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How do you respond?Submitted by Prometheus 6 on June 7, 2006 - 6:26am.
on Race and Identity Why White People Are Afraid It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may be self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves and the system. The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned... A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have -- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable...in a world in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that possibility can be scary. A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow "they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more generally, but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear of the depravity that lives in our own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the barbaric things we have done to them? A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism: The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people.
"a totalitarian police state to justify retaining extreme minority rights" The global police state already exists. It was colonialist in its earliest formation, and neo-colonialist in its mid-to-late twentieth century phase. These hegemonic systems maintained the status quo of white supremacy and white privilege worldwide, and provided their architects and engineers with the tools and methods needed to extract the natural and human resources of the so-called Third World to create wealth for the privileged elite. The current system of global domination relies on capitalism to preserve Western hegemony (white supremacy), but tends to operate indirectly through faux "global" institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO. But some of the wheels may soon come off the bus. The rise of China and the other Asian economies pose the greatest threat to white supremacy since its emergence in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unfortunately, China has embraced capitalism. This is particularly a problem for African nations. Given the abundance of vital raw materials available on the African continent, Africans will find themselves answering to a new set of neo-colonial masters anxious to move in and initiate new programs of exploitation to generate wealth for a newly emerging capitalist elite. Post new comment |
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is a totalitarian police state to justify retaining extreme minority rights. What's always been compelling is the intellectual gymnastics that defenders of the status quo went through to simultaneously defend the US and apartheid South Africa. It's not really about numbers. It's not really about participatory democracy or free speech or free anything. It's about identity theft. White folks, per se, have an identity that is based on theft. They could simply choose to abandon the identity and things might work out better - but, it's worth saying that there are a number of bad, bad folks of all colors that won't allow this "transformation." Transcending "whiteness" is not the same, nor as important as face the idea of "white supremacy." So much to lose, so little time.