Lizza Littlewort's 'We Live In The Past'

On Wednesday, Cape Town’s 99 Loop gallery opened its doors for the first day of Lizza Littlewort’s ‘We Live In The Past’ exhibition. The artist aims to draw out South Africa’s colonial past, as found in the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch painting, but reinvents this work to convey the legacy to contemporary eyes.

As an illustrator, Ms. Littlewort previously produced educational works on such topics as healthcare and the environment. She helped set up a permaculture project called ‘Tyisa Nabanye’, a collective that aims to promote food security and sustainable living. She has degrees in architecture, fine art and English literature from the University of Cape Town (UCT), the city of her birth.

“The point of the show is really about the political background to ‘art treasures’ in general, using South Africa and my family as particular examples,” Ms. Littlewort told The World Weekly. “The same discussion would really cover where the Queen got the gold and diamonds in her crown and where anybody ever got so much money that they could develop such a sumptuous ‘high art’ culture.”

“Each painting in this body of work is a play upon an earlier painting by a Dutch Master painter,” explains Ms. Littlewort. “The less famous ones were chosen because they were painted by my ancestor, Jakob Willemzoon de Wet the Elder. I chose these works in order to make my comments about the continuities between past and present more personal, embedding them in my own family history.”

The reinterpretation of this body of work filters the original images through neon tones, thereby accentuating and distorting the subjects. In this way, the realism of the Dutch Masters is reimagined in a modernist trajectory: from the desolate landscapes of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method to Neo Rauch of the New Leipzig School. The end result was described by academic Niklas Zimmer as “uncomfortably beautiful”.

Mr. Zimmer argues this effectively subverts the naturalist style, which was so conducive to the establishment’s version of history. The original purpose of the Dutch paintings was to “warn the viewer that we cannot take our riches with us when we die”. Now Ms. Littlewort wants to remind viewers that “the astonishing wealth Holland accrued at this time has fundamentally shaped global history”.

Not only does the project have a strong historical focus, it is informed by South African literature and particularly the work of JM Coetzee. “My honours dissertation was on Dusklands, which is an extremely violent story about the genocide of indigenous people at the Cape,” Ms. Littlewort told The World Weekly. She took this literary account alongside Dr. Nigel Penn’s work on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the Khoi and San peoples by white settlers.

“I am examining here my complicity and predicament as one who benefits from Dutch merchants’ wealth and power,” Ms. Littlewort explained. “My mother was born a de Wet, and her mother was a Versveld. Both the de Wet and Versveld families owned large farms in the Robertson and Darling areas respectively.” She goes on to relate that the de Wets’ ancestor, Jakob Willemzoon, was a Haarlem-based painter and art dealer, whose son was given a powerful post in the Dutch East India Company’s outpost in the Cape.

A major point of the exhibition is the close proximity of the art world to colonialism. “Painting and art is conventionally seen as ‘innocent’ and outside of the overarching political condition,” said Ms. Littlewort. “To me it’s much the same as the first-world white person having ‘subjectivity’ and ‘individuality’, while the conquered are represented as non-human stereotypes.”

It’s all too convenient, in her view, for white South Africans to tell black South Africans to “get over the past”. Yet the call for the statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from UCT grounds drew opposition from the white community, as she sees it. In this case, white South Africans were afraid of their own historical and cultural heritage being erased. The fact that apartheid ended in 1994 and Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 is lost in all of this.

Appropriately, ‘We Live In The Past’ makes reference to the campaign to oust the Cecil Rhodes statue at UCT, but it also takes place against a backdrop of protest. Student campaigners brought 10 universities to a halt and forced the South African government to freeze tuition fees. Mass demonstrations have been organised throughout South Africa’s major cities. This may be an ideal time for a resurgence of political art.

This article was originally published at The World Weekly on November 5, 2015.

The trouble with cultural appropriation.

In recent years, I’ve heard a lot of talk about cultural appropriation in the music industry. Not least about Miley Cyrus and the spectacle of ‘twerking’, but also Macklemore and Iggy Azalea (bog-standard targets). The charge of cultural appropriation alleges that these artists have stolen their style from black performers, and it seems clear that there is more than a hint of truth to this claim. But it shouldn’t be implied that this is just a cultural question.

The more serious cases being the fact that there is a Blues root to almost all music today. Black talent has been rinsed by the music industry for a very long time. It’s a great historical irony that the classical music of the United States, a profoundly racist society, is Jazz music – the rhythms of the oppressed – which emerged out of the Reconstruction period following the civil war. The end of this period came in the form of segregation and the rise of the Klan. As much as culture has always represented the heart of a heartless world the Jazz scene was the vivacity of a world devoid of hope.

All of this confirms the Janus-faced nature of history. So if we’re going to make a distinction it’s worth making one here: there’s the point that the music industry has rinsed Black America for a long time, and then there’s the concept of cultural appropriation and what it brings to this debate. This kind of cultural criticism is worth unpacking. The charge of cultural appropriation can only be asserted on the basis of certain presuppositions. First of all, it takes cultures as homogenous, self-enclosed, static entities; secondly, it implicitly advocates that this should be the case.

Not only is this presupposition wrong, it shouldn’t be the case either. Cultures don’t have borders and never have had borders. Nor should cultures have them. To take an example within a dominant culture: Beowulf, the oldest piece of English literature, was produced in Scandinavia. The English language is composed of many influences, famously so, from Latin, Greek, French, and even Irish; its homogeneity can only arise out of heterogeneous origins. The numerical system employed in the West is Arabic. What we might call cultural transmission can’t be avoided.

