Some Brief Thoughts On Race-Fetishism And Identity Politics On The Left
By David James
11 November, 2012
Countercurrents.org
It would be silly to suggest that South Africa’s current state of political oppression is attributable to the poorly conceived racial strategy of the anti-apartheid partisans, but in this article, Beyond the ANC: A New UDF or a Mass Workers’ Party?, the brilliant political analyst Jane Duncan writes:
The UDF’s approach to the national question was also highly problematic, relying as it did on the assumption inherited from the Freedom Charter that South Africa consisted of four ‘races’: black, white, coloured and Indian. This assumption took for granted that ‘races’ existed as valid biological entities, and that as a result, there was nothing wrong with organising ‘racial groups’ separately.
This meant that the UDF’s non-racialism was, in effect, multiracialism: a political approach that did nothing to counter ‘race thinking’ in society, including in its more progressive elements. If the main liberation current was unable to divest itself of the notion that races actually existed, then it is unsurprising that the society that it gave rise to in part, is unable to transcend race as a dominant social identity, with all the attendant dangers for social stability.
The most important phrase above, I insist, is “including in its more progressive elements.” I have made myself a pariah in some Leftist circles for denouncing identity politics and the primacy of race (one cannot defeat racism by adopting its central theses) in our discourse and formulations. Here in the US, in my unfashionable view, we have seen the rise of a new form of racism, one which identifies White culture as the root of global conflict and oppression, and which is fiercely hostile to it and minimizes or otherwise marginalizes the accomplishments and contributions of White thinkers, artists, and activists. In short: White people and culture (i.e. a race) are the problem. This new racism now coincides with the old, top-down, White-supremacist model, and together they have a reactionary synergy. Previously there had just been the legitimate resentment of White imperialism by its non-White victims, now there is a body of thought within Critical Race Theory which puts flesh on the bones of racial contempt, sanctions racial condemnation.
Duncan isn’t going this far, not here at least, but her observations are canny in that they recognize that race and “race thinking”, triumphant and omnipresent on the Left these days, is an obstacle, and needs to be transcended in order for class consciousness, which is, after all, the sina qua non of a workers’ movement, to surface and proliferate.
Those Leftists who fail to grasp this, however well-intended they may be, are undermining their own efforts.
Dave is an anarchist in Seattle, and can be reached through his blog saveourcola.wordpress.com
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