So there was a bit of a heated discussion recently on the topic of “anti-white” or “reverse” racism and we (some of the mods) figured we would clarify some rules for this community:
- “White people” is a very vague term. Having low expectations of people in the imperial core is understandable for someone in the Global South, but it’s better to be specific. Saying “I’m racist against white people” when you mean “I don’t trust the average person in <insert imperialist country>” is going to cause misunderstandings
- People who were racist in the past are not necessarily racist in the present. Many of us were liberals before becoming Marxists, and there’s a significant overlap between liberals and racists
- No matter your ethnicity, don’t use terms like “subhuman” or “orc” to describe yourself and your group; it may make others uncomfortable
- Don’t call for violence (particularly against ethnic groups, but it’s best to avoid it in general so the instance doesn’t get in trouble)
- Stick to Lemmygrad’s rules of good-faith discussion
that’s all, folks
geniune question: are we able to call for traitors and enemies of the working class to get the wall or no?
it’s probably fine if it’s something vague like “<person> gets the wall”, but direct death threats to individuals might get the instance in trouble with the server provider (you’d have to ask an admin for a concrete answer)
I’m very relieved reading that. In some places in the past this topic was often really hot and incredibly USA-centric.
What did I miss?
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Sometimes solidarity is earned. If global north people needs the solidarity from the south, they not just be some kind of leftist that asks for health care and high wages but should be thoroughly anti-imperialist. But that does not give us the permission to use the racialised language to cuss at global north proles. But the harsh criticism should not be blunted.
Shifting the topic from anti-capitalism to anti-“insert gender/race/colour/nationality/other biological/natural-born traits here” is just helping the capitalists.
Capitalists are happy to incite division based on anything, even ideology, this helps to keep the exploited divided and not a threat to their rule, which is what happens if people keep bickering about issues like the ones in question.
I’m saying this also as a reminder that capitalists will allow anti-capitalist ideology to exist, to a certain degree, because anti-capitalist can mean anything from Marxism to anarchism or worse. More time spent on debating the right path is less time spent on putting theory into practice, which is more time for capitalism to live on.
Division is what capitalists employ to break the unity of the proletariat, which is why they emphasize individualism and demonize collectivism. Capitalists want a monopoly on unity and democracy, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat.
This is not to say that we should all forget the wrongdoings of certain people and groups and join up in fake-unity, but instead hold on to those thoughts, and keep in mind the fundamental enemy that is capitalism.
capitalists will allow anti-capitalist ideology to exist, to a certain degree
You see this with fascism, which is in many ways pretends to genuine anti-capitalism, and so ends up capturing a lot of well-meaning people whenever it takes power.
Fascism is just ultra-capitalism, and they loveeeeee capitalism, that’s why capitalists allow it to exist.
It’s important to always remember why we hate the “white men” and see them as evil, some seem to forget that it’s about historical and hierarchal issues, not inherit faults with skin color and lack of spice in food.
A lot of pale ethnic groups that got nothing to do with colonialism or were even victims of colonialism sometimes get lumped with white people hate because of this, which is hurtful ig.
I think there would be a benefit to introducing a new term that describes the ruling class of imperial core entities and their populace without generalizing based on skin color, similar to “zionist” maybe. Also, it’s gotta be hip fr fr.
Edit: oh yeah, and white people in the imperial core are also not the source of the problem obviously. I don’t know why I forgot to write about that. @ComradePupIvy@lemmygrad.ml wrote better than I could ever do read their reply.
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missed ALL of this flamewar and only seeing the tail end of it feels like seeing the 2nd half of a looney tunes joke, im sure the setup & punchline was insane but now its just like “Damn”
insane is a word one could use for what happened
Can we still say ‘Amerikkkrakker’?
It’s basically just “gringo” but longer
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I thought gringo meant someone who doesn’t speak Spanish. Particularly if they can only speak English and are/act like a white person.
I’ve heard it used to broadly refer to people from western countries and also nth-gen Latin Americans who don’t speak any Spanish. But that’s it (from my experience).
I never heard gringo being used in meaning other than “white Usian” (or occasionally their also Usian PoC lackeys), but i’m not from there, so…
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Caucasian Europeans
As in, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis etc? /s
I think we should stop using nonsensical US terms.
it can be used in radically different ways dependent upon the region as well
I guess.