We seem to have reached a point where cultural appropriation now extends to criticism of individual conduct. This is especially ironic as the phrase was coined by George Lipsitz, who defined it as a form of strategic anti-essentialism (this was long before the momentous days of Tumblr). He warned against wanton appropriation which could be insensitive. This implies that there is a sensitive way to do so, and that has been lost to the whirlwind of social media. No one seems to have the time of day to look into the terms of debate, which obscures the issue further.

This is the crux of the matter. To suggest white guys with dreadlocks are ‘acting black’ implies a certain amount of identity essentialism (e.g. that there are social attributes belonging inherently to black and white people) which takes essence to precede existence. The contemporary Left can see this problem when it comes to transgenderism and rightly chides the radical feminists who question it. At the same time, it ought to be kept in mind that the gender roles shouldn’t be maintained as a binary in the first place and this also applies to the question at hand.

In its worst moments, the contemporary Left seems to have become preoccupied on interpersonal conduct. The response to every issue comes in the form of regulation, which seems to extend a kind of consumer ethics (in this case at least) and make it business ethics. So it’s at once moralistic, reformist and puritanical. It would be a mistake to characterise this as ‘identity politics’. It’s almost a kind of ‘lifestyle politics’ – it’s about who has the most responsible newsfeed – which is a retreat from organised politics. It belongs to the same family as ‘privilege-checking’ and ‘trigger warnings’.

As if what we need today is a new set of ethics and we can remake the world without power. This criticism shouldn’t be confused with not being a committed anti-racist. Exploitation in the music industry is a political and economic question, it’s not a moral and cultural one, we should respond accordingly without de-politicisation. When we’re talking about race we’re dealing with formations of social control and we shouldn’t forget that the scars and wounds are very deep. Ultimately, we should be looking to move beyond diversity and aim for greater hybridity and immixing – not less.

Keeping privilege in check.

It is no coincidence that the decline of the Left as an organising force has been followed by various forms of depoliticisation. It has come in the form of moralism as well as in the culturalisation of politics. Not only class, but race, gender, and sexuality, have been reduced to ethical and cultural questions. It’s a kind of ‘lifestyle’ politics, not even identity politics. As if all we have to do is change our personal conduct and private attitudes then the system will be rendered humane. It’s all a matter of self-regulation, chiefly in language.

If we take privilege-checking, it’s about who has the legitimacy to talk first and foremost. The demand to ‘check your privilege’ will be thrown at anyone for a multitude of reasons. If you fall into an intersection of privileged groups then you can find yourself on the receiving end of this demand. Of course, there is a serious point worth considering. People ought to reflect upon the advantaged position in which they were born and act responsibly. But that’s not what we’re talking about.

No-platforming is not so far away from ‘calling out’ someone on their privilege. Not only is privilege-checking sanctimonious and censorious, it is essentially reformist in its ad hominem attacks. If we take it seriously then its aim is to delegitimize the voices of the privileged and empower those who are underprivileged. So it’s about shifting the discourse, but not very far from what we have already. It’s perfectly conceivable that there are figures who can speak without the baggage of ‘privilege’. It doesn’t make them automatic allies of the Left.

It’s not really about resolving social problems. It’s about reshaping the discourse at best. It smacks of the kind of regulatory measures preferred by liberals. If we can vet the speakers on the basis of privilege then we’ll have a better discourse. It loses sight of the possibility that there is a structural problem with the kind of society in which we live. It’s not enough to challenge privilege and demand that it limits its reach. It won’t go away overnight. It’s the modesty of these aims which the Left should criticise.

If we are radicals then we don’t want to keep privilege in check because we don’t think such privileges should exist. Therefore we are for the abolition of privilege and not the maintenance of such privilege in any way. This calls for more than ‘shouting down’ illegitimate voices. It takes collective action, which requires coordination. The question of organisational form still hangs over the Left long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Perhaps it is the face of this question that the Left would rather turn towards moralism.

This article was originally posted at the Third Estate on November 2 2014.

"Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white".

What's in a slogan?

Tapping into deep-running resentment has long been a tried and tested method of revanchistes everywhere. Then there are those reactionaries who go a bit further to reach for more than just resentment. This is where we'd do better to borrow a concept from Nietzsche - some would say, an indispensable concept - that of ressentiment. As Anindya Bhattacharyya blogged, the best way to understand ressentiment is in Deleuze's terms as the master's maxim is “I am good, therefore you are bad”, while the slave expresses the logic of ressentiment: “You are evil, therefore I am good.” In striking down the affirmative and active propositions of the master, the slave asserts their own power and their own position.

In white nationalist, supremacist and separatist circles - the crowd who wish they could emulate Adolf Hitler - this strategy can be found in the following slogan: "Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white." Note the implication that to be pro-white is to be racist and, of course, we can see the truth in that side of the message. Yet it seems to most that the concept of 'anti-racism' is not anti-white when in actuality this requires more of us than straightforward common-sense. We first have to deconstruct what the social category of 'white' really stands for in order to determine what the slogan really means.

The social category of 'white' has in the past removed from the outset certain groups. We know that the white nationalist claim to be 'pro-white' does not extend to European Jewry, for instance, in fact it may even exclude the Slavs and the Irish if taken far enough. Hitler's Aryan master race certainly excluded the Slavs and Roma. In a sense there is truth in this claim insofar as the identification with one's pale epidermis often leads in a certain grotesque direction. In another sense the interests of the majority of white people living in Western countries are not served at all by racism. At the most racism serves to maintain relative advantage - what we may call white privilege - at the expense of class loyalties and the development of a class consciousness.

