Category: Leftist theory

Any category or concept is going to leave important things out. It’s the nature of abstraction. Using the term ‘Black’ to describe a group of people can obscure more than it reveals. As a biological category it is meaningless, as is the concept of race generally. There is no clear biologically relevant distinction between blacks and non-blacks. There are some genetic diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, that are more prevalent among those with African ancestry compared to those with European ancestry. Other diseases prevalent in the Black community, like hypertension, however, are related to social, not biological phenomena.

Even as a social category, it abstracts a lot of differences. Within the group of Black people, there are men and women, there are children and adults, there are wealthy and poor, there are powerful and disenfranchised, there are those with access to resources and those without, there those with legal status and those without. So a lot of detail and nuance is lost in the use of the concept.

Despite this, it is still very meaningful as a social category. Black people in the United States, for example, have less wealth, less income, suffer poorer health, and are disproportionately incarcerated compared to people who are not Black. To say that the concept of race has no biological value and that individuals are what they are, cannot be made into an argument to deny the social reality of racism. Racism is real. It is brutal. And in the system of caste that is US racism, Black people, and indigenous people, are at the bottom.

What about the concept of ‘People of Color’? That, too, obscures a great deal. It obscures differentials in political power; it obscures class differences; it obscures gender differences; it obscures questions of imperialism; it obscures the crucial distinction in this world of those who have papers and passports and can cross borders and those who do not, cannot, and are ‘illegal’.

Does it, however, have merit, like the concept of Black race or ethnicity, that countervails what it costs in abstraction? It has the merit of excluding whites, who, while they can be oppressed on gender or class lines, are at the top of the racial caste system. It can be a useful substitute for the term ‘non-white’. But it can also lead to simple-minded analysis.

When whites in movements argue that everyone needs to get over race, transcend it, and work on common issues of class, against capitalism and the ruling elite, antiracists are unimpressed because such an approach enables the most privileged and powerful groups to impose their agenda on the rest. Such an approach denies problems of privilege and differentials of power within movements and organizations for social change. Denial is no basis for solidarity. As a substitute for denial, antiracists ask white activists to think about privilege, to be attuned to hierarchies and exclusion that can happen in organizations, and to work to overcome them. Pretending equality is already here is a recipe for maintaining inequality. Addressing and attempting to make structural redress for inequality can make a group, or a movement, stronger.

The way to fight racism is not to deny differences and hierarchies of privilege but to bring them out in the open and try to change them. But if that is the case, the ‘People of Color’ label is often not helpful, for several reasons.

First, because it leads to the same kinds of denial as comes from denying race altogether. There is a hierarchy of privilege within the group ‘People of Color’. At the bottom are poor African Americans, indigenous people, and Latinos. At the top are an elite of people from different ethnicities selected and adopted into the ruling class. In between are groups of immigrants, some of whom have historically had a degree of upward mobility and are used against those below them as rhetorical devices: ‘model minorities’ who are supposed to have ‘made it’, proving that racism does not hold ‘People of Color’ back and thus that African Americans (as an example) have not ‘made it’ through their own fault. There are also groups of brutally exploited and oppressed immigrants and refugees, who work at low wages to try to remit money to support their families in poor countries under constant threat of deportation. These groups are treated differently within the racial system. They are subject to different stereotypes. They have different, and sometimes opposed, interests. Black people, for example, have an interest in a tighter labor market, while immigrants have an interest in the chance to go to the US to work. Many institutions, and often the law, think affirmative action obligations to Blacks to redress centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and violence are met when an upper class Asian is hired.

