Angela Davis on Shulamith Firestone

In the wake of Shulamith Firestone’s untimely death, a number of tributes have appeared praising her work in feminist theory.  While Firestone was a creative and risky thinker, unafraid of advancing drastically counter-intuitive ideas, it would be remiss to fail to point out that she hewed quite closely to one of the most central dogmas of our society – white supremacy.  Angela Davis comments:

One of the earliest theoretical works associated with the contemporary feminist movement that dealt with the subject of rape and race was Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution.” Racism in general, so Firestone claims, is actually an extension of sexism. Invoking the biblical notion that “. . . the races are no more than the various parents and siblings of the Family of Man,” she develops a construct defining the white man as father, the white woman as wife and mother, and Black people as the children. Transposing Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex into racial terms, Firestone implies that Black men harbor an uncontrollable desire for sexual relations with white women. They want to kill the father and sleep with the mother. Moreover, in order to “be a man,” the Black man must

… untie himself from his bond with the white female,
relating to her if at all only in a degrading way. In
addition, due to his virulent hatred and jealousy of
her Possessor, the white man, he may lust after her as
a thing to be conquered in order to revenge himself on
the white man.25

Like Brownmiller, MacKellar and Russell, Firestone succumbs to the old racist sophistry of blaming the victim. Whether innocently or consciously, their pronouncements have facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist. Their historical myopia further prevents them from comprehending that the portrayal of Black men as rapists reinforces racism’s open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women’s bodies. The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality. If Black men have their eyes on white women as sexual objects, then Black women must certainly welcome the sexual attentions of white men. Viewed as “loose women” and whores, Black women’s cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy.

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Privilege and Politics

Trayvon Martin’s murder has provoked a response unlike anything I’ve seen in my decade or so of anti-racist activism.  Though cases like the Jena 6 drew a nationwide response, Trayvon’s case, undoubtedly aided by social media, has served as a galvanizing force that has not remained a lone instance of racism, but has worked to push the cases of the thousands of African Americans slain by cops, judges, and vigilantes into the foreground.  Because of Trayvon, we now know about Ramarley, Rekia, and Bo too.  This is an extremely exciting development, and while it is still too early to tell, I’m hopeful that this represents the beginning of a new movement against white supremacy in the US, dedicated to tearing down the new Jim Crow.

As always, the rise of a new movement has highlighted important theoretical differences among those fighting racism.  The disagreements and arguments that follow from these differences are an important aspect of a democratic movement culture, and are to be welcomed.  They give all of us a chance to learn from each other, to figure out what we really think, and to try and craft a strategic orientation for our movement.

In the case of this movement, the debate that has surfaced most prominently concerns the question of white privilege.  It was raised primarily by a youtube video, in which a white activist chastised other white activists for wearing ‘I am Trayvon Martin’ shirts.  Doing so, she argued, obscures the white privilege of these activists, and makes it seem as if Trayvon’s murder were merely an arbitrary injustice, and not part of a system of white supremacy that relentless oppresses African Americans.  Generally, white activists need to recognize their privilege and the fact that they are closer to George Zimmerman than Trayvon.  Only by doing so will they be able to overcome the racism with which they’ve been socialized.

The video set off a debate.  Sherry Wolf responded with a piece criticizing the notion of white privilege, and arguing that white workers do not, in fact, benefit from racism.  Divided as a class by racism, they suffer the exploitation and oppression visited upon them by the capitalist class even more intensely, since they are unable to unite as a class to combat it.  Sherry’s post prompted a thoughtful rejoinder from Alex Fields, which has helped to clarify some of the main issues and stakes involved in the debate.  Alex and I had a short back and forth on facebook, which I’ve posted below, before agreeing to go public.  In what follows, I will respond to the points Alex raised in both his post and on facebook, and try to lay out what I think the most important critiques of white privilege theory are, and why I think the basic position Sherry defends is a robust prescription for anti-racist politics.

To begin with, I thought it might be helpful to lay out what I perceive as the points of agreement between myself and Alex.  If I am mistaken about any of these, please feel free to correct me.  Alex and I both have caveats or different emphases on these points, but I take this to be the general ground of agreement.

1.) White supremacy is central to contemporary American society.  African Americans and other people of color are oppressed in manifold ways, from mass incarceration to being treated as unreasonably angry when they try to bring up racist oppression.  This is a system that must be destroyed, and collective political action is necessary for this to be accomplished.

2.) The existence of white supremacy means that white Americans have untold advantages over African Americans in many aspects of life.  While the degree to which whites can take advantage of these varies tremendously with class, they nonetheless constitute the material basis of racism among white Americans.  If whites were not actually in better funded schools, able to escape the worst ravages of mass incarceration etc, racism would simply not be an effective ideology.  In a number of crucial ways, whites have it better.

3.) Part of building an effective movement against white supremacy involves white activists understanding their privilege, and taking it into account when building solidarity with people of color.

This is a substantial area of agreement on crucial political points, especially in the context of the ideology of post-racial America.  I was glad to see Alex’s reply to Sherry written in a comradely (though still appropriately polemical) tone, since the disagreements that exist between these positions should not prevent us from seeing each other as comrades in the struggle against white supremacy.  Nonetheless, there do exist disagreements between us on questions that are central to the movement.  These center around the relationship of racism to capitalism and working class interests, and the political tendencies of white privilege theory.  In a way, this is an awkward debate, since Alex’s critique of my position and my critique of his revolve around what we take to be implied by premises the other accepts, and not as much what the other is actually arguing.  In such a debate, there are going to be lots of accusations of burning straw men, which can be frustrating.  This is, I think, unfortunately unavoidable.  I am going to try and keep such accusations to a minimum, since their proliferation can obscure the real issues in the debate.  With that absurdly long exercise in throat clearing completed, it is time to get down to business.

