This essay could be improved with a stronger conclusion on action and what to avoid doing. White dude leftists can be very annoying, are more often class reductive, and can lta the knowledge of marginalization that might otherwise be taught through personal experience, as the author notes. And while some of the points are incorrect, such as Bolsheviks being ethnically homogeneous (Stalin himself was called provincial even after his death by those who looked down on Georgians), I was planning to overlook that because the core truth is real, which is the extent of racialization of the US and what rope it plays. But then it kind if just fizzles out. All polemic, no practical organizing advice or "prove yourselves white dudes" step outside of what can be gleaned from an early (valid) criticism: that white guy organizing spaces that aren't actively addressing this by elevating non-white guy perspectives will reproduce thr patriarchy and white supremacy, in one form or anorher.
As someone who has dealt directly with this issue in orgs, that isn't very good advice, as it leads to tokenization. Both by the aforementioned white guys, who understand that by doing what a brown woman said they have done well, and by non-"white guys" who learn that advancing an understanding and accounting of, for example, racial justice is about whether they feel heard in a meeting. You have to put the responsibility for education and actual community embedding on everyone involved. The white guys need to read and reeducate themselves and take on real projects that integrate racial justice with the people most marginalized, not for those most marginalized. And the non-"white guys", well, they do have a lot of shit to put up with, but in my experience just being wary of self-tokenization would be the best way to personally develop in this context. It can be (reasonably) frustrating for a white guy to take up space on something you know better than him, and especially if he has decided he is going to lecture you about it or spread some bullshit. Nothing invalid in that feeling. And to return to tokenization, I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with white liberals for whom the discovery that many black people don't want police abolition is like a free pass to resume supporting the racialized carceral state. They end up tokenizing the black people that don't want immediate abolition as the only black voices that matter, even, and ignore all of the context of social violence and how withdrawals of policing are also used as weapons against black people.
At the same time, I think it is valuable to ask oneself what it would mean for someone with the same identity or experience they have to disagree with them and how that might look in a communist org. This is often the first "wake up call" for the internalized tokenization that people bring from liberal spaces where they were "the one X" or where the space was so absurdly wrong that everyone with "X" identity was in unanimous agreement: in a left space, a person brings up their own experience to make a political point and someone with the exact same experience disagees vehemently. A very common next step is for such a person to try to find an angle by which their experience should be counted as more real, perhaps by finding another marginalized identity. If a brown woman is disagreeing with a brown woman, well it may be time for a self-tokenizer to reach for another label, like them being queer etc, to shut down discussion and reduce it to egos. This kind of thinking can be the death of organizations if it is internalized. It tends to lead to unnecessary conflicts and crashouts because it is not really about education or correctness, it is about a liberal tokenization that reduces societal marginalization to a defense of one's own ego and self-worth. To be clear, being a queer brown woman will mean having distinct experiences of marginalization from a straight brown woman and it is valuable to educate with those experiences and appreciate them both personally and analytically. But one has to be self-critical around relevance and whether one is tokenizing oneself to elevate their own personal opinion vs. building understanding of the meaning of variable vs. shared experience.
Anyways, I think the keys are an onus of education and a political education for members (the author could provide a reading list) and to authentically embed with your local communities and work in coalitions. It is better to do the education first so that your org doesn't alienate other orgs with ignorant takes. But embedding is essential, it is the only way to actually integrate liberation struggles into your org. Real projects aligned with your goals and the needs and thoughts of the community. This will also help you distinguish invalid identity-based reactions to your work, which will inevitably happen. A local NGO headed by X identity might go on a radio show and start criticizing your work and the only way to be ready for that is to be educated and embedded.
Learning to gracefully handle the uncomfortable feelings that arise from criticism is a valuable skill. If you constantly reject the invitation to improve, you won't.