Collapsing all of these groups under the rubric of ‘People of Color’ does exclude those at the top of the hierarchy (white people) but it leaves the rest of the hierarchy intact. As a result, people at the top of the new hierarchy – in movement organizations these are often drawn from the ranks of class-privileged academics from the least oppressed racial groups – can claim the oppression of everyone below them as their own. Rather than trying to understand and addressing our own privilege and hierarchy, we can posture and be righteous. This does not help those we ought to be most concerned about – those who are most oppressed, those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

If addressing privilege and working against it within social movements and organizations is onerous, then why should whites shoulder the burden alone, since they are not the only ones with privilege? If, conversely, as antiracists claim, addressing privilege and working against it is a positive personal growth experience, then why should whites monopolize such a wonderful thing? We could all benefit from understanding how privilege and hierarchy work, and taking an honest look at where we stand. Perhaps we could start by being a little more specific about the racial system and its impacts, which do not come down on everyone equally. Using a better set of categories might help. The categories I use for North America, with their own flaws and problems, are: European or white, South Asian, East Asian, West Asian, Latino, African or Black, and Indigenous; always with the question of citizenship and status (immigrant, refugee, status/non-status).

Recognizing these differences is particularly important when ‘People of Color’ groups, caucuses, and organizations are formed. A ‘People of Color’ caucus in a community antiwar group is an example. The idea here is good: to create an autonomous space where an oppressed group can work and develop without constantly negotiating boundaries and issues of privilege. So long as the creation of such a space does not come at the expense of representation of the oppressed in larger, integrated groups (in the antiwar example, the existence of a caucus should not prevent people of color from being represented in the leadership of the larger antiwar organization or coalition). But if the autonomous space is a ‘people of color’ space where highly privileged people of color interact with much less privileged people of color, the most oppressed still have no space, and can now be denied a voice, of their own.

It’s true that no set of categories or concepts is perfect, and it would be easy to come up with arguments against the set I’ve chosen. But starting with a concept like ‘People of Color’, which obscures privilege and hierarchy within the racial system itself, can often make work harder for antiracists.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto.

Sorry for the missed days. For yesterday at least I have an excuse – I share a computer, and another user of my computer downloaded enough pop-up programs and viruses to destroy my computer. That problem still isn’t fixed, so I’m blogging from elsewhere.

Continue reading “Morals and tactics”

I’ve been wondering about a lot of different things lately.

I have thought of myself as an opponent of nation-states and national ‘sovereignty’, for example. I believed that nationalism (or what Basil Davidson called ‘nation-statism’ in his useful book ‘The Black Man’s Burden’) was usually exclusive (in North America, for example, it is often a kind of settler ideology that excludes both exploited immigrants, displaced indigenous people, and african-americans) and often destructive. I thought of national ‘sovereignty’ as an excuse used by elites to do terrible things to their populations. I made some of these arguments in an interview with Mike Albert.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between nationalism and imperialism, and it seems to me that in this world national sovereignty is one of the only possible political defenses against imperialism that has some power. You can attack Colombia’s Uribe or Israel’s Sharon for their vicious mobilization of nationalism for murderous purposes. But you can’t forget that Venezuela’s ‘proceso’, or Bolivia’s movements, are about developing a country for the benefit of the people of that country — a nationalist idea, that ends up being an anti-imperialist idea. And indeed, it seems to me that the strongest grounds for opposing the US occupation of Iraq (or the coup in Haiti) is the nationalist idea of “Iraq for the Iraqis.” Tricky there, too, because there are losers in these national projects — certainly Saddam’s version of nationalism was a horrific one for those excluded from his notion of the national identity.

The question is, what is the next step? If you don’t like imperial occupation and colonization, what do you fight for? A vision of a different global order, open borders, some innovative protections for culture and freedom, the kinds of things I was arguing for in the interview? Or should we dream first of nation-states of citizens who can democratically control their own fates, decide on their own development, decide on their own resources, without interference or imposition from outsiders?

The United Nations is supposed to be a body that balances the universal needs and rights of all people with the reality that national states are the arena where most rights and responsibilities are exercised. I don’t think we’re going to jump from the current imperial nightmare into a just global order without something happening in between (maybe what happens in between is something like what George Monbiot proposes for a global order?)

Is the arena for that the national state? Is the mobilizing force behind it nationalism? It has certainly been one of the strongest anti-imperialist forces in the past, for all its flaws.

