The idea that all whites are privileged at the expense of Blacks is popular on the left--but Bill Mullen makes the case that Marxism offers a better understanding of racism.
Harlem marches to defend the Scottsboro Boys
CAPITALISM HAS had devastating effects on people of color in the U.S.
in recent years. Current Black unemployment remains at nearly double
the national average for whites; predatory subprime lending caused
foreclosure rates to skyrocket among non-white homeowners when the Great
Recession hit; and mass incarceration and "stop-and-frisk" police
policies continue to make African Americans and others doubly vulnerable
to state-sponsored racism.
In the political sphere, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the
U.S. Supreme Court, gerrymandering of congressional districts along
racial lines, and new restrictions on democratic rights in the form of
voter ID laws--not to mention the mass deportation of immigrants and
attacks on reproductive rights--have left the poor, disproportionately
non-white population in the U.S. facing the sharp end of the neoliberal
stick.
It can be no surprise that one effect of this climate is to undermine
confidence about the possibility of building interracial struggles for
equality--certainly not at a moment of seeming hard times for
any grassroots struggles.
Widening gaps in income and wealth between whites and non-whites;
wage gaps between men and women, and whites and non-whites; the
continuation of a ruling class that still looks and speaks in the name
of white men (along with, increasingly, white women); egregious judicial
miscarriages of justice like the acquittal of George Zimmerman; the
ongoing epidemic of police violence; the eruptions of mad-dog racism
among the Tea Party and the Religious Right--all of this naturally
increases skepticism about the potential of whites and non-whites to
link arms in successful campaigns for racial and economic justice.
Some commentators, bloggers and activists put forward what is
sometimes called "privilege theory" or a "white skin privilege" analysis
to explain these conditions.
Many good anti-racist activists have adopted some or all aspects of
the "white skin privilege" argument. Fundamentally, the idea is that
racism is inevitable under capitalism because all whites, no matter
their class, benefit from the unequal distribution of social resources
along racial lines. Because all whites gain from this arrangement, most
are loathe to fight against it.
Many young activists who use the term privilege are really talking
about oppression and inequality. But there is more specific meaning to
the theory of a white skin privilege, as it was forcefully described by
scholar Laura Pulido:
White privilege is a form of racism that both underlies and is distinct
from institutional and overt racism. It underlies them in that both are
predicated on preserving the privileges of white people (regardless of
whether agents recognize this or not). But it is also distinct in terms
of intentionality. It refers to the hegemonic structures, practices, and
ideologies that reproduce whites' privileged status. In this scenario,
whites do not necessarily intend to hurt people of color, but
because they are unaware of their white-skin privilege, and because they
accrue social and economic benefits by maintaining the status quo, they
inevitably do.[1]
Pulido's description of white skin privilege is powerful and useful
in some ways for describing the unintended effects of racist behavior.
Yet the popularity of "white skin privilege" theory also speaks to
capitalism's capacity to obliterate histories of real interracial
struggle that challenged racist "hegemonic structures, practices and
ideologies."
This erasure, or amnesia, is a historical marker of successful and
ongoing attacks on the social welfare state, trade unions, workplace
labor organization and public education---all arenas where the U.S.
working class has a long history of standing up to racism.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"WHITE SKIN privilege" first appeared as a codified body of analysis
in 1967. In that year, Noel Ignatiev, under the name Noel Ignatin, and
Theodore Allen produced a pamphlet containing two articles: "White
Blindspot" by Ignatiev, and "Can White Radicals be Radicalized?" by
Allen.
"White skin privilege" theory as they developed it argued that white
radicals and activists did not put enough emphasis on racism in either
assessing U.S. history or developing tactics to build revolutionary
movements in the here and now. Their analysis combined the influence of
Black nationalism's emphasis on white supremacy in U.S. society; a
commitment to the centrality of Black workers to the revolutionary
struggle; and an argument that "white chauvinism" among white workers
was the single-biggest obstacle to working-class unity, and hence
revolution.
