratically selected for their technical skills and educational achievement. The vast majority of these groups have not “become white” like the Irish, Poles or Italians that preceded them: that is, they have not gained unquestioned access to the housing, education and employment benefits monopolized by white Americans, and come to be considered members of a white “race.” Instead, they inhabit a middle ground in which they have partial access to such benefits, and are not considered white, yet remain racially distinct from blacks. Racial “middle layers” with similar class mobility and racial statuses have existed in throughout U.S. history (with Chicanos following the Mexican-American War, for example, or Chinese during the gold rush). However, the racial categories associated with these groups rarely became nationally predominant, and were sometimes absorbed into the white/black binary in the course of legal and social conflicts (as in the case of the Irish in the late 1800s). Today the situation is different.
The contemporary racial order includes a “middle layer” more predominant and longer lasting than any such layer in U.S. history. This arrangement has been made possible ideologically through the ruling class adoption of “multiculturalism” and “colorblind” public policy and discourse. Multiculturalism allows groups across the U.S. to retain a non-white status for a long period of time—perhaps indefinitely—without becoming either “white” or “black.” With this status, groups may climb the class ladder in a manner unimaginable under de jure segregation, distinguishing themselves from most blacks, fraternizing with the white middle class, and even entering the ranks of the bourgeoisie in limited numbers, while retaining a distinct “cultural” identity. The class mobility of groups in this “middle layer” depends partly on their passive acceptance of the subjugation of proletarian blacks. At the same time, they remain distinct from whites and vulnerable to white supremacist backlash, as in the case of East Asians in the rustbelt during the 1980s, or Arab Americans nationally after 9/11.
4.
Part of the “middle layer” suffers from a degree of class immobility similar to that of proletarian blacks, and thus acquires a “darker” racial status than other non-black groups. Groups are “darkened,” so to speak, by structural factors that consistently hold them in the lowest layers of the proletariat (the reservation system among Native Americans, or intransigent underdevelopment in the home countries of Cambodians, Salvadorans, and many other immigrant groups). “Dark” racial groups participate in domestic, agricultural, and dirty, dangerous or non-unionized industrial labor. Sometimes these groups must enter the workforce along starkly gendered lines, with men assigned to low-wage production and transport work (for example, construction or other day labor) and women assigned to low-wage reproductive work (nannying or housekeeping) after traveling to the U.S. alone. Members of “dark” racial groups struggle alongside lumpen and working class blacks in poor urban neighborhoods, the prison system, warehouses, sales floors, construction sites, small factories, and the street force that first appeared in the 1992 L.A. riots. The main structural factor maintaining a “dark” layer in the current period is the division between documented and undocumented. Since 2006, the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. have waged a nationwide general strike, only to be intimidated by ICE raids and racist state legislation, and frustrated by tepid federal reforms. They continue to struggle clandestinely, take action with prudence, and seek out allies.
5.
Whites remain a privileged stratum in the U.S. by definition, though the “wages” of whiteness have shrunk in absolute terms for 30 years, and have grown more porous with the adoption of colorblind public policy. The bourgeoisie remains overwhelmingly white, and the white proletariat continues to waver in its allegiance between white supremacy and class struggle. Whites retain access to the housing, education and employment benefits from which most blacks and “dark” racial groups are excluded; yet the defeat of de jure segregation has limited the extent of these benefits, and allowed some “middle layer” racial groups, and a few blacks, to gain access to them as well. At the same time, deindustrialization and neoliberalism have steadily eroded the living standards of lumpen and working class whites in most parts of the country, driving many into poverty or extreme debt. Proletarian whites have responded with bewilderment and outrage to these developments, giving rise to contradictory political trends. On one side, they have engaged in fascist militia-ism and the Tea Party movement; on the other, they have predominated in the ranks of the Occupy movement and trade union battles, which the unions must now embrace for their very survival even as they work to limit their potentials. In opposing the regressive gender regime of the far right, white women, queers and trans people undermine support for potentially fascist politics among the white proletariat.
6.
The racial order today is characterized by instability, perhaps more so than in any other period in U.S. history. The white proletariat is growing increasingly polarized between a commitment to old-style white supremacy, which would likely require a fascist movement to re-impose, and class struggle in association with some or all of the non-white proletariat. “Middle layer” racial groups with a high degree of class mobility tend to ally themselves with the liberal wing of capital, but a “dark” portion struggles in political isolation against extreme oppression. The majority of lumpen and working-class blacks struggle under similar conditions, despite the occasional concerned gesture from the black bourgeoisie, which so far has sufficed to contain mass rebellion. The bourgeoisie is divided over how to reproduce class rule, and what form of white supremacy is appropriate to this task. Persistent divisions in the U.S. ruling class and Republican Party on questions of, for example, immigration reform, reflect ongoing conflict among the capitalists about what should happen. Even though “multiculturalism” appears to be the dominant ruling class policy nationally and internationally, the success of fascist movements in Europe and Russia could contribute to the retrenchment of a more rigid racial order in the U.S, perhaps cast in cultural terms. It is a time of great uncertainty, and our actions will make a difference in the outcome.
7.
This account of the racial order suggests several possibilities. First, it suggests that the terms and strategies of previous eras will prove unsuited to this period. The category “people of color” will fail to cohere a revolutionary bloc, as it encapsulates too broad a range of racial groups, with widely varying experiences of racialization, lived material conditions, and relations with proletarian blacks. Nor will a politics which views racial privilege as an attribute or object possessed by individuals pose a serious challenge to the system. These politics not only obscure the institutional arrangements through which racialization occurs, but also provide a basis for bourgeois blacks and “middle layer” racial groups to assert their individual “right” to climb the class ladder, at least as much as they provide a means for proletarian blacks and “dark” racial groups to challenge their subjugation.
Black bourgeois nationalism will likely be hampered in this period by the unwillingness of black women, queers and trans people to submit to rigid gender regimes, and their openness to forming autonomous organizations with women, queers and trans people of other “middle layer” racial groups; both are the results of the gay liberation and feminist struggles of the 1970s–1980s. Furthermore, black nationalist politics that don’t explicitly aim to overthrow the black bourgeoisie will tend to be marginal and reactionary in practice, ensuring the deference of the black proletariat to the black bourgeoisie, rather than, as in previous periods, creating openings through which the black proletariat might transcend its segregated bourgeoisie as the latter struggles for integration.
8.
Second, this account suggests that a variety of social and cultural conflicts will unfold as different sectors of the population navigate, and develop their own understandings of, the shifting racial order. These will likely entail battles over the meaning of “authentic” blackness, itself an expression of the conflict between lumpen and working class blacks, and upper middle class and bourgeois blacks. They may involve the emergence of new subjectivities capable of unifying blacks and “dark” racial groups, while remaining porous to working-class and lumpen whites: for example, geographic or “hood” identities, already grasped at by the thousands of multiracial youth who address each other as “my nigga,” and the small “nations” of street organizations. In the course of these conflicts, proletarian blacks and “dark” racial groups will probably be forced to challenge the legal idioms with which much of the colorblind racial order is maintained, such as “illegal” and “criminal”.
If global capitalism continues to experience extended stagnation and crisis, the white proletariat will continue to polarize between far right and the left. This could entail conflict within white communities over their relations to non-white groups of different types, and whether parts of the white population are “becoming black.” The same conditions could generate conflicts within “middle layer” racial groups over their relations to blacks, and the content of their own identities (for example, a resurgent focus on afrolatinidad or indio status in Latino communities). The outcome of these conflicts will indicate what kinds of alliances are possible in the current period between different layers of the proletariat.
9.
