“It was soon after the riots of June ‘76, and Johannesburg was so tense it was hard to breathe. Soweto was mourning its many hundred martyrs, and a political detainee named Wellington Tshazibane had just ‘hanged himself’ while in the custody of the secret police…
Whenever my phone rang, some white paranoiac came on the line to pass along another rumor.
Children were being butchered on their way to school. Some whites had heard that tomorrow was kill-a-white day. Others had it on good authority that black maids were being incited to poison the master’s tea…”
- Rian Malan, from “My Traitor’s Heart”[1]
“No, no need to fear, we are perfectly OK…
South Africa is not going to start slaughtering you and all that…”
- Thabo Mbeki[2]
“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks,
as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”
- Nadine Gordimer[3]
White South Africans repeatedly justified the continuation of the brutality of apartheid by reminding the country – and the world – of the “swart gevaar,”[4] or “black menace.” Having some awareness of the tremendous level of violence and humiliation they were inflicting on the general population, white people lived with the nagging fear that someday ‘the blacks’ would come thrashing into their heavily-guarded pockets of prosperity and privilege and simply annihilate them. Of course, like so many other places governed by the tyranny of white supremacy, the violence never boomeranged back enough to fulfill the nightmares of the ‘average white man and woman’ (who anyway would insist that they were totally innocent and had nothing to do with it, when it was all over).
Whiteness survived the decades of anti-colonial wars that brought ‘independence’ to the majority of the world’s people (and the corresponding radical upheavals within the various ‘mother countries’ of empire). Even if they have to wall themselves off within increasingly over-policed houses, suburbs, and nations, white people seem intent on protecting what bits of privilege they can. Millions will be locked up, surveilled, placed under military rule and/or straight murdered to protect the world’s whites from their own unwillingness to be accountable for the history of imperialism. So, the fear of the ‘black menace’ remains.
The situation is dire, but we seem to have reached a dead-end (or multiple dead-ends) in our thinking. ‘Undoing Racism’ is now the registered trademark of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, one of dozens of grant-driven organizations that service the ‘anti-racism’ needs of the corporate and non-profit world. The branding of the phrase, ‘Undoing Racism’ is an attempt to control the way that we talk about Race, the limits and possibilities of our aspirations for a non-racial existence – and so far it’s working. Even within the radical left, (and for that matter the anarchist ‘post-left’) if we talk about race at all the conversation is inevitably driven down the narrow paths that the anti-racist NGOs have generated.
Who says there is such a thing as ‘people of color,’ that such a coherent unity between the world’s non-white peoples exists? For that matter, are there even African-Americans? Is there such a thing as a ‘white heritage,’ or an ethnic identification that white people might aspire to beneath and outside of the history of imperialism? Can the word ‘white’ really be replaced by the word ‘male’ or ‘able-bodied’ or any other privileged group, and convey roughly the same meaning? Are all forms of oppression truly ‘equal’? Towards what end do we speak in these ways? Do these articulations of the problems of race help us to end race once and for all? These are heretical questions that we are not meant to ask.
Undoing Racism is a registered trademark, which is based on a standardized definition of racism, which is based on a standardized set of ideas about who white people are and who people of color are and what that all has to do with feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, and so forth. This straight-jacketing of rebellion against white civilization has led to the creation of a new kind of ‘black menace’ amongst the white ‘left’. Many white radicals refuse to ‘do anything’ about race because they are disturbed by the way in which militant politics are watered down by attempts to fit whatever work we’re doing within the anti-oppression paradigm that the NGO machine has generated. For example, when a new suburban development, or a dealer’s lot full of SUVs, or a ski resort are set on fire, white privilege is being attacked at the point of production. But no one is describing it in these terms; even the elves who carry out the arsons don’t think of themselves as committing an act of treason against Whiteness. The action remains firmly within the confines of ‘radical environmentalism.’ Then, if radical environmentalists want to attack white supremacy, the whole anti-oppression framework is imported into the movement, and suddenly we are led to believe that perhaps even civil disobedience is racist behavior somehow. As a result, talking to some white radicals, one gets the sense that they’re afraid that black[5] people have a certain inherently liberal ‘taint’ to them, and that if they align themselves too closely with ‘anti-racism,’ that taint will rub off on them.
This criticism from certain anarchists is not just the Afrikaner nightmare flipped upside down; there is an important warning in the subtly racist fear of these young militants. The message is clear: the ideological and practical frameworks of ‘anti-oppression’ trainings are not generating the type of resistance that will be capable of making any serious rupture in the long night of racialism. At exactly the moment when people need to be thinking about how to add some claws to their struggles, anti-racism de-claws us. Race is a power in and of itself, and must be directly confronted, in constantly fresh and inventive ways.
The slippery beast of Whiteness has caught on to this ‘Undoing Racism’ business, and is far ahead of us, carrying on the business of empire and ecocide. We need to hit the poor fucker from different angles, armed with new tactics and new ideas.
[1] The grandchild of one of the architects of apartheid, Malan’s book is full of ‘tales of ordinary murder’ under apartheid.
[2] Thabo Mbeki is the current president of South Africa, and was one of the key negotiators for the ANC during the ‘transition’ to a majority government. This quote summarizes his message to the whites on the other side of the negotiating table.
[3] A prominent South African novelist, Gordimer’s work is very focused on supporting the struggle against racialism, from a radical white perspective.
[4] This is an Afrikaans phrase.
[5] For my part, I prefer to use the word ‘black’ in the sense that the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa spoke of it: as that portion of society that is not only not-white, but self-consciously wanting to identify themselves, in both name and action, as in opposition to the structures and ideology of White Power. That is to say, i reject biological framings of who is black or white, and reject also the term ‘people of color,’ because it assumes that all non-whites aspire to be something other than white, which is a dangerous assumption. For example, the BCM saw it as obvious that African, Indian and Coloured people working within the police department or other branches of the apartheid government were quite clearly not ‘black,’ and I would certainly agree.