The Ignatiev/Allen pamphlet was published by the Students for
Democratic Society Radical Education project, and had a lasting impact
on the New Left, SDS and the Maoist New Communist Movement.[2]
But most people who invoke "white skin privilege" today are more
likely influenced by academic writing done in the late 1980s and early
1990s, which began to re-popularize the term and the idea. These
writings have little direct relationship to the 1960s political analysis
of the term, whatever its merits and flaws, and should be considered
separately.
In this article, I want to focus on two writings that, in my
estimation, are most often quoted or cited by contemporary anti-racist
activists in support of a "white skin privilege" analysis--though the
two pieces are very different in character and diverge in how they
explain and interpret the causes and effects of "white skin privilege"
or "white benefits."
The first is Peggy McIntosh's essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the
Invisible Napsack," written in 1990. McIntosh, a professor of women's
studies, argued among other things that whites benefit from racism by
having unfettered access to social spaces where they are a majority and
to consumer goods tailored to their interests (like flesh-colored
Band-Aids).
The second is David Roediger's 1991 book
The Wages of Whiteness:
Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
Roediger, then a historian at the University of Missouri, drew his
title phrase "wages of whiteness" from W.E.B. Du Bois' 1935 book
Black Reconstruction.
There, Du Bois argued that antebellum and postbellum whites in the
American South earned what he called a "psychological wage" from living
at a higher economic and social standing than African Americans.
Roediger applied this idea to a wide range of 19th century labor
history, documenting instances where white workers chose to act against
Black workers rather than working for solidarity within the working
class. Roediger argued that while capitalist bosses did use racism
consciously to divide the working class, white workers sustained racist
ideas--"approved them," in Du Bois' words.
I think both of these writings, despite their differences, exhibit
weaknesses in explaining what racism is and how it works. For this
reason and a variety of others offered below, I believe that Marxists
should reject "white skin privilege" as an explanation of how capitalism
produces racism, and how we might fight against it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PEGGY McINTOSH'S "White Privilege" essay often describes white skin
privilege as the expression of personal decisions and choices. This
makes racism appear to be something that depends on individual behavior
or lifestyle, rather than structural inequalities produced under
capitalism. As a white woman, McIntosh writes:
1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or
purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would
want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
McIntosh here confuses individual rights with "privileges."
"Privilege" in this context better describes the power held by
institutions and their representatives that restrict or abuse those
rights to begin with--police, banks, realtors, etc. Calling basic rights
"privileges" also puts the onus of social change on restricting the
rights that do exist for some, rather than extending them to others.
This is sometimes called "checking your privilege" by privilege
theorists.
Such an approach leads only to recognizing inequality, rather than
fighting to overturn it. As Native American activist Andrea Smith has
written of "checking your privilege" workshops she has observed: "It did
not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any
political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that
enabled their privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political
project themselves."
The idea of insisting on basic social rights as "privileges" also
indicates how capitalism wins concessions from anti-racist activists,
restricting the fight against inequality to one of individual reflection
and moral achievement, rather than collective solidarity.
McIntosh also refers to the world of white skin privilege as a
"system" without describing its structural features. Privilege, she
says, is "conferred" upon whites, but she doesn't say how or by whom.
She pays no mind to class differences among whites that significantly
limit, for example, the areas where most can afford to live. She ignores
the fact that many working-class whites live in highly integrated
neighborhoods, while wealthier whites "pay for" their segregation.
She then writes about privileges:
Disapproving of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught
to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their
attitude. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for
whites, whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been
conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these
problems.
So racism creates a set of privileges that white people can't avoid
having, and "[i]ndividual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these
problems." McIntosh makes "privilege" a question not of fighting racism,
but of feeling guilty about it. She normalizes racism, while
downplaying the confidence and capacity to resist it.