It is possible to cohere a revolutionary bloc, which draws together the revolutionary social forces in U.S. society, given the present balance of forces. Objectively, this bloc must: (a) incorporate lumpen and working-class blacks while breaking decisively with the black bourgeoisie, thus expressing the revolutionary energies of the former independently of the latter; (b) unify black and “dark” racial groups, thus challenging the anti-black basis of the racial order, while fostering insurgency in more neighborhoods and sectors of the U.S. economy than those inhabited by proletarian blacks alone; (c) on the basis of this alliance, radicalize other “middle layer” racial groups whose class mobility would otherwise cause them to vacillate politically, such as most East Asians in the U.S; and (d) draw a plurality of proletarian whites to the side of revolution, thus decisively splitting the allegiances of the white population and abolishing the “white race” in the process. A bloc of this type will be able to defeat both fascism, and the “multicultural” racial order which may be taking shape even now: a regime that unites the liberal wing of capital, the white proletariat and most “middle layer” racial groups against “dark” racial groups and proletarian blacks, and in which state repression is carried out and legitimated in legal, “cultural” and colorblind terms.
10.
The decisive factor in the creation of this bloc is likely to be the appearance of some form of “black-brown” alliance, which draws together proletarian blacks and “dark” racial groups, and is articulated across a range of different contexts. Blacks and “dark” racial groups live alongside each other in poor neighborhoods in many regions, and lay claim between them to a broad swath of production and transport in the U.S. economy. A “black-brown” alliance thus has the potential to bind together the U.S. lumpenproletariat and industrial working class, and maintain the cohesion of a revolutionary bloc.
Many developments could help forge this alliance: a spate of riots that draw blacks, “dark” racial groups, and lumpen whites into the streets; a new wave of immigrant mobilization; a “black-brown” feminist movement that reaches beyond the academy, publishing houses and nonprofits to poor and working class neighborhoods; a surge of wildcat actions in small or non-union shops; or a series of public sector strikes coordinated with poor communities. Class struggle by proletarian whites could help spur this alliance by demonstrating the feasibility and potentials of resistance, as well as the limitations of such movement without the participation of blacks and “dark” racial groups. In many parts of the country, a “black-brown” alliance could take the form of solidarity between the “criminalized” and the “illegal”. Both proletarian blacks and undocumented immigrants possess explosive revolutionary potentials, while both have faced serious defeats in recent decades that oblige them to seek allies among the rest of the proletariat. Unity between black and “dark” racial groups, in this and other forms, may lie at the core of the insurrections to come.
—by BA JIN
Featured photo courtesy of DENNIS FLORES
What is racial in the U.S. racial order?
I do not wish to argue over terms. Definitions are not right or wrong; they are useful or not useful. No biologist has ever satisfactorily defined a race. Shifting attention from races to racial oppression gives better results: racial oppression, like gender and national oppression, is a specific form of oppression; its hallmark is the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group. Huck Finn’s Pap could push W.E.B. Du Bois off the sidewalk. Thurgood Marshall famously defined a Negro as someone who has to sit in the back of the bus in Georgia. Any other definition would have been hopelessly sloppy and subjective.
Is there anything today corresponding to old-fashioned Jim Crow, anything that applies to all members of a group and can therefore define the group? If not, then what are “white,” “black,” “Latino,” etc. but statements of probabilities? How do those terms as used in the theses differ from standard bourgeois empiricism, as reflected, for example, in the census?
What if, instead of continuing to use “racial” (or “ethnic”) designations, we start at the other end? Consider those who, having lost all connection to the means of producing their livelihood, are left with only a single commodity, their labor-power, which in order to survive they must sell to those who own the means or production? Marxists, of course, refer to such people as the working class. Narrow the group to those who possess no special skills or training that allow them to earn more than the bare minimum necessary to survive (if that), who have no institutional (union or other) ties to a particular industry or place of employment and who move from job to job, experiencing protracted spells of unemployment, often without unemployment insurance, who are unable to maintain a stable residence and who have an intimate acquaintance with the criminal justice system.
We have moved from class to a stratum of a class. For historic reasons, that stratum contains a greater proportion of those known as “black,” “Latino” (a problematic term, but let that go for now), and “American Indian” than their share in the general population, but it will include plenty of those known as “white.” (Whether it includes a greater proportion of those known as “Asians” than their share in the general population, and from which parts of Asia they or their ancestors derive, can be ascertained easily enough.) Isn’t that a more useful way of looking for the revolutionary subject than focusing on the “racial order”?
The various constituent groups bring to the cause of human emancipation different strengths and weaknesses: histories of struggle “back home” coexisting with fear of deportation and gratefulness for making more money than they did before; self-confidence born of a history of overcoming obstacles through direct action coexisting with a sense of racial entitlement; honor and family loyalty coexisting with patriarchal traditions; the ability to see through the deceptions of official society and its agents coexisting with religious and legalistic illusions—I do not intend the list to be exhaustive. Each group’s national past is an important part of its story, and to deny it would be dangerous (perhaps as dangerous as making it everything). The task is to examine it through the lens of class.
Historically, race served capital by guaranteeing the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence, of the working class of the favored group; it was for whites, not others. Apart from that function, it was of no importance to capital, for whom labor power is labor power, nor should it be to us.
A few additional comments and questions:
1) The theses acknowledge that a “small but ideological significant layer of blacks” have entered the “non-segregated bourgeoisie and upper-middle class,” and assert that “the majority” or black people are structurally barred from those circles. How many whites are part of the bourgeoisie and upper-middle class? Aren’t the children of white workers structurally barred from those circles? How much of what the theses point to is race-based and how much is the normal operation of class?
2) What about those black folk who are neither part of the bourgeoisie nor caught up in a life of protracted unemployment, homelessness, and the criminal justice system—the ones who drive the buses, deliver the mail, maintain the phone lines, clerk in hospitals and department stores, hold down jobs, make payments, save (or borrow) for their kids’ education—the majority of any community—how does their situation differ from that of their “white” counterparts except that there are more of them and that more often than whites they have family members in desperate circumstances?
3) What do the theses mean by the term “lumpen”—those some call the “criminal class,” what some now call the “precarious proletariat,” or something else?
4) The theses say that the “vast majority” of the new immigrants constitute a “middle layer,” neither black nor white, that they have not gained “unquestioned access to the housing, education and employment benefits monopolized by whites” Is “unquestioned access” to housing, etc. part of the definition of white? If it is, how many young people of European descent qualify as white? Has “white” lost its force as an analytic category?
5) The theses state that many in the middle layer “retain a non-white status and a distinct cultural identity for a long period of time—perhaps indefinitely,” and that they “remain vulnerable to white supremacist backlash,” citing hostility toward East Asians in the rust belt, or Arabs after 9/11. What backlash are the theses referring to? The persecution of German-Americans during World War I (!) exceeded in scope and violence anything directed at Arabs. Does the occasional violence directed against individuals of Asian descent held responsible for the loss of jobs in Detroit compare with the internment camps for the Japanese in World War II?
6) The theses distinguish between the “new immigrants” in general and the “dark” racial groups. How does the situation of the “dark” racial groups differ from that of Irish in 1860 (Gangs of New York) or Italians in 1910 (Godfather Part 2)?
7) The U.S. working class has always been stratified by background and nationality. I am not arguing that nothing has changed; the small likelihood of an increase in the demand for labor-power taking place soon makes the present situation different from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But rather than clinging to a category, “race,” that has lost its force, it makes more sense to abandon it altogether and undertake a class analysis.
8) I agree that the “people of color” category has lost whatever value it possessed. A legacy from the days when national liberation struggles swept across Asia, Africa and Latin America, it has become a self-serving ideology.
9) The theses speculate that “most” East Asians whose class mobility would normally incline them to “vacillate politically” (more accurately, side with capital) might be radicalized by a general upsurge. Maybe so, but have the framers of the theses visited the University of California-Berkeley or the library at MIT?
Hey Noel, i agree with most of your historical points, but i cant see how we can just “abandon” the category of race. That that is even possible prior to a revolutionary situation seems off. In my present experience, which is centered in Philadelphia, young people at the bottom of society continue to think of their class positioning in racial terms, in both reactionary and counter-hegemonic ways. What would b the practical implications of dismissing race as an analytical category in practical political work? It would seem to imply an approach to the struggle against racism as needing to be subsumed into the class struggle. But the point is to abolish racial oppression through the class struggle, no? Not to just stop using race as category, right?