As in, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis etc? /s
Reminds me of a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, where the main character, an Englishman working in Hollywood, goes to see about funeral arrangements for his recently deceased friend and has this conversation with the receptionist.
“I presume the Loved One was Caucasian?”
“No, why did you think that? He was purely English.”
“English are purely Caucasian, Mr Barlow. This is a restricted park. The Dreamer has made that rule for the sake of the Waiting Ones. In their time of trial they prefer to be with their own people…”
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I can understand the practical realities of moderation in an anonymous online space in which such sentiments can quickly escalate to a personal level.
But we really need to kill racial ideology. I don’t think we should be that uppity about it.
We SHOULD be racist against “White people”!
Because it doesn’t exist in real life!
Why are we treating a colonial stratification of peoples into “races” and “ethnicities” at face value? Why are we offended like there is a global White genocide?
People in the global south don’t need white guilt. They don’t need self-flagellating whites on one hand and white supremacists on the other. They need “white people” to help tear down this globe-spanning economic and ideological system of stratification that has caused so much pain and suffering.
The hatred of white people is a hatred of this racist system of Capitalism that forcefully and continuously suffocates the entire world.
Mental colonization runs deep in postcolonial societies - and when the colonized lashes out, it is an expression of the humanity that has been denied. The least of my problems is when the oppressed uses the oppressor’s language to demonstrate the false justifications of the oppressor’s existence.
To phrase this another way to make it really on the nose: there are 1.5 billion Global Northerners, while there are 6.5 billion Global Southerners, and since might makes right, “white people” should really be the ones oppressed (lol).
I am not sure I understand your statement, while I agree that we should no longer have divisions based on race, and that race should not be a thing, I do not think the solution is calling a group of people, orcs or sub-humans, or calling for execution squads to commit mass genocide, as was commented on the thread and has prompted this post.
I do not think I have heard any comrade arguing that white people should be feeling personaly guilty or be self flagellating, as we need to work together arm in arm to help tare down capitalism, but putting any effort into racism, or any other discriminatory practice only seeks to further divide us, and take us farther from that goal.
I have and always will be a supporter of the colonized standing up to their oppressor, I would agree that when they stand up for their humanity it is a right and just cause, however I do not see how this has to do with discussion at hands.
Lastly, as communists we fight for the liberation of all people, for an end to opression, I do not understand your insentience that the “white people” should be oppressed, as this only contenues in the same mindset as the capitalist, that there is always a bigger fish, that oppression is alright so long as I am the one doing the oppression. We stand here and profess an ideology of equality, one where every person is treated as a person, and the idea that we should opress another group for any reason, is anthietical to this idea, to reuse a quote I used early, when Fidel Castro talked about the United States, after they had to fight a revolution to get out from under their control, and then got slapped with an economic blockade that can be defined as a genocide in and of itself, “In Cuba we have never cultivated hatred against the American people or blamed them for the aggression perpetrated by the governments of that country. That would have run contrary to our political doctrines and our internationalist conscience, both well-proven throughout many years, and increasingly rooted in our ideas.” or that Dr Ernesto “Che” Guevara once said “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” and I can only speak for myself here, but I find oppression, and blind hatred based on a characteristic a person cannot change, and was born with, and injustice, no mater who it is happening to, I would much rather judge a person on their actions, and on what they fight for, as I agree with Dr. Che Guevara, anyone who trembles with indignation at every injustice is my comrade, reguardless of who they are.
Not that I disagree with your broad points but race is such a contradictory concept, I’d like to raise some challenges. I’m not asking these questions as a ‘gotcha’, either (although I do make some claims that contradict your argument), and they’re not necessarily for you to answer alone, although you may have some thoughts, which I’d be glad to hear.
Does the answer change if the identification of whiteness requires accepting a racial hierarchy? Of which self styled white people are at the top?
A personal anecdote: I’ve always been uncomfortable with ticking the ‘white’ box on forms. It’s very existence is to put me into one category and exclude me from others, which might more accurately reflect my origins. I don’t fill in that box on any form any more. Or I put ‘other’ or ‘NA’. Not because I’m not white; to the people asking, I would be. I just reject the category itself. It shouldn’t exist. I see being white as a choice, to agree with the government’s view of who deserves rights and who doesn’t. If I was born twenty years earlier, they’d have another box for me. I’m not letting them include me now, just because they have decided to ‘include’ me by their graciousness.
