A few notes on "The White Skin Privilege Concept: From Margin to Center of Revolutionary Politics"
The White Skin Privilege Concept: From Margin to Center of Revolutionary Politics
This blog seems to be undergoing a renaissance. I'll give that another day or so before it falls into incoherent disuse again. At some level, I feel like I ought to start a Wordpress blog for signed articles, maybe have a Dreamwidth for personal stuff, perhaps even experiment with tumblr, though I don't understand how people can reblog that much shit and still have any time left in their days.
Anyway, I thought the article linked above was interesting and highly worth reading; it's the best history of the concept of white privilege on the left I've seen. (Small quibble with the article's title, "White Skin Privilege" - in my experience the only people who still use that term remember personal debates with Ted Allen.)
I got the article from a FB friend who has a strong critique of the way, in his view, the white privilege notion has become a mainstream tool which displaces a structural analysis of race and can be used by white liberals to "play the race card against" and invisibilize radicals of color who organize as part of "the mainly white left."
My own interest in this article comes from a somewhat different set of premises. First, I thought the article's distinction between the Sojourner Truth Org. and the Prairie Fire OC version of white privilege analysis was quite interesting. Boiling it down quite a bit: for Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen of STO, white privilege analysis was a tool for understanding the particular challenges of organizing the white working class, which was still conceptualized as a central task of communists. If you were trying to organize white workers, you needed to understand why their allegiance to whiteness / imperialism seemed so fierce and intractable, despite apparent class interests which would point in the opposite direction. For the Weather Underground and PFOC, white privilege analysis was about dismissing the white working class as a revolutionary force and convincing individual white radicals to do solidarity work with third world struggles both overseas and within the US.
Personally, I came to white privilege analysis as someone from a complicated class background, nonetheless having grown up economically quite poor and culturally mostly working class. (I would say in terms of food, clothing, regional strata, regional language markers, and family social position in school I was quite working-class, though my mom was quite educated, which meant that I had access to education and in my public school was quickly tracked with "my betters.") I think I was always interested more in what this article defines as the STO version of white privilege theory (an immanent critique of the difficulty of organizing the white working class). I've always had a problem with the implicitly middle-class frame of much of white antiracist organizing, at the same time that I know that that organizing world has been an incredibly important space in which a number of my friends have become politicized or advanced their political thinking and their own ability to think about the complexities of race.
I don't think it's helpful to dismiss white privilege theory or the white antiracist organizing milieu. That's not what the author of the piece is doing. If we dismiss the notion of white privilege, it's too easy to fall back into strange forms of substitutionism: university students and prisoners both face an eclipse of their futures, so they are functionally equated in important ways; or, there's a failure to recognize that the response of the Black community of Oakland to Oscar Grant's murder by BART Police had some dynamics that couldn't be equated to those of a radical youth response.
The latter is tricky, because the mainstream media repeatedly created visions of "white anarchists" as "outside agitators" without whom docile Black and Brown youth wouldn't be doing any of this silly illegal stuff. Having been present in July, I can say that this vision is a deeply skewed, tendentious attempt to minimalize what was a very diverse outpouring of anger. Also, white and Asian youth who mostly didn't grow up in the communities most impacted by police repression in the Bay Area still have perfectly legitimate reasons (many of which are personal and visceral) to hate police. The whole "outside" element gets tricky too. A lot of people who are now radicals in the Oscar Grant movement grew up in East Bay cities; they are people of all different races. Are they "outside agitators" just because they've been radical for a while? The media made hay over the number of arrestees who weren't from Oakland, but if you add up all the East Bay cities, the majority were clearly locals. (Saying someone from Berkeley or Richmond or Hayward protesting in Oakland is an "outsider" would be sort of like saying that someone from Queens is an "outsider" if she goes to a protest in downtown Brooklyn, I imagine.)
Nevertheless, a riot which is clearly an outpouring of anger on the part of a community which has been systematically oppressed is different than a riot which can *plausibly be portrayed by the media* as being the work of outsiders. A great number of generally sympathetic, left-leaning people accepted the outside-agitator analysis. Some radicals were tone-deaf to this, and there's a certain tendency to throw out the baby of white privilege analysis with the bath water, to the point where we get not a confrontation with structural racism but a new populism where acts of resistance are flattened out and the dynamics of various social groups involved in various forms of activity is no longer taken to matter.
To me, the point of reviewing the question of white privilege now is not returning to a "pre-privilege" left analysis of race, but to be careful about a few things. 1) The final scene the article envisions, as well as the situation my friend recounted, brings up a real problem: privilege lingo can become its own orthodoxy with a set of answers to problems which allow people to feel comfortable in avoiding real, honest grappling with difficult problems; in a bizarre irony which is nonetheless relatively common, this orthodoxy can be used to ignore what people of color in a room are saying or to render them invisible. I've been in a lot of rooms where it gets way too easy to go from "we're a mostly white organization" to "we're so overwhelmingly white that we need to deal with our problems as if we're an entirely white group" to, even, "we are the white left, and we're part of the problem." This move may be earnest and sincere emotionally, but if there are POC sitting right there while these conversations are happening, it's probably replicating the problem. Of course, this scenario doesn't invalidate the privilege lens. It does mean that dealing with race dynamics in an organization is a much more complicated process than just confessing privilege and hoping for some always unattainable expiation.