The categories of race and class have certainly shifted in the U.S. over the past 30 years, and revolutionaries must adapt their strategies and methods to this fact (something most are not doing well at all, still stuck in the 60’s and even 30’s). But not using “race” as a category does nothing to change this. New frameworks for understanding and fighting capitalism will grow from within new struggles against it. Ultimately, for race as an understanding to change (or to end) race as an object needs to first be transformed. Race is not a stain that we must remove from a pure class struggle, but a contradiction that is still central to the maintenance of class rule and the capitalist world, a contradiction whose tensions we must heighten in order to destroy.
-Arturo
this is an interesting and valiant attempt to describe a really difficult and complicated situation whose roots extend back for centuries. i think this essay does get some things right, but in its attempt to condense, it elides and oversimplifies to a fault, and ultimately this limits its conclusions. i’m going to try to lay out some disagreements i have with this essay, in the hopes that it promotes a healthy discussion and encourages the author (or others) to look again, to look deeper, and to come back with more.
first i have some vulgar notes in response to direct quotes pulled from the essay, designated by their numbered section:
3. (these quotes all refer to the “middle layer” group)
” the racial categories associated with these groups rarely became nationally predominant”
what exactly is meant by “nationally predominant”? what about pre-1965 immigrants whose racial categories did become federally targeted through discriminatory legislation and policies? (ie, chinese exclusion act, japanese internment, high rate of mexican lynchings from after the mexican-american war til the early 1930s, mexican repatriation program, the chicano movement) these historical categories and designations are still at play in the racialization of non white non black peoples, and it does not make sense to discount them because of a perceived lack of national prominence or importance (for example, the same language and stereotypes about japanese immigrants were at play during japanese internment in the 1940s, and again in the murder of vincent chin in 1982).
“they inhabit a middle ground in which they have partial access to such benefits, and are not considered white, yet remain racially distinct from blacks.”
this is too much of a generalization of entirely disparate racialized groups to be correct or of any usefulness. how can this “middle ground” – above blacks, below whites – actually be defined for all the peoples encompassed by the “middle layer” category? does everyone in this category truly have “partial access to benefits” across the board? this is an example of why the middle layer category is not useful as a frame of analysis.
” they remain distinct from whites and vulnerable to white supremacist backlash, as in the case of East Asians in the rustbelt during the 1980s, or Arab Americans nationally after 9/11.”
racism against non white non black peoples is also systemic; describing racism against these groups as merely occasional outbursts of white supremacist violence misrepresents the structural nature of institutionalized racism in the u.s.
“The contemporary racial order includes a “middle layer” more predominant and longer lasting than any such layer in U.S. history. This arrangement has been made possible ideologically through the ruling class adoption of “multiculturalism” and “colorblind” public policy and discourse.”
non white non black people have existed here since before the beginning of the u.s. as a country; it is historically incorrect to attribute this “arrangement” to the adoption of multiculturalism and colorblind policies. the white supremacist u.s. govt (and its british, french, and spanish colonial predecessors) has maintained and promoted the notion of racial distinction among non white peoples as a divide and conquer tactic since before the colonial era, pitting racialized groups against each other to compete for resources and undermine solidarity across racial lines. it is unclear how a relatively recent ideology (multiculturalism, colorblindness) can be said to have created and maintained the designation of multiple peoples as non white but also non black.
4.
using the term “darker” to denote those sections of the “middle layer” that experience extreme class immobility is a dangerous and inaccurate misnomer. darker or lighter skin does not equal necessarily worse or better treatment, especially when talking about non white non black peoples; the situation is obviously more complex than this, so why resort to tired mischaracterizations?
“a “black-brown” feminist movement that reaches beyond the academy, publishing houses and nonprofits to poor and working class neighborhoods”
do you really presume that feminism currently emanates from the academy, and that such formations as the one you describe do not already exist/have not already existed?
and some general points:
the major flaw i see in this essay is the “middle layer” thesis. i don’t see the utility in condensing all non black non white peoples into a single category. and furthermore calling this category the “middle layer” incorrectly implies that being in this category means one’s position in the racial hierarchy is always higher or better than being black, even if only marginally.
i agree with this statement: “The category “people of color” will fail to cohere a revolutionary bloc, as it encapsulates too broad a range of racial groups, with widely varying experiences of racialization, lived material conditions, and relations with proletarian blacks.” in this sense, the “middle category” is performing a similar function of smushing together the disparate histories and lived experiences of everyone who is not white but also not black. while it is obviously necessary to separate out and acknowledge the specific histories and lived experiences of anti-black racism in the u.s., i think you do your theses a disservice by condensing everyone else into a single category. yes of course, some non white non black people are more upwardly mobile and benefit from light(er) skin privilege and etc etc – but how does it make sense to put an indigenous person living on a reservation, a light skinned arab, a hmong refugee, an undocumented mestizo (just to throw out some random examples), all in the same category? each of these persons would have different experiences of racism and class mobility, and their lives would be extremely different depending on their geographic location, their gender, and the historical moment, among other factors. it’s not doing us any favors to minimize any of this, and at worst it falls into the trap of analyzing the u.s. racial order solely through a black-white lens.
this essay does not deal with racialization of native americans (ie, genocide, dispossession, reservation system, residential school systems). this is essential to acknowledge because it is the only other major systematic, long-term, legally-mandated racism in the u.s. aside from black slavery and subsequent legal discrimination (jim crow, black codes). also there is a lot of overlap between black and native american populations, especially in the southeastern u.s.; this complicates the narrative of racialization in the u.s. (the seminole wars, black freedmen who joined various indigenous nations, etc)
this essay also does not take into account u.s. racism in terms of imperialist wars and occupations in southeast pacific, middle east, and latin america.
you mention “low-wage reproductive work” but do not actually speak of gender as a “structural factor” maintaining a division between the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, and/or proletariat and bourgeoisie. gender is a structure that interacts with the structure of race under capitalism; without taking this into account in your framework, your analysis of the current racial order in the u.s. is necessarily incomplete.
hope these interventions are useful; i’d be interested in any disagreements or clarifications the author or others have in response.
great comment f!
I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this intervention, and that I think it’s unfortunate that much of this discussion and subsequent critiques seemed to move forward without further examination of these notes.
thanks bryan and n.
i believe actually that NPC took up my comment and responded to it in their comment below. i would love to get your thoughts before i reply again.
Noel, can you say more about why there’s a chance for an increase in demand for labor power distinct from prior centuries?
I second what others have said about darkness and the middle layer. Noel raises some challenges about race analysis I’ll have to chew on. In general, I think we need to move away from variants on 1960s pan-racial alliances which at the same time glossed over real class contradictions within sections of the working class divided by race, and ignored potential unities at the same time. For example, some white Cuban immigrants enter the US legally and have access to a variant of social democracy few other immigrants or native-born Americans do. Yet many such Cubans enter into real oppression either in the illegal economy or in the underclass sections of precarious working class life in factories in Hialeah, recycling garbage, etc. Likewise the racial divisions in society create clashes around access to social goods as you see in Miami with divisions between West Indians, Haitians, and native born blacks. Part of what Noel raises that I think is useful is that there is how we describe and understand the world, and how we organize as revolutionaries. Those two tools don’t necessarily add up.
women, queers, trans against fascism: I see no reason to make the assumption that being oppressed as women, queers, and trans are makes them inherently opposed to fascism. In general I think the left is too conservative with fascism. There’s no reason to assume that any potential fascism will be racist, sexist, and queer-phobic. While many fascisms will, the potential for a fascism which groups a broader coalition of people losing their traditional privileges is possible. Likewise a truly revolutionary anti-capitalist fascism that set itself out to create an authoritarian repressive regime doesn’t inherently have to target traditional repressed communities. In the 20s, sections of fascism were among the avant garde and increasingly attracted former leftists, artists, intellectuals, etc. We shouldn’t assume that fascism will always be crass, conservative, and stupid. We’ve already seen fascist experimentation with moving away from overt racial oppression. It may not be serious now, but what stops some future fascist from trying to unite races, genders, and sexuality within the lumpen, petit bourgeois, working classes to destroy the anti-national bourgeoisie, wage nationalist wars, and re-establish the glory of the United States? On a socialist basis?
abolishing the white race- At this stage in the game we should question this language. What is the logic for using such awkward language for something that is easily explained without it? I know language is secondary, but I’ve never understood why that phrase was seen to help us.
agency, revolutionaries, predictions- The big gap in this contribution is relating to how we parse it out. It’s relevant and necessary to create new understandings of class recomposition and race in the US, something both this piece and Noel’s reply contribute to. Aside from that, my worry is that the piece suggests too much of a picture of watching and waiting. I could be wrong, because it’s short and there’s lots of reasons not to spell out a strategy in such a piece. Likewise, it’s also false that we can simply leverage at will class formations we want as the left. Objective conditions have a large role there. Still, we need to carve out how revolutionaries can play a role in the subjective struggle that goes beyond analysis of society, predictions, and awaiting the emergence of a potentially revolutionary force. We should do all that too, but revolutionary agency still has a role. It’s one that’s been denigrated on the one side by the “build movements step by step…. revolution” and on the other by spontaneism.
