Source: https://mronline.org/2017/08/26/charlottesville-is-america-the-myth-of-the-white-supremacist-tidal-wave/
Structural racism is the root of all racist ideas and warrants
just as much, if not more, attention than the gathering of white nationalists
Posted Aug 26, 2017 by
Eds.
Topics: Culture , Human Rights , Race
Places: United States
Originally published: Black Agenda Repost by Danny Haiphong (August 25, 2017)
One death and many
more injured later, the “Unite the Right Rally” to protest the removal of
General Robert E. Lee’s statue became firmly planted in popular consciousness
well after the band of white nationalists dispersed. Conversation regarding the
significance of the demonstration has continued over a week after the incident.
The demonstration comprised of hundreds of white nationalists from a number of
organizations, all assembled to defend white power. Their opponents, which
consisted of everyone from anarchists and communists, confronted the white
nationalist mob head on. And like a tidal wave, the media narrative that a
white supremacist takeover is flooding the shores of the US has many watching
the scene from afar wondering what to do from here.
However, white
supremacy is not a tidal wave. And it isn’t a lurking storm that seeks to wreak
havoc on the shores of the US either. That happened centuries ago, when English
colonizers laid their claim to the North American mainland circa the mid to
late 17th Century. Virginia was the birthplace of the white race. It was in
this settler colony that the white racial category was invented in order to rescue a crumbling
tobacco capitalist industry from ruin. The early colonial-capitalist relations
of debt bondage united African and European laborers and landowners in
rebellion against the colonial administration, prompting the ruling elite to
give Europeans the right to escape the harshest form of bondage that was
ascribed to newly subordinate Africans laborers.
“Virginia was the birthplace of the white race.”
White supremacy
continued to shape colonialism in North America, as the enslavement of Africans
based on racial inferiority was found to be hugely profitable. The US was able
to rapidly advance the productive capacity of the capitalist system in large
part because of the free labor of Africans and the stolen land of First Nations
people. White superiority went on to justify imperial expansion in the West and
South even after the end of formal chattel bondage. Black labor remained so
terrorized and dispossessed by white rule that class solidarity never could
take hold in the US mainland. This pressing problem has yet to be resolved, as
wars rage on both at home and abroad in the name of the first empire to be
founded on white capitalist rule.
When placed in proper
historical context, the events in Charlottesville are hardly surprising. White
supremacist terror is a critical piece of the US imperialist machine. A few
hundred white nationalists protesting a perceived loss of white privilege
is a reflection of institutional realities that have yet to garner a similar
reaction among large sections of the US populace. Some of these realities
include the daily murders of Black Americans at the hands of police, a
gaping racial disparity in the wealth
distribution of US society, and an incarceration regime that
warehouses more Black people than the total number of people imprisoned in
any single nation in the world. Structural racism is the root
of all racist ideas and warrants just as much, if not more, attention
than the gathering of white nationalists.
“White superiority went on to justify imperial expansion in the
West and South.”
A radical
orientation to US imperialism’s state machinery has become all the
more necessary in these dangerous times. The FBI has been infiltrating white power groups for years, ostensibly to
investigate the presence of such groups in law enforcement. However, the FBI’s
role in white nationalist formations may be more insidious. It is now a matter
of public record that many of the terror plots uncovered by the FBI were orchestrated by the agency in the first place. This
begs the question as to what influence the state has over white power
groups, especially in light of US government support for Nazis in Ukraine and similar forces all over the world.
Popular consciousness
of the relationship between the state and white supremacy has been clouded
by an anti-Trump movement led by a significant section of the ruling elite in
Washington. This movement has grossly distorted the threat of a fascist,
white power takeover of the US political system. The Democrats in particular
have equated white nationalism with the Russian Federation and Putin with
Trump. Yet white supremacy is not the primary question on the order of the day
for the ruling elite. Rather, the ruling class raises the specter of white
nationalism as a proxy to enlist a growing number of the US population on the
side of war with Russia and to cover up any notion that the Democratic
Party lost the election is due to its own undesirable qualities. In this period
of crisis, US imperialism requires white nationalism to fester and grow so that
its two-party system remains a legitimate political option. This is why
Washington may officially condemn “hate” but does nothing about the presence of
white nationalist groups in regions across the country.
