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<div>Hm. An organization is "white supremacist" if it does not see race as the result of systematic and systemic racializing oppression? There are many, many political organizations in the US. Very few of them have an internal intellectual discourse on the nature of priveledge and race. Many of them are multi-racial.
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<div>Let's take a conrete and idiosyncratic example from my own experience: the workers in a hospital have a union. The RNs, highest wage, are mostly white and filipina. The service unit, lowest wage, is mostly black and recent immigrants from latin america. The techs, in between, are a big mix of everyone. The CEO is african american; there are a number of out gay managers, and a number of mormon managers (not overlapping!).
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<div>The hospital workers, going into negotiations for a new contract where management is going to try to strip them of (or two-tier, ie strip from future workers) a chunk of their economic benefits as well as their pension. Management is under great financial pressure, because the hospital is the public-sector county hospital downtown, and while for-profit hospital five miles up a highway make millions off the lucrative market, this hospital cares for the poor, the undocumented, the uninsured--- in effect subsidizing the for-profits (these workers also have better benefits than those at the for-profits). Among new births at the hospital, about 80% are undocumented, and it is common to hear murmurs among the white-collar employees in the business office things like "we're out of a job in a few years if the mexicans don't start giving birth at the other hospital.", or much less polite versions of that.
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<div>The 2000 workers, 73% of them dues-paying members of their union, elect a large bargaining team, about 120 people, to go to negotiations. They have a series of marches, rallies, unseat a county commissioner who opposed them, and do a variety of things in the course of their campaign. Typically, 80 come to monthly meetings, 70 to bargaining, a couple dozen give weekends up to walk for pro-worker pol candidates, 800 come to a rally, etc.
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<div>Many of the white RNs complain about the filipina RNs speaking tagalog at work, because it 'excludes' them. Many african-american janitors make the same complaint about latino co-workers, with the same reasoning. Many of the workers who are militant in the way they interact with mgmt on a daily basis, complain about the 'mormon mafia' upstairs that just screwed them on their on-call procedures or whatever. Others complain about the 'faggots' in mgmt.
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<div>After a march on the ceo, several black members from radiology refuse to participate in the union any longer, expressing that they think the attack on the ceo specifically was because he is black; one of these workers had, in the past, a white steward refuse to file a grievance about racism. On the whole, the african-american workers are by far proportionately the most members of and active in the union. Another black member drops membership because she sees a report on Lou Dobbs that SEIU is for immigrant rights, which she is against, and organizes a small campaign to get more folks in radiology to drop. Many of the white workers are also conservative on this issue, especially in the security department, altho there everyone belongs to the union, because membership is socially enforced among the guards. Some of the nurses, especially on the baby floors, refuse to be members of the union, because it is not an organization of professionals, but includes 'everybody' (blacks and latinos in dietary and janitorial); and they hope the california nurses association would come to town so they could join that instead, which is a craft union for nurses only.
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<div>A white nurse who is very active, and occasionally works out of the shop on staff at the union, who has largely progressive politics, sparks a big fight with other more radical staff members after her and some co-worker friends are heard reflecting that they're glad Schwartzenegger signed Tookie Williams' death warrant. A filipina republican nurse who comes on staff as an organizer walks out of a staff meeting one day where a veteran pro-choice organizer is speaking about her experience in political organizing. And there is a mexican-american nurse on staff, who is against gay marriage, abortion, and even immigration!, but is an amazingly dedicated organizer, passionate unionist, and I would argue fits the definition of class warrior.
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<div>In fact, on the bargaining team, about 50% of the team are republicans, many of them the most militant unionists. Among the others on the bargaining team there are dems, apolitical people, a socialist (regarded as a wingnut by most of the hospital), some progressives, and an RN who's also leader of the local chapter of ACORN.
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<div>The chief steward of the service unit (which is mostly non-white) is a white guy, a security guard, who is arguably a good combative steward to have on your grievance, but has an abrasive personality, has made many enemies, socially conservative, and is regarded by a number of black workers in the unit as a racist. He also has an adoptive black daughter. Another worker, a black woman in janitorial, wants to run against him for the chief steward office, and they have frequent arguments about union stuff in meetings, in which race is a never-mentioned subtext.
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<div>While tensions outlined above are not the predominant fact of life in the hospital, nor shared by everyone, they frequently bubble up in meetings or bargaining caucuses. </div>
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<div>This CEO, months later, is revealed to have dug the hospital many millions in the whole without reporting it, the hospital offices are raided by the police, and he is put under criminal investigation for embezzlement. Some of the disputed kickback-contracts were between him and former black business colleagues back in chicago, and his public position is that the allegations are racially-motivated. Meanwhile, the hospital continues to be treated by the powers that be in nevada as the 'mess downtown for the immigrants and gangbangers', conservatives roll their eyes at the financial meldown, and when politicians step in to offer a bailout, make it contingent on a rollback of the workers benefits. Letters to the paper about the hospital seethe with condescension and disgust for the predominantly workin-class, predominantly people-of-color patients and workers at the downtown hospital. There is an unstated racial element to the self-righteous way many denounce the disgraced ceo, a bit of a double standard in a town in which the vast majority of corruption is official, legal, white, rich, and privat-sector.
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<div>Certainly, the hospital operates in a political and cultural environment of white supremacy, among other things, at the big level. But whenever I get closer in to the details than that, I find white priveledge analysis a blunt tool that must be conditioned with a lot of 'false consciousness' caveats to be of any explanatory relevance for ordinary peoples' opinions. Is the union a white supremacist organization there, because it does not have the internal intellectual discourse about race that bitch said is necessary to not be white supremacist? Are the workers? Which ones? I don't think it's 'clearly understood', on any more than a gut level, by a small or nonexistent percentage of workers there, that "the liberation of whites is bound up with and dependent on the liberation of people of color"; I don't think people think in those terms at all. Altho industrial unionism itself, the conviction of workers in different departments and skills and wage levels, and races and genders, to stick together because "we're stronger together", is that something like that liberation thing? Or not? And so, are they white supremacists?
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">It depends on what people mean, but if they're just "including" people of<br>color then, yeah, it's white supremacist. If race is seen as cultural
<br>difference rather than as the result of systematic and systemic racializing<br>oppression then, yeah, it's white supremacist. If it's not clearly<br>understood that, as the pithy expression goes, the liberation of whites is
<br>bound up with and dependent on the liberation of people of color and the<br>liberation of male workers is bound up and dependent on the liberation of<br>women workers, then -- yeah -- it's still white supremacist.
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