Thank you everyone for the comments so far. Both Noel and F’s critiques deserve thought-out responses, and maybe ultimately a blog post that deals with some of the points brought up in both. I grappled with Noel’s comments, and will offer some thoughts here, and then take another set of notes and respond to F’s comments after a breather.
I understand Noel’s critique to be about what methods revolutionaries should use to analyze society and develop strategies. Noel writes: “racial oppression, like gender and national oppression, is a specific form of oppression; its hallmark is the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group.” If I’m reading his comment right, Noel upholds this definition of racial oppression, and believes no oppression in the U.S. today conforms to this definition; he thus thinks that if we try to understand oppression and resistance in terms of the racial categories we’ve inherited from the past, we will end up confusing ourselves and failing to develop a good strategy, because the racial categories we use will fail to map onto material reality. Instead, Noel suggests that we “start at the other end” and undertake a class analysis to identify, say, the stratum of the proletariat that we think has revolutionary potential. Once we’ve identified a stratum, we can then examine how different parts of that stratum have different racial or national labels for historical reasons, what strengths and weaknesses they bring to the table due to this history, and how to work with them. He believes this method is better than “reading” the present reality with racial categories that have become fairly incoherent. Noel, correct me if I’m way off on this sum-up.
While I see the logic in Noel’s argument, I think the method he ultimately proposes won’t work, or will just bring us back to the same problems this piece is starting to grapple with. I think if we did a straight-up class analysis of U.S. society, we would find there exist within the proletariat several caste-like or race-like divisions and stratifications, maintained by the operation of factors diverse as mass incarceration, undocumented immigration, the reservation system, and immigration or flight from countries which are underdeveloped or decimated by war. Not all these factors are equally powerful, or affect the same sized population, but they all work to consistently relegate those they affect to a lower social status and economic position than those not affected by them (perhaps not as comprehensively as the definition of racial oppression put forward by Noel, but we’ll get to that). I think we would also find that racial categories generated in previous periods, which are still floating around in general usage, often correspond to the people affected by these systems, but imperfectly (“black” refers to a large chunk of the prison population and communities impacted by prisons, but also to many who aren’t affected by it). And I think we would find that, in this relationship between material factors and racial categories, the former as started to manipulate the latter (mass incarceration has begun to rework the meaning of “black,” so that “black” starts to mean “criminal”). If we wanted to develop a revolutionary strategy in this situation, we would have to understand how to attack the caste-like or race-like stratifications within the proletariat, and we couldn’t do so without using the racial categories which society attaches to the people affected by these stratifications among others, and which these stratifications are increasingly coming to define.
So, I think if we used the method Noel proposes, we would find ourselves back in a situation where we had to grapple with racial categories. I agree with Noel that we shouldn’t be trapped by these categories, and we shouldn’t try to squeeze reality into categories that don’t fit. (That’s why I disagree with people who say “nothing has changed with white supremacy, they just use racial codewords now.”) However, because changes in material conditions never simply wipe clean preexisting categories and invent new ones wholesale, but rather take up and rework old ones over time; and because the shifts since the 1960s have not erased caste-like stratifications within the proletariat so that racial categories are merely ideological, but have rather reconfigured them so that racial categories map onto them imperfectly even as they grow increasingly bound-up with these stratifications; I think we need a method that grapples with race. In Marxist terms, we need a method that can grapple with both base and superstructure, and the relative autonomy of the latter in actual practice. I think at bottom, the fundamental difference between the method Noel proposes, and the one I’m fumbling toward with these theses, may be that we have different takes on base and superstructure.
I’ll try to get into this more. From my perspective, Noel’s method of understanding race assumes racial oppression actually functions as it claims to function. Racial oppression IS the reduction of all members of X group below all members of Y group. Taken to its most empiricist extreme, this definition would imply that if you find a few members of X group who are above members of Y group, then racial oppression doesn’t exist, and the categories corresponding to X race and Y race are no longer useful to revolutionaries. My beef is that categories never correspond to material realities perfectly, and there are always discrepancies and gaps. Crafting a revolutionary strategy requires understanding how and why these gaps are narrowing or widening to the point that categories will fall out of popular usage, not just discarding categories as soon as we discover that gaps exist. A definition of racial oppression which takes as its paradigm a very tight correspondence between material reality and racial categories, something only possible in certain periods and moments, will come up short.
Noel asks: “Is there anything today corresponding to old-fashioned Jim Crow, anything that applies to all members of a group and can therefore define the group? If not, then what are ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘Latino,’ etc. but statements of probabilities?” I would reply: if we understand race as a system which always puts all members of X above all members of Y, and if the only hallmarks we can point at to identify this process are sets of laws which claim to do this in writing, then we basically reduce race to law. It’s like saying: if there’s a set of laws on the books that define a racial category and relegate it to a certain treatment, then race exists; if there are no such laws, race doesn’t exist, and all racial categories are just statements of probability, made more or less accurate by non-racial systems that affect the chunks of the population to which the categories refer. My gut says this approach misses how Jim Crow actually functioned in relation to racial categories. For example, some Jim Crow laws defined “negroes” and earmarked them for particular treatment, but others such as voting requirements were ostensibly “colorblind,” and affected poor whites as well. Plus, Jim Crow only existed in the south, while in the north segregation was largely de facto. And in both south and north, a vast configuration of extra-legal mechanisms (say, everything from lynching to everyday norms of social interaction) was also needed to define and police racial categories. At particular historical moments in this mess, individuals and small groups of people referred to as “negro” may have found themselves in a social status above some “whites” (say, a northern black business owner voting while a poor white was turned away at the polls in the south). Does this mean racial oppression did not exist in the U.S. in these moments? Or that the definition of racial oppression above is too rigid to understand the complex operations between material systems and racial categories?
To use a different example: what kind of method would be helpful if we were revolutionaries trying to understand the situation and intervene in the aftermath of the Civil War? The above definition of racial oppression would seem to imply that racial oppression ceased in 1866, and that we should conduct a straight-up class analysis to figure out where to take action. And of course, we would obviously be wrong to build a strategy based on “negroes” and “whites” as we understood them and their interests prior to emancipation. However, even if we cast aside all racial categories and tried to conduct a straight-up class analysis of the situation, we would quickly find that caste-like divisions still existed within the population, masses of people were still using racial categories, and that the situation was very fluid. In order to figure out how the situation was likely to develop, and build a strategy to head it off, we would have to understand both how the material reality was changing, and how the categories were being reconfigured or remade in relation to it.
I think we are living through a period as fluid as that following the Civil War, and that we need a method of the type I’ve described to understand the situation and act. (I tried to hint at this in thesis #1, but now I think I should’ve been clearer, and maybe titled the piece “10 Theses On The U.S. Racial DISorder”!) These theses were my first swing at developing and using such a method, and in doing a dance between base and superstructure, I may have presented things in a confusing way. Noel asks: “How do those terms as used in the theses differ from standard bourgeois empiricism, as reflected, for example, in the census?” Throughout the theses, when I used terms like “white,” “black” and “Latino” which are in general usage in society, I tried to qualify them or situate them in a broader class picture. In other cases, I basically invented categories myself, which I felt corresponded to some as-yet-uncrystallized ideological categories floating around society, which correspond to the divisions being reproduced by material structures in society (i.e. “dark” racial groups: on a gut level, I felt this was a legitimate category to invent because I think most of society views those I’ve put in this category as being “more black” than others). This presentation may be needlessly confusing, but I hope folks can see the method I’m trying to get at.
