Netflix part 7, Ghetto racism
As mentioned earlier, in the media offerings of contemporary race theorists, there's almost always a gratuitous nod to class conflict, and we get it about 19 minutes in: Kendi proclaims that "What Whiteness does is blind [Whites] to who the real robbers are." Then the screen fills with images of rich Whites.
And this from a man who received most of his funding for his CAR institute from the Rockefeller Foundation! Has he bitten the hand which feeds him? No, don't be silly, the assertion is quickly bent to the racial narrative, just the way the Foundation wants it.
While Kendi's observation is correct, he's drawing a bogus color line, and an intrinsically racist one. Blacks are no less blind to this reality. In my experience, Blacks cling to their racial identity more ferociously than any other racial grouping and dismiss non-racial theories of social phenomena more readily. Blacks are--again, in my experience--less receptive to Kendi's class argument than are Whites--much less! The racist trope which Kendi endeavors to substantiate is that it is only Whites who have been fooled by racism, succumbed to it, whereas Blacks know better and/or are better. This belief that a given race has greater access to truth in any circumstance, but particularly in regard to interactions between races, is incontestably racist and vapid. However, it is common among Blacks, even among activists. A great many Blacks believe that they belong to a superior race. When put in these terms, it's almost always denied. Nevertheless, ghetto racism is quite real and reactionary.
It's an often insuperable problem when people of all races amass to take action against racism. I have met many Black activists who believe they understand race by virtue of their Blackness and Whites do not, very simply, because they are White. One doesn't have to be a genius to see the problem presented by racist "anti-racists," particularly when they claim privilege based on their racial identity. And if you, dear reader, are at all surprised by this, then you have obviously not been engaged in antira activism. Many Blacks view race as their bailiwick, their fiefdom, their area of unique expertise. And efforts to disabuse them of this racist lunacy is often met with condescension. Black racism, like its White counterpart, plays a vital, indispensable role in the reproduction of American racism and global capitalism, neither could exist without their cooperation. Blacks hold up half the bourgeois sky.
What Kendi is propounding is the myth that American racism is unilateral, that it has penetrated and compromised only White minds and Blacks have been uncorrupted by racist ideas, have seen through them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. White and Black racisms are a matching set, they operate in a feedback loop. They are different, but mutually dependent. We are all affected by race. We all live in its vortex. Racepolitik is how the ruling class rules here in the land of the presumptive free. All of us in the US are racialized subjects, we are all are racially programmed. From birth, we are fitted to race like contour sheets to a mattress. And melanin affords no protection, neither does standpoint epistemology, and if you think they do then you have succumbed to racial ideology. You have not seen through it, you have fallen for it. The reality is racism is designed to affect everyone, and it does, much to the advantage and delight of Kendi's patrons. In order for racism to be defeated, Blacks need to recognize their racial programming and reject their supplementary role in American Racepolitik, just as Whites do.
Racism by necessity, by definition, is a binary phenomenon.[1] The discourse which inheres is designed to work on both sides of the barricades--it has to. Unilateral racism cannot long survive. Every American Black has race consciousness, however, considerably fewer have class consciousness. And it's almost always highly educated Blacks who do. Kendi's intimation that Blacks have greater class consciousness is farcically wrong. The contemporary Left is a race-fetishist, postmodernist mockery of a real Left, whose raison d'etre, it would seem, is to combat "class reductionism." And this movement away from class politics into these peri-fascist, exclusionary identity reserves has at every turn been championed by a majority of Blacks. Our race-divided working class is a plutocrat's wet dream, plutocrats such as the kind that fund Kendi, and nobody is more responsible for that than the African-American community and its army of me-first, race-first advocates.
Not all Black activists meet that description, but a number do. The urgency and militancy Blacks and allies have demonstrated in countering racism is admirable--we need more of that kind of thing!, however, the fight for racial equality has not led to a racially united, empowered proletariat, one capable of effecting real change. Quite the opposite. There is as much mutual racial antagonism, the bane of the American working class, as ever before. We are all still crabs in a tank stepping over each other trying to escape. We have almost achieved racial parity now, and the gap between rich and poor continues to broaden and has almost reached that of the age of the robber barons of the late 19th century, the age of John D. Rockefeller, eponym of Kendi's Rockefeller Foundation.
What Kendi is hawking here is pure fiction. It disguises the truth. Among the Black lumpen/proletariat, in my experience, there is near universal belief that Blacks have occupied the lowest stations of the American economy because of their race; that racial ideology came first, and enabled exploitation. Inexplicably, this quintessentially fascist idea is widely accepted on the American Left. Certainly, it's found a home in the ghetto. Racepolitik still rules America, and Blacks are as much to blame as anyone.
However, the race-begets-class mantra is easy to disprove if one takes the time to check facts. Racial designation was constructed over time, and clearly in accordance with the economic interests of the planter class, both White and Black. Ideology was not master but servant, consequence not instigation. Cane and cotton cultivation was not a pretext to enslave Blacks, Blacks were enslaved to facilitate such cultivation and garner for their masters the profits derived therefrom. And the racial ideology developed from that. This might seem obvious--it should, but it is this reality which race theorists, including those who appear in Stamped, serve to obscure.
As Kendi speaks of elites, we see images of rich Whites only, which reinforces race-uber-alles ideology. First, there have always been rich Blacks. As noted earlier, Black slave owners were instrumental in the homologation of slavery (as opposed to indenture) and the process of its racialization. And rich Black slave owners supported the Confederacy. Like the White bourgeoisie, the Black elite have acted in their economic interests, and have been willing to sacrifice the lives and liberty of their fellow Blacks. Certainly African slave catchers/vendors had no compunction about it. There has been no Black Pact just as there has been no White Pact. Race is a ruse. Both Blacks and Whites, on both sides of the Atlantic, have repeatedly put profits ahead of race loyalty. The racial narrative, the cover story, is unsupportable when viewed against the actual course of events. It cannot survive a moment of honest scrutiny, and the American bourgeoisie cannot survive its collapse. Which is why we have fake history such as is found in Stamped.
1, Kenan Malik's book, Not so Black and White, provides a very different view of race. I found it interesting.
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