When she says: "the discomfort you may be experiencing is your white supremacist and patriarchal conditioning" she is absolutely correct. It is one's personal responsibility to confront that on their own. There is a lot more that was said in the essay but it is apparent from this thread that a lot of people aught to deal with that.
this comment secion is gonna be bad i thought, and then it was waow. hexbear crackers strike again.
When whitey is actually criticized and they drop their performative "support"
Lmao it was like what, less than a week since we were chatting in the chat/selfcrit thread and you were talking about the racism and this exact stuff happening.
Less than a week
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
There's not a word for the absolute disgust and contempt I feel for any settler that'd fix their face to tell me they're any kind of left right now. Not one, not in any fucking language. Like, both of those are mighty weak for the intensity I'm feeling.
Chauvinists in this thread are really proving her point:
Let’s just rip the bandaid off: if you’re a white man, you fundamentally lack the ability to understand what true liberation looks like because people who look like you have never been enslaved. You can read about it in books all day, but you lack the specific lived experience of what it means to be persecuted strictly on the basis of your identity, and what it means to fight to the death for your freedom as all of your ancestors have done before you.
some cracker after reading this: "OH WHAT SO I'M NOT ALLOWED TO ORGANIZE??? I'M GONNA PROUDLY SIT ON MY ASS BECAUSE YOU MEANIES WON'T LET ME IN!!! ALSO I JUST DECIDED I LIKE SEGREGATION NOW"
Jesus fucking christ people grow the fuck up
The "i'll just spit dummy out and move to Ireland to be away from POC people cos i dont like your take" guy is today's top embarrassment. Fucking wild.
If you're a white guy in a communist org, perhaps the most important thing you can do is not recruit other white guys - your party/whatever should implement a straight-up affirmative action program to highly prioritize women, people of color, and ESPECIALLY Black people
Honestly, I think Grace was too lenient. Settler-leftists haven't proven themselves any less microaggressive than their more regressive counterparts in my eyes. I'm right there with her-- if I'm vetting an org, and I walk into the physical function to see a white male majority, I Grandpa Simpson my shit and walk right back out because I know, every single time, I'm going to end up in an argument over some microaggressive white shit and I'mma be left feeling like ain't shit changed, and wondering why I spent the effort on these crackers.
She's stronger than I am, frankly. Every goddamn day, I think about taking out a loan, using it to pay down the flight out and the exit tax on renouncing my citizenship, defaulting on that shit, and leaving the West's settlers to their fate. Every. Goddamn. Day. Because if I'm keeping it a whole band, I still don't believe there's a future where we achieve socialism as still one nation. I still don't believe there's a future where the white race as a monolith and the majority internalizes that they HAVE to pay us back for everything they took from us, and all the trauma over hundreds of years that was left in the gaps of what they took. I still don't see a socialist future that doesn't have a self-determined Black state as an opposite to Amerika, as an example to all subjects of empire that the settler devil could be opposed and surmounted.
She a WHOLE lot nicer than me, and stronger to boot.
And I'd like to thank BOTH @finderscult@lemmy.ml and @bigboopballs@hexbear.net for proving my motherfuckin point.
I still don't believe there's a future where we achieve socialism as still one nation
If you disagree with this statement, please build anti-colonial national self-determiniation into your politics. There must be Black, indigenous, Puerto Rican, [add more internally colonized nations here] full self-determination built into your revolutionary project. That means if the Black nation in the US decides to pursue full independence from the new government during the revolutionary process, it takes priority over building a unitary socialist state. The US is the prison house of nations, not a true nation in itself. It would be incredibly naive to assume these settler-built boundaries will be maintained in their entirety when Native nations are able to pursue independence on their own terms, for example.
Sometimes people on here talk about US balkanization as the chaotic predecessor to revolutionary conditions, but I think it's far more likely to be the orderly dismantling of colonial borders post-revolution.
Yup, you make a very good argument. I've re-read my previous comment and I'd like to apologise for engaging in tone policing, and to thank you for bringing up your personal experience (which I assume must be exhausting).