If white is a political category (as is black, Asian, or any other race), and is not, in fact, based on skin colour, can one be racist against ‘white people’? Stuart Hall calls race a ‘floating signifier’, which is a useful concept.
If so, who does ‘white’ refer to? What is it’s content? Southern Europeans might be white in North Western Europe but not in the US, for example. On the basis of skin colour alone, someone from North Africa might be white, until their interlocutor placed them as African rather than ‘Mediterranean’/Southern European. Someone from Eastern Europe might not be white in North Western Europe but they might be white in North America, depending on their accent. And this turns upside down depending on wars within Europe.
Then, a broader question, can there be hate crime but not racism against white people?
The same wouldn’t naturally apply the other way around even if all racial categories are political. I’m being quite broad here because white people have at one time or another labelled anyone who isn’t ‘white’ as black and the powers that be are constantly changing who they count as white.
… hatred based on a characteristic a person cannot change, and was born with…
Is whiteness an inherent trait if it’s content changes all the time and depends on location? Fanon argued, ‘to be rich is to be white, to be white is to be rich’. Revolutionary organising means working, from the beginning, to abolish whiteness; it cannot survive a revolution because capitalism is racial capitalism. As soon as someone recognises the need for revolution they must at once recognise the need for and begin to undermine the category of whiteness.
From this perspective, I can see how one could commit (racially motivated) hate crimes against white people, but is it racist in the same way as it is to be racist against ‘other races’?
I have two questions about the Castro quote. First, does ‘American people’ not include several ‘races’? Second, is it a problem to equate ‘American people’ with white people? Then, for the Che quote, is it not an injustice to show support for the concept of a white race, given that it is inseparable from white supremacy?
(I’m not saying white people should be oppressed, I’m saying revolutionaries must seek to abolish whiteness. I’m unsure if it really means anything to say that white people ‘should be oppressed’ because as soon as that becomes a possibility, there would be no such thing as whiteness, which requires a hierarchy of which it is at the top.)
Then, a broader question, can there be hate crime but not racism against white people?
I think the distinction between “hate crime” and systemic racism might be useful, but it discounts the numerous “hate crimes” that forms a natural part of the oppressed peoples experience, like Indigenous people in the Americas or Chinese people in Southeast Asia.
I’m unsure if it really means anything to say that white people ‘should be oppressed’ because as soon as that becomes a possibility, there would be no such thing as whiteness, which requires a hierarchy of which it is at the top.
That is what I am trying to say in my original comment but just with rhetorical flourishes.
So the “white” thing is interesting. White supremacists like to talk about “white culture” and “white identity,” but in practice being “white” means having no culture and having no identity; whatever culture you originally possessed has been assimilated to the general American anti-culture of mass consumerism and social climbing. You have become the atomized individual, without family or communal ties, which is required by the capitalist machine. This evident in the way European immigrant to the US have historically not been considered “white” until their original culture is entirely lost; even the Germans, who are about European as European can be, were for a long time somewhat stigmatized as “Dutchmen.”
In other words: people who are proud to be “white” are fighting for a cipher, something which, as you said doesn’t really exist. Maybe in remote parts of Appalachia, say, there is something approaching a “white culture;” but even that is more a regional Southern thing than it is a “white” thing. White persons in (say) Washington or Seattle have little in common with it, and it seems to them quite foreign and “exotic.”
My conclusion is that communists should stop using specifically usian terminology.
communists should stop using specifically usian terminology
Exactly. This can be probably not be stated enough.
This evident in the way European immigrant to the US have historically not been considered “white” until their original culture is entirely lost
As seen in a lot of settler colonialism, a manufactured “new” identity is created to promote a form of nationalism and shared ideology. This grew and evolved into a white identity that spread BACK to Europe creating the racial hierarchy that Western countries embrace so much.
e.g. “Europe is a garden” and the dirty jungle is trying to encroach. There’s similar sentiments in America, Canada, Australia etc towards their neighbors who aren’t considered “white”. It’s what Sakai refers to as a “Garrison Community” in Settlers (https://readsettlers.org/ch13.html#2). It’s the basis of the Great Replacement Theory that the far right love.
First they promote the racial categories of white and non-white, then they claim they (whites) are being genocided: no stats necessary - no evidence they’ve lost anything etc.
There are communists in Sweden. Good and honest people. So there are in Norway, Finland, Canada and the USA; in Belgium, the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands too.
Be kind. L’Internationale sera le genre humain.