The slogan is designed to undermine anti-racist activism and even demonise those activists and the language with which we rightly criticise bigotry and discrimination. The constant noise of white whining about the 'misuse' and 'overuse' of the term should be evidence enough that it is not anti-racism which is out-of-control. In fact, we've been living through the reactive offensive to slime the advocates of multiculturalism and demonise cultural sensitivity (under the new swearword of 'political-correctness') and tolerance. The aim is the same as the pro-white message: to further legitimise racism.

The scarred language of race.

It's interesting how racial language lingers to this day. Sometimes it is the case that the words we employ fail to keep pace with the progressive strives we have accomplished.  The rise of feminism in the 1970s and subsequent shifts in attitudes and lifestyles has led to a state of affairs where we increasingly fixate on what kind of language is most appropriate. Many couples I know have debated to themselves how appropriate terms like 'girlfriend/boyfriend', 'partner', 'spouse', 'my other half', are today. The decline of marriage and increasing prevalence of cohabitation and the emergence of non-monogamous relationships has led many to find such terms estranged from their own lives. The same is true in other areas.

On the racial front we find the idioms of scientific and cultural racialism remain with us. In census forms 'white' and 'black' are used as identity-markers abstracted from any historical context: the events of Bacon's Rebellion, where European indentured servants and African slaves fought side by side, only for the legislative moves towards instituting white privilege. The word 'white' was first used as a racial term with laws passed to prevent Europeans from marrying Africans in the Thirteen Colonies. The European workers were bound to the slave-masters even as they had much more in common with the African. This was how the white race emerged. It was not biological, yet it is objective, - as Theodore Allen told us long ago - it came about in the late seventeenth century as a formation of social control.

With the nineteenth century came the intensified biologisation of racial classifications. Racism became scientific and anthropological. It increasingly became about skin-colour, but not totally over night. For a long time, the Irish were not regarded as equals to 'white' American and Englishmen, they were regarded as racially inferior, often marginalised to the same quarters as African-Americans, and attacked as 'monkeys' in such outlets as Punch. Once the Irish were accepted as 'white' then they campaigned against German immigrants on the grounds that the new settlers were not 'white'. This was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The classifications of race were certainly flexible and highly relative. Its relativity and ambiguity reveals the absurdity of such classifications.

The use of the word 'coloured' to describe Africans, South Asians, and 'mixed-race' people, is somewhat revealing. It's a floating signifier with multiple applications, but it's clear from the outset that those who are 'colourless' are 'white' people. In South Africa a sudden shift in classification could move one's relatives to another part of town and deny them freedom of movement and a whole array of other rights. Of course, neither white nor black is a colour. Perhaps the terms of race sets its own rules by which we are one or the other. Many progressive Americans use 'people of colour' to refer to African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, unifying Black and Brown; while 'coloured' has been properly relegated to the past along with its cousin term 'negro'.

Both terms could serve to further reinforce the status of white people as colourless, but only in negative relation to those who are coloured. In the same way as John Derbyshire writes of 'non-blacks' when he means 'white people'. It makes sense that the origins of the 'white race' lie in the slave trade and the type of power structure necessitated by class society. The displacement of class consciousness by racial consciousness facilitates class society to reproduce itself. The promise of a harmonious and organic social order in conjunction with a thriving capitalist economy has been the dream of conservatives for centuries. The 'white race' finds itself situated as multi-class formation against those who are external to this collaborative relationship. The 'non-whites' are conceived as a disruptive presence in what should be a harmonious social system.

Then we have the way in which we talk about miscegenation. The term mixed-race is derivative of miscegenation, a word which was coined by anti-abolitionist propagandists in 1863. It was used in a pamphlet accusing the abolitionist movement of pursuing 'race-mixing'. This is a persistant trope on the Far-Right to this day. It used to be acceptable to describe someone as 'half-caste' for having a white parent and a black parent. It's a sore point for the generation of those who fail to understand the term, its history, and implications. It literally translates to half-pure. Setting aside the obvious implication that the person is 'halved', and somehow incomplete, it has far from an immaculate past to put it lightly. Half-caste was originally a term in Australian law. The children of European and Aboriginal Australians would be seized by the state under the auspices of this law and forcibly assimilated into 'white' Australian society.

All of this just goes to show the extent to which the language of race is itself highly problematic. We can't decode every term we use before we use them and yet we cannot dispense with them either. Without the proper historical perspective we can easily take such terms to be constant, unchanging and timeless. Can we do any better right now? The primary alternative to talking of race has been to talk of culture. We have gone from the era of multiracialism to multiculturalism since the late 1980s. There are those on the Right who push back against multiculturalism as they insist that their problem is not with multiracialism. The banal and toothless language of culture does more to obscure and gloss over than to illuminate and challenge. In multiculturalism race is left intact as a disavowed category while in multiracialism the categories are reinforced and left unexamined.

Lessons for a White Ally.

The radical American anti-racist campaigner Tim Wise has an interesting designation for what he does and what other white anti-racists do. He calls himself a 'white ally'. Wise argues not for white anti-racists to speak for people of colour, but to develop a critique of white privilege from within. The point should be to strengthen the position of racially-conscious Black Americans by providing a critique of the same white male power-structure from a white perspective. I agree with this priority: to undermine white racial consciousness in its manifestations. The other aims that we have to consider were summed up well by Theodore W Allen. As part of the conclusion to his review of David Roediger's book Wages of Whiteness (1991) the Marxist historian and economist Ted Allen listed the four basic challenges that the anti-racist has to meet:

First, to show that white supremacism is not an inherited attribute of the European-American personality. Secondly, to demonstrate that white supremacism has not served the interests of the laboring-class European-Americans. Third: to account for the prevalence of white supremacism within the ranks of laboring-class European-Americans. Fourth, by light of history, to consider ways whereby European-American laboring people may cast off the stifling incubus of 'white' identity.