White skin privilege is a dangerous counterpart to the point Michelle Alexander makes in
The New Jim Crow
that capitalism individualizes racism in order to prevent people from
fighting it collectively. As Alexander suggests, we need to understand
racism as a social structure that needs to be torn down by mass
movements, like the prison walls themselves.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DAVID ROEDIGER'S
The Wages of Whiteness was written during a
period--the late 1980s--of the dominance of conservatism and extreme
pessimism about the prospects of the class struggle and interracial
class unity. Thus, many white working-class people who had identified
with Democrats in the past shifted their loyalties to the Republicans
during the 1980s, in response to the saturation campaign designed to
demonize the Black working class.
In my opinion, this historical context shapes Roediger's approach to the history he examines in
The Wages of Whiteness.
Himself a committed and politically active anti-racist, Roedger
nevertheless focuses his book almost entirely on examples of failures of
racial solidarity in U.S. working-class history. This aids his thesis
that "working class 'whiteness' and white supremacy [are] creations, in
part, of the white working class."
In order to make his argument in
The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger makes several errors in analysis. I will discuss just two here.
First, Roediger excludes from his definition of the "working class"
property-less African Americans and other non-white workers. This
exclusion enables him to disregard evidence of interracial
collaboration, and naturalizes the equivalence of "whiteness" to class.
To his credit, in the afterword to the second edition of
The Wages of Whiteness,
Roediger admitted this error--what he called "the unexamined and
indefensible notion that white males were somehow 'the American working
class.'" Roediger acknowledged that this made his interpretation of
labor history more pessimistic than it might have otherwise been.
Second, I believe Roediger distorts the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois. In
Black Reconstruction,
Du Bois clearly identified the "wages of whiteness" as a
divide-and-rule strategy, under which racism is imposed by the Southern
planter class and northern industrialists on workers. Du Bois was very
clear that racism did not originate with whites. He writes:
The race element was emphasized in order that property-holders could get
the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible
to exploit Negro labor. But the race philosophy came as a new and
terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness
impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to
prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor
movement in the South made impossible. (p. 680)
Du Bois could not have been clearer that racism is disadvantageous to
both
Black and white workers. White workers must even be "induced to prefer
poverty" over equality with Blacks. Du Bois also makes clear that this
attitude did not originate with working-class consciousness, but was a
"new and terrible" strategy to maintain control over newly
proletarianized labor.
By emphasizing that this divide-and-rule tactic prevented a
successful interracial working-class movement, Du Bois means to show
that the only lasting "benefit" from this outcome went to the American
ruling class. Barbara Foley has also pointed out that Du Bois was likely
to assume that, in using the term "wages of whiteness," any "wage"
provided under capitalism was in the interests of the capitalist class,
not the working class.
Roediger's book, unfortunately, emphasized only one element of Du
Bois' interpretation: The "tragic" fact of white workers allowing racism
to blind them to their mutual class interests with Black workers.
The Wages of Whiteness is Roediger's most widely read book,
which is why I have concentrated on it. But it should be said that
Roediger has gone on to write several other books on race and U.S.
history, which emphasize clearly how ruling elites use race to divide
labor. These include his valuable recent book, with Elizabeth Esch,
titled
The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE HISTORY of interracial struggle in the U.S. is hidden from most
people. It is important to recapture that history in order to assess the
validity of "white skin privilege" theory. I would highlight these
historical events to give us a more complete picture[3]:
-- In 1676, a mix of 400 armed whites and Blacks, free men, servants
and slaves, rose up against the government of Virginia in what has
become known as Bacon's Rebellion. Though the Rebellion included an
attack on Pamunkey Indians, stirred by the ruling class failure to
provide land protections, the Rebellion was also a response to beatings,
whippings and restrictions on marriage suffered by both slaves and
white servants.
-- In 1688, Francis Daniel Pastorius and three other members of the
Germantown Settlement in Pennsylvania drafted a petition requesting that
slavery be outlawed in the colonies. The petition also defended the
right of slaves to rebel. Though slavery continued as a practice, the
document was resurrected in 1844, giving further momentum to the
abolitionist movement.