In her essay, Sherry argues that racism serves to divide black and white workers, making both more vulnerable to capital.  Thus, accepting racist ideas is not in white workers’ interest (note: this is different from claiming there is no material basis for the racism of white workers.  Every ideology has material basis).  Though she does not explicitly state this, she assumes (correctly, I believe) that racism is itself a product of capitalism.  Alex argues that this perspective is mistaken, and leads to bad political conclusions.  He describes two:

If by overcoming capitalism we get rid of both capitalism and the core of racism, but by getting rid of racism we only do damage to the capitalist system without ending it, it seems clearly to follow that it’s more worthwhile to struggle directly against capitalism. Second, there’s a difference in HOW we ought to struggle against racism on these competing views. Sherry pretty explicitly says that racism is a tool used by the ruling class to oppress workers, and that white workers do not materially experience privilege. If she’s right, then it follows that anti-racist struggles are just a struggle against racism in the capitalist power structure, and not struggles against racism within working class institutions, for example. This is a huge difference, and I think the former position is only a little bit different from saying that we really ought to just be struggling against capitalism, and not against racism as independent from capitalism.

I do not believe either of these actually follow from Sherry’s argument.  In fact, her argument explicitly contradicts both of these claims.  Sherry argues that white workers cannot pursue their class interests successfully (at least not very far) so long as they are divided (or divide themselves) from black workers by their racism.  It follows ineluctably from this assertion that the only way white workers can pursue their class interests successfully is if racism is destroyed or significantly weakened.  In other words, there is no struggle directly against capitalism.  It is impossible to successfully confront capitalist class power without smashing the barriers to working class unity.  If this is not done, we can forget about getting very far in expropriating the expropriators.

The second conclusion attributed to Sherry’s argument does not follow for much the same reason.  Racism in working class institutions prevents those institutions from effectively damaging capitalist class power.  Therefore, if we want those institutions to do their job and play a role in helping us stick it to the bosses, we need to purge them of racism.  Only by doing so can we forge the institutions we need to both defend our basic class interests and, hopefully, go on the offensive.

Simply put, neither of the baleful political conclusions Alex argues are entailed by Sherry’s argument actually follow.  If white workers’ class interests are damaged by racism, only by attacking it viciously wherever it reveals its head can those interests be pursued.  In Alex’s original reply, he argued that this line of argument makes little headway against privilege theory, as “White privilege analysis does not say that working class white people are better off under racist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy than they would be under an alternative system like socialism; it says rather that within our current system of racism, white people in all classes are given real privileges that people of color are not.”  But as my explanation of these points implies, this is misleading, since the comparison is not only between a socialist society and our current one.  Even reforms which would leave white supremacy and capitalism in place, such as ending the drug war and mass incarceration, would be of benefit to white workers.  They would weaken the role of war on crime rhetoric in binding white workers to the state, and free up money to be spent on redistributive programs that would weaken market dependency and thus strengthen labor’s hand.  In other words, even within our current system of racism, white workers would benefit not from racism being strengthened, but from it being damaged.

As a final point on this side of the debate, it is curious that Alex asserts these conclusions follow from Sherry’s basic argument, given the political practice of the organization she is a part of.  A quick glance at socialistworker.org reveals that the ISO devotes easily as much time to issues of racial oppression as it does to ‘direct’ struggles against capital.  If it is a logical conclusion of the theory that the ISO holds that struggles against racism are less important than struggles against capital, what are we to conclude from the fact that their political practice seems to include no recognition of this?  I have no doubt the sectarian trolls of the left have all kinds of speculations on this point, but if you accept, as I think Alex does, that comrades in the ISO are committed Marxists and sincerely dedicated to overthrowing white supremacy, this is a real question.

On the white privilege side of things, the debate centers around the political tendencies operative in privilege theory.  I argued that there is a tendency to focus on changing white behavior, and that collective political action fades to the background.  Since such action is the only way the institutions of white supremacy in the US are going to sustain much damage, this emphasis on changing behavior inhibits the struggle against racism.  Alex replied, quite correctly, that while such an emphasis may predominate in some white privilege theory, that doesn’t invalidate the theory any more than the sometimes stiff structural focus of Marxists invalidates it.  I want to argue, however, that this focus is actually dominant in white privilege theory.  To understand why, I think it is worth stepping back for a moment and contextualizing the theory.

Critics of white privilege theory often argue that it is a result of diminished expectations.  They often do so, as Sherry does, by asserting that things like the right not to be shot down while walking in a neighborhood are rights, not privileges, and it constricts our horizons to categorize them as such.  I think it’s right to categorize privilege theory as the product of diminished expectations, but that this is a fairly weak example.  Rather, I would argue that white privilege theory is a product of the defeat of the movements of the sixties and seventies, and that the emphasis on individual behavior we find there arose as an alternative to collective political action.  In the wake of those defeats, it became far easier to imagine changing the behavior of individuals than organizing a collective movement around systemic change.  Political pessimism wrote itself into political theory through a variety of ways – Roediger’s adaptation of social history to argue that racism came from below, for example, dovetailed politically with the theoretically very different arguments for a Foucauldian emphasis on the micro-politics of power.  Not all of this, of course, was detrimental.  Some of it filled in gaps left by more systemically-focused theories of racism.  But what became hegemonic was an anti-politics – a turn away from collective action towards individual rehabilitation.  Again, I’m not arguing that some of this wasn’t necessary and important.  What is problematic is the way this focus excludes political action.  It’s legible in the video Sherry is responding to.  There, whites are encouraged to ‘critique norms,’ ‘give access to discourse,’ ‘raise children without indoctrination’ – important tasks both, but there is no mention of the need for collective political action.  Some might say. as Alex has, that this is not in contradiction with such action, which is true.  But, like white privilege theorists themselves often assert, silence is itself symptomatic.