This is from the starting-point that the historical relativist critique of race as a social construct does not go far enough in unsettling the roots of race as a formation of social control. Likewise, Allen rejects racism as a natural occurrence among white people towards the Other. Actually the point of his work is to provide a historical account for race in specific historical conditions: namely, slavery. As a Marxist historian Allen is concerned with the degree to which white working-class people have undermined their own interests by pursuing racial interests over class interests. The first victims of racial oppression are those immediately subject to it, the second victims are those who blindly align themselves with the oppressors. For example, trade unions in the US were incredibly weaker because they had, for a long time, a white-only membership policy. White privilege (a concept Allen coined) is not to be understood as the literal privileges of white people, but the relative advantages gained through divide and conquer.

The colonial and racial oppression of the Irish provided the impetus to presuppose a 'common interest' among English people which may circumvent the class antagonism and even render it harmonious. This is why Karl Marx was right to situate the struggle for Irish national liberation was, effectively, the struggle against the English ruling-class which could open up the space for the English working-class to shake off the chains of class oppression. Ultimately, the British ruling-class managed the crises of its colonial outpost through various methods, eventually leading to a partitioned compromise, and to this day leading to a peace process. The reunification of Ireland has been postponed and by now the thrust of British capitalism lacks the need for racial oppression in Ireland. We can say that the material circumstances have changed, but that doesn't legitimate the cause of a united Ireland as that was always a just cause. It's just no longer linked to working-class emancipation in the same way.

Dreams of a Black Christmas.

The American Right have long been engaged in the fight to defend Christmas from the imaginary threat posed to it by secular progressives. The tenth box on your advent calendar marks the day of the Slate article by Aisha Harris on the assumed white-skin of Father Christmas. The following week was filled with the usual hysterical commentary from Fox News in its bid to deflect the ‘liberal agenda’ to destroy Christmas and drown puppies at birth. This is a part of the kulturkampf waged by conservatives since the end of the Cold War and anti-Communism no longer provided the impetus of social hypochondria. The snow had not yet settled in the wake of the spat when the anti-racist campaigner Tim Wise offered some insight:

Now don’t get me wrong, if there were a Santa Claus, there is very little doubt that he would have to be white. After all, no black man could manage to work only one day out of the year and not be called lazy; and surely no black man could get away with breaking into millions of homes, even if he was bearing presents. Some cop or neighborhood watch captain would surely have taken him down long ago, convinced that the red suit he was wearing signified gang colors. So, and let me be the first to admit it: in a world where Santa actually existed, along with unicorns, pixie dust and the Lorax, Megyn Kelly would have a damned good point. Note, this is how one can make a joke about Santa being white, without reinforcing white racial normalcy: but of course no FOX personality would choose to make the joke this way, because such a joke would require, first, an acknowledgment of the reality of racial profiling and anti-black racism, neither of which conservatives can afford to countenance. This is why conservative race humor isn’t funny, just racist; please take note of it. Thank you.

The liberal pretentions of colour-blindness forgo all challenges to the normative claims of the white male power-structure in the US and elsewhere. The racial consciousness of white people remains intact with all of its trappings of ressentiment and anxiety about what the future may hold. The barriers are up against any critical reflections on what white normalcy amounts to in seasonal symbolism. The paucity of the liberal framework leaves open the possibility of coercion clouded by consent and by sameness. As if coincidentally Black America just happens to be poorer and more prone to be incarcerated than White America. The assumed white-skin of the meritorious, intelligent, beautiful and articulate individual so prevalent in contemporary society is not to be disassociated from these patterns. The disparities of class and race are these patterns, and they are anything but natural. The campaign to keep Christmas white fits with the anxiety washing over the Republican Party since they lost the 2012 election.

The entitlement to govern for white people has been challenged by the election and re-election of Barack Obama. And a lot of white people have a problem with this, they feel they're losing their country. There’s some truth in it as anyone can see from the birth-rate of Hispanic-Americans which has outpaced European-Americans. As Mike Davis has suggested, 2012 may have been the last white election. The decline of the angry white male phenomenon may well be underway, the only hope of the GOP is to back-off on immigration and pursue the policies which would appeal to Hispanic-Americans. But the anxiety over this loss is not to be indulged in. It demonstrates that white privilege is real and that it has been a major force in American life for much more than the last decade. The historic construction of a white racial identity has been a means for the class tensions inherent to capitalism to be managed and controlled.

It’s apt then that the reactionary behind the ‘War on Christmas’ phenomenon was the racist columnist Peter Brimelow. Max Blumenthal found Brimelow was first unsettled by receiving ‘Happy Holidays’ greetings from retailers in place of the traditional ‘Merry Christmas’. Around the same time Peter Brimelow had churned out his book Alien Nation (1995) bewailing mass-immigration as undermining the ethno-cultural core of White America. He claimed Clinton’s victory in 1992 was the result of a Black, Hispanic, Jewish and minority white coalition of voters. He suggested that the expansion of this coalition (especially the non-white segments of it) could’ve created the social basis for Jesse Jackson to become President. Brimelow would go on to be increasingly marginalised for his advocacy of a racially-conscious body politic. But the Christmas campaign would be taken up by Fox News in the early years of this century.

