BK on Identity

[Brad Mayer]

Yep, Yoshie, in practice this issue has been with us since it first emerged 
in the US Civil War (where, in NYC, quite a few white worker knuckleheads, 
believing that freeing the African-American slave would bring down wages, 
staged their own veritable Kronstat on Manhattan island during July 
1864.  In political content far worse than Kronstat, of course, but it is 
still the greatest single urban civil disturbance in US 
history.  Apparently the notion that white workers gain from the oppression 
of nonwhites is promoted these days by guilt-ridden white liberal 
intellectuals rather than by open racists.  Or at least these are the 
imperial procounsuls of choice...for the historical moment.

-Brad Mayer,
Enganing in an autonomist refusal to work by posting to this list ;-)


>McIntosh writes: "As a white person, I realized I had been taught
>about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had
>been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege,
>which puts me at an advantage." So far, so good. White workers are
>indeed at an advantage in all important respects, _compared to_ black
>& other discriminated-against workers. However, she incorrectly
>argues that white workers "gain from" black & other
>discriminated-against workers' disadvantages (and that male workers
>"gain from" female workers' disadvantages). Pace McIntosh, white
>workers not only do not gain but in fact *lose* in their class
>struggle against capital *because of* their relative advantage
>vis-a-vis black & other discriminated-against workers. This is the
>material basis of cross-racial solidarity to which many white workers
>have _yet_ to become hip, perhaps _because_ a good number of them --
>taught by McIntosh, et al -- think that they gain from their relative
>advantage.
>white workers of the USA, wise up!
>Yoshie