Exh Amthy why

 From the blog post American Thought  

WHITENESS, RACISM AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE

Today it is almost impossible to find a person who was engaged in a discussion with the left from the West and who never encountered ideas such as white privilege, White and whiteness. In this particular view the concept of White becomes a separate “sociological category”.

It looks like people sometimes forget how racism is, in similar way as class, a problem of the political and economic, i.e. it is a problem of access to societal resources and services, segregation, violence and in the role that certain group plays in a political process. It is always used to exclude certain ethnic groups based on their or their ancestors background.

‘American Thought’’s approach towards race and culture also reveals its poverty of understanding the historical role, limitations and fundamental concepts of classical liberalism; such as individuality as expressed in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859). It is expressing a constant need adhere to their own specific ethnic identities and to aggressively impose them to others. This is rooted in their constant fear of not having an identity and in their refusal to just accept that they are just Americans.

Furthermore, it seems that anti-racism of today has become the enforcement of racial and ethnic differences as an answer to the failure of “colourless” liberal anti-racism. I have said ethnic because, for example, the concept of whiteness is not rooted in what we know as “classical racial division”, as it excludes numerous ethnic groups which are usually considered as Caucasian on the basis of their political heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course, again, exclusively from an American perspective. It usually states how certain Caucasian groups are not white in a “sociological sense” and how, accordingly, all non-whites are considered as “oppressed people”. Who is actually white and who is not is the question on which there are a lot of answers as self-proclaimed Marxists are sinking deeper into the cesspool of “racial science” charlatanism.

If we go little bit deeper and place these concepts into the reality of political and economic discourse that has been present for the last few decades, i.e. so-called neoliberalism, we can get some interesting insights. One of the most important outcomes of neoliberal policies has been the total destruction of the “public realm”, along with the sole idea of the public and social. Through the process of transition ex-socialist societies, such as the Croatian one, in which I am living, have been more radically hit with this change in discourse then Western ones. And in the political sphere this discourse did not only abolish the public and social, it did not only proclaim that the personal is now political, but it proclaimed the personal the only form of politics. Which in its essence, together with the dissolution of society into individuals, leads us towards situations where perusing ones racial or ethnic culture and identity is considered progressive.

I would again like to emphasise the imperialist nature of ‘American Thought’, i.e. in this particular case, looking at the rest of the world trough “American eyes” and copy-pasting American racial dynamics onto every other society. For example, Europe is an extremely complex continent with an extremely long history of interactions, conquests, World Wars, Cold War, conflicts, pogroms and grudges. It is impossible to look at it as one whole as it is divided within its own segments based on these previous conflicts and interactions. To try to incorporate whiteness in Europe is frankly quite idiotic as majority of people in Europe are Caucasians and yet through history a lot of them were enslaved[3], ghettoised, exterminated and relocated. Therefore, it is impossible to use an American understanding of racism in Europe as there are a lot of parts of Europe, like the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, where racism as such simply does not play any significant role as there are other ethnic, religious, “clan/tribal” and ideological conflicts which have marked our recent history and which play an important role. European Islamophobia and Antisemitism as, unfortunately, dominant and widespread forms of discrimination and prejudice cannot be looked through “American eyes”. However, we can use a classic understanding of racism, in the sense of a certain group of people being inferior to other, in the case of Antiziganism directed towards people of Romani heritage which is widespread in Europe.  For one to understand these relations it is important to make a proper analysis of social dynamics of the societies in question, along with examining historical sources, instead of adopting shortcuts of cheap theories.

The concept of whiteness is also interesting in the left’s attempts to comment on ‘conflicts in the world’. The conclusions are always the same: failed processes of national liberation[4] are always at the centre in the most primitive neo-Maoist sense, every gang of chicken thieves deserves “critical” support, no matter of their class, political and ideological prefixes (i.e. support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood etc.) and in the case that there is some kind of “socialist” omen (i.e. Rojava, “Novorossiya”, Naxalites etc.), which is usually just a relic of Soviet Cold War imperialism, then comparison with past social revolutions begin. Of course, nobody ever mentions the working class. The goal of ‘foreign politics’ analysis is always the same: solidarity with ‘oppressed people’.

But who, or what, are these ‘oppressed people’?

‘Oppressed people’ are usually considered as those that do not belong to the dominant identarian narrative of the country they live in. When I put word oppressed in inverted commas I do not do that to ridicule oppression of certain groups because they are something really real and nobody should turn a blind eye to them. A lot of these oppressions, for example, the oppression of women, have existed almost as long as human civilisation and are not necessarily products of capitalism, even though capitalism did absorb it, sometimes enhanced it and even, in some cases, set in motion certain progressive changes and reforms. A lot of these cases show how impossible it is to solve them within limits of capitalist society.

However, one cannot call himself/herself a Marxist if he/she pursues broad and sloppy populist categories. People have always been a broad category with only one realpolitik, nationalist and populist task: to justify collaboration of Marxists with a certain fraction of the bourgeoisie. History is here to witness the failures and self-destructive toxicity of these attempts.

One more thing that is important to reflect on is how whiteness is used in discussions. Cries such as “shut up white” and “check your privilege” are used when somebody expresses disagreement with the nonsense of the American left. The goal of such an approach was never to engage in discussion or exchange arguments, which usually, in its modernist fashion, leads to new conclusions and cognitions. But for social scenes: change is not a goal. Their main goal is to preserve themselves and they are hostile to any intrusion that could shake their foundations. To quote El Mago, leader of Mara Salvatrucha gang from a movie Sin Nombre (2009): “the scariness goes away, but the gang is forever.” Nothing will change.