“The ruling class raises the specter of white nationalism as a
proxy to enlist a growing number of the US population on the side of war with
Russia.”
This is not to say
that white supremacy does not pose an immediate and violent threat to oppressed
people, especially Black people. White supremacist groups possess a
complex relationship with the US state. They enforce white supremacist terror
with protection from the state yet expose the public to the nation’s
racist roots all at the same time. The social relations behind the thousands
of lynchings that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century remain
intact. Only this time, the hoods are (mostly) off and these groups have
reduced in size compared to the number of heavily militarized police occupation
forces that exist across the US.
Powerful movements
armed with organized Black self-defense forces made the weakening of
organized white nationalism possible. Beginning in the 1960s, it became
untenable for the ruling class to openly espouse support for white vigilantes.
That doesn’t mean white terror ceased to exist into the present day. The state
merely shifted the social control of Black America more heavily
onto formal channels of the state. Prisons were erected and a steady
stream of federal funds and military weaponry sent to state and local
police departments. It was through these reforms that the US state was able to
legitimize state violence against Black America as a matter of national
security. Ironically, such conditions laid the basis for white nationalist
organizations to regain strength.
“The state merely shifted the social control of Black
America more heavily onto formal channels of the state.”
Black August is upon
us and few others understood white nationalism and fascism better than the
immortal George Jackson. Jackson studied the ideas of the “honky” in order
to unite prisoners of all colors in a common struggle against state
authorities. His work Blood in My Eye analyzes the system of fascism
in the context of US political economy. He concludes that for Black America and
much of the world’s people, fascism had arrived. The year was 1970-71, and the
Black Panther Party that Jackson joined from within prison was being attacked
on all sides by the US state. That same state was also waging bloody wars
abroad, most notably in Vietnam. Jackson defined fascism as the last reform
stage of US imperialist development; a stage characterized by the
ruling class’s inability to allow legitimate resistance to exist without waging
a total war in response.
The point here is not
to debate the definition of fascism here, but to achieve a greater degree of
clarity about the current systemic crisis of imperialism. There is no greater
disservice to the struggle against fascism and white supremacy than to confine
it to the racist ideas of bands of organized whites Americans. These bands are
not a class and cannot take state power in any real way independently.
Their existence is buttressed by a system of exploitation ruled over by a tiny
class of profiteers that ultimately controls the state apparatus. It is
here where the real threat of fascism lies.
“No party in Washington is actively fighting to use the Justice
Department to defend Black Americans from being murdered by the police or
imprisoned for life in geriatric gulags.”
This threat possesses
a bipartisan character. The road to fascism has been paved by the
existence of so-called US democracy itself. Every actor in Washington has
played a part in the consolidation of state power in the hands of monopoly
capital. No state opposition can be found to the fleecing of Black wealth and
the wages of the poor generally. Washington is also united when it comes to war
with Korea and drone strikes in Pakistan. And no party in Washington is
actively fighting to use the Justice Department to defend Black Americans
from being murdered by the police or imprisoned for life in geriatric gulags.
The political debate
around the question of white supremacy must become more nuanced. US imperialism
is in crisis and a significant portion of the ruling class hopes to keep the
struggle against white supremacy completely separate from its class roots. The
system’s goal is to steer the struggle against white nationalists
toward a quest to purify the US of its “hateful ideas.” However,
exploitation and state violence does not emerge out of hate alone, if at
all. Such relations are the product of a system of class rule. White
supremacy wouldn’t exist if it were not profitable, thus making the system of
capitalism at the root of private profit an indispensable target in the struggle
for a new world all together.
