In short, whiteness is a mess of pottage. For proletarians whose ancestors hail from various European countries to identify as white is to sell their birthright of the power of working-class solidarity for racial privileges. That's the point that, for instance, Theodore W. Allen, who recently died, explained in detail through his research on colonial Virginia: Jeffrey B. Perry, "In Memoriam" (ZNet, <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=7154>, February 2, 2005).
Something similar could be done for the "American" identity, i.e., the consciousness of the Empire of Innocents, as Chuck Grimes puts it.
Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com, Tue Feb 8 12:32:12 PST 2005:
>My basic guess is the US empire benefits only the top who has
>managed to collectively manipulate both foreign and domestic labor
>(and material resources) and play them off against each other (race
>to the bottom)---and that is enabled by the globalization of
>technology in manufacturing, agriculture, communication,
>transportation, finance, etc, etc.
>
>So, while the standard of living in say Sweden might be better at
>the middle and lower end, the standard of living at the top between
>the US and Sweden is completely skewed with the US at hundreds of
>times higher. In other words the two-class US society and its
>imperialism are locked together and mutually re-enforce each other.
>Sweden isn't an empire, so its top can not leverage these imperial
>benefits for themselves---you can be sure they would if they could.
>
>On the other hand the US working/middle class is propagandized to
>identify with the US top (and ignore their own conditions) and
>believe they (or we) are the beneficiaries through cheaper
>goods---economic access to the consumer society. And we are further
>propagandized to believe we are part of the Good Empire, the Empire
>of the Innocent. It's all win-win, spreading the American dream. We
>are not like the old nasty imperialists. Of course not. The US
>government isn't running an empire of military trade outposts and
>plantations (Heart of Darkness), US corporations are spreading and
>sharing prosperity abroad (malquiladoras).
>
>So, given the Empire of the Innocent, Bush can rightly claim `they
>hate freedom', and enough people in the US can pretend to believe
>him.
>
>If they don't believe him, then the house of cards of the Good
>Empire, Empire of the Innocent starts to implode. On implosion you
>drop out of your mindpod dream world like Neo in the Matrix. The
>world we really live in (as in depend on as a society) is a god
>damned nightmare of exploitation, a vast wasteland of peoples and
>lands all over the earth. (Out of sight, out of mind.)
>
>You can get to the `real' world just by following the trail back on
>a bag of groceries or a computer. Pretty soon you end up in some
>industrial slum with toxic waste and sewage running down the middle
>of the street with skinny little kids playing in it. A few miles up
>the road, we get to the palace of the compardors with their stolen
>native artifacts, glass living rooms and global cell phones with
>private numbers to US corporate HQ. Their two-class society as its
>beneficiaries too.
>
>What's the mystery?
James Baldwin wrote, "As long as you think you're white, there's no hope for you." The same can be said about being American: "As long as you think you're American, there's no hope for you." The more national privileges you gain, the more class power you lose.
A hopeful sign is that neither racial nor national privileges are what they used to be. The Empire of Whiteness, the Empire of Innocents, is running out of gas, economically speaking. Many of today's white youths see that, having taken the Red Pill. They are beginning to feel that whiteness is a sorry mess of pottage and would rather identify with Blacks, Indians, the oppressed, than with white rulers. That shows in culture and politics. The same goes for Jewish youths, the best of whom would rather identify with Palestinians than Zionists. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>