Is there a single vast, monolithic, homogeneous white working class culture?
Is every member of the white working class racist, whether consciously or unconsciously?
Consequently, is there an unbridgeable gulf between such folks and working class POC?
Is the white working class the irredeemable enemy of POC?
In pondering our own individual answers to these questions there is one crucial external point to be considered.
White supremacists would answer each of these with a resounding yes.
White supremacists not only accept these premises, they are integral to both white supremacist ideology and propaganda.
The fundamental assumption of white supremacy is that racism and the division it produces is an innate characteristic that will find expression regardless of any attempts to ameliorate or suppress it. In this view, inter-racial solidarity is an impossibility, since race/racism is an inborn and immutable fact of nature. One that will inevitably find expression in culture and in a unrelenting struggle for racial supremacy.
Given this, nothing could suit them or their apocalyptic agenda better than to see ostensible progressives and anti-racists embrace any or all of the above axioms.
This is why, historically, white supremacists have taken a less hostile, even actively encouraging attitude toward Nationalist and separatist sentiments among people of color. It is why Malcolm X found it necessary to denounce such overtures by American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell in no uncertain terms.
This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense -- by any means necessary.
In short, white supremacists will attempt to appropriate and exploit anything that they perceive as fomenting racial division and hostility. They will use it to validate, justify and propagate their own bloody ideology.
White supremacists flog this stratagem to this day, with such propaganda as the “comic book” “White Will”, produced by William Pierce’s National Alliance, which portrays a Black Militant as aiding white supremacists against “Jewish machinations”.
That this is a deeply cynical and vicious tactic ought to go without saying.
Unfortunately, it is one that can be extremely effective as well.
After all, if both sides of an argument tell those classed as white that they are the enemy of POC but one side says this enmity is justified while the other condemns them for it and labels them as irredeemable, who do you suppose they will listen to?
This is an example of one of the classic tricks in the white supremacist/racist handbook. The appropriation of a particular stream of AA opinion by white supremacists who then misportray it as being the opinion of all African Americans. In this they are following the established pattern of reducing Black People to ciphers, suitable only for the projection of their own fantasies and obsessions.
Of course the AA community is no more a single vast, monolithic, homogeneous whole than any other segment of US society. Nevertheless, it suits the white supremacist project to treat them as such, just as it suits them to treat those classed as white in the same fashion.
This is also, in my opinion, the crux of a problem within white liberal and progressive circles. What I would describe, for lack of a better term, as disguised condescension.
Perhaps I'm a bit of an antique. Having grown up during the civil rights struggle and having spent my life doing anti-racist work in the south, I'm steeped in the politics of racial reconciliation. My lode stars are people like M.L. King, Coretta Scott King, Reverend Joseph Lowery, John Lewis, Rev. James Orange and Rev. William Barber among others, as well as Malik el-Shabazz, W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass.
The Southern leaders of the Civil Rights movement didn’t preach the politics of division, much less the demonization of whole groups. Despite living and struggling within the belly of the beast, where their lives were literally on the line every day, they preached and worked for racial reconciliation. A legacy that Rev. William Barber carries on to this day. One might search their histories for denunciations of the white working class as the motive force in white racism but one would search in vain.
This may be hard to grasp but there was a solid reason for it. White racism and white supremacy were never defined by the class divisions between southern whites.
It wasn't the white working class that inaugurated the institution of slavery, consciously constructed and inculcated the doctrine of white supremacy, precipitated a Civil War in defense of slavery, overthrew Reconstruction and instituted Jim Crow. In every instance it was the elites of Southern white society that fomented and led these efforts. The entirety of southern white society, from top to bottom, was complicit in this history, irrespective of individual dissenters.
The same complicity applies to US white society as a whole, in as much as they passively tolerated slavery and allowed the imposition of a terrorist regime of white supremacy following reconstruction.
To put it bluntly, the stereotype of white supremacy/racism as the creation of an ignorant, atavistic and benighted white laboring class is a myth. One that, unsurprisingly, originated among the very elites who bore primary culpability for slavery and all its poisonous fruits.