In his replies, Alex offers a more nuanced theory of changing white behavior, arguing that it is necessary for white activists to realize their privilege and work to undo it in their organizing work.  As he says “collective action and attempts at solidarity will usually fail if the white folks involved are unable to challenge the racist patterns in their own thought and behavior.”  Here, changing white behavior is not a replacement for political action, as it so often is elsewhere, but rather its precondition.  This is a much stronger argument, and I agree with much of it.  Nonetheless, I think it is overextended, and that this overextension is politically harmful.  While it is vitally important to create antiracist spaces in our movements, I don’t think it’s true that movements will usually fail if white privilege is not systematically confronted and resolved within movements.  There’s a test case here in the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964.  There, thousands of mostly white college students from across the country descended on Mississippi for a voter registration drive.  As white privilege theorists would predict, they caused a lot of trouble.  Coming from white backgrounds, they didn’t realize the danger that they were asking black folks to put themselves in just by voting.  Their privilege blinded them to the fact that they could be putting someone in danger simply by knocking on their door.  Many of them had far less developed racial awareness than the majority of white activists today, coming from liberal backgrounds in which the south was conceived as a totalitarian society in contrast to the liberal north.  Racism was seen as a regional aberration, not a systemic feature of American society.  Yet and still, Freedom Summer was a success.  It undoubtedly would have been more effective if the privilege of these students had been confronted and worked through.  But their failure to do so did not sabotage the movement.

Now, I am unequivocally not arguing that white privilege in movements is not a problem, or that it does not hamper movements, or anything like that.  Whenever it surfaces, it needs to be confronted.  But identifying white privilege as one of the most important factors in the failure of collective political action leads to a mistaken political perspective that cannot be a solid foundation on which to build a movement.  Rather than white privilege, I would argue that what explains the failure of significant movements to develop is the same thing that explains the general weakness of the left – the defeats of the last wave, the hegemony of liberal pro-democratic party politics, the legacy of Stalinism, the implosion of significant far left groups, etc.  If we think that white privilege is the most important thing holding our movements for racial justice back, we’re likely to miss a good deal of this, which makes it very difficult to address successfully.  Again, this isn’t to suggest that addressing white privilege in movements isn’t important – it’s crucial.  Assigning an improper explanatory role to it (or anything else, for that matter), however, does nothing to strengthen our movements.

I hope this does as well clarifying my position as Alex’s piece did his.  These issues are absolutely central to anyone concerned with rejuvenating Left politics in the US, and I am very heartened to see them being discussed and debated among comrades.

 

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A Note on the Affective Dimensions of Liberal Intervention-Mongering

‘fashion changes.  style remains’ – coco chanel

In the world of white liberalism, this season’s must have accessory is a Kony2012 bracelet.  Having wandered aimlessly for a bit since the heady days of Save Darfur, the fashionistas of philanthropy have at last discovered an accoutrement which highlights their morality, cosmopolitanism, and general beneficence of spirit.  Though the accessorizing hits different accents this time around (notably a focus on ‘the children,’ which was lacking in the Save Darfur campaign), the essential style remains the same, based on a certain color combination whose potential for customization has proven limitless: white people save brown victims from brown villains.

An interesting development in this season’s iteration of the theme, however, has been the rapidity with which it has met opposition.  Immediately after the line’s immaculately choreographed launch, critics from a variety of quarters pointed out its disconnect from its purported objects of concern, its imbrication with imperial designs on the continent, and the stains of racist discourse discoloring the whole endeavor.

The prominence of this critique has provided for an interesting look into how the liberal interventionist crowd reacts to criticism of their project.  The dominant response seems to be a sort of wounded aggrievement – a shock that one could criticize such a noble endeavor, combined with an aggressive attack on those making the criticism: ‘what do YOU think should be done?’

The stubborn attachment to the ideals of the campaign reveals a bit of the affective dimensions of liberal interventionism.  On one level, the reasons for the attachments formed by the campaign’s supporters are clear enough – they allow them to see themselves as the paragons of morality, they validate nationalist narratives about the world being a place full of problems that America solves, etc.  But as significant as these are, I don’t think they quite explain the ardor with which supporters proclaim ‘something must be DONE!’

To understand this, I think it’s necessary to consider the role this campaign plays  within broader liberal ideology.  For me, this ideology is best summarized by PZ Myers’ response to Terry Eagleton’s argument that liberals refuse to admit that ‘the traumatic truth of  human history is a tortured body’:

If we want a signifier for the human condition, imagine the culture we would live in now if, instead of a dead corpse on an instrument of torture, our signifier was a child staring in wonder at the stars.

As a response to Eagleton’s argument, it’s primarily a touching display of the most syrupy naiveté.  But it’s interesting for the way it reveals the liberal refusal to confront the basic truth of Eagleton’s argument: our world is one of massive exploitation, starvation, oppression, torture, and misery.  For radicals, these are the foundational facts that determine our orientation to the world.

The liberal faith in our world’s basic reformability, however, requires that all of this be denied, or at least suppressed.  This is, I think, the role campaigns such as Kony2012 play.  They are strategies of containment, a means of partially recognizing the truth of history while quarantining its radical implications.  No ideology, after all, is ever based on pure falsehood, but rather exists in a complex relationship of repression, misdirection, misemphasis, and exaggeration with people’s lived experience.  The Kony campaign, and liberal moral panics like it, allows a limited acknowledgment of the scale of human suffering that exists in the world.  At the same time, however, it immediately works to contain this acknowledgment.  Here, one is reminded of Domenico Losurdo’s argument that liberalism works by creating sacred and profane spaces – the former are where the rights espoused by liberal philosophy apply, the latter where their negation rules.  In the period of classical liberalism, this allowed philosophers like Locke to create a rights-based system in England, while denying the rights of the indentured servants, Africans, and Indians in the New World.  Today, the logic of the spatialization is slightly different, as it works to contain the reality of oppression to distinct spaces (Africa, usually), reinforcing the appearance of justice in the West and simultaneously positioning it as the agent of salvation of the profane spaces.

This dynamic, I think, explains the fervor with which liberal calls to ‘DO something’ are made.  The limited eruption of the reality of human history into liberal ideology provokes a fevered counter-reaction, in which the oppression glimpsed must be extinguished as quickly as possible.  Once this is accomplished, the world can return to its former happy state.  It’s not perfect, of course.  Crooked timber of humanity and all that.  But once dark blots like Kony are removed, it’s still a beautiful place.