Not that you are intentionally tone policing here, but I think her tone adequately conveys her feelings on the issue. Tired, angry, resigned, determined, all come across in the prose.
If her tone offends you then you're placing yourself in the shoes of the white male communists who failed her rather than her, and that's almost certainly chauvinism.
Some other users have pointed it out as well, and while my tone policing wasn't intentional as I ultimately agree with the author, it was still a case of it and I apologise for it. Thank you for calling it to my attention, I'll keep it in mind for the future.
Yeah, after some reflection, you're right that I was doing tone policing. I'd like to apologise for that, and thank you for bringing it up.
good on you for doing self-crit. disclosure that i don’t believe I should accept the apology as i am not Black, but I’m glad you were willing to reflect on it.
It’s a foreign experience that your body instinctively rejects because you have been socialized in an environmental that is inherently anti-black and misogynistic. Whether you realize it our not, the discomfort you may be experiencing is your white supremacist and patriarchal conditioning pushing you to reject the idea that a Black woman could be better equipped to do something than you are.
It's kind of like the opposite of a fever, where you spend your whole life in a slick oily fog of malady, riddled with sores and plagues that you dont even notice, but then someone tries to give you an immune system and that's when you feel the inner turmoil of "your" virus trying to fight it off.
Sorry not sorry to anyone sick of my Warhammerposting, but it's like being born and raised into a nurgle cult before somehow getting treatment as an adult. Clarity burns at first
but any Jew that opposes Israel ceases to be white.
yeah thats just not true. whiteness is not that individual, theres nothing about your beliefs that can impact your whiteness.
I think it would be more correct to say that, to higher caste white people, other lower caste white people can lose their whiteness, but those same people still maintain their whiteness when dealing with non-white people. An Ashkenazi Jew (a European) is a white person to every non white person, even if they are pro Palestine. Being a "good white ally" or something doesn't mean you have sacrificed the power you have which is based on the way you look, act, think, were raised, and the dynamics you have with non white people. An Ashkenazi Jew might be pro Palestine but they will still get hired over an equally competent Black person, survive a police encounter that may have killed an Indigenous person, be welcomed into a store by a clerk who follows a non white person around to the store, etc. these are benefits of their whiteness, regardless of their internal commitment to the struggles of non white people
I think a distinction can be made between racism and colorism. Racism can be applied to people with white passing complexion under the certain contexts and in certain historical moments, but colorism is entirely visual and is based solely on how people look.
Light skin is a universal privilege that applies in all white supremacist society and can never be taken away, even when racist sentiments against light-skinned ethnicities flares up. It's like you say, they can always just quietly pretend to be Anglo. That said, light skin isn't a universal protection either. Even if it's always a privilege to be able to hide, it's not like light skin stopped the Nazis.
Sure racism and colorism is a conversation for non white people. You're talking about European Jewish people, they are white and that doesn't go away because of their opinions on Zionism
Are you under the impression that antisemitism doesn't exist?
You sound like a Zionist.
Islamophobia exists, do you think that means an ethnic German convert to Islam isn't white?
Europeans are white, Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans, and are white. They weren't always considered white by white people, like Italians and Irish people, but now they are firmly cemented in their whiteness, their strongest allies and protectors are non Jewish white people who are also white supremacists.
This is obvious if you look at the white Jewish people calling Ethiopian Jews anti Black slurs, making them second class citizens, and perpetuating systemic violence against them in the so called Jewish state. Europeans Jews literally run a white supremacist settler colony, what are you on about
You're literally just repeating what I already said, you should take some time offline to reconstitute yourself
How does an anti-Zionist Jew walk around and be misidentified as non-white? You're talking about other Jews accusing them of antisemitism for not being Zionists, is this your example of a racist attack against them for somehow exiting their position as white people?
