People of Color and Racism

(This is what you might call a special post- I am for reasons that are both personal and political addressing something that some people who looked at my blog between 2009 and 2017 may have criticized me for)

In early 2018 a political friend (who is a widely respected Black veteran of the fight against racism) explained something to me about racism which had not been explained to me very well before that. I had done a post on my blog about the theory/fact that people of color in America can’t be racist. It was originally written and published in 2009 and in 2017 I re-wrote it so it would be more convincing. This essay is largely about how it shouldn’t be held against me, but my position in that 2017 post was that people of color can be racist.

(Not sure exactly where to place this, but in early 2018 I deleted that post)

To a large degree, back then I thought of racism as a set of beliefs and I only sort of thought of it as a system in America. I remember I DID, in the decades before 2018, use the word “structural” a lot but I did not use the word “system” and I think that using the former is less critical than using the latter (I think the latter is a more holistic way of describing it (or comprehensive or something like that)). My friend explained that since there is only one racist system in this society and it’s for the benefit of white people, people of color can’t be racist (I knew of course that there is only one racist system here and it’s for white people, but I didn’t connect the dots the way most white allies do). My very limited 2009 research into this theory/fact had led me to believe that the argument in favor of it was that people of color didn’t have the power to be racist towards whites. In 2018 the explanation that referred to a “system” made a lot more sense to me.

The 2017 version of that post focused largely on two arguments. First, that people of color DID have SOME power with which to be racist towards whites (i.e. the use of physical violence). Second, that I referred to both anti-Catholic and  anti-Protestant bigotry in N. Ireland with the word “sectarianism,” and if I did that I was going to communicate in a similar way about racism in this country.

There are three general points I need to stress. First, what I was calling “anti-white racism” is what many people (including the friend I refer to above) call “anti-white bigotry.” Second, I wrote a very long paragraph in that post explaining why I believe that what I now call anti-white bigotry is a very small problem. That paragraph, with a couple of small changes, is available in a post here. It is about half-way down from the top and starts with “Even without that…” Third, since 2018 there have been 1-2 posts that were “labelled” (“tagged”) “anti-white bigotry,” meaning that they are partly or mostly or completely about that topic (in early 2018 I deleted the post where I said people of color could be racist). At this point there are 109 posts labelled “anti-racist” and there are about 41-189 more that could more or less be labelled that way, so I was and am OVERWHELMINGLY more concerned about white supremacy than I am concerned about anti-white bigotry.

In the context of admitting this mistake I made I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but as you may know I got an Ethnic Studies degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Somehow I missed being told in those classes that people of color can’t be racist. First, I hope this isn’t held against any of my professors. Second, I really was a fairly or almost very good Ethnic Studies student and further down I publish the grades I got in those classes.

And there’s some even better evidence that I was a good anti-racist in general. Although some of my anti-racist activism wasn’t about power and privilege and control and exploitation (some of it was just about challenging the prejudice of most white people) I DID do a lot of anti-racist activism that WAS about what I then called “structural racism.” In the mid-90s I did a lot of activity around defending Affirmative Action and defending immigrants. In 1996 and 2000 I attended a total of about 5 actions that were part of two labor union campaigns by the “Justice for Janitors” project of the Service Employees International Union. In 2001 I helped organize three events about racism in America that were largely about racial injustice and inequality. In the late 1990s I went to 3-4 actions in Denver about police brutality and in the last 10 years I went to two Black Lives Matter protests in Boulder. Some of the material on my blog is about “structural racism” (that is not everything I did as a white ally, but probably about 2/3 of it).

Although it was about challenging the prejudice of racist Irish-Americans and not about concrete improvements in the lives of people of color, a large chunk of my Northern Ireland activism was done in a way that was in conflict with white supremacy in this country. That and some other relevant thoughts are in a long post here.

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There are four things I need to explain that help justify my belief that this political mistake shouldn’t be held against me.

First, a lot of the books I read about N. Ireland that were written by anti-Unionist (“unionist” meaning pro-British) leftists referred to both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarian. I offer examples of that further below.