One needn’t search far to find this very construct in some of the earliest defenses of slavery, wherein the traffickers in human beings sought to justify both the institution and their own parasitic existence as being a bulwark staving off a genocidal race war. You find it in their justifications for the Civil War. In their justifications for the overthrow of Reconstruction. For the re-imposition of white supremacy. For Jim Crow and for opposition to the Civil Rights movement.
In what must rank as one of the most colossal examples of hypocrisy in human history, bordering on outright lunacy, this enabled some to posture as the “friend of the negro”, even as they battened on the blood and sweat of black folk.
Here, I think, we can locate the seed bed of two characteristic features of white supremacy: white paternalism and white condescension. Hard to miss the fact that if a slave master can be viewed as the slave’s “best friend” that same pretense can be extended to almost anyone. A perverted sense of “noblesse oblige” comes into play, by which an ostensible sympathy for Black folks is combined with a sense of innate superiority, whether admitted or not.
However, for this piece of self serving, psychological self hypnosis to work, the onus for white supremacy/racism must be placed elsewhere. Preferably at the greatest social distance as possible.
What better solution than to follow the precedent established by the antebellum elites and fasten criminal responsibility on the least powerful, most vulnerable, class of whites?
This pernicious mode of thought permeated southern white society and culture, with presumably “good” white folks being assessed, not on their active opposition to the racist status quo but on their class status. Never mind that they sat atop or near the top of the white supremacist pyramid. They were not to be blamed because they were not of the “ignorant, redneck, peckerwood” class.
This particularly grotesque form of classism found its most obvious expression among the “better class” of white folks in an obsession with “proper” racial etiquette and manners. One typical demarcation was in the language one used to describe African Americans. “Good” white folks spoke of “colored folks”. “Bad” white folks spoke of “nigras” or worse. “Good” white folks, while not challenging the white supremacist regime, might extend small courtesies or personal charity to Black people. “Bad” white folks were those whose active malice piled added indignities and violence on top of systemic oppression.
Needless to say, in this conception it wasn’t the condition and needs of Black people that were central. No, it was all about the wants and needs of the “good” white folks. Their need to deny culpability. Their need to think well of themselves. The need to excuse themselves by having someone worse than themselves to point a finger at.
The necessity of obscuring the fact that their own social status and way of life was as dependent on the regime of racist violence and terrorism as surely as that of the crudest and most backward poor white.
Indeed, the culpability of the “good” white folks was greater than that of the “bad” whites, because it was they who actually maintained the white supremacist regime through their passive acceptance. While their personal acts may have consoled a bad conscience, they did nothing to end the systemic brutality and injustice visited on Black southerners. A regime that wouldn’t and couldn’t have existed without the active connivance of the highest levels of southern white society.
So pervasive was this classist mode of thought that it infected even those white liberal/progressive whites who eventually supported, more or less, the goals of the Civil Rights movement. The cheapest way for such folks to purchase their anti-racist bona fides, at least in their own minds, was to adopt the class based “good white folks”/”bad white folks” dichotomy.
So when I see ostensibly liberal/progressive whites echoing this objectively white supremacist canard in the present, my suspicions are immediately aroused. It is, In my opinion, little more than the same old, same old. A get out of jail free card for those who want to posture as anti-racist while avoiding the hard and unpleasant work of confronting and uprooting white racism among those classed as white. A means of distancing and denial through symbolism without substantive action. A way of avoiding putting any real skin in the game.
No doubt my view will disturb many and anger more than a few. I can only say that it is an opinion based on the lived experience of growing up within the edifice of Southern apartheid. Of the intimate knowledge of southern white supremacy that comes from being a member of the master class by accident of birth. Of being the scion of a cross class union. Of the observation and study from childhood onward through years of struggling against the endemic white supremacy/racism of southern white society.
I would add that the view I’ve articulated is a relatively charitable one. A less charitable view would be that this indulgence in classic white supremacist classism is the product of conscious cynical calculation rather than psychic distress. An intentional exercise in diversion and misdirection that serves an agenda, rather than an expression of human frailty. In substance, telling people what they want to hear rather than what is real.
I hope and trust that any such folks constitute a small minority. In keeping with that hope, I would urge that anyone who identifies themselves as anti-racist ask themselves this question: Can white supremacy/racism be defeated by adopting its premises and tropes?
I think not.