No, anti-Zionist Ashkenazi Jews still walk around with all the privilege of every other white person. Until the entire Jewish collective is removed from whiteness wholesale, there is no distinguishing one as white and one as not white. Whiteness is a power dynamic defined by power over non white people, which every Ashkenazi Jew has regardless of their personal beliefs. There may be infighting among the Jewish community about Zionism but that is irrelevant to the concept of whiteness, privilege, and power over non white people
I'll just clarify first that when I mentioned jewish people below, I am talking about ethnic european jews and not jewish people of color.
Racism and colorism are similar, but distinct oppressions. Sure, a Jewish person with passing complexion is safe as an anonymous person on the streets, but once they are identified as an anti-Zionist Jew things become very different: police become more aggressive, job opportunities disappear, other whites become violent, etc. There is definitely a privilege to having passing complexion, but that only lasts as long as their anonymity lasts. Once it's "discovered" that they're not a core white ethnicity, and they're disloyal to whiteness, the knives come out.
Okay but is this really true? For the police example, what other context would you be referencing besides maybe a pro-Palestinian protest, do you have examples of cops singling out Jewish protesters and not everyone else?
For the job opportunities, do vocally anti-zionist goy lose job opportunities too, or only vocally anti-zionist jews? Not talking about Jewish organizations run by Zionists, but regular jobs that aren't religious in character.
For other whites becoming violent, I don't see how someone isn't already antisemitic would single out anti-zionist jews to be hateful towards, surely they would be the same amount of antisemitic to any jewish person? are you asserting selective antisemitism among non jews towards only anti-zionist jews only when it is apparent they are anti-zionist?
Once any anti-zionist is discovered, jewish or not, zionists will attack them. They might have jewish specific insults to hurl at anti-zionist jews, they might see them as betrayers of their shared religion and so have more a motive to make that clear, but if an anti-zionist jewish person is attacked by a zionist, that same anti-zionist jewish person can still walk away from that encounter with all the same privilege and power over non-white people. maybe if they apply for a job at the place where the zionist who attacked them is the hiring manager, they won't get a job, but otherwise they would still get hired before an equally qualified non-white person.
Let me clarify: I'm talking about Anglo and Franco whites being antisemitic against Jews for not being sufficiently Zionist. We've seen all the hits: accusing them of controlling the media to spread lies, accusing them of controlling UN and agencies like Amnesty to spread lies, of being shiftless cosmopolitans that aren't loyal to any country and can't be trusted, of controlling opposition political parties to enact their sinister plots like Great Replacement, etc etc. This is wielded, by whites, against anti-Zionist Jews.
I've seen all these attacks against jewish people but I have never seen or heard of any anti-zionist jewish person saying they have been singled out by non-jewish people for being anti-zionist. of course this isn't evidence that it hasn't happened, but I'm having a hard time following your logic and see no evidence to support it. I have heard antisemitic people say these things about Israel itself and "the jews" in general, but not anti-zionist jews specifically. I have had jewish friends working in jewish orgs get pushed out because of their vocal anti-zionism, but these people didn't lose their whiteness in the process.
I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth with me on this but it feels like you are really reaching with this conclusion that anti-zionist jews have the benefits of their whiteness taken away for being anti-zionist.
Well I know in the Latin American context there's colorismo, which is based on skin tone and isn't directly rooted in ethnic specificity. There are so many people with non-white admixtures that the concept of white supremacy can't be maintained without compromises, but people with lighter skin are privileged over people with darker skin regardless of what race they actually are.
I think the US might be going in this direction? It's slow, though.
this is a ridiculous critique. within the settler colony known as the united states, all white people are part of the settler class which oppresses Black people, regardless of their own histories of persecution. the author is writing to their experience of organizing in the united states. do you go to authors of any other race writing about their struggles and say “okay but have you considered you’re centering yourself too much”?
I had my forecasted "uh oh" moment when I got to the line "the most revolutionary thing that you can do is something different"
It's threads like these that makes me doubt some of y'all are even communists. All this talk about national self determination scares me. Like the 20th century didn't happen or something.
