The Global Privileges of Whitness

White supremacist ideology and White privilege are global in reach and in aspiration. I examine three nodes in the global distribution network of White privilege: empire, corporate profits, and victimhood.

(http://monkeyfist.com/articles/764)



The Global Privileges of Whitness
By Kendall Clark


     Whiteness is ownership of the earth. -- W.E.B. Du Bois
     
     I use the term white supremacy ... I intend a latitudinarian
     conception, one that encompasses de facto and de jure white
     privilege and refers more broadly to the European domination of
     the planet that has left us with the racialized distributions of
     economic, political, and cultural power that we have today. We
     could call it global white supremacy. -- Charles W. Mills,
     ``Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy,'' in
     Blackness Visible
     
   The average White American's attitudes about race and racism are a
   mixture of self-congratulation and defensiveness -- ``Yes, America
   has had some episodes of racism and racial bias, but that's all
   clearly in the past.'' In truth, White racism hasn't gone anywhere.
   Its tenor and tone have evolved; now it's expressed in carefully
   coded messages rather than in crudely overt themes. White racism,
   and the White supremacist ideology it reflects, and the network of
   White privilege it maintains, are alive and well.
   
   Racist expressions of White supremacist ideology maintain three
   particular nodes in the vast network of White privilege: White
   empire, White corporate profits, and aggrieved White victimhood.
   
  The Maintenance of Empire
  
   With a model [1]constitution and [2]Truth & Reconciliation
   Commission, which the US desperately needs to implement, South
   Africa seems to be the exemplar of struggling with the post-colonial
   condition. But it faces obstacles, including a horrifying struggle
   with AIDS and Western-dictated structural adjustment programs, which
   are demanded as preconditions of expanded trade relations,
   development loans, etc.
   
   Later this year, the United Nations will convene a [3]global
   conference on racism in Durban, SA. One might reasonably expect,
   given the shape of African colonial history, that central to the
   conference's agenda is a discussion of reparations for colonialism
   and the lave trade.
   
   But as The Independent's Alex Smith [4]reported on 12 June 2001,
   during SA President Mbeki's visit with newly-elected Tony Blair,
   Mbeki was reminded that one of the ongoing privileges of White
   Empire is its careful, unblinking avoidance of any responsibility
   for past horrors. Blair isn't so much refusing responsibility as
   refusing to acknowledge that there's anything to take responsibility
   for. Smith reports that at the racism conference, European countries
   will apologize for colonial exploitation, but Blair warned Mbeki
   that such apologies cannot be used by African countries to press
   claims of reparation. A formal apology means nothing when the very
   idea of reparations is ruled off-limits. An apology which cannot be
   the basis of subsequent, morally appropriate action, such as
   reparations, is not an apology at all; it's merely words in the
   verbal form of an apology, signifying nothing but a churlish display
   of White privilege.
   
   It's not only Tony Blair who mans the ramparts of White empire.
   Other European colonial powers and the US have threatened to scuttle
   the UN conference by sending "junior delegations", if, as Smith puts
   it, "the issue of compensation for the ills of slavery is allowed to
   dominate the agenda" (where "dominate the agenda" means, roughly,
   "appear on the agenda").
   
   That such refusal is an exercise of White privilege is made
   perfectly obvious by another sentence in Smith's report: "Britain,
   which claims its views are in line with other European countries,
   says it wants to look forwards, not back." That is, White Europe and
   America will make the determination of what constitutes an
   appropriate moral response to colonial horrors like the
   international slave trade. No Africans need apply. The victims have
   nothing to say about the matter.
   
   Not content to rest with an injurious, boastful display of the
   privilege of White empire, Smith reports that the British Foreign
   Office hastens to add this insult: "'The African group [in Geneva]
   has put forward a position which makes extensive reference to the
   historical slave trade. But no one wants a retrospective conference.
   It is important for international anti-racism mechanisms to be made
   more effective. We are looking to address contemporary issues.'"
   
   Not only will White people be the sole determinant -- note the
   nullifying claim that "no one wants a retrospective conference";
   Africans simply do not count -- of what is or is not true, of what
   is or is not morally appropriate, but White people will unilaterally
   be so in the guise of being ``effectively anti-racist''. Thus is
   reached the pinnacle achievement of propaganda, the total inversion
   of truth. Asserting White privilege is effectively anti-racist, and
   justice for African peoples is an impediment.
   
  The Protection of Corporate Profits
  
   Empire is the servant of corporate (that is, private) profit. Such
   was the case with European colonial empires, and such is the case
   with the neocolonial corporate empire that bestrides the planet
   today. Just as White supremacist ideology was developed, in part, as
   a justification for European colonial Empire and, particularly, the
   slave trade, one of its chief uses today is to justify and protect
   White corporate profits. And that's perfectly clear in the case of
   American drug companies and the African AIDS pandemic.
   
   As Bob Hebert wrote in a recent column, Andrew Natsios, Bush's
   choice to [5]head the US Agency for International Development, is
   busy spreading White supremacist ideology to protect corporate
   profits. It makes no sense, Natsios claims, for US drug companies to
   make drugs freely or cheaply available to combat AIDS in Africa
   because Africans
   
     don't know what Western time is. You have to take these (AIDS)
     drugs a certain number of hours each day, or they don't work.
     Many people in Africa have never seen a clock or a watch their
     entire lives. And if you say, one o'clock in the afternoon, they
     do not know what you are talking about. They know morning, they
     know noon, they know evening, they know the darkness at night.
     