In the wilderness Brimelow found new allies in race-baiters of all kinds (neo-eugenicists, white nationalists, cultural conservatives, even eco-racists and racist feminists) and with them he established VDARE.com. It would become the leading anti-immigrant web journal, its name a reference to the first English child born in the New World. By 2010 Brimelow was much less careful in his words in describing the Obama administration as a ‘minority occupation government’ given its lack of ‘deep ethnic roots’. He claimed the immigration policies of the US are aimed at population displacement in the pursuit of radical economic and social change. This fits with the Buchanan theory of immigration as an objective of the cultural Marxist plot to vanquish white Christian male society. In concluding that it would be natural for whites to pursue their racial interests he compared white nationalism (although he didn’t use the term) with Zionism and Black nationalism to claim the same legitimacy for its aims.

VDARE continued the War for Christmas and, as Blumenthal has noted, began to be more specific about who was responsible for the attacks on Christian society. Of course, it turned out to be the age-old enemy of Christendom - namely, the Jews - as VDARE readers would find from reading the obscene scribbles of Kevin MacDonald and Steve Sailer. When Blumenthal pushed Brimelow on this matter he found the aging English reactionary ambivalent and insistent that “It’s an argument”. The need for a racial explanation of social ills is necessitated by rightist criticism given its priority in externalising all failures of the system to disruptions of its mechanisms. The assumptions of white success run with this to emphasise what is at stake, whereas the normalcy of being white has to be emphasised against those who are looking to excavate the disavowed record of racial oppression. Any troublesome talk of racism can be attacked as the liberal agenda going after everything white people hold dear.

A White Problem.

One of the major flaws of political correctness and multiculturalism has been the way in which it has subsumed questions of 'race' under the euphemistic umbrella of 'culture'. This shift in language correlates with the disavowal of the race problem. Culturalisation of discourse has amounted to depoliticisation. With good intentions of inhibiting prejudice and furthering sensitivity, we find ourselves all too complacent in attestation to racial oppression and injustice. You'll know what I mean if you've ever had that conversation about Malcolm X with your liberal friend, who accuses the man of being as bad as the white racists he fought against. It's the presupposition of equal standards which trips over the unevenness of history's contours, where we find the grievances of black people conveniently tucked away from prying eyes.

As if standards have ever been levelled between white and black. The continued relevance of these categories of race are evidence of the inequality already present before we begin to talk. The categories remain with us in spite of the civilising consequences of the abolition of slavery, the struggle for human rights, the emergence of affirmative action and political-correctness. In the avoidance of these primitive forms of classification we only affirm them as categories, in that we hold them at arm's length because they seem too real. This isn't to say that we should revert back to the language of scientific racism. Rather I would suggest we have to first acknowledge the problem of race and engage with its emanations and its poisonous legacy. I would not discard politically-correct and multiculturalist tolerance for I value hybridity, equality, freedom and solidarity. It's that these innovations are reformist rather than revolutionary for which I reproach them.

 

What was so interesting about the trial of George Zimmerman was the way in which Zimmerman's own ethnic background became a subject of discourse. The question of whether or not Zimmerman counts as 'white', or if 'white Hispanic' is a more appropriate term, became an early fixture of the media spectacle. This is interesting for a number of reasons. For starters 'white' isn't even a colour and the classification of 'Caucasian' has been discredited as a product of a discredited ethnology. Yet the history of 'whiteness' reveals it is not a wholly natural factor. There was a time when signs saying "No dogs or Irish" could be acceptably left in shop windows. Benjamin Franklin considered German immigrants to be too dark. By the 19th Century the American settlers laid claim to a mythic Anglo-Saxon heritage to distinguish themselves from the fresh influxes from the Old World. Traditionally racists have viewed any tainted form of whiteness to constitute its opposite.

 

Last year John Derbyshire was dumped by National Review for a racist article in which he refers not to 'white' people but to 'non-black' people. Revealingly we find 'white' to be socially constructed and necessarily distinguished from the Other. How else are we to understand the tones of voice in which coloured and half-caste were once said? This is how we are to properly understand George Zimmerman and the media fascination with his background. It is not whiteness but his status as a non-black person. Incidentally we find that the signifiers used to designate blackness are just as slippery, if not more so, than in the case of white privilege. During the American imperial adventure to the Philippines, the racial classifications of the period were far from absent. Sergeant Howard McFarland of the 43rd Infantry described the situation "At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into a nigger heaven." In these examples we find that there can even be a disconnect between pigmentation and racial constructs.

 

We can't get away from these tropes even if we have moved away from the acceptance of scientific racial classifications. The constructs have to be understood partly in accordance with the historic situations from whence they came and the consequences they continue to have in society today. It is on these lines that Noel Ignatiev talks of the need to abolish the 'white race', e.g. the category of 'whiteness' as a privileged social strata. This is no simple task and cannot be achieved by liberal colour-blindness. The hopes of resuscitating Black liberalism in the wake of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict are highly flawed. The radical strain of the Black Civil Rights movement has to be resuscitated. Though we also need to engage with the historical process behind the identities of white and black. The very contours of the debate have to be explored before Americans, let alone the rest of us, can move to a post-racial society.

Lincoln's Favourite Play.

MACBETH:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly. If the' assassination

Could trammel up the consequence and catch

With his surcease success, that but this blow

Might be the be-all and end-all, here;

But here upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgement here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions which, being taught, return

To plague th'inventor. This even-handed justice

Commends th'ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips. He's here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against

The deep damnation of his taking-off,

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself

And falls on th'other. 

Race and Private Property in Clybourne Park.