I mean I don't think we are all but that's besides the point I think.
Isn't socialism built within the material conditions of the environment? Like socialism in the US will be different to socialism in the USSR etc because the very root systems of oppression unique to those areas are different.
The writer is black in America. So like of course a huge part of American socialism has to include the self determination of black and native Americans and land back stuff? Like if white socialists want to build a movement together with non whites then they need to read, hear and just take the criticism and instead of questioning or "pushing back" at something they can't possibly understand from a lived experience?
Like the writer is clearly mad and rightly so, and users here are knee jerk critiquing the article because it makes them uncomfortable for not fully understanding what the writer is saying or doing instead of having a good think I feel.
So i dont think this last bit is fair.
Also if people want to stop burning out token poc in orgs, then they could always support them and share the load to help it be a manageable long term position?
Like I see it a lot where a minority just gets dumped with a role and cis het white people just expect them to perform without any support or aid and when they burn out its all "well did they even try" and other rancid shit so I think in that regard it's again on white org members to recognise that and better support any non white members who are in positions of leadership.
Finally I don't think it's their job to point out everything or give people a road map to improvement. We should be listening these experiences and working ourselves to fix our perceptions and better support those who can inform change right?
...So, what, you think the settlers should get to benefit from any fruits of radical societal change that the subjects-of-empire they oppress make happen without giving up anything in return? That you still get to rob us of even more labor, like you always have over the four hundred years of your society's history? Fuck that.
I dont think you've read what I wrote and I'm not going to get into a "is it productive" common sense talk about systemic racism in America and if what a black socialist and activist has said has merit in your opinion.
Racist to who you dumb fuck?
You literally can't be racist to white people. If you're still at that point in your understanding of racism and the systems of oppression that spawn from it then my dude log the fuck off and stop having opinions especially in this thread.
I'm by no means an expert and I'm probably cringe af to other users but even I know this is the most balls to the wall fragile cracker whiney piss baby take ive ever seen.
Loser.
GarbageShoot-tier take. Of course you've got an account to ban-evade on. What's the matter, you ain't talked down to enough folk yet? You ain't cracked the whip for your masters enough? Overseer-assed motherfucker.
"nOt WhItE, jUsT aNtI-rAcIsT" proceeds to use every weapon of the white 4channer. I wish I could say I was surprised but it's so fucking predictable and so fucking repellent.
I dunno how they get in. Little worms.
We've now had the incel struggle session and the ova special to that.
Today's the settler struggle session.
What's next gang? Erghhhhhhhhhh
This is something an anarchist would say. It borders on being anticommunist.
To me it just reads as a way of saying society is made up of people, and if we want to change one we have to change the other. How is that anti-communist?
If you uncharitably read it as the entirety of her political analysis then she looks like she has a bad political analysis!
Your org needs to literally stop onboarding white men (and maybe white people entirely depending on your gender split) to be sure you represent the real national makeup of the revolutionary class. A revolution in the US will necessarily be centered on the Black nation, and if you end up 90% white it's going to be basically impossible to meaningfully recruit Black people, and then you're not a part of the revolutionary movement anymore. Even if every white guy in your branch is a dedicated Black Nationalist, anti-colonialist feminist (which they should be), people are simply not going to believe it if your org looks like a country club.
My
branch was mostly white guys when it was very small, and we intentionally restricted growth along these lines for years to correct that demographic error. Our gender imbalance was totally resolved in about 6 months, and so we tightened the onboarding rules even more. We tell white recruits straight up that they're going on a waiting list while we prioritize POC comrades. Our national composition is now much closer to our geographic area, but it remains a policy we have to keep in place (thought a bit less restrictive) to be sure we maintain that throughout our future growth.you can be a freind of the party, you get the education and you volenteer for the party but you dont take up space in membership since youre sooooooooooooooooooo concerned.
You did not read his comment
We tell white recruits straight up that they're going on a waiting list while we prioritize POC comrades. Our national composition is now much closer to our geographic area, but it remains a policy we have to keep in place (thought a bit less restrictive) to be sure we maintain that throughout our future growth.
It's that simple. Do you get it now?
The people on our wait-list that stay engaged, show up to events, and help with organizing tasks are the ones who make it in. The ones who bail because being white put them at the back of the line instead of the front for the first time in their lives aren't serious revolutionaries in the first place.
The people on our wait-list that stay engaged, show up to events, and help with organizing tasks are the ones who make it in.
What does party membership entail above and beyond these things? Asking out of raw ignorance on my part. Just showing up and listening or helping out is all I'd expect to do anyway for a long while.
You take on all the rights and responsibilities of a member. You pay dues, you attend regular meetings, you go through the education program, you have the right to vote, you are assigned tasks to complete with the expectation that you will do them in a timely and professional manner, and you are a representative of the party in all political contexts.
You should reach out to your local revolutionary organization and ask how to get involved. I didn't say "no white people ever". I said that white guys are significant de-priority for organizations who already have an abundance of them. It may be in your area there's no demographic imbalance in the org and they can take you in no problem. Or maybe there is, and you'll need to exist in a more peripheral role than a full member for a while. You can still provide time, labor, and other resources.
This would still involve me being present at org events as a white person which will likely make POC people uncomfortable.
When you're trying this hard to miss the point, you just come across as exactly the person this article was written about. Not that it matters; by your own admission, you don't organize anyways.
You won't make POCs uncomfortable because you're white, but because you refuse to listen to them.
I'm thinking really I should just look into immigrating to Ireland to make sure I'm hardly ever around POCs at all.
This is ass backwards levels of racism and white American fuckoonery.
Let me be clear we do not want you. We never want you. We despise plastic Irish Americans who think they will just invade our home and shack up cos they decided being Irish is romantic now and not white slurs. We do not want you here. People like you are a joke and its genuinely insulting you think you'd be welcome or that your dog shit cracker ass American white boy takes would be tolerated.
Get a grip. No POC in Ireland? My God you are a dumb #£%*
You can have understanding of others struggles, but you will always have a greater understanding of your own.
Marx and Engels had an understanding of industrial capitalism through their interactions and experience with workers. Dismissing those who have a great understanding of struggle as not having a special role in understanding that struggle is liberalism. It's ignoring the reality of oppression and prescribing solutions.
If you had read any political theory from the past 100 years, this would be self evident to you.
Men can't read a book on how it feels to suffer under the patriarchy as a woman and understand how it affects them literally in the same way white people can't read a book on how it feels to life under systemic racism literally. If someone is a man and white they can never understand how it feels and therefore their analysis will be lacking if done in isolation.
No amount of pompous theory reading will make up for listening to the experiences of those who can fill in those gaps and going outside and touching grass.
You've taken a call for real intersectionality and trust in those who have lived experience over those with a theoretical understanding of the topic and read it as "if you aren't oppressed you can't be a socialist but that's not right cos daddy marx did good" and I think that's daft especially when the system we are discussing is systemic racism in the US.
And on that note marx and engles were not infallible and their theory's are white male centric century old writings. Great starting points but wrote in a world and time that do not reflect the material conditions of today.
Marx didn't include women's labour in his theory of primitive accumulation focusing it entirely around men in factories completely abandoning the labour at home that women did for free as essential slaves to their husbands without suffrage of any kind without even going into child birth and child raising.
Marx completely erased women and our struggles relating to labour. Intentionally or not isn't the point. As a white dude he just didn't fucking think so don't go round saying "MaRk AnD aNgLeS gOt It RiGhT" when they literally didn't. We've built on what bits they did get right CONSIDERABLY but there's more to come as theory develops.
If you wanna read theory go read calliban and the witch as it talks about exactly the immediate above.
Dumbass.
Edit: actually no, go read stuff on racism first because that's what this thread is about. Then calliban.