Second, the post I deleted in 2018 was called “Guilty of Being White.” I got that title from a song of the same name by a 1980s punk rock band called Minor Threat. The man who wrote that song is Ian MacKaye and it was apparently inspired by he and his friends in High School getting beaten up by Black kids (I may have gotten that from wikipedia but I just found a better source for it here). The thing is, Ian MacKaye I believe is very anti-racist. That’s mostly based on the following: I found a YouTube fan video about anti-racist skinheads that had 4 Minor Threat songs as the soundtrack; and after leaving Minor Threat, he became the vocalist for a band called Fugazi and according to another Black veteran of the fight against racism (Daraka Larimore-Hall) Fugazi was in 2001 the most progressive hard-core punk band.

Third, in a song on Body Count’s first album, Ice-T (the vocalist of the heavy metal band) refers to a Black woman who hates white people as a racist. That was on the same album as “Cop Killer” and was thus long before any alleged “selling out” by Ice-T when he joined the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Also, since he got that job Body Count has often played "Cop Killer" at concerts and on a 2017 BC album (Bloodlust) Ice-T did a song called “No Lives Matter” where the lyrics are a creatively written hybrid of support for Black Lives Matter and opposition to poverty. Another reason I would say that he didn’t “sell-out” by joining the cast of SVU is that in 1993 when BC played “Cop Killer” at a concert I went to, Ice-T first said something about how in theory being a cop is something cops should be proud of, but that the reality is very different. He wasn’t 100% anti-cop even then and if you consider the fact that almost once a season SVU’s writers give his character good lines criticizing the police, I don’t think that he has compromised his values to be on that show.

Fourth, I know that at least in 2009 at least some people at the Southern Poverty Law Center believed that people of color could be racist. Although they are wrong about that I imagine it was a semantics thing the way it was with me (in the sense that they were probably referring to anti-white bigotry but were inappropriately using the word “racist”). (Part of why I am reluctant to penalize them much about this is that, at least in recent years and maybe for decades now, in addition to their work on stuff like tracking Klan activity, they also do a lot of work that’s about economic justice)

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Below are the grades I got for classes that were part of my major.

Intro to Asian-American History. B-

Intro to Ethnic Studies B

Indian/Govt Conflicts FBI on Pine Ridge A (Note: about 1/4 of it was about the Black Panthers)

Race, Class, and Pollution F (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I failed this is that I made some bad decisions about what to spend time on, I had some personal problems, and I hadn’t, at that point, taken the Research Methods in Ethnic Studies class and until I took it I did not like doing research)

American Indians in Film A

Emergence of Modern Mexico D (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I got a D is that I learned that Summer that Summer School isn’t a good way for me take college classes)

Asian-Pacific American Communities C

Chicanos/US Social System C

Research Methods in Ethnic Studies B

Topical Issues in Native North America A

Selected Topics in Ethnic Studies: Prisons, Crime and Culture B- (Note: About 10% was about the Black Panthers)

Research Practicum in Ethnic Studies B+

Japanese-America: Critical Thinking A-

North American Indians: Traditional Culture B

Senior Seminar in Ethnic Studies A-

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This last part is about the N. Ireland dimension of this that I referred to above. It’s a work-in-progress because I have only just started reading those books (4 out of 5 I have read before and I remember some stuff that backs me up on this, but I need to read them again and take some notes and then I’ll add that material here). (I get the impression that in the last 10-20 years it may have become unpopular among anti-Unionists to refer to anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarianism, but most of my reading of the books I’m referring to was around 2000 (I might change how I talk about it, but I am unlikely to become active on the NI issue in the future and may not have the opportunities to discuss this with other anti-Unionists))

 

UPDATE 5/3/24 I just finished the N. Ireland book relevant to this that I haven't read before (Twenty Years On, 1988). It is edited by one of it's contributors (Michael Farrell) but the essay that contained something relevant is by a Northern Ireland Protestant man named  Geoffrey Bell. On p. 93 he says that the involvement of some Protestants in the Civil Rights Movement proved it was non-sectarian. On p. 94 he says that efforts by the left of the CRM to reach out to Protestant workers helped the anti-sectarian cause.