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Daniel Guérin – Negroes on the March

From the archive – Daniel Guérin’s report on the Black liberation struggle in the United States.  An excerpt from his longer piece on the US, Où Va Le Peuple Américain?

View this document on Scribd

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Racism and American Libertarian Thought

So the story of Ron Paul’s alleged racism is once more making the rounds.  First surfacing in 2008 as a result of James Kirchick’s reporting in The New Republic, its most recent iteration is an article by Jonathan Chait, a wretched corporatist Democrat whose motivation in rehashing Kirchick’s story was probably concern that Paul’s positions on the wars, drug policy and the like would embarrass Chait’s beloved commander in chief (Chait has recently written on how liberals are afraid of power, a phobia that his unrelenting sycophancy seems geared towards proving he does not possess).  Though the charges are old, their re-emergence is nonetheless a salutary development, as Paul’s star has risen in recent months with the eruption of class anger against Wall St and the perpetual implosion of the Republican primary field.  Given this (undeserved) street cred, it’s useful for people to be reminded of Paul’s entanglements with racism and other odious discourses.  The gist of the story is that Paul published a series of newsletters in the 1980s and 1990s (which ended up providing much of the seed money with which he launched his political career) that contained a whole host of rather nasty bits on pretty much every oppressed group in American society.  Chait gives us a small sample:

This “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism” was hardly the first time one of Paul’s publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author–presumably Paul–wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.” That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which “blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot.” The newsletter inveighed against liberals who “want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare,” adding, “Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems.”

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters’ commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa’s transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a “destruction of civilization” that was “the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara”; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending “South African Holocaust.” …

The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, “a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby,” and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted “a well-known Libertarian editor” as saying, “The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is ‘Silence = Death.’ But shouldn’t it be ‘Sodomy = Death’?” Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to “poison the blood supply.” “Am I the only one sick of hearing about the ‘rights’ of AIDS carriers?” a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” which is false.

Going over the material here again, I found myself wondering how Paul’s supporters attempted to defend such rank filth.  This lead me to Julian Sanchez & Dave Weigel’s article, ‘Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?’  Weigel is a libertarian writer, but someone I nonetheless respect as he has, in the past, shown himself to be perfectly willing to confront racism in conservative ranks.  He continues that work in this piece, which treats the newsletters as the abomination that they are, but also reveals that the question of their authorship is not straightforward.  Paul maintains he has no idea who wrote the offending pieces, and has repudiated the sentiments contained therein.  The smart money appears to be on one Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr, a mainstay on the libertarian right in the US for forty years and a longtime associate of Paul’s.  As Sanchez and Weigel point out, this doesn’t exactly exonerate the candidate.  Even if Paul himself is not a racist, he was undeniably willing to profit off of the vilest sort of racial obloquy.  However, they also contend that even if Paul has failed to come clean about his past, his current conduct, such as his willingness to call out the racism of the war on drugs, evince a clear repudiation of any association with racism.  To me, this is less than convincing.  I am not the least bit interested in what Paul believes in his heart of hearts.  His political conduct reveals that he is more than willing to draw on the language of white supremacy when he thinks it will benefit his cause, and equally willing to discard it when he believes it will not.  The best one can say of Paul after reading Sanchez and Weigel’s reporting is that he is a consummate opportunist.

What interested me most about their piece, however, was not their evaluation of Paul, but rather the peek they afford into the racial politics of American liberatarianism.  Lew Rockwell, it turns out, is no minor crank.  He is the founder and chairman of the board of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that aspires to be a sort of organizing center for right-wing libertarians and the most important institution for disseminating the ideas of Austrian economics.  Reading some of Rockwell’s publications, the likelihood that he was responsible for penning the words quoted above appears high.  Rockwell has a habit of publishing openly white supremacist material, such as this gem from Samuel Francis:

In the first place, the natural differentiation of the races in intellectual capacities implies that of the two major races in the United States today, only one possesses the inherent capacity to create and sustain the level of civilization that has historically characterized its homelands in Europe and America [note: this is level of civilization of which Francis is so proud]….And secondly, the recognition of racial realities implies that most of the efforts now deployed to combat racism…are misplaced, based on a profound misconception of racial capacities…Those policies and laws are the fruit of a discredited egalitarian mythology that animates the federal leviathan’s perpetual war against civil society and debilitates white resistance to the gathering storm of racial revolution that the enemies, white and non-white, of the white race and its civilization now openly preach and prepare. (Qtd. in Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment, 173)

This appeared in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, a publication Rockwell edited with Murray Rothbard.  Rothbard is the single most important figure, after von Mises and Hayek themselves, in the strains of libertarian thought that claim adherence to Austrian principles , and is the subject of breathless adulation by his followers (the account linked to reminds me of nothing so much as the old Stalinist mythology of Lenin, in which young Ilyich, upon hearing of his brother’s execution for populist terrorism, exclaimed ‘No, we will not follow that road.  That is not the road to take,’ and, presto! Bolshevism was born).  As would befit a man with such a reputation for individualism and creativity, Rothbard didn’t merely publish the racist views of others: he penned a number himself.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rothbard and Rockwell devised a political strategy for American libertarians that hoped to inflame class and racial resentments among white Americans in the hopes of turning them against the welfare state, the Federal Reserve, and all the other bogeymen of the libertarian imagination.  The fruits of this strategy are not pretty.  Take, for example, Rothbard’s manifesto for this orientation, the 1992 essay ‘Right-Wing Populism.’  In it, he laments the ‘massive scare campaign’ mounted against David Duke, the former klansman and inveterate racist who briefly rose to prominence in Republican politics in Louisiana.