Clybourne Park begins in 1959 just as Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bed room house in a respectable neighbourhood for a knock-down price. The low price offered by Russ enables the black family to move into a predominantly white area of Chicago, which alarms the neighbours and Russ finds himself arguing with Karl over what should be done. As the play was written in reaction to A Raisin in the Sun and that would lead us to conclude that the family about to move into the neighbourhood are the Youngers. The Youngers had come into a great deal of money and decided to move into a better neighbourhood, which just so happened to be white only to find they're not welcome. Clybourne Park then jumps forward 50 years to 2009 and the tables have been turned. Now it is a white couple, about to have a child, looking to move into the same neighbourhood, which is now predominantly black, with the intention of knocking down the same house to build their own family home.

America changed a great deal from 1959 to 2009, particularly in regards to race and property relations. In 1959 the conflict was still raging between the US and the Soviet Union and the "red scare" McCarthyist witch-hunts were still in the back of people's minds. Typically Karl invokes the Soviet Union when Russ tells him to leave. JFK, the first Catholic President, was about to be elected. The Civil Rights movement had just got started, segregation was still in place in the US and African-Americans were still deprived of the right to vote. Fast-forward 50 years and there is a black family in the White House, a presidential palace built by slaves. The references to the Korean war are swapped for references to the war in Iraq, from the Cold War to the "War on Terrorism". Kevin has three relatives fighting abroad and has a support the troops attitude to the war. Russ and Bev left Clybourne Park to get away from the house where their son Kenneth hung himself after coming home from the Korean war.

Since 1959 the US has become ever-increasingly unequal as the social democratic policies initiated under Roosevelt have been eroded. The brief opening of jobs and rights for African-Americans began to be closed in the 1970s when job opportunities dwindled as finance has replaced manufacturing in importance in the economy. Formally rights remain intact, but for millions of blacks these rights have been stripped away in the judicial system. The election of the first Black President has been construed to represent America's shift to a post-racial era. Thus, the elephant in the room in Act II of Clybourne Park is race and racism. The eruption of racist jokes represents just how real issues of race still are in America, whilst the patronising tone of liberals towards black people is depicted very well with hammed up acting, absurdly euphemistic language and the way characters generally avoid the elephant in the room. The flaw of liberal multiculturalism comes across clearly, we officially accept the non-invasive Other so we can go on ignoring the Other in our daily lives.

It is typical of American conservatives to advocate a meritocratic attitude of colour-blindness on matters of race, which provides a convenient platform from which affirmative action can be shot down as "racist" to white people. Note that the conservatives are colour-conscious enough to spot a black person calling for affirmative action or dares to remind white people of the injustices of the past. There are some conservatives would go even further to increase the constraints on Blackness, opposing the label 'African-American' and instead arguing that the label 'American' should be used to describe everyone. The invasive Otherness of slogans like "Black Power" unsettle conservatives, because it makes reference to black people and not coloured people, the immediate reaction is to pin the label "racist" on Malcolm X. The "colour-blindness" of the American conservatives like Ronald Reagan has space to revoke the Civil Rights act and place Nelson Mandela on a list of "terrorists".

The importance attributed to home ownership in American culture is related to liberal notions of meritocracy and private property. It's a contradiction of middle-class aspirations, colour-blindness and classlessness which collide in Clybourne Park. There is a correlation between race and class in the US: 50% of white children in the US will live on food stamps at some point in their lives whereas 90% of black children will live on food stamps. Discrimination hangs in the background of the American Dream, with the white urbanites act to "protect" the interests of the community when a black family move in next door. It was the aspirations of the family which led them to take up the opportunity of an affordable house in a respectable neighbourhood, it was a chance to make it up the ladder from one social class to another. American meritocracy was only intended to allow white people, if anyone at all, to rise up the ladder. It provides a retrospective justification for white privilege, a meritocracy in which the meritorious are almost all white by coincidence.

Interestingly, it is only after the explosion of racial tension into racist jokes and a full-blown fight that the spirit of Kenneth can leave the house. The suicide note he left for his parents remains a mystery to us. We might interpret the events in between as a vanishing mediator. From the black family moving into a white neighbourhood up to the white family moving back into the neighbourhood, which is now predominantly black, all of this had to happen in order for Kenneth's letter to be read and understood by someone. Though not by the audience. The letter is confessional in content and might offer up a catalogue of atrocities which he committed in Korea. From the thematic focus on race and private property we might surmise that the crimes in Korea may be a stand-in for a submerged history of violence in the US. Then we might infer that it is only after tensions, along the lines of race and class, have been resolved can Americans understand the past without the nostalgic filters of self-serving apple pie and freedom-loving rhetoric.

The Myth of Ronald Reagan.

Fact and Fiction.

February 6th 1911, exactly 100 years ago today, Ronald Reagan was born in an apartment in Tampico, Illinois into a devout Christian working-class family. Ronald Reagan, or "Dutch" to his friends, went on to become the 40th President of the United States and is considered by some as one of the greatest Presidents. Since he took power in 1981, Reagan has been a subject of adulation by Republicans and is widely revered on the American Right. Reagan is now being held up by the Tea Party as a figure of immense integrity and ideological purity. The Tea Parties emphasise small government and fiscal responsibility, family values and a strong defence. For the Tea Party, Reagan belongs to the most noble of political traditions going right back to the American Revolution. This is the first of a series of articles that are aimed to dispel the myth of Ronald Reagan through a critique of the impact of Reagan's policy in foreign, economic and social spheres.