-- In Boston in the 1730s, bread riots and protests against high
prices for daily goods preceded riots against the impressment of men
into naval service. Crowds storming the house of the colonial governor
of the state were described by a merchants' group as a "Riotous
tumultuous Assembly of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and Other
Persons of Mean and Vile Condition."
-- In 1739, 18 members of the Darien, Georgia, colony introduced a
petition to Gen. James Oglethorpe and colony trustees against the
institution of slavery. The petitioners wrote, "It is shocking to human
Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity should be sentanc'd
to perpetual Slavery."
-- African American slaves and freemen fought for their freedom
alongside whites, in both the Continental Army and the British Army
during the American Revolution. Crispus Attucks, an African American,
was famously one of the first Americans to die in what would become the
Revolutionary War.
-- As Howard Zinn and Herbert Aptheker have shown, whites assisted in
slave rebellions in the U.S. as early as 1802. William Lloyd Garrison
began publishing his abolitionist newspaper
Liberator in 1831.
The Underground Railroad was an interracial collaboration. Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were both assisted in their flights to
freedom by whites. John Brown, a friend of Frederick Douglass, was
executed for organizing a raid on the federal government's arsenal in
Harper's Ferry that he hoped would spark a slave insurrection. He was
eulogized by W.E.B. Du Bois for his attempt to help organize what Du
Bois called the Black "proletariat."
-- Lucy Parsons, who was of Black, Native American and Mexican
ancestry, and her white husband Albert Parsons, helped to lead the May
1886 nationwide strike for the eight-hour day. According to her
biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh, when Parsons spoke of workers' revolution,
she "talked about the common blood of humanity which flows in Black
Africans, workers of Europe and in her own ancestors---the real Native
Americans. Poverty was their common enemy, and they must fight it
together."
-- Both Reconstruction and the massive railways strikes of 1877
involved Black and white cooperation. The New Orleans General Strike of
1892, the Populist movement before the turn of the 20th century, and the
steelworkers and miners' strikes after it were all interracial. In
contrast to the racist American Federation of Labor, with its craft
union orientation, the major industrial union movements in U.S. history,
including the Industrial Workers of the World and the Congress of
Industrial Organizations, emphasized interracial organizing.
-- Black workers not only played a central role in the development of
the white majority Communist Party of the U.S., but they shaped its
policies on Black self-determination and the primary role of African
Americans in labor struggles. Harry Haywood and Claude McKay were among
the Black Communists to emerge as important leaders. Interracial unity
was crucial to Communist struggles in Harlem and Alabama during the
Great Depression, as demonstrated in excellent books by Mark Naison and
Robin D.G. Kelley.
-- Every major civil rights organization or initiative in the postwar
period through the 1960s was interracial, and led by African
Americans--the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor
People's Campaign, to name a few. The SCLC, for example, emphasized its
view that not all whites were racist as it sought to build a larger
movement.
-- Among the Black Power groups of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black
Panther Party created interethnic anti-racist affiliations with other
oppressed groups and with some anti-racist whites, as did the Dodge
Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit. One of the mentors of
DRUM activists was the white Marxist autoworker Marty Glaberman.
-- More recently, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the campaign for
boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel's occupation of
Palestine, and national protests against the murder of Trayvon Martin
and execution of Troy Davis all saw new interracial coalitions formed to
challenge racism and the effects of capitalism.
-- In 2012, the interracial Chicago Teachers Union won strong support
for its strike across working-class Chicago, especially largely Black
and Latino communities, by emphasizing the struggle against "educational
apartheid," as shown by school closings and layoffs of minority
teachers disproportionately affecting African Americans and Latinos.
Union solidarity and racial solidarity went hand in hand.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THESE EXAMPLES from U.S. history help confirm the Marxist analysis of
how capitalism uses racism to try to divide and rule--and how struggles
arise, some organized by socialists and some not, to challenge both
racism and the capitalist system.
Marxism is specific about racism precisely where the idea of a "white
skin privilege" is fuzzy and vague. Marx, as is well known, traced the
history of capitalism to what he called a period of "primitive
accumulation"--including the extraction of wealth from Latin America by
the European colonizers, and the beginnings of the slave trade.
The cotton industry of the 19th century, Marx famously wrote,
couldn't exist without slavery, and capitalism without both. This led
Marx to his famous pronouncement in
Capital, referring to racism in the U.S.: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."
Marx also showed how capitalism and colonialism created hostility and
racism among English workers against Irish workers, even though the
latter were, by definition, "white." In an 1870 letter written to
Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in New York[4], Marx wrote:
Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a
working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and
Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker
as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the
Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation, and
consequently, he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and
capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over
himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against
the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of
the "poor whites" to the Negroes in the former slave states of the
U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He
sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of
the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the
press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the
disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the
impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is
the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the
latter is quite aware of this.
Marx is clear here that capitalist competition produces resentments
and racial bigotry---Marx calls them "religious, social and national
prejudices" among workers. He is clear that this prejudice is maintained
by bourgeois society in the interests of the ruling class. Like Du
Bois' analysis of Southern society in
Black Reconstruction, he
sees racial hostility as a key to the "impotence" of the working
class--its weakened ability to fight back in unity against its
exploitation.
It is here that Marxism draws its sharpest distinction with
"privilege" theory. Marxism holds that people's ideas--such as their
ideas about race---can change depending on objective historical
conditions. From Bacon's Rebellion to the CTU strike, there are examples
of ordinary people who have defied the expected behavior based on their
possession of property, social standing or place in existing
hierarchies of power, and acted according to the principle of
solidarity--that an injury to one must be confronted because it is an
injury to all.
Privilege theory is predicated on an unchanging
status---privilege---rather than a dynamic understanding of human
consciousness or human history. Its pessimism follows from its premise.
Privilege theory's skepticism about social change flows from its
investment in a conceptual category that is static and often, as we have
seen from the evidence, ahistorical.
Marxism remains the best tool for analyzing racism, sexism and other
forms of oppression--and providing a guide for combatting them--because
it understands that capitalism is the main engine of oppression and
social division. Gregory Meyerson has put this well[5]:
Marxism, properly interpreted, emphasizes the primacy of class in a
number of senses. One, of course, is the primacy of the working class as
a revolutionary agent--a primacy which does not, as is often thought,
render women and people of color "secondary."...
The primacy of class means that building a multiracial,
multi-gendered international working-class organization or organization
should be the goal of any revolutionary movement: the primacy of class
puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The
intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of
class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race,
gender and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting,
but its causes are not.
Meyerson helps show why it is precisely when racism and sexism are on
the rise--like the times we live in today--that we must turn to Marx
for guidance. Our fight is not just against men making more than women,
but against the exploitation of all workers. Our battle is not just
against the "privilege" for some to own homes in segregated suburbs, but
the reordering of society so that everyone experiences lives of equal
means.
Our struggle is not only against the "hegemonic structures" that
allow George Zimmerman to get away with murder, but the proactive fight
for public streets where differently abled men and women, Black, white
and Latino, gay and straight, can live free of the violence of
inequality. Our efforts to build a "multiracial, multigendered
international working class organization" depend on our ability to forge
alliances between people, based not on giving up whatever they do have,
but on fighting for the same rights for everyone.
That's what it means to have a Marxism that puts the struggle against
racism, sexism and all forms of oppression at the center of its
tradition and practice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Notes
1. Laura Pulido's article is "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 90, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 12-40.
2. The essays by Ignatiev and Allen can be found here at this website in a pdf. Allen later went on to write The Invention of the White Race, in two volumes, and became a critic of "white skin privilege" analysis. See his essay "On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness."
3. For a good review of U.S. historical literature on interracial struggle, see Lee Sustar's article in International Socialism.
4. Marx's letter can be found at the Marxists Internet Archive.
5. Quoted in Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire, p. 45; originally in "Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others," Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, 3, no. 2, (Spring 2000)
http://socialistworker.org/2013/10/30/is-there-a-white-skin-privilege