For Rothbard, Duke’s ascendency confirmed the potential of a libertarian politics fused with racial resentment:  ‘It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what’s wrong with any of that?’  (The notion that one must call for equal rights for whites, of course, implies that whites are currently oppressed, a proposition at the core of contemporary white supremacist discourse.)  Rothbard proposed that libertarians embark on a two-pronged strategy.  First, ‘build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-moulders, based on correct ideas’, and second, ‘tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and economically.’  This distinction between an esoteric and exoteric knowledge is, of course, a familiar one in conservative intellectual history.  In Rothbard’s case, the libertarian intelligentsia, imbued with the all-powerful understanding of Ludwig von Mises Thought, will use their correct ideas to shape society, while the roused masses will perform the work of tearing down the existing statist institutions.  For Rothbard, the arousal of the masses is best accomplished through appeals to racism.  Libertarians should remind the masses that ‘The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of “corporate liberal” Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.’

He goes on to propose a list of eight programmatic demands for the new populist libertarianism, which includes items such as ‘Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.’ ; ‘Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire “civil rights” structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.’ ;

Rothbard's agents of liberty

‘Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or “inside traders” but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.’ ; and ‘Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.’  As Rothbard’s fascoid rhetoric about the police reveals, he is more than happy to compromise on aspects of supposed libertarian principle to accomplish the goal of rousing the masses against the dusky statist parasites.  Appeals to tradition similarly trump libertarian theory, as Rothbard indicates a willingness to compromise on ‘such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and neighborhoods, that is, to “community standards.”‘  Of course, as Corey Robin has argued, such private and local forms of authority have historically been the most important sources of authoritarianism in the US.

‘Right-Wing Populism’ was far from Rothbard’s only venture into race-baiting.  In the sickeningly titled ‘Their Malcolm…and Mine,’ Rothbard expostulates on Malcolm X and the legacy of Black nationalism.  Engaging in the venerable white supremacist tradition of complaining about the injustice of a holiday for Dr. King, Rothbard raises the spectre of a holiday for Malcolm and cries out in anguish, ‘Isn’t “Dr.” King for Heaven’s sake, enough?’ Later, he exalts Malcolm at King’s expense, writing ‘he was not a fraudulent intellectual with a rococo Black Baptist minister style, like “Dr.” King.’  The Tea Party’s obsession with the credentials of a certain prominent African American is, it appears, not a new phenomenon on the American right.  But even worse than Rothbard’s contempt for King is his praise for Malcolm: ‘He carried himself with great pride and dignity; his speaking style was incisive and sparkled with intelligence and sardonic wit. In short, his attraction for blacks was and is that he acted white. It is a ridiculous liberal cliché that blacks are just like whites but with a different skin color; but in Malcolm’s case, regardless of his formal ideology, it really seemed to be true.’  Rarely have more offensive words been offered as approbation.

Most peculiarly, Rothbard, who was himself Jewish, appears to have been something of an anti-semite.  His own self-description of himself was as ‘a pro-Christian Jew who thinks that everything good in Western Civilization is traceable to Christianity’ (paging Anders Breivik).  His defence of Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan contains the unpleasant assertion that ‘Rosenthal’s [one of Buchanan’s Jewish foes] proboscis tells him that Pat is an anti-Semite.’  An essay of his on Origins of the Welfare State in America evinces a disconcerting interest in the Jewishness of many of the players in the story.  An associate of Rothbard’s, who wrote a piece entitled ‘Why must Christians routinely grovel and apologize for crimes against Jews which they never committed?’, recounted that ‘It is not Christian anti-semitism, but, as Murray Rothbard used to note, Jewish goy-bashing which has become the characteristic act of tastelessness in our time.’

Rothbard’s apparent anti-semitism has provoked the expected response from his acolytes: He’s Jewish!  This is hardly a serious defense.  Anyone who believes that Jews cannot be anti-semites is obviously unacquainted with the writings of Gilad Atzmon.  More generally, Rothbard and his supporters have argued that it is impossible for him to be a racist, since racism is a ‘collectivist’ ideology, and Rothbard was a principled individualist.  This is roughly on the same level as a misogynist arguing it is impossible for him to hate women, because his mother was one.  Rothbard was undeniably willing to spread racist ideology to further his political ends, at the very least.  Moreover, even if we accept the questionable assertion that libertarianism and racism are logically incompatible, there are a multitude of ways the two can still co-exist.  Rothbard could simply be an inconsistent libertarian.  Or, he could fail to recognize his own beliefs as racist.  Regardless of its insufficiency, however, this defense at least has the virtue of raising the issue of the relation of political theory to racist canons of knowledge.  For as profoundly as the ideology of white supremacy appears to have suffused the American libertarian movement, I would at least be willing to grant that there is no necessary logical connection between libertarianism and racism.

Why, then, have the two had the relationship they have?  One answer is suggested by Rothbard’s own writings.  In his review of that infamous tome of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve,  Rothbard raves about how the book has scientifically established the ‘almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.’  For Rothbard, this is a development to be celebrated.  Why?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

‘An operation in defense of private property.’  I doubt that racialist science has ever received such an honest description from one of its partisans.  Here, it seems to me, lies the crux of the affinity between libertarianism and racism.  By arguing so strenuously that markets are the most efficient and most just form of social organization, libertarians tend to be unwilling to attribute the continued racial stratification of American society to the operation of markets.  With this explanation unavailable, others must be found.  Now obviously a belief in Black inferiority is not the only other option here.  Some libertarians argue that, ironically, it is anti-poverty programs themselves that perpetuate racial stratification, as they eliminate the incentives to work hard, save, etc, and thus hurt the very people they were implemented to help.  But even this genteel version of the argument has inbuilt tendencies towards racist scapegoating, as  this sort of talk inevitably seems to descend into descriptions of a ‘culture of poverty’ and other ugly tropes.  What begins as a structural explanation slides all too easily into an argument about the deficiencies of racial minorities themselves.  As Rothbard’s example shows, however, some strains of libertarian thought embrace racism full stop, arguing that racial stratification is simply the expression of the genetic superiority of the white race.  The market simply articulates what is written in our genes.  Thus, while considered as abstract propositions, there may be no necessary relationship between libertarian thought and racism, in the historical conditions in which both exist, there does exist an elective affinity between the two.