Ok in conclusion: I think we need a method to help us understand the crash-landing of the U.S. racial order, anticipate if a new racial ideology may be taking shape in its wake, and decide how to intervene. I think we need to consider stuff like: (1) how divisions and stratifications within the proletariat are currently being created materially; (2) how existing racial categories correspond or not to the groups affected by these stratifications; (3) if and how the mechanisms creating these stratifications also reshape old racial categories or generate new ones; (4) how masses of people in their daily activity are grappling with these stratifications and this mix of racial ideas, and taking action; and finally (5) what openings these trends suggest for revolutionary action. I offer my own guess at what’s coming when I describe “the ‘multicultural’ racial order which may be taking shape even now” in thesis #9: “…a regime that unites the liberal wing of capital, the white proletariat and most ‘middle layer’ racial groups against ‘dark’ racial groups and proletarian blacks, and in which state repression is carried out and legitimated in legal, ‘cultural’ and colorblind terms.”
Would such a system become truly colorblind, and generate a whole new set of ideological categories to correspond to the caste-like divisions it maintains? This seems pretty unlikely to me. Would such a system turn the two sides I’ve described into “white” and “black”? Maybe, but that’s pretty wild speculation, and it’d be hard to mobilize people using “white” and “black” in a way that doesn’t correspond to how the terms are generally used at the moment. Can we take action using existing racial categories, pushing for nuances within them which correspond to material relations, and thereby bring into existence a revolutionary bloc adequate to these emerging material divisions? I think so.
Follow-up questions for Noel:
1. How do you understand the motion of base and superstructure in the U.S. right now? And, if you accept that it’s a highly fluid situation where the two are slip-sliding all over the place, how do you think revolutionaries should best understand the situation and intervene?
2. You write: “Historically, race served capital by guaranteeing the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence, of the working class of the favored group; it was for whites, not others.” What is your understanding of racial orders in other parts of the globe that were less bipolar than that in the U.S, like Latin American mestizaje, or the tri-racial stratification of whites, coloreds and blacks under Apartheid? How do we understand who these systems were “for,” so to speak?
3. Do you think a straight-up class analysis would result in a significantly different account of the revolutionary bloc I describe in thesis #9?
Oh, and just saw Scott Nappolos’ comment–I’ll try to put together a response there too, phew!
[I’m not sure if my comment went through the first time, I apologize if I post twice.] This is thought provoking stuff. Thanks for writing it. I have a few thoughts.
Like F, I don’t like the ‘middle layer’ terminology. It’s not clear what the term means here. I can see it being about loyalties (the middle layers is divided between loyalty to the whiter and capitalist power structure vs the more racialized and working class population), or about how well off people are/are likely to be (making the term part of a sort of measurement of degrees of misery/oppression). If it means the second, it’s confusing because of the use of darker/blacker in the piece. It would basically mean that ‘middle’ means ‘whiter’. That makes sense I guess, but it invites confusing political status with actual skin color. This would also suggest, even if the piece doesn’t mean to say so directly, that black people are likely to be worse off than undocumented Latinos, say, because black people are, well, darker. That COULD be the case, but it’s something to be tested, I think, if it’s even possible to find a stable unit for measuring oppression/misery.
On thesis three, it’s not a big deal but I’m not convinced that Chicanos and Chinese during the Gold Rush were quite as included as you suggest here. I think it’s also worth mentioning that the immigration act of 1965 dramatically restructured Mexican migration to the U.S. That act set the legal foundations for the ‘problem’ of ‘illegal’ Mexican immigrants that has become so prominent today, which you mention in thesis four. (I suspect there’s also something important going on with regard to immigration policing and the growth of a privatized repressive arm of the state but I’m not sure.) That’s not to say there weren’t other forms of policing Mexican migration previously, just that the 1965 act set up parts of today’s conditions beyond what you say about it here in terms of new legal immigration. That extension of legality to some migrants went along with illegality for others. That’s probably a tendency to pay attention to – greater inclusion/extension of benefits for some will likely be paired with great exclusion/loss of benefits for others.
On thesis five, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that working class whites “have predominated in (…) trade union battles.” Maybe. It’s my understanding though that the membership of unions in the U.S. are more racially diverse than the U.S. population, meaning that workers of color are in a sense statistically over-represented within the mainstream labor movement’s membership. I can find the statistical information on this if you like/if you don’t want to take my word for it. (I know the post didn’t put forward this analysis but I think it’s worth mentioning that if I’m right here about union membership then this is a challenge to or at least a fact needing to be dealt with by the analysis that sees unions as necessarily instruments of upholding white supremacy. It’s clear that unions were such an instrument at one point in U.S. history and in some places some unions may still be. It’s also probably the case that unions always play a role in dividing some workers -again, greater inclusion/extension of benefits for some will likely be paired with great exclusion/loss of benefits for others. It’s not clear, though, that unions today are necessarily institutions that produce *racial* divisions).
On thesis 8, I agree that it’s likely that “the white proletariat will continue to polarize between far right and the left.” I also think that that left will largely have a character of defending loss of/threats to privileges. I think Occupy was/is largely a movement of white people reacting to the threat and reality of downward mobility/not having the future they’d expected. I also think the labor movement mobilizations in Madison around the budget bill etc were largely about unionized strata fighting to keep what they had. It’s not like unionized workers were the only people attacked by that bill. The Madison mobilizations were still important, like Occupy, and were still ‘left’ responses, but I’m not sure how much they contribute to positively reshaping/undermining the racial order of the United States.
Finally, if you have time, I think Thomas Borstelmann’s book The Cold War and the Color Line is worth a look. It suggests that decolonization after WWII created people of color leadership in states that the U.S. wanted to influence. This made the domestic forms of racism/white supremacy in the U.S. into a foreign policy liability. That in turn created conflicts between racists in the federal government who wanted the US to effectively compete with the USSR for the loyalties of people of color led countries, and racists in US state governments who wanted to uphold black/white relationships as they’d existed. The book suggests that this created more room for black freedom movements to operate because it partially hampered the ability of the repressive forces of white supremacy to operate in the way they had once operated. And, if I remember right, the book also says that the US Supreme Court explicitly referenced international concerns like this in the decision Brown v. Board about school segregation. I don’t know if there are any analogs in the present in terms of divisions within state can capitalist forces domestically and internationally that form problems for the racial order, but it’s worth asking.
One more thing, despite the critiques I put forward, I think this piece is drawing the debate exactly how we need to and forgot to add that. Ba Jin’s reply underlines precisely those points. The old divisions the left used are increasingly undermined, a new racial-class recomposition is underway, and we need to do real material work to figure out what the implications are. I’m glad y’all raised these.
I wanted to add, reading over Noel’s comment, that I think this is a bad definition of oppression, that racial/gender oppression is only racial/gender oppression when there’s “the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group.” I don’t see why oppression has to mean every single member. That seems weird to me, and invites nitpicking and hairsplitting along the lines of “there’s this one time where once one person wasn’t worse off…” As one example, there were a handful of free blacks who owned slaves in U.S. history. That made them, in one particular way, above some very poor whites who didn’t own slaves. That doesn’t mean U.S. slave society was not a system of racial oppression.
“Is there anything today corresponding to old-fashioned Jim Crow, anything that applies to all members of a group and can therefore define the group? If not, then what are “white,” “black,” “Latino,” etc. but statements of probabilities?”
Those terms have always been statements of probability. That doesn’t make them unreal or not a part of oppression. Why is probability incompatible with oppression? Why must oppression mean every member of a group rather than significant differences in probable life outcomes?