For the GOP Ronald Reagan is an icon of American conservatism and have succeeded in crafting a folkloric Reagan, to an extent which would impress Kim Jong-il. Take the story in which Reagan invites a black family to his home for the night, having dinner and breakfast with them, because they were refused rooms in the local inn. This is a story for anyone eager to glorify Reagan as a man ahead of his time. In reality Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights act, tried to veto the Civil Rights Restoration act, on the grounds that the acts imposed too much regulation on small business and churches. He also opposed the Martin Luther King holiday but reluctantly voted for it given the level of popular support. Reagan later added Nelson Mandela to a list of terrorists in 1988 as he propped up Apartheid. These facts mean much more than the story of the anonymous black family and the friendly white man, which would have us believe he was everything we'd want from a President.

Reagan is often described in glowing terms as a man of humble origins who earned his privileged position in society through sheer hard-work. Of course, the fact that Reagan was a star of the B-movies who became the biggest corporate spokesman of the 1950s is downplayed. As a politician Reagan began his career as a Democrat and was a proponent for the social democratic policies of Roosevelt's New Deal. But in the 50s he made the transition to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, endorsing Eisenhower and Nixon along the way, before completing the transition and defecting to the Republican Party in 1962. Reagan began to espouse the core principles of American conservatism: small government, free-markets, anti-communism, family values and individual freedom. Reagan's success as a politician was down to his ability to present policies favoured by "Corporate America" as good for all sectors of society.

Ronald Reagan is still revered as an apostle of the free-market, small government and fiscal responsibility. There is a clear difference between the Reagan dreamed up by the public relations industry and Reagan the man. Even though under Reagan the size of the federal government increased relative to GDP, enormous protectionist barriers were hoisted up against foreign competition, whilst corporations were allowed to close plans all over North America and spending on the military increased rapidly under his administration. The systematic deregulation of the financial sector led to the Savings and Loans crisis, to which the Reaganites responded with bailouts for companies that were "too big to fail". In foreign policy the Reagan administration led a brutal crusade of violence and terrorism in the name of promoting democracy, which thousands in Latin America and the Middle East slaughtered.

The last 30 years have been heavily influenced by the events that took place in the Reagan era. The discourse was redefined in the 1980s by the likes of Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, who created the GOP playbook of mudslinging and outrageous lies, we have them to thank for right-wing media - e.g. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh - that has crudified debate. Millions of Americans don't even vote because the elections look meaningless, as the candidates smear one another as "Nazis" and "anti-Americans". The culture wars are still raging in America, wedge issues like abortion and immigration remain a rallying call against liberals on the Right. At the same time "Reaganomics" has led to an enormous gulf between the rich and the poor, with the most basic aspects of the welfare state being torn up for the sake of "small government" and the "free-market".

Difficult Decisions.

To say that the cabinet led by David Cameron has been busy lately is euphemistic, this government is suffering from hyperactivity and has taken advantage of the small window of opportunity open to them. Reform, either radical or reactionary, is best pursued in the early days, while your opponents are weak, to ensure that the legislation can be rammed through despite any public opposition. Since Labour has been preoccupied with presenting themselves as a socialist party once more - never mind the upcoming and mediocre leadership contest - the Con-Dems have had enough time to kick start the class war. It was early days when Cameron unveiled 23 bills (and one draft bill), which is more than the 15 bills that Roosevelt rammed through during his first 100 days.

The Con-Dems like to describe their reforms as "progressive" and "radical", even Melanie Phillips called the coalition "social democratic", but nothing could be further from fact and closer to fiction. These reforms that seem to have emerged on a weekly basis are deeply reactionary on closer inspection. Cameron is intent on continuing, if not completing, the neoliberal programme of privatisation and deregulation, lower taxes for the rich and lower public spending at a higher cost to the poor. Tories and Liberals are indistinguishable from one another as they claim that these spending cuts will not hurt the most vulnerable. It's hard to see how £11 billion cuts to benefits and a 20% VAT hike will not harm working-people, let alone the under-class. This is just the tip of the shit-heap mislabelled "radical".

The coalition government have unveiled plans for reforms of education, health-care and housing, which the Con-Dems promise will not harm the vulnerable. But the cuts to housing will probably drive thousands of poor people out of cities and onto the outskirts of cities. The "free schools" that Michael Gove talks about will be propped up by private companies and such schools will get the best resources, because they can afford it, at the expense of the rest of students in the country. The cuts to benefits and national insurance could lead to less unemployment, but the stagnation of wages for working-class people would continue for years to come - which are effectively lower wages due to inflation and the VAT hike. In a nutshell, the working-class and the under-class will suffer most during these cuts.

The current government consists of 18 millionaires, 19 men and 22 white people, it's a product of affirmative action for rich-white-men essentially. To call such a coalition "radical", or even "progressive", is to demean such a word. In spite of this, the Con-Dems insist that they are "progressive" whilst pretending that the decisions to slash and burn, which they made before the election, are "unavoidable" and "difficult". The words of Margaret Thatcher come to mind "There is no alternative." Even though government debt is at around 70% of GDP today, it should be remembered that this is not unusual, in between 1920 and 1960 we always had debt over 100% of GDP. Particularly after the Second World War, which left us with a government debt that made up 250% of GDP, but we still created the welfare state and nationalised several industries.