Let’s change scales and look at a different strategic question. Vijay Prashad’s latest ZNet Sustainer Commentary makes some interesting points about relating to electoral politics (something I try to think about as well). He says that the Anybody But Bush argument is the wrong one to have: it’s ineffectual, it’s the wrong issue — “Nader’s 2.9 million votes in 2000 is far less than the number of people who went to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 on its opening night: the point is not to fight over those who come to the polls, but to engage those potential voters who have either been deviously disenfranchised, or who feel no stake at all in either the democratic institutions or else in the movement for social change.”

To Vijay, “Our communities are active in many arenas (against police brutality, against workfare, against racism, against warfare, against domestic violence, against ecocide, against homophobia, against the working-class, against local sovereignty, against injustices of all kinds) – we need to move from these vibrant, often successful struggles to a different level. We have to have the courage to move toward the electoral domain to solidify our gains and to risk governance, with all its problems.”

The idea is that we “already have a social movement that has made many gains, and it is up to us to move our base to the polls to elect viable and decent local candidates who are accountable to our movements.” Examples? “The successful candidacies of Boston’s Felix Arroyo, Providence’s Miguel Luna, Austell’s Alisha Thomas, Tucson’s Raul Grijava, Newark’s Ras Baraka, New Platz’s Jason West…” I don’t know anything about these folks — but I would be interested to learn more about them… perhaps from the book Vijay cites, called “How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office” by the League of Pissed Off Voters. They have a 30 year plan. I like the last line of Vijay’s comment — the task is to make “the link between the struggle and the election. This is a far more important task than to treat our vote as a commodity and decide which shop to sell it to in exchange for some measure of personal satisfaction.”

Keeping that link alive though is tricky, because what inevitably happens is that elected politicians cease to be accountable to their constituencies. And progressive local politicians quickly discover that the real power lies elsewhere. How can a movement that can achieve a degree of local power make a transition to real power at the national or international level, without getting stuck?

I gave a talk on Friday night to a local community group. Small group (usually the case for my talks). The topic was Canadian foreign policy (I’ll be publishing the talk soon). It was a smart crowd, engaged, awake, I think activist in inclination. It was actually a biweekly discussion group, and they brought in guest speakers after which they discussed things among themselves, some retiring to a local coffee shop to continue the chat.

For me a talk is mostly an excuse to get to the Question and Answer period. During the talk, you have an obligation to give something to the audience, some preparation or research that you have done, but how can you know what you can offer unless you can hear some questions, and know where the audience is at?

Anyway as I said, during question period, there were very interesting questions. Some were relating to the content of the talk itself, so I won’t go into them yet. But one of them was really very good. The talk was very informational in nature: presenting various facts, historical and contemporary, about Canada’s role in the world that very few people know. So one audience member asked: “Do you really think if people knew this, they would do something about it?”

Rather gets to the point, doesn’t it? This is actually a constant debate among Z types. I gave a rather long answer, more or less as below.

At the Z Media Institute, for example, people like Chip Berlet from Political Research Associates and Amy Goodman from Democracy Now come and give talks about the mainstream media, the political culture, etc.. These journalists, being genuine journalists, have a belief that if people knew what their government was doing they would act. The problem, to them, is that the media doesn’t keep people informed, and so they can’t make informed decisions.

Michael Albert disagrees. He doesn’t think the problem is information. In his blog, he asks:

Doesn’t sufficient evidence of deceit and destruction now exist for everyone to see it? Can the average American – much less the average citizen of England given their far better media — be unaware of the vile nature of our government’s pursuits, other than by adopting an ostrich approach that actively denies reality? There is a parade of images and rhetoric blasting into everyone’s line of sight. The spin campaign to obscure its meaning is utterly absurd, yet we know it will largely work. Why?

His answer:

I contend that at least one important factor at work is that people feel there is no alternative to the injustices that surround us and, at any rate, that they are helpless regarding altering those injustices. To become irate will buck social norms and make their lives harder, not easier. No gains, in their view, will accrue to themselves or to others either. People thus reject the uncomfortable, alienating, and in their view unproductive world of social judgments to instead focus their energies on the relatively comfortable, acceptable, and productive worlds of sports, tv, lawn care, shopping, dating, business as usual, survival, and other daily interaction with friends and family.

There is also a third. Ward Churchill expresses it in his new book, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Talking about the sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, Ward says:

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..