2) There's a dialectical relationship between an organization's ability to deal with its own internal problems and its ability to make itself relevant to what's happening in the larger world. If we try to pay attention only to big-world political issues and structural racism, declaring questions of internal movement culture to be unworthy of further discussion, it's likely that we're facing some problems that seem insoluble merely through more talk which nonetheless are centrally wrapped up in our ability to function effectively. On the other hand, if we shift our focus entirely inward, it's possible to lose focus on the institutions we really want to change. Without structural changes, some of our interpersonal contradictions are and will remain insoluble. Furthermore, the kind of solidarity, respect, and comradeship we hope to achieve in struggle together in radical movements is something different than the kind of reconfiguration of subjectivities liberals and conservatives hope to achieve through a discourse of white privilege.
3) The question I've alluded to and then ignored: is white privilege analysis of some sort actually important / useful to understand for organizing white workers? I suspect that the answer is "yes," in the sense that I'm firmly convinced that the Du Boisian - Ignatin analysis is important for understanding white workers, and anything that's important for our understanding of the world shouldn't be jettisoned from our attempts to frame an approach to organizing. However, it's hard to think of many real-world cases where a white privilege analysis was critical. Sometimes white workers act in solidarity with other workers and sometimes they don't, and white privilege analysis can help you understand why they often don't without getting stuck on a moralistic or personalistic criticism which would become disheartened too easily. But I'm not sure if the organizer who saw a worker or group of workers about to make the wrong choice because of privilege, who understood this, would have any better recourses than the organizer whose principle was "Black and white unite and fight!" and who understood the backwards white worker as a victim of false consciousness. Is it as simple as saying that yelling "You ignorant dupe!" at someone is not a good organizing tactic? Maybe attempts to decide whether a theory is "useful" in such an immediately utilitarian manner are always prone to this kind of absurdist incoherence. Or maybe the question is not whether white privilege theory is useful for organizing white workers at all, but whether its importance to this organizing is absolutely central or secondary. I suppose I may be beginning to think it's somewhat secondary, though still important, which might be a bit of a shift.
This blog seems to be undergoing a renaissance. I'll give that another day or so before it falls into incoherent disuse again. At some level, I feel like I ought to start a Wordpress blog for signed articles, maybe have a Dreamwidth for personal stuff, perhaps even experiment with tumblr, though I don't understand how people can reblog that much shit and still have any time left in their days.
Anyway, I thought the article linked above was interesting and highly worth reading; it's the best history of the concept of white privilege on the left I've seen. (Small quibble with the article's title, "White Skin Privilege" - in my experience the only people who still use that term remember personal debates with Ted Allen.)
I got the article from a FB friend who has a strong critique of the way, in his view, the white privilege notion has become a mainstream tool which displaces a structural analysis of race and can be used by white liberals to "play the race card against" and invisibilize radicals of color who organize as part of "the mainly white left."
My own interest in this article comes from a somewhat different set of premises. First, I thought the article's distinction between the Sojourner Truth Org. and the Prairie Fire OC version of white privilege analysis was quite interesting. Boiling it down quite a bit: for Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen of STO, white privilege analysis was a tool for understanding the particular challenges of organizing the white working class, which was still conceptualized as a central task of communists. If you were trying to organize white workers, you needed to understand why their allegiance to whiteness / imperialism seemed so fierce and intractable, despite apparent class interests which would point in the opposite direction. For the Weather Underground and PFOC, white privilege analysis was about dismissing the white working class as a revolutionary force and convincing individual white radicals to do solidarity work with third world struggles both overseas and within the US.
Personally, I came to white privilege analysis as someone from a complicated class background, nonetheless having grown up economically quite poor and culturally mostly working class. (I would say in terms of food, clothing, regional strata, regional language markers, and family social position in school I was quite working-class, though my mom was quite educated, which meant that I had access to education and in my public school was quickly tracked with "my betters.") I think I was always interested more in what this article defines as the STO version of white privilege theory (an immanent critique of the difficulty of organizing the white working class). I've always had a problem with the implicitly middle-class frame of much of white antiracist organizing, at the same time that I know that that organizing world has been an incredibly important space in which a number of my friends have become politicized or advanced their political thinking and their own ability to think about the complexities of race.