At the same time, Rothbard’s writings also evince a deep libidinal investment in white supremacy.  His fantasies about police violence being unleashed on vagrants and muggers reveal a real sadism, a desire to see non-white bodies broken.  This emotional connection to the politics of white supremacy is connected with, but not reducible to, the elective affinity described above.  Here, Corey Robin’s recent writing about conservatism seems relevant.  Robin argues that conservatism is always a defense of threatened hierarchies.  It is ‘a meditation on–and theoretical rendition of–the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.’  For Robin, this is the unifying thread linking family values, the free market, imperialism, and racism.  Clearly not every strand of conservatism embraces all of these causes, but what links all of them are a defense of a certain hierarchy – be it in the workplace, in the family, or between nations.  Libertarianism fits in here as a defense of  the subordination of employers to bosses, but also more generally as an endorsement of a hierarchical society.  Libertarian polemics narrate a heroic tale of productive entrepreneurial ubermenschen and their parasitic antagonists.  In these stories, those at the top of society deserve everything that has come to them, as do those on the bottom.  Hierarchy is valorized a moral good.  This gesture is generalized from economic life to life in general in Rothbard’s beloved essay ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.’  Here, in the course of arguing that Leftist egalitarianism is morally abhorrent, Rothbard slips into a long excursus on the inferiority of women, arguing that the universality of women’s oppression is itself the greatest proof of male superiority.  The emotional attachment to hierarchy in libertarian polemic, though it may originally center on the workplace, seems easily extendable to other forms of hierarchy as well.

Ron Paul’s newsletters are thus not an aberration in the political tradition with which he is affiliated.  American libertarian thought has some deep entanglements with racism, a fact which is unsurprising when one considers the origins of many of the movement’s favorite tropes in the defense of the slavocracy.  Even if some strains are less enamored with white supremacy than the American Austrians (reason magazine seems quite committed to racial egalitarianism, while the CATO Institute tends instead to promote the sort of historical revisionism that counterposes Martin Luther King and the ‘good’ civil rights movement against the ‘bad’ movement for things like affirmative action), the veneration for the market that is always at the heart of libertarian thought contains real affinities with the tradition of white supremacy.  Taking a long view of American history, it does not seem too much to say they were made for each other.

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Negroes with Guns: Robert F. Williams and Black Power

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Justice for Troy Davis

In NYC yesterday.

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Class Politics in Israel

Note: What follows is my attempt to work through issues involving the current struggles in Israel, particularly in light of arguments presented at a meeting on that subject I attended last Friday.  Many of the claims below thus originate with contributions heard there, though I of course bear ultimate responsibility for their explication here.

The series of protests that have swept Israel in recent weeks have presented a difficult question for those of us committed to Palestinian liberation.  On face, they appear a clearly positive development.  They have decisively tripped up Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicose swagger, reducing his approval rating by 20 points in a very short time and leading various Likud ministers to distance themselves from the PM.  The protests have also grown rapidly, with 150,000 Israelis participating this weekend, and throwing up some quite punchy slogans, such as ‘the market is free, but we are slaves.’  As such slogans suggest, the protesters consciously see their role as confronting neoliberalism in Israel, which over the last thirty years has produced a society which, while free of the massive unemployment confronting many European economies, is one of the most unequal among the developed nations, subject to a dangerous combination of low wages and rapid price growth. In light of all this, the housing protests have been associated by many commentators with the Arab Spring and resistance to austerity more generally.

However, there also seem to be clear differences between the protests in Israel and the Arab Spring.  For instance, the National Union of Israeli Students, which has been one of the most prominent organizations in the struggle, has an appalling record on the question of Palestine, gaining headlines last year with absurd talk of organizing a counter-flotilla to expose Turkey as a ‘rogue state’  and working with adorably earnest StandWithUs Zionist propaganda outlet.  With such forces playing a leading role, it is unsurprising that the protesters have done nothing whatsoever to connect their own struggles with those of the Palestinians, despite the clear links between skimpy social spending and the promotion of settlements.

Given their contradictory character, the proper response to these struggles is unclear.  Israelis opposed to the occupation have seized on the opportunity to make the connections between military spending and cuts to social services, but it is not at all obvious that they are finding any significant audience within the protests.  Despite these limitations, some leftist groups have been quick to hold up the protests as evidence of the potential for working class unity in the Levant.

My own political background is in a tradition, that of the International Socialist Tendency (specifically the ISO in the US), more skeptical about the possibilities for militancy on the part of the Israeli working class.  Drawing on Tony Cliff’s own experiences as a Trotskyist in Palestine under the Mandate, and the writings of the Matzpen group, the IST has argued that the Israeli working class is, because of its position in the Zionist colonial project, not a revolutionary class, and that Palestinian liberation can only come through the efforts of the Arab working classes.  This perspective is admirably summed up in the saying ‘the road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo.’

This was the perspective presented at the meeting Friday, where the speaker pointed out that the levels of class struggle we are currently seeing in Israel are not exceptional even in Israeli history.  In 1951, 1962, 1969, and 1971, Israel saw a series of wildcat strikes by key workforces such as seamen, dockers, and postal workers.  None of these periods saw any substantial challenge to Israeli colonialist endeavors, let alone Zionism itself.  Given the historic failure of the Israeli working class to challenge Zionism, even at its most militant, our expectations for a significant but clearly less potent struggle such as this should remain modest at best.

Undoubtedly the most interesting and challenging aspect of the meeting came in explaining the reason for this failure.  The traditional explanation in IS circles has been that put forward by Haim Hanegbi, Akiva Orr, and Moshe Machover in their 1969 article, ‘The Class Nature of Israeli Society.’  Machover et al offer three primary lines of explanation for Israel’s unique class politics.  First, they argue that the fact that Israel’s working class is primarily composed of immigrants has distorted class consciousness, leading Israeli workers to hold higher hopes of social mobility, and consequently less investment in strategies of class struggle than working classes in other nations.  As the authors note, this alone cannot explain the persistent conservatism of Israeli workers.  If it were only Israel’s immigration patterns that distorted working class consciousness, one could reasonably expect second and third generation Israelis to demonstrate more traditional patterns of class conflict.  This has not happened.