Thanks to Ba Jin for this excellent piece, which I believe lays out above all the practical challenges we face moving forward in the present moment. I have small disagreements, questions, concerns, but I’m late in coming to this discussion, so I’ll focus on the broader questions largely raised by others.
Noel says: “Definitions are not right or wrong; they are useful or not useful.” And yet he immediately insists that any definition of racial oppression that differs from his own is sloppy and subjective. As Ba Jin and Crashcourse have both rightly suggested, Noel’s own definition, neither right nor wrong, is simply not useful. It cannot describe the history of racial oppression, which Noel himself has helped us to understand, but more importantly it reduces to nonsense if we attempt to apply it practically. Do racial systems disintegrate as soon as a single member of the oppressed group is promoted? Nonsense. Systems need not be absolute to function, and the virtue of these Theses is that they demonstrate the ways in which systems continue and are strengthened precisely due to the promotion of a small group.
Interestingly, when Noel flips the equation and begins from class, no such conceptual absolutism is deemed necessary: why is it not the case that a single case of a worker successfully becoming a capitalist does not thereby render obsolete class as a category? Because the system continues to function, of course, condemning the vast majority as it showcases a successful few.
F seems broadly concerned with the category of “middle layer” (which Crashcourse also dislikes) as 1.) unnecessarily homogenizing the experiences of non-black, non-white groups, and 2.) suggesting that these groups are all better off than black folks. I don’t see these Theses as doing the first, because their objective seems to be to describe, in broad strokes, the structural relationship between race and class in the U.S. at the contemporary moment. I think the task of struggling with and understanding the complexity of this “middle layer” remains.
Precisely because this is an effort to describe the systemic function of white supremacy, Ba Jin clearly implies that white supremacy in the United States is fundamentally anti-black. This is correct. This is not to dismiss or reduce the experiences of other groups (and we need to avoid the sort of moralism that conflates describing the functioning of a system with claiming that some people don’t matter: we’re talking about who matters in what way to capitalism). It is correct to say that, in general terms, the vast majority non-white, non-black people enjoy structural advantages over the vast majority of black people in the U.S. (again, unless we insist on Noel’s conceptual absolutism, this holds).
I’m not sure “middle layer” can be avoided as a category: it is a loose category because it attempts to describe a broad, heterogeneous, and diverse grouping that nevertheless stands in a certain position within the functioning of a system. We could call it something else, but we would be simply exchanging terms; we could reject the idea of speaking in such general terms, but then we are abandoning the task of describing the functioning of a system (we could similarly say that white or black is too broad, that it neglects immigrant status, and break these down ad infinitum until we can no longer see their systemic function). This is where, against F’s comparison, I see “middle layer” as the opposite of “people of color”: the latter attempts to erase the task of understanding structures of oppression (including class but also white supremacy), whereas the former is the result of asking these hard and necessary questions.
I do, however, agree with others about the confusing use of “darkening” as a description of a process. I take the author’s point to be emphasizing that race is generated by social interactions, but race is also very sticky (and stickier for some than others) and can’t be so easily determined via class mobility. Black folks who get rich don’t “lighten,” they get rich. But some groups that get rich do indeed become white.
Finally, there lay between Thesis 9 and Thesis 10 the crux of the difficulty in many senses. Thesis 9 says that the revolutionary bloc “must” attract a “plurality” of “proletarian whites.” Must? This would be nice, but when might this happen? And what if it doesn’t? Thesis 10 rightly places practical impetus instead on building black-brown unity, and suggests street rebellions might generate a revolutionary bloc… and yet such rebellions in the U.S. (as opposed to the UK, for example) might be more likely to feed white supremacy among working-class whites. This doesn’t mean they aren’t the path, simply that we need to be clear about where we place emphasis in the struggle and under what conditions (and at what moment in the struggle) we expect proletarian whites to be on the right side.
And no, Noel, that’s not “settler politics.” It’s a realistic assessment of the function of white supremacy in the present moment.
First off, thanks to Ba Jin for his accurate summary of what I was saying. To help others I am reproducing it here:
I understand Noel’s critique to be about what methods revolutionaries should use to analyze society and develop strategies. Noel writes: “racial oppression, like gender and national oppression, is a specific form of oppression; its hallmark is the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group.” If I’m reading his comment right, Noel upholds this definition of racial oppression, and believes no oppression in the U.S. today conforms to this definition; he thus thinks that if we try to understand oppression and resistance in terms of the racial categories we’ve inherited from the past, we will end up confusing ourselves and failing to develop a good strategy, because the racial categories we use will fail to map onto material reality. Instead, Noel suggests that we “start at the other end” and undertake a class analysis to identify, say, the stratum of the proletariat that we think has revolutionary potential. Once we’ve identified a stratum, we can then examine how different parts of that stratum have different racial or national labels for historical reasons, what strengths and weaknesses they bring to the table due to this history, and how to work with them. He believes this method is better than “reading” the present reality with racial categories that have become fairly incoherent. Noel, correct me if I’m way off on this sum-up.
Before, say, 1600, it would have made no sense to speak of nations or races. To describe Chaucer as “English” or “white” would have been meaningless. Empires and churches were the order of the day. The appearance of the nation was linked to capital. Estates gave way to classes. Gender, which of course originated long before, was transformed. Today the categories that have been used for centuries to define reality in Europe (and in other places drawn into the capitalist world) are in disarray. Even class is open to question: In “The Commitments,” two characters meet at the welfare office; one asks, You’re working class, ain’t you? The answer: I would be if there was any work. As a friend of mine says, better to be self-employed than unemployed.
It has become commonplace to say that race, is a social construct, yet many still begin their analysis by assigning people to one or another group whose existence cannot be assumed but must be proven.
Everyone knows that “class matters.” No one—certainly not I—wishes to deny that color, language, place of origin, etc. make a difference to one’s fate. The categories used to analyze reality will determine the conclusions. Does the continued use of race as a category help or hinder clear thinking?
Thurgood Marshall’s famous definition of a Negro was not merely about symbols or the written law; it touched in vital ways the lives of all Negroes. Conversely, it was necessary that the privileges of the white skin extend to all those designated as white because only thus could all whites be enlisted as enforcers of the oppression of not-whites.
There is nothing like it today: the worst-off black Americans share so little with the upper layers that, as one prominent black intellectual said, they might as well be from different planets. No less important, there are plenty of people traditionally described as “white,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian” who live as the poorest black folk do. Ba Jin knows this. That is why he qualifies his use of the terms “black,” Latin,” etc. to mean the masses of workers and poor folks. But why labor so hard to keep alive a category that no longer describes what he intends and that requires so much explanation to make it useful?
To continue talking about people of mixed African, European and American Indian descent in the U.S. variously referred to as “Colored,” “Negro,” “African American,” “black” and too many other terms to list as if they were all part of a single “race” makes no more historical sense than to describe modern human beings as apes. And the same goes for those commonly described as “white,” “Latin,” etc.
Ba Jin properly asks what difference it makes. Several things come to mind: (1) Dropping the category of “race” eliminates the theoretical basis for regarding Obama and his class as traitors to their race or brothers gone astray instead of as the class enemy. I don’t think that is a big problem among readers here, but it is good to place on a sound theoretical basis what people feel intuitively, and moreover it is not simply a question of a handful at the top; whereas the direct oppressor of the black poor used to be the white policeman, school teacher, social worker and prison guard, today those positions are held by people who, as the saying goes, “look like us” (or do they?); (2) It avoids the muddle of the “middle layer,” which is so obviously flawed that barely had Ba Jin formulated it than he started to disassemble it. The garment manufacturer born in China is not part of the same group as the workers from his home province who work for him in the sweatshops over the restaurants in Chinatown, nor of the descendants of Mayans who crawl through tunnels to work in kitchens; (3) It recasts the problem of the white worker. Many workers in this country still think they are masters because they think they are “white.” But if 59 percent of those counted in the census as “white” voted for Romney, 41 per cent did not. I hope I do not need to say here that I do not regard Obama as the candidate of black or any other freedom; but the 41 percent of so-called whites who voted for him were not voting their color above all other considerations—and that means that white solidarity no longer operates with the same force it did in the past (although it could return in an even worse form), and that the repudiation of the white-skin privilege is no longer the key to strategy in dealing with white workers as a group (although a challenge to racial preferment could be crucial in a particular locale)—because they are no longer a group.