I don't think it's helpful to dismiss white privilege theory or the white antiracist organizing milieu. That's not what the author of the piece is doing. If we dismiss the notion of white privilege, it's too easy to fall back into strange forms of substitutionism: university students and prisoners both face an eclipse of their futures, so they are functionally equated in important ways; or, there's a failure to recognize that the response of the Black community of Oakland to Oscar Grant's murder by BART Police had some dynamics that couldn't be equated to those of a radical youth response.
The latter is tricky, because the mainstream media repeatedly created visions of "white anarchists" as "outside agitators" without whom docile Black and Brown youth wouldn't be doing any of this silly illegal stuff. Having been present in July, I can say that this vision is a deeply skewed, tendentious attempt to minimalize what was a very diverse outpouring of anger. Also, white and Asian youth who mostly didn't grow up in the communities most impacted by police repression in the Bay Area still have perfectly legitimate reasons (many of which are personal and visceral) to hate police. The whole "outside" element gets tricky too. A lot of people who are now radicals in the Oscar Grant movement grew up in East Bay cities; they are people of all different races. Are they "outside agitators" just because they've been radical for a while? The media made hay over the number of arrestees who weren't from Oakland, but if you add up all the East Bay cities, the majority were clearly locals. (Saying someone from Berkeley or Richmond or Hayward protesting in Oakland is an "outsider" would be sort of like saying that someone from Queens is an "outsider" if she goes to a protest in downtown Brooklyn, I imagine.)
Nevertheless, a riot which is clearly an outpouring of anger on the part of a community which has been systematically oppressed is different than a riot which can *plausibly be portrayed by the media* as being the work of outsiders. A great number of generally sympathetic, left-leaning people accepted the outside-agitator analysis. Some radicals were tone-deaf to this, and there's a certain tendency to throw out the baby of white privilege analysis with the bath water, to the point where we get not a confrontation with structural racism but a new populism where acts of resistance are flattened out and the dynamics of various social groups involved in various forms of activity is no longer taken to matter.
To me, the point of reviewing the question of white privilege now is not returning to a "pre-privilege" left analysis of race, but to be careful about a few things. 1) The final scene the article envisions, as well as the situation my friend recounted, brings up a real problem: privilege lingo can become its own orthodoxy with a set of answers to problems which allow people to feel comfortable in avoiding real, honest grappling with difficult problems; in a bizarre irony which is nonetheless relatively common, this orthodoxy can be used to ignore what people of color in a room are saying or to render them invisible. I've been in a lot of rooms where it gets way too easy to go from "we're a mostly white organization" to "we're so overwhelmingly white that we need to deal with our problems as if we're an entirely white group" to, even, "we are the white left, and we're part of the problem." This move may be earnest and sincere emotionally, but if there are POC sitting right there while these conversations are happening, it's probably replicating the problem. Of course, this scenario doesn't invalidate the privilege lens. It does mean that dealing with race dynamics in an organization is a much more complicated process than just confessing privilege and hoping for some always unattainable expiation.
2) There's a dialectical relationship between an organization's ability to deal with its own internal problems and its ability to make itself relevant to what's happening in the larger world. If we try to pay attention only to big-world political issues and structural racism, declaring questions of internal movement culture to be unworthy of further discussion, it's likely that we're facing some problems that seem insoluble merely through more talk which nonetheless are centrally wrapped up in our ability to function effectively. On the other hand, if we shift our focus entirely inward, it's possible to lose focus on the institutions we really want to change. Without structural changes, some of our interpersonal contradictions are and will remain insoluble. Furthermore, the kind of solidarity, respect, and comradeship we hope to achieve in struggle together in radical movements is something different than the kind of reconfiguration of subjectivities liberals and conservatives hope to achieve through a discourse of white privilege.
3) The question I've alluded to and then ignored: is white privilege analysis of some sort actually important / useful to understand for organizing white workers? I suspect that the answer is "yes," in the sense that I'm firmly convinced that the Du Boisian - Ignatin analysis is important for understanding white workers, and anything that's important for our understanding of the world shouldn't be jettisoned from our attempts to frame an approach to organizing. However, it's hard to think of many real-world cases where a white privilege analysis was critical. Sometimes white workers act in solidarity with other workers and sometimes they don't, and white privilege analysis can help you understand why they often don't without getting stuck on a moralistic or personalistic criticism which would become disheartened too easily. But I'm not sure if the organizer who saw a worker or group of workers about to make the wrong choice because of privilege, who understood this, would have any better recourses than the organizer whose principle was "Black and white unite and fight!" and who understood the backwards white worker as a victim of false consciousness. Is it as simple as saying that yelling "You ignorant dupe!" at someone is not a good organizing tactic? Maybe attempts to decide whether a theory is "useful" in such an immediately utilitarian manner are always prone to this kind of absurdist incoherence. Or maybe the question is not whether white privilege theory is useful for organizing white workers at all, but whether its importance to this organizing is absolutely central or secondary. I suppose I may be beginning to think it's somewhat secondary, though still important, which might be a bit of a shift.