There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” an “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for “our kids,” no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

So there is one position (that of the journalists):

We don’t know. If we knew, we would care.

And another (Michael’s):

We know. We feel helpless. So we pretend we don’t know.

And a third (Ward’s):

We know. We don’t care.

Each has different implications. If the journalists like Amy are right, then providing the information will eventually work, contribute to making some change. If Michael is right, piling on knowledge of atrocities and analysis of the systemic nature of it all will only make people more helpless unless there is some accompanying strategy for how people can act to change it all. Strategy, examples, experiences, ideas about alternatives. If Ward is right, people don’t wake up unless there is some cost to them, and the main problem is that the cost to us has been too low: “More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”

But it didn’t work: “Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case… Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US.”

Robert Jensen once said something similar in a talk he gave in Canada about a year ago. He said when he saw the planes hit the buildings on 9/11, he thought there are two ways for this empire to come to an end. One way is historically unprecedented, that the citizens of the empire could dismantle it from within. The other way was what he was watching on TV.

Of the three, Michael’s is the most optimistic, and probably neglected. Certainly movements pay more attention to analyzing the power structure than even to finding weaknesses within it, to say nothing of strategies to make change and alternative ideas. If Amy is right, then it’s just a matter of working away and doing more of what we’re doing. If Ward is right, we’re pretty much doomed, so we’ll have to proceed on the assumption that he’s wrong — as he is doing, since he is a rather tireless activist who is constantly trying to fight for change.

If you’re ready to give up, these two books will not help you — they might push you over the edge, actually. Still, I recommend them.

Continue reading “Two books if you’re ready to give up”

Now, having read Toufe’s piece on moral agency I am not about to try to make some kind of case absolving an artist like Nelly for creating a video in which women are treated in degrading, sexist, and appalling ways. Social change is made by moral agents who decide not to follow the script that is laid down for them. By people who face all the social forces and do not succumb to them. It is these exceptions to the social script that provide possibilities for hope.

Having said that, I saw this article on hip hop and gender politics and thought it was provocative, in the opposite way that Toufe’s piece was. The author is saying — look, there’s plenty of sexism and misogyny in hip hop, there’s no question. But sexism and misogyny wasn’t invented by rap artists. It is consumed by huge numbers of people. (And, a point that the author doesn’t make, it is put forward by incredibly concentrated media companies as *the* dominant voice of hip hop, creating enormous pressures on artists to create that kind of work if they want a shot at recognition, reward, etc.) So there is an institutional context for this, and hip-hop artists alone shouldn’t have to take the fall for sexism.

The fact that they are is actually telling. By blaming hip-hop for sexism and misogyny, other sectors of society (no less infected by sexism) can throw up their hands and wonder why *they* are so sexist and misogynist. Must be a pathology of ‘black culture’ or ‘hip hop culture’ or ‘youth culture’. The one thing it can’t be is something that is pervasive throughout a patriarchal society where men beat their wives and girlfriends senseless, rape and terrorize women, and just generally keep women in their place across the board.

This is something worth watching for. It is not unlike a lot of what is being said about the ‘new antisemitism’. Remember the ‘old antisemitism’ is what was practiced by Europe since the Crusades and the Inquisition and culminated in the Holocaust. But many pundits are saying, look, the ‘new antisemitism’ is worse than the ‘old antisemitism’, and the ‘new antisemitism’ is criticism of Israel, and it is practiced not by whites and white supremacists but by Muslims and their supporters. So whereas in the past, opposing anti-semitism meant opposing white supremacy (and those things that accompanied it, colonialism, racism, and imperialism), today you can oppose ‘the new anti-semitism’ and still be firmly on the side of white supremacy, because the ‘new anti-semitism’ is something that is, by definition, practiced by white supremacy’s victims (Muslims, Arabs).

In this way, blacks can be blamed for sexism (and homophobia), Muslims can be blamed for anti-semitism (and sexism and homophobia). Not only does this justify doing bad things to them (locking them up or bombing them), but it also helps us to avoid any reckoning with these diseases of our own society.

Still thinking through this, but I might try to lay out the argument in an essay or a commentary.