Language reflects reality as distorted by ideology. Words may mean different things in different contexts. The young people who call themselves “niggaz” to distinguish themselves from others of the same color who are better off than they (whom they call “black”) are making a statement about class. In Brazil many poor people who in the U.S. would be counted as white identify with Black Power. Lucasville prisoners wrote “Convict Race” on the prison walls. We must be alert to the meaning behind the words. I am not suggesting that we abandon the terms black, white, etc. If the result of asking the centipede how it walks is to render it unable to move, attempting to eliminate these terms from our vocabulary would leave us mute. In one of the early issues of Race Traitor, we wrote that I’m Black and I’m Proud is the modern rendition of Workers of the World Unite. But we need to be aware of the problems and remember that terms that are used in popular parlance (because there are no other) may not serve so well for theoretical analysis.
Ba Jin asks what is the application of what I am saying outside the U.S. I do not claim to be an expert on every part of the world. Color prejudice exists widely, but I don’t think it helps to call it all racial. It is true that there were once parks in Shanghai with signs reading “No dogs or Chinese,” but the colonialists ruled China by relying on feudal, comprador and bureaucratic elements among the Chinese; the same in India and Africa (except for South Africa). National oppression promotes class distinctions; race tends to flatten them. Four places developed historically on the basis of enlisting a portion of the working class to police the rest in return for the privileges of “race.” Protestant rule ended in Ireland, Apartheid fell in South Africa, Jim Crow is gone—leaving only “Israel” where classic racial oppression prevails.
Regarding the chance for an increase in the demand for labor power in the near future: I meant exactly the opposite of Scott’s reading of my words. Sorry if I was unclear.
I know I failed to address some questions, but I must stop now, and this is not necessarily my final word. I very much appreciate the opportunity to take part in this exchange, and for the continuity of the discussion. Again, thanks to Ba Jin for his reply to me.
Race did not start in 1600. During the Reconquista in Ibera the Moors and Jews were racialized with the notion of “limpieza de sangre” (purity of blood) and of “raza.”
All—and why it matters
Previously I wrote that the hallmark of racial oppression is the reduction of all—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group. (That definition I took from Ted Allen.) My assertion has been challenged by several people, on both factual and conceptual grounds. Let me try to defend it.
Those who seek to refute me by citing exceptions miss the point; “all” is to be read politically, not sociologically; the goal is not to survey the conditions of blacks, whites and others but to understand the relation of race and class. (Those who think I am evading the criticism should read Marx’s response to the people who demanded he prove the law of value.) The cases cited as exceptions can be assessed only in the light of theory. Yes, Sally Hemings went to Paris and lived in a big house and attended fancy dress balls. She went because of her special relationship with Jefferson. Yes, some Negroes owned slaves; their existence was not generally known; at the same time they could not vote. These examples—and probably more could be cited—were the “exceptions that prove the rule”; they all existed because of special circumstances and implied no challenge to the racial order.
Richard Wright said “Negro” was not a description but the most unanimous fiat in all American history. The unanimity was essential. While white supremacy served capital, it was maintained at the insistence of white labor. (Ted Allen and I disagreed on this.) There are too many examples to cite, from labor union exclusion to the 1921 attack on the black community in Tulsa because whites saw it as too prosperous! (If the ability of some white workers to escape the working class was necessary to white solidarity, prosperous and especially assimilated blacks threatened it.) Unless white workers could push all black people down to a position beneath them, they could not be relied upon to help capital maintain the black masses as an oppressed peasantry or to acquiesce in their own exploitation. For capital, white supremacy was cheap insurance against proletarian revolution. That is why the poorest white man could address a Negro college president as “boy” and demand that the college president remove his hat and call him “sir,” and why the legal system did not punish whites for assaulting blacks. (Lincoln used troops to put down a white mob attacking blacks during the NY Draft Riots in 1863—obviously a special moment. Nothing like it happened again until 1943, when Roosevelt put soldiers on Philadelphia streetcars to protect black drivers.) I urge people to reread Huckleberry Finn, chapter 6, where Huck’s Pap goes on a drunken rant about the proper position for black people.
For centuries, capitalist rule in the U.S. rested on the support, at least passive, of white workers, which depended not on whites sharing in the surplus value extracted from black laborers but on their being the favored slaves of capital, standing at the head of the jobs line, at the end of the layoff line, and with the right to vote, serve on juries, on occasion promote one of their number out of the ranks of the working class, and spend whatever money they had where they pleased and live wherever they could afford—the real house slaves of U.S. history. That arrangement is in disarray. Ba Jin was right: “The Racial Disorder” would have been a better way of opening the discussion.
It sounds then like for Noel like “all” doesn’t mean “all” (““all” is to be read politically, not sociologically”), it means “most” or “generally speaking” and it’s a statement of probability – one that’s politically important. In that case, I don’t see much point in saying “all” as that invites confusion and makes it look like there’s much greater political difference than there is.
What we’re talking about then is a change in likelihood, from very likely social outcomes and political allegiances to likely ones. To my mind that means this is a different racial order, as the theses suggest, not a shift from a racial order to a post-racial order or something.
thanks for this important and challenging conversation!
Ba Jin, in thesis 9 you say the revolutionary bloc needs to “(b) unify black and “dark” racial groups […] (c) on the basis of this alliance, radicalize other “middle layer” racial groups whose class mobility would otherwise cause them to vacillate politically…”
I think I get where you’re coming from with the “dark” marker, though I share some of the concerns around the oversimplified metaphor of a color spectrum. Wondering what you think of Andrea Smith’s “Three Pillars of White Supremacy,”? Though imperfect, especially in the limited ways it addresses capitalism, I find it helpful insofar as it acknowledges a fundamental anti-Black logic, while at the same time going deeper to analyze a variety of mechanisms of racial oppression for different nonwhite groups — slavery, genocide/colonization, and Orientalism/war being the three pillars.
“To keep this capitalist system in place — which ultimately commodifies most people — the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not Black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. This helps people who are not Black to accept their lot in life, because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy — at least they are not property; at least they are not slaveable.”
I might be wrong but it seems like you’re trying to use a similar angle of analysis: both the dark/light, Black/non-Black binary and the multiplicity of racialized groups and mechanisms of racialization. So just curious if you find any resonance with her paradigm.
I’m also wondering if you can clarify, maybe in terms of base and superstructure, how you imagine the unified insurgent force of black and “dark” groups would go about radicalizing other racial groups in the “middle layer”? Since commonality of class-stratum position is ruled out, I’m guessing you mean an appeal to some kind of shared racialized experiences that transcend relative social and economic dis/advantages? But I don’t want to put words into yr mouth. Thanks!
And thanks to everyone for the discussion, which I keep pestering friends and comrades of mine to check out. 🙂
Kloncke, if you read Ba Jin’s theses as ruling out class then I think you missed the point: the dialectical relationship between race and class. I liked a slogan I heard Noel say not too long ago: the black revolution is dead, but long live the black proletarian revolution! But now theres this sweeping conclusion that we must discard the struggle against white supremacy all together from the class struggle, because there is supposedly no longer a material basis for the superstructure of race in Amerika, which is defined in very legalistic terms. Ba Jin, on the other hand, ironically building on much of Noel’s earlier ideas, is looking at how U.S. society in the present period is materially organized and disorganized along racial and class lines, how these lines have shifted, and what are the organizational implications that follow.
Some arguments against Noel’s thesis:
1. Racial oppression, and a revolutionary strategy to overthrow it, does not start and end with the legal codification of white skin privilege.
2. Although what is unique about this period is that the black bourgeoisie is no longer legally tied to black proletariat, and white supremacy is not longer legally sanctioned, the black bourgeoisie has nonetheless always been the class enemy of the black proletariat and there have always been white proletariats at the very bottom of capitalist society in Amerika.