The second factor Machover et al describe is the uniqueness of Israel’s ruling class.  Unlike ruling classes in other capitalist countries, the Israeli ruling class has historically not been composed of capitalists and their retinue.  Rather, Israeli history has been characterized by the dominance of capital by the political institutions of Zionism, such as the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency.  In Mandatory Palestine, the Histadrut in particular played a key role in subordinating Jewish capital to the Zionist project, organizing strikes, boycotts, and physical attacks against Jewish employers who hired Arab labor.  After the nakba, these institutions retained their predominance in the new state, as the Histadrut emerged as a majr employer, and a significant amount of the economy was controlled by the government, which was dominated until the mid-70s by Labor Zionism.  Israeli society has thus been characterized not by the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, but by that of the Zionist bureaucracy.  In particular, the role of the Histadrut as the only legitimate representative of the Israeli working class goes a long way in this account towards explaining the commitment to Zionism evident in Israeli working class history.

The third factor figures most prominently in the IST’s account of Israeli class structure, and that is  Israel’s unique role in imperialism.  As the Zionist propaganda outfit FLAME put it, ‘Israel is indeed America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East and the indispensable defender of America’s interests in that area of the world.’  The imperial powers support Israel because of its ability to punish misbehaving Arab regimes and guarantee continued imperial control over the most important strategic commodity in the world – oil. In return for this service, the imperial countries agree to subsidize Israeli society with foreign aid, guaranteed loans, and various incentives for private contributions to the Zionist project. The result of all this is, as Machover et al put it:

The Jewish worker in Israel does not get his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living which does not correspond to the output of that society. The same obviously applies to the profits of the Israeli bourgeoisie whose economic activity and profit-making is regulated by the bureaucracy through subsidies, import licences and tax exemptions. In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker, but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies.

Up until Friday evening, I thought this was a very persuasive account of Israeli working class conservatism.  However, the speaker in the meeting pointed out that the inspiration for these protests, neoliberalism in Israel, complicates this analysis.  The living standards of working class Israelis have been falling for almost thirty years, with no appreciable increase in political challenges to Zionism.  This itself seems a prima facie falsification of the thesis that subsidies from imperialism work to buy off the Israeli working class.  Upon further consideration, there are additional problems with the thesis.  For one thing, it is highly reminiscent of the labor aristocracy thesis put forward by Third Worldist groups that argue the American working class is bought off by the super-profits of imperialism (this thesis has been subjected to devastating critique recently by Charles Post).  This resemblance is particularly ironic given that Tony Cliff was one of the first to reject the theory of labor aristocracy as an explanation for the prevalence of reformist ideas.  Finally, the  growth of the Israeli economy in recent decades has been such that the aid it receives from imperial nations is simply too small a part of its national economy to be a significant explanation of working class consciousness.

Where does all this leave us?  First, I think it’s worth recognizing that Israeli working class conservatism itself is a fact.  In the United States, for example, income is a fairly good predictor of support for imperial endeavors, and has been for at least fifty years.  The American working class has the most to lose from American wars, and their class consciousness is reflective of this.  In Israel, support for aggression against the Palestinians and neighboring countries has enjoyed almost unanimous levels of support, with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon consisting of the only significant exception.  This is indicative of a real difference between the Israeli and American working classes.  (Unfortunately, many Trotskyist groups are unwilling to recognize this difference, with the Spartacists arguing that ‘If successful, [BDS] would hit the Israeli proletariat the hardest, causing mass layoffs and weakening its social power that could and must be mobilised to defend its Palestinian brothers, and the peoples of Lebanon, and to smash the Zionist state from within through socialist revolution’ and the US SWP even going so far as to accuse BDS activists of anti-semitism.)

The question, then, is how to explain this difference, if imperial subsidies are clearly not plausible.  At the meeting, it was argued that the commitment of the Israeli working class to Zionism has so thoroughly shaped class consciousness that Israeli workers cannot conceive of themselves as anything but a Jewish working class in a Zionist state.  Ultimately, I don’t buy this argument.  It’s a bit too close to the positions advanced by whiteness theorists, who hold that white working class consciousness is so tied up with whiteness that it will never mount a serious challenge to capital.  This seems to grant the ideological-political aspect of class formation undue causal power in explaining very broad patterns of class conflict.  For me, at least, a sixty year history of Israeli working class conservatism calls for an explanation more deeply located in the class relations of Israel.

Such an explanation is, I think, visible in outline at least in the article by Machover et al.  First, while the argument about imperial subsidies clearly cannot explain Israeli history since the 1980s, it fairs somewhat better for the earlier period.  During this time, capital inflows from imperial nations really did make up a significant portion of the Israeli economy.  from 1949-1965, Israel had a savings rate that averaged around zero percent, yet the rate of investment was nearly twenty percent of  GNP.  This meant Israel was both able to spend substantial amounts on both capital formation and consumption during this period.  As Machover et al explain, ‘the growth of the Israeli economy was based entirely on the inflow of capital from outside.’  In this period, then, it seems quite plausible that capital from the imperial nations subsidized the Israeli economy to a degree that does have explanatory power.

This explanation becomes even more compelling when combined with their argument about the uniqueness of Israel’s ruling class.  Because of the volume of imperial investment, the Israeli ruling class was able to hold as its main class project the colonization of Palestine, rather than the extraction of surplus value from Israeli workers (though of course this remained an important concern).  This assortment of labor bureaucrats, settlement agency directors, and Histadrut officials pursued a class strategy which did not bring them into as direct a confrontation with Israeli workers as other ruling classes.  Though I lack the data to substantiate such a claim, it seems plausible that the Zionist bureaucracy’s hegemony over Israeli capitalists was premised on their ability to guarantee a certain level of labor peace by subsidizing the costs of the reproduction of labor power.  Imperial subsidies thus made the victory of the Zionist bureaucracy possible, retarding the development of class struggle in Israel, and ensuring the hegemony of Zionist consciousness in the place of class consciousness.

