Author Topic: The "Black" and "White" Identity Politics Scam  (Read 2568 times)

Zea_mays

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Continued from above.

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When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard – including from my own mouth – the argument that the real problem was that white people weren’t talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

How does trapping anti-white pale-skinned people into the mindset that they are forever and unchangably tainted by "whiteness" help to abolish "whiteness"?

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In 1860, a man who called himself “Ethiop” published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyn’s first public school for Black children. Wilson’s essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof.
In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the “Aborigines”; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was “a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing” that made the men and women who enabled it into “restless, grasping” marauders. “In view of the existing state of things around us,” Wilson proposed at the end, “let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?”

Much has changed since Wilson’s time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent.

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In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is “real, but moot”, and he advocates for something he calls “symmetrical multiculturalism”, in which “identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black”. What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: “Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas.”

Another usual suspect:
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Eric Kaufmann was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Japan.[1] His ancestry is half Jewish, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Costa Rican.[2][3] His father Steve Kaufmann is of Jewish descent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kaufmann

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From another perspective – my own, most days – whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield.

That's because, "whiteness" (like Jewishness) is not a mere ethnic group. It is a tribal identity. An in-group specifically defined to differentiate the tribe from, and broadcast the belief in supremacy over, out-group members.

And "blackness", despite being a crude category, was created by whites (and not by "blacks" trying to form a tribal in-group), explaining the asymmetry.

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Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek “legitimate expressions”, whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

The religion of Jewishness has had at least 3000 years to reform itself along non-tribal lines and prove it was qualified for innocuous coexistence. Instead it has given us Eric Kaufmann (and Jared Kushner, and Jason Miller, and the apartheid state of Israel, and Disraeli, etc. etc. etc.).

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Yet even this does not fully answer Wilson’s question.  [...] Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as “a moral choice”, as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.
[...]
As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world “will not become unracialised by assertion”. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.)

Here's what the moral choice to abolish "whiteness" looks like on the individual level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

Here's what it looks like on a policy level:
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It is said the South will never submit — that we cannot conquer the rebels — that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other ; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to ; if their whole country must be laid waste and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, Sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be re-peopled by a band of freemen, than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency. I do not say it is time to resort to such means, and I do not say that the time will come, but I never fear to express my sentiments. It is not a question with me of policy, but a question of principle.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens

And, well, this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler