Tag: Race Traitor

White Workers and Race Treason in Revolutionary Struggle

Noel Ignatiev used to say that the biggest impediment to revolution in the United States is that most white workers identify more with their race than with their class. Thus, they side with the white ruling class in order to obtain what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “wages of whiteness” that separate them from workers of color and prevent effective working class unity [ed: a friend reminded me that this phrase was actually from David Roediger riffing off of Du Bois]. How does this play out in practice and how can we break the cycle of white identification?

A friend of mine told me about his recent trip to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which chronicles the miner’s strike and armed uprising that led to the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. As he explored the town, he saw a flyer advertising a support group for addicts. It was a standard pitch, something like: “Do you feel alone and unsupported? Are you dealing with addiction? Are you in debt and struggling to make ends meet? Come to our weekly support group for help to get back on your feet.” The kicker was that at the bottom, it was signed by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Let’s dig into this scenario. Imagine a poor white opiate addict, a young person working a minimum wage job without a clear future. The relatively good jobs that had given their parents and grandparents a higher standard of living have disappeared. They feel that they have nowhere to turn for support, for community, for hope of a better life. What comes next?

1. They could see this flyer for the KKK-run addiction group. They go to a meeting where they find a supportive community that tells them that they are not alone and they are not broken. The group make them believe that there is the possibility to be strong and whole with hope for a better future. The problem is that immigrants, Black people, and globalist (Jewish) elites have stolen their job and their dignity. Rather than identify with a multiracial working class, their problems (and their solution) are articulated along racial lines. They are led to identity with their whiteness as the only path towards a better life. This is the base for fascism in the United States.

2. Imagine that this person encounters a different flyer. It has a similar message around addiction support but it is posted instead by a local DSA chapter or anarchist mutual aid network. This group provides support for them on an individual level but they also supply a different analysis of their problems and a very different solution. The blame is not placed on immigrants, Black people, or Jews, but rather on the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses the vast majority of people. The group helps to unionize the worker’s low-wage job, thereby showing the material benefits of struggle and solidarity with all workers (including, we might imagine, an immigrant worker who was previously the target of scorn and abuse by white workers). This process helps the person to identify with their class rather than their race. They see that multi-racial workers’ solidarity actually improves their material conditions, and they are drawn into the anti-racist left.

3. What do the Democrats offer to this person? For better or worse, liberals tell them that they can identify neither with their race nor their class. Dems perhaps offer a tepid job training program and admonish them to abandon the white privilege that they cling to as their last remaining hope. Is it any surprise that the person might reject this option? And that, in the absence of a strong leftwing alternative, they might be pulled in by the fascist, white supremacist path of the KKK? If the left isn’t there offering a model for white workers to identify with and fight for their class interests, then the fascists will certainly do it with race.

After Trump’s election in 2016, people wrote a whole series of postmortems evaluating the role that the white working class played. On the one hand, “economic anxiety” was blamed; on the other, white supremacy and racism. I think that this debate misses the point of how politics actually works. Most people are exploited under capitalism, including the white working class. Most people, again including the white working class, also experience assaults on their sense of dignity and worth. The question is not whether or not individual white people are fundamentally racist, but rather how their grievances are articulated into a coherent set of politics.

The same grievances can be framed in either race-based terms (Trump tells white workers that Mexican immigrants stole their jobs) or class-based terms (Bernie tells white workers that capitalists shipped their jobs overseas). In the first case, immigrants are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in racial terms. In the second case, capitalists are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in class terms. The point is not to convince white people in abstract moral terms that they should give up their white privilege, but rather to offer a political analysis and strategy for improving their lives through identification and struggle within the multi-racial working class.

This analysis is not based on morality but rather on strategy. None of this is a call for people of color to have more sympathy for white people or move to rural areas to organize them. I think white radicals have a specific role to play here. It’s not just about doing what is morally right, but rather preventing fascism from spreading further and offering a revolutionary alternative.

Note that I am not calling for “color-blindness.” Disidentification with whiteness requires an active process of treason and struggle against white supremacy, not a simple disavowal of the privilege of one’s skin color. The point is not for white people to simply check their privilege, but rather for us to develop and popularize modes of analysis and struggle that enable white people to identify common interests with people of color and fight together to overthrow this system and build a new world in its place.

Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics

Check out the recording of the panel discussion I organized on Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics! (See the description below.) We are thinking about hosting an event series on anarchist history this fall, please reach out if you are interested in participating! You can email me at scb274@cornell.edu

Anarchist movements have not only organized workers and challenged state power, but also produced vibrant cultures of resistance. In this panel, Kirwin Shaffer, Montse Feu, and Spencer Beswick examine how anarchists have engaged with questions of race and gender in their cultural production in Cuba and the United States.

Tracing diasporic networks and grappling with intersectional identities that traversed political and cultural boundaries, the presenters explore the mixed legacy of anarchist movements in their struggles to overcome racialized and gendered limitations to their emancipatory visions. ————————————————————————-

Kirwin Shaffer: “The Multiple Uses of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Cuban Anarchist Culture” 0:15

Montse Feu: “Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Protest and Solidarity in the United States” 19:56

Spencer Beswick: “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation” 37:30

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Panelists:

• Kirwin Shaffer is Professor of Latin American Studies at Penn State University – Berks College. He is author of three books on anarchism in the Caribbean (Anarchist Cuba, Black Flag Boricuas, and Anarchists of the Caribbean) and co-editor of the award-winning edited collection In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History.

• Montse Feu recovers and examines the literary history of the Spanish Civil War exile in the United States, US Hispanic periodicals, and migration and exile literature at large. She is the author of Correspondencia personal y política de un anarcosindicalista exiliado: Jesús González Malo (1943-1965) (Universidad de Cantabria, 2016) and Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019).

• Spencer Beswick is a PhD candidate at Cornell University studying the history of anarchism and the left. A chapter he wrote based on the material for this presentation will be featured in a forthcoming book series on anarchism and punk published by Active Distribution. Spencer’s dissertation is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, 1989-98

I just submitted my chapter for this upcoming book series on anarchism and punk coming out from the UK radical publisher Active Distribution next year (distributed by AK Press in the US). I’m excited to get published in print for the first time! Here is the introduction to the chapter:

Love and Rage banner at a 1993 anti-fascist demonstration in Chattanooga, TN

“What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”-Love and Rage member Joel Olson

“Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white […] Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building” (Love and Rage, 1997, p. 3). Thus argues a 1997 editorial that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial or should it accept its whiteness and try to work in coalitions with people of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage (1989-98), which was the most significant American anarchist federation since the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. Love and Rage was embedded in the largely white punk world. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive in the post-1960s counterrevolution, members worried that punk’s white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and “race traitor” politics that sought to abolish whiteness in order to build revolution.

This chapter begins by situating Love and Rage within the history of race and anarchism in the United States. Despite a rich tradition of anti-authoritarianism among people of color, American anarchism is typically thought to be a largely white phenomenon. But in the 1980s, imprisoned ex-Black Panthers began to theorize a new form of Black Anarchism that reverberated through the anarchist world. Love and Rage drew on this tradition as well as the theorization of white skin privilege by the Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-86) to center whiteness as one of the major barriers to revolutionary politics. Given its focus on race, the federation was keenly aware of its own racial demographics. Co-founder Chris Day argued that the group’s social base was the newly “reproletarianized” children of the white middle class who came to anarchist politics through the punk scene. I employ political theorist AK Thompson’s notion of white middle class “ontological politics,” which explains how dissident youth sought a new way of being in the world, to analyze how punk culture provided new forms of life and politics for white reproles. The punk scene provided a refuge for young dissidents to live their anarchist politics.

Anarchist punks practiced a form of white race traitor politics: they sought to actively repudiate their privilege in order to break up the “white club” that upholds the US racial hierarchy. But the efficacy of these tactics is questionable, and I end by critically evaluating Love and Rage’s approach to anti-racism. Despite its commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism, the group failed to adequately address the problems posed by its own whiteness and experienced great difficulty both recruiting and working in coalition with people of color. I argue that, aside from anti-fascist organizing against white supremacists, the federation’s punk-influenced ontological politics largely favored individual, performative rejection of white privilege rather than collective political action. This undermined Love and Rage’s efforts to build multi-racial revolutionary dual power beyond the boundaries of punk subculture. I end by identifying lessons that anarchists, punks, and anti-racists can draw from the federation’s history.