If this combination explains Israeli working class conservatism before neoliberalism, what explains its continued hold?  Here immigration seems to play an important role.  Over the last twenty years, nearly a million Russian Jews have immigrant to Israel (Israel today has a population of seven million).  Fleeing first Stalinist stagnation and then the savagery of Russian neoliberalism, these immigrants have found in Israel significantly higher standards of living than they had previously.  Immigration as an explanation of conservatism is further supported by the fact that Russian Jews are one of the most conservative sectors of Israeli society, forming the prime support base for Avigdor Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu.

It’s not exactly clear how unique character of Israel’s ruling class continues to play out.  Much of Israel’s economy has been privatized, and the Histadrut no longer plays anything like the role it once did in organizing either capital or labor (unionization rates have been sliced in half since the 1960s, and most of the industries it used to own have been sold to private owners).  Capitalists play a much larger role in Israeli society today than in the 1960s, and the housing struggles are partially a reflection of this fact.  To be clear, these capitalists are no less committed to the Zionist project than their predecessors, but they are also subject to market discipline in a way the bureaucracy never was.  This market discipline has led them to undertake their attacks on the Israeli working class.

Admittedly, this leaves my account in a lame position, as I am forced to rely on some kind of ideological intertia or hangover to explain the persistence of Israeli working class conservatism since the 1980s in the face of increasing capitalist attacks, precisely the kind of explanation I dismissed as insufficiently materialist earlier.  Two replies.  First, I think immigration is a significant factor, and is actually invaluable for explaining the rise of the far right in contemporary Israeli politics.  Second, it’s important to emphasize that the combination of Zionist bureaucratic hegemony and imperial subsidies is a good explanation for the pre-neoliberal period, and that this significantly reduces the period of conservatism to be explained by ideological factors.  I find it a good deal more plausible to explain thirty years of conservatism as a result of previous class formation than to explain sixty years on the basis of politics alone.

In conclusion, I’m not sure my argument here is necessarily incompatible with the perspective laid out at the meeting.  The struggles over housing will almost certainly not develop into a generalized challenge to the regime, because their participants remain committed to the Zionist project.  Though it’s possible that the struggles will create splits in the ruling class Palestinians can put to good use, neither they nor their supporters should expect much from the tent cities.

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White Slavery

Jezebel’s genealogy of these images is, at best, incomplete.  The debt vigilantes aren’t gesturing back to LBJ’s attacks on Goldwater.  Rather, they’re extending the essential social vision on which the right has been operating since Obama’s election.  The discussions of the health care bill as reparations, the ceaseless scandal mongering about organizations of people of color, and, of course, the steady stream of racist humor oozing out of every GOP regional official’s mailbox all work to invoke a picture of white America usurped by the illegitimate Black man in the White House.  The hysteria over the debt has not been widely linked to these more obvious expressions of racial resentment, but the right is drawing from a deep well with their pictures of pretty little white girls and breathless warnings about the economic slavery of future generations.  In the early twentieth century, ‘white slavery’ was a potent concept for organizing a number of anxieties revolving around race, class, and gender:

The image of the migrant prostitute as ‘white slave’ fit in to racist conceptions of Americans and Europeans. For many Europeans, as Guy points out,

it was inconceivable that their female compatriots would willingly submit to sexual commerce with foreign, racially varied men. In one way or another these women must have been trapped and victimised. So European women in foreign bordellos were construed as “white slaves” rather than common prostitutes (1992: 203).

Accounts of the day stressed the ‘whiteness’, equated with purity, of the victim:

The traditional Western connotation that whiteness equals purity and blackness equals depravity flourished in a myth that appealed to the moral and prurient natures of its audience (Grittner 1990 :131).

Only ‘white women’ were considered ‘victims’; [7] for example, campaigners in Britain against the ‘white slave trade’ to Argentina were not concerned about the situation of native born prostitutes (Guy 1991: 24), nor were American reformers concerned about non-Anglo Saxon prostitutes (Grittner 1990: 56).

The ‘white slave’ had as her necessary opposite the ‘non-white slaver’. ‘Non-whiteness’ was usually literally represented, but also figuratively, with ‘otherness’ from whichever social group conducting the campaign serving as a marker of ‘non-whiteness’. The very name ‘white slavery’ is racist, implying as it does that slavery of ‘white women’ was of a different, and worse, sort than ‘black’ slavery. In America, in particular, this contrast was explicitly used to downplay the black slavery experience (Grittner 1990). In both Europe and the United States ‘foreigners’, especially immigrants, were targeted as responsible for the traffic. Jews, in particular, were seen as responsible [8](NVA 1910, Bristow 1982, Grittner 1990, Guy 1991). According to Bristow, the term ‘white slavery’ first appeared in 1839, in an anti-Semitic context (1982: 34).

Sometimes the reliance on this discourse has been quite explicit.  Generally, however, it’s been one step removed, with whiteness being invoked primarily through images, rather than words.  Even the anti-Chinese current is generically appropriate, as moral panics about white slavery in American Chinatowns ran rampant around the turn of the century.  Later, in the 1960s, this discourse was repackaged into a kitschy sexploitation flick, The White Slaves of Chinatown.
Here, finally, is the true ancestor of the both the little girl and the pretty blonde freedom fighter, whisked away to god knows what sexual torture in the debt prisons of the celestials. This is why it is a mistake to see GOP game of debt ceiling chicken as merely the product of misguided economics or political opportunism by Obama (though both of these surely play a role). It is another aspect of right wing racial praxis in the United States.

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Raymond Williams as Black Power Militant

From Robert F. Williams’ Negroes with Guns:

What happened and continues to happen in Monroe, N.C., illustrates an old truth: that words used in common by all men do not always have a meaning common to all men.  Men have engaged in life-or-death struggles because of differences of meaning in a commonly-used word.  The white racist believes in “freedom,” he believes in “fair trial,” he believes in “justice.”  He sincerely believes in these words and can use them with great emotion because to the white racist they mean his freedom to deprive the Negroes of their basic human rights and his courts where a “fair trial” is that procedure and that “justice” that decision which upholds the racist’s mad ideal of white supremacy.

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