   And it isn't just Natsios; an "unnamed senior Treasury Department
   official" made the same point in April, according to Herbert.
   
   The Bush administration asks us to believe that the perfectly
   reasonable idea that record drug company profits should be
   subordinate to ameliorating the AIDS pandemic in Africa is actually
   absurd since Africans aren't sufficiently human to follow a drug
   regime. And let's make no mistake: to claim that an entire continent
   of human persons cannot follow a drug regime is to claim that they
   are not actually human persons at all. Or worse since some animals
   might be taught to follow simple drug regimes. The clear implication
   of Natsios' claim is that Africans are less than human. Further, he
   seems to know nothing about Africa, which contains many large urban
   populations where people can tell time perfectly well. Does Natsios
   believe everyone in Africa lives in a jungle hut?
   
   All of which begs the question of drug companies and dispensing
   agencies finding some other mechanism -- a [6]simple kinetic-powered
   device that chimes each time a medicine must be ingested comes
   easily to mind -- by which to help people in rural areas, where life
   is lived by agrarian rhythms more than by clocks, to follow drug
   regimes. Surely the head of US AID should be required to know that
   Africa is full of urban metropolises, that rural areas are less
   clock-bound than urban areas, and that there's nothing unique about
   Africa in this regard.
   
  The Privileges of Victimhood
  
   The oppressive ideal is for White privilege to be so deeply embedded
   and entwined in the social order that it's hard to see and so hard
   to fight. One way to make White privilege invisible is to create a
   kind of cult of aggrieved White victimhood. If White people are
   victims (of affirmative action's so-called reverse racism), the real
   claims of people of color and of women will make little sense. False
   claims of oppression dilute the force of real claims. White
   aggrieved victimhood is a smoke screen for White privilege.
   
   The American cult of aggrieved White victimhood has been
   strengthened by representations of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a
   tragedy enshrined by the White corporate media as "the worst act of
   terrorism on U.S. soil." According to the media, the victims and the
   institutions that McVeigh attacked were White, which is not to
   diminish the deaths of people of color in OKC, but only to recognize
   that the federal government is largely a White institution, and that
   the media face of the Oklahoma City Bombing has been almost
   exclusively a White face.
   
   But by any objective measure the [7]1921 Tulsa Race Riot was a worse
   act of domestic terrorism than the Oklahoma City Bombing: 300 people
   killed (90% of whom were black), 1,400 homes destroyed, the
   Greenwood district of Tulsa, a thriving black community, devastated.
   Most White people simply cannot hear that as race-rioting by Whites,
   but that's what happened. It's crass and rather absurd to compare
   the dimensions of human tragedy, but the White corporate media
   started the quantification game, and if they're going to play it,
   they should be made to play it fairly.
   
   These media representations have reinforced White privilege in two
   ways. First, by obscuring the responsibility for the terrorism of
   the Tulsa Race Riots, the White privilege of avoiding responsibility
   for harms is reaffirmed. Second, by claiming a false sui generis
   status for the Bombing, White victims are taken seriously and black
   ones are ignored, made invisible. The effect is to make White
   privilege invisible because papered over by a false picture of the
   world in which black victims of one of the worst domestic terrorist
   attacks in American history (and countless other black and Native
   American victims of White genocidal violence) are denied any
   semblance of justice; where the White power structure that committed
   such an act evades responsibility; and where White victims and
   institutions are meant to be seen as under attack, both by
   terrorists like McVeigh and, less dramatically, by the claims of
   those, primarily people of color and women, who "falsely" claim to
   be victims of oppression.
   
   The Bombing has been a matter of intense governmental and media
   attention in order to reinforce the invisibility of White privilege
   and the worthlessness of black lives. The Tulsa Race Riot has
   disappeared down the memory hole because, as a horrific assertion of
   White privilege, it too reinforces the status quo, but in a way
   that's far too visible. The same forces that urged public
   broadcasting of McVeigh's execution and lamented that he could not
   legally be tortured to death demand that, when women and people of
   color press their legitimate claims for justice, White America is
   under siege from a "victim culture". The message is clear: anything
   to satisfy White victims, but for the survivors of the Tulsa Race
   Riots and countless others, nothing but the back of the hand. The
   cult of aggrieved White victimhood is angry and jealous and will
   acknowledge no other victims before it.
   
   As an antiracist White American, I have been accustomed to thinking
   of race and race privilege in terms of the American experience. But
   radical black thinkers like Delany, Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Fanon,
   and others have always understood that the White supremacist power
   structure is a global structure. White privilege is a global
   privilege, backed by a global ideology of White supremacy. It must
   be seen, understood, and opposed globally.

References

   1. http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/constitution/saconst.html
   2. http://www.truth.org.za/
   3. http://www.un.org/WCAR/
   4. http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?dir=1&story=77564&host=1&printable=1
   5. http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2001/pr010427.html
   6. http://www.freeplay.net/newsite/product/gsw.html
   7. http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trrc/trrc.htm


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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/764