3. The working class is still divided along racial lines, an obstacle to full proletarian revolt. Black and brown proletariats are still disproportionately incarcerated, murdered by the police, less likely to own property, less employed, in the worst jobs, etc. in relation to white proletariats. There is also the “public and psychological” aspect of racism which still does affect and influence poor whites and bourgeois people of color. For these reasons, there is still less revolutionary consciousness among white proletariats that black and brown proletariats, and thus, it is more strategic for revolutionaries to organize and agitate among black and brown proletariats (by proletariat I mean waged, lumpen, reproductive, etc).
I’m going to repost below a comment I originally put up on the Kasama repost of this article, the comment quoted by “Kalitramplesshiva” is F’s comment above. The discussion on Kasama also focuses more on issues of nationality and national self-determination, which is the context behind my comment below:
I agree somewhat with the critiques here about national self-determination–that this nuance is excluded, even though it is a particularly important lens through which to view certain peoples in the “middle layer,” especially when the radicalization of these populations in the US often explicitly ties to various national struggles overseas (in the case of, say, the Philippines) or domestically (tribal sovereignty for first nations peoples).
But I also think that the above comment (resposted by Kalitramplesshiva) points out a general misunderstanding and misportrayal of what’s actually being argued in the “middle layer” category, treating it as a vulgar essentialization of myriad different peoples, rather than an analytic category of a very real structural function assigned certain peoples within the overall (“multicultural,” “post-racial”) white supremacist order of the US today.
The role of a structural analytic category is not to reduce everything to itself but to point out a shared function or pattern within an overall structure — in this case the shared function of being a divide-and-conquer middle category, different in quality today from historical variants of similar racial middle-layers by the existence of a growing non-white bourgeoisie, multicultural/post-racial popular ideology, and very real material redistributions of wealth and increased access to certain social benefits. These are material facts, they are not merely speculative.
Again, it’s important to understand the function of an analytic category here. The “middle layer” category is like a line of best fit — it’s not saying that ALL non-white, non-black people fit on that line (in fact, statistically, very few points actually lie on the line itself), but that the category describes a general direction which exists when you extrapolate a pattern from disparate peoples, with their disparate personal situations, national histories, etc. etc. This means that there can be plenty of people in the “middle category” who have it worse off than the majority of the black population still excluded from the black bourgeoisie, and there are many who have it better than many working-class whites. It also means that the middle category in some sense includes the very categories that Kalitramplesshiva points to in the comment above: Appalachian peoples, fresh immigrants from the east European diaspora, Afro-latinos, Afro-indians, Afro-appalachians, etc.
When people say that this category ignores peoples’ intimate personal situations, their national background, individual identity, etc. the only response is: duh. That’s not the function of the category, and we shouldn’t demand that it accommodate itself to something that it is not, though we can certainly argue that some of these aspects demand a thesis in their own right.
It’s useless to take singular anectodal examples as counters to statistical evidence — it’s a plain fact that a single point, given its absence of dimension on a plane, cannot be accurately placed in relation to a line of best fit–this is something which only works at the collective level. It’s also pointless to play the identity politics game of challenging any claim about racial oppression of a certain group with historic examples of racial oppression of another group. Pointing to anti-Asian pogroms in the US as a counter to this article’s arguments seems strange to me: it’s not arguing about the historic form of race in the US, but its contemporary form. Anti-Chinese/Japanese pogroms are not happening at nearly that scale today — and the racist attacks against, say, Japanese or Chinese peoples, are today certainly outscaled by the extrajudicial murders of black people, the structural poverty of natives and rural black populations in the south, etc. So what function to the historic examples of anti-Chinese or anti-Japanese pogroms play in the critique, unless one is arguing that anti-Chinese/Japanese racism is foundational for both the historic and contemporary racial order in the US, which I think is (at least for today) just plain factually wrong.
Finally: I do think that the article makes a major error in treating black peoples as a central pole on one side of the racial order while excluding the equally egregious historic position of native peoples operating in that same role and who today continue to be among the poorest people in the US, conditions on most reservations being comparable to those in the “third world”. This challenges its schema of dark-light, which is certainly an oversimplification and probably a bad metaphor to use. It also excludes the important question of nationality and self-determination among black people in the US, as well as native sovereignty. These are important questions to ask, even though it’s obvious that nationality and the “national question” do not operate at the same level today as they did sixty or a hundred years ago.
Noel, could you clarify something?
Are you saying that the struggle against white supremacy should be abandoned because it no longer has a material basis, or are you saying that the older conceptions of race need to be discarded because they no longer have a material basis, and what’s needed instead is objective investigation on our part to understand how the categories of race exist and move in the current historical moment?
I understood your position to be the latter.
Have comrades seen this? A reply to Ba Jin from signalfire. http://www.signalfire.org/?p=22491
Noel, can you clarify something?
Are you saying that because the old conceptions of race have lost their material basis the struggle against white supremacy needs to be abandoned altogether?
Or are you saying that as communists we need to engage in some objective investigation in order to discover the new material premises of white supremacy if we’re to develop new theories and conceptions?
Or is it something completely different?
Arturo, I understand that, yes. My question had to do with how exactly Ba Jin imagines the unification of the “dark” layers and “middle layer” of racial groups in light of the relative class mobility Ba Jin mentions. As Ba Jin writes, “The class mobility of groups in this ‘middle layer’ depends partly on their passive acceptance of the subjugation of proletarian blacks.” So if we understand proletarian or lumpen blacks (and other “darker,” extremely oppressed groups) to be denied this class mobility, my question is how this layer going to convince the middle layers to give up their relative advantages (or hope for advantages) in favor of proletarian unity. I suspect the answer has something to do with an imagined community of “black and brown” (and tandem working-class white) fighters against white supremacy as part of the larger project of seeking freedom for all, but I could be wrong.
On a related note, when you refer to “black and brown proletariat,” I see how this helps distinguish from black and brown bourgeoisie, but I’m not sure it’s actually much of a departure from the “people of color” category that Ba Jin criticizes as obfuscating. Isn’t black-and-brown proletariat a broad category that includes the so-called racial “middle layers” and academics, professionals, petit bourgeois, nonprofit moguls, etc., as well as people facing police murder, incarceration, un(der)employment, and the other racialized oppressions you mention?
The reason I ask about these things is I think a strategic racial analysis of the U.S. situation has to balance attention to the particular and attention to the general, in order to build the kind of proletarian unity that everyone seems to agree racism is hindering. Yes, liberal and bourgeois black and brown people / poc / whatever you want to call it, have successfully deployed broad racial and cultural markers as a way of papering over class and class-strata divisions, and promoting a sense of unity across classes or class strata. They’ve been able to do this partly *because* of the histories of much more rigid racial divisions in the nation (though of course there were always intra-racial conflicts around approaches to class war, as well). Many people still relate to these near histories in terms of psychic trauma and desire for healing, desire for togetherness. In order to puncture unhelpful liberal illusions of unity, I agree that we need to point out (and adroitly organize around) the much more complex relationships around race in terms of class antagonisms, and that this can mean emphasizing the divisions and fragmentations within supposedly coherent groups like “people of color” or “black and brown people,” or even “black people” or “Hatian-American people.” I think this essay and conversation is a good step in that direction. At the same time, I don’t see how a revolutionary U.S. project that seriously centers racism can afford to dispense entirely with broader categories on the level of “Black & Brown” or “people of color” — even if we choose to reject those specific categories. Though incomplete, limited, and currently cast in liberal terms most of the time (though what isn’t?), imagined communities on this order still seem useful in articulating reasons for revolutionary working-class unity across racialized class-strata / mobility divisions.
Signalfire’s response picked up here with some additional discussion: bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/from-signalfire-a-maoist-response-to-the-ten-theses-of-ba-jin/
Ba Jin’s original piece now picked up here:
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=4052
There are those up before dawn, worried how they are going to eat today. There are those of us up, shuffling off to work. Bus-bus-train, 10 to 12 hours, train-bus-bus. Most of us, stressed, another fucking shut off notice in the mail box. For all of us wishing for a better life, with only a scratch ticket and a prayer. There has to be a better way…..
I belong to one race, the rat race