The Con-Dems also claim that government spending under Brown was unsustainable, which was true in a sense and false in another. It was unsustainable as the recession had led to a massive drop in tax revenue, which led to the "massive deficit", but it was sustainable in the sense that tax revenues would rise following the recovery. An estimated £100 billion is lost through loopholes in the tax system and active evasion every year, closing such loopholes and cracking down on evasion should be a major priority. Increasing taxes on the wealthy (a mortal sin in our economy) to rejuvenate the manufacturing industry, which could be used to provide jobs and training for the unemployed, whilst extending and improving public services for the Common Good. This probably wouldn't shrink the deficit immediately, it could set in motion the "shrinking" over a longer period of time and hold those responsible for the crash accountable.

Tony Benn, Caroline Lucas, John Pilger and Salma Yaqoob, among others, were right to advocate mass-participation in active resistance to the cuts. The social democratic reforms of the 1930s and 40s were imposed to keep the masses at bay, to prevent a revolution. But that was because there is a strong labour movement in those days and there was the Soviet Union, which was still young in those days and represented that revolutions could succeed. Today the unions have been decimated, the Soviet Union is gone, which is why the need for change is not going to be followed without a serious "push" from below. Change comes from the grass-roots upwards and can shake the very foundations of society. It's not going to be easy, but we must act now. The remnants of the welfare state, particularly benefits, education and health-care, are under threat.

Related Links:

The Axeman's Jazz - Why cuts? Why now and How to Stop Them

100 Days of Dave
How Dave Hit the Ground Running
The Time to Organise is Now 
Countering the Cuts Myths
Shameful Health Gap
The Great Tax Parachute

A Colour-Blind Society?

Rush Limbaugh once listed individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a colour-blind society and national security as the core tenets of the American conservative movement. Despite the claims that the American Right are "colour-blind" and are proponents of a colour-blind meritocracy - in which those most deserving rise up the ladder and the unworthy remain at the bottom of the heap - race baiting remains a tool of vilification on the Right. The American Right are "colour-blind" until a black person raises the issue of racism or past injustices suffered by African-Americans in the United States. Because in a so-called "colour-blind" society it is racist to even acknowledge black people as African-Americans, as opposed to Americans, and the same method is used to shoot down arguments for affirmative action.

Just as in the case of Reverend Wright, in which the words of a black preacher were taken out of context and used against the Obama administration, liberation theology was turned into racist psychobabble to justify raising the possibility that Obama might be a racist. It was the same right-wing commentariat that were vilifying Wright and Obama as racists, who supposedly adhere to a "colour-blind" vision of America. Of course, it was "colour-blind" conservatives like Ronald Reagan who opposed the Civil Rights act on the grounds that it infringed on the civil rights of businesses and property owners. Reagan went on to be dragged kicking and screaming into voting for a day honouring the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. But that did not stop him from putting Nelson Mandela on a list of "terrorists" in 1988.

Last week the issue of race has once again resurfaced in American politics, in a similar manner to the ACORN scandal last year, this time it was Shirley Sherrod who was the target of vilification. Andrew Breitbart, a leading conservative blogger, posted a selected excerpt of a speech by Shirley Sherrod at the NAACP (see here). In the clip it appeared as though Sherrod admitted to discriminating against a white farmer on the basis of his skin colour. Soon after right-wing pundits like Bill O'Reilly leaped on the clip as evidence that Sherrod should resign from her position in the Department of Agriculture. The clip was posted on BigGovernment.com, the same website where the selectively edited videos that brought down ACORN last year were posted. The American Right had it in for ACORN ever since the organisation endorsed Obama in 2008, the Right has propagated conspiracy theories that the election was stolen by ACORN for Obama.

Even though in the full video Shirley Sherrod tells a story of the way she felt when first worked with a white farmer - back in 1986 when she worked for a non-profit organisation - and how her immediate reaction to him was wrong. The point of the story was that she should help white farmers, because "the struggle is really about poor people" in Sherrod's own words. The fact that Sherrod's initial reaction was down to anger going back to the murder of her father in the 1960s is also ignored by the conservative media. But in the end her reaction to the white farmer, who she perceived as "talking down to her", did not go as far as outright discrimination. Sherrod actually saved the man's farm, because solidarity among poor people should transcend the "boundaries" created by centuries of racism in the US.

Sadly, it's too late as the Obama administration forced Shirley Sherrod to resign. The Democrats could be facing a rebellion by voters in November, and Obama is also looking to secure a second term, so Sherrod had to go to avoid any allegations that the Democrats are racist. Breitbart's video did it's damage and the administration looks even more vulnerable to the Atwater tactics of the Republican smear-machine. Unfortunately, the idea of a "colour-blind" society is still prevalent among white Americans and the conservative movement. This is unfortunate as such a vision would ignore past injustices, instead of compensating for them, and would exacerbate the condition of namelessness experienced by African-Americans - as a direct result of slavery which stripped them of their culture and history.

In this vision of a colourless society in which people rise in accordance with their effort there would be no room for addressing the crimes of the past. This would make this an ignorant society, one which carries no guilt and no desire for redemption to resolve the crimes on which a high standard of living enjoyed today is partly built on. It would be a society in which indifference to minorities, women and the poor as a whole would be nurtured. In a sense, it would be affirmative action for rich-white-men who have not gained their position out of effort. Very few would rise up the ladder, as they already do, and the vast majority of people would remain at the bottom. Tensions along racial, gender and economic lines would be concentrated and would fester for years to come. In short, it wouldn't be much of a society to live in if "colour-blindness" were the chosen method to deal with racism.

Related Links:

Rachel Maddow blasts Fox News over Shirley Sherrod Part 1/2

Rush Limbaugh on Sherrod with his eyes wide open 

Fault Lines: Cornel West

Cornel West on Obama and Race Part 1/2

The Willie Horton Ad and the Revolving Door Ad