"We are in need of drastic, revolutionary change, more extensive than probably most of us can imagine at this point in time." Yes we need change on so many levels it is sometimes difficult to take it in. Capitalism needs to go, racism needs to go, sexist attitudes need to go, thinking children (or anyone) need to be smacked around for any reason at all. Thinking that bombing people is going to solve any problems is stupid. We are a living in a fucked up world that is getting increasingly more fucked up.
Mankind is tribal. In group preference is completely normal around the World. White people are finding this out the hard.
What's hard to understand is why the Left are cheering on the Capitalist class importing millions of cheap workers, suppressing pay and conditions and demographically replacing the indigenous peoples of Europe?
Liberals love having Brown servants and workers that they can be benevolent to, but they don't have to interact with them on any other level.
Liberals love to say how "Progressive" they are while wearing clothes made by child slaves. They're just as much hypocrites as the Conservative who preaches "Right to Life" for fetuses, but then hustles their daughter to an abortion clinic as soon as her Abstinence-Pledge boyfriend knocks her up.
I would say that's none of your business. It is of course a progressive point of view, but labelling it progressive isnt an argument. And if I am sitting next to a white man, brown man and black man on a train who start a drunken fight, I really dont care who wins. I shall move to the next carriage. I would prefer all three to be "wiped out" to follow your simile.
Your kind is pond scum. I am pretty sure nothing else would want to be associated with you "race warriors". Then again pond scum seems to have been pretty successful in DC of late, so perhaps you are pleased at the comparison.
I recently had someone say that the genocide in Gaza is a partisan issue, since one of the political parties in my country names it for what it is. I guess that's the polite kind of racism.
Eretz Israel was formally established as a British and American military proxy in 1948, for control of access to all of the fossil fuels of the Middle East and North Africa, and for control of navigable shipping routes to British colonial India/Pakistan and China. India, Pakistan and China have shed their official colonial status but the economic ties are a different matter.
The UK and USA have both been sponsors of the genocide.
One should think of Israel as the biggest of 800+ overseas U.S. military bases, "Unsinkable ? carrier", created to control (bomb) this whole oil-rich region.
Especially the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil transit chokepoint.
The American Empire is really the current transmogrified form of its collapsing British parent.
The petrodollars will become meaningless as the world transitions to clean energy and abandons the need for fossil fuels. Unlike the American Empire, China is leading the way, large scale, with various EU countries also making the transition.
Of course, climate catastrophe or global nuclear war could also bring the game to a rapid ending, soon.
Yeah ever wonder why they call it the "cold war" even though plenty of actual wars were fought during that period? it is not like no one died; people died, just not white people so I guess it didn't count. Real racism is so vast, so huge, so big that it is basically invisible. When the fighting and dying happened to black, brown, and asian people, it was treated as a mere sideshow to the superpower rivalry and considered cold since the people whose lives really matter (i.e. western european whites) did not die en masse and saw their nations burn.
History is written by the victors and so it will forever be remembered as the "Cold War" because in the eyes of the victors the millions of people who died outside of Europe and North America just do not count.
"You’re allowed to vote on whether or not your government will become more abusive to immigrants and other marginalized members of your society, but you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue."
There's the rub. The war machine can never be shut down, which only fuels more "impolite racism" at home. As they say, "Fascism is imperialism come home." To end fascism, imperialism must end. The war machine must be shut down. Forever.
Hi Caitlin, I completely agree that it’s the acceptable type of racism that enables a genocide to be carried out, through biased framing and emphasis, omission, false equivalency and outright lies favouring a particular group.
But I’d like to point out an editing error in your essay: “Without the imperialist extraction of labor and resources from the global south at extortionate prices…”—the last three words should be: “through extortionate means”. “Extortionate prices” can only mean extremely high prices, whereas you are trying to say “extremely low wages/prices”.
"Fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'ni**ers' of Mrica."
-Aimé Fernand David Césaire
***
Simply speaking, Fascism is Imperialism brought home..
“In his book Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, the political scientist David Michael Smith calculates that the US has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people between 1945 and 2020. Add in domestic social killing and move the time back to the founding of the American Empire in 1776 and the body count climbs to 300 million. In his 2013 book America’s Deadliest Export, William Blum reported that the United States after World War II: worked to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments; interfered in elections held by 30 sovereign nations; tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed more than 30 nations; and tried to suppress nationalist, leftist, and populist movements in at least 20 nations. (These numbers need to be updated for the last three years of the Obama administration and the Trump and Biden presidencies to include, among other things, US funding and protection of Israel’s 2023-20?? genocide in Gaza, Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s sovereign elected president, and Trump’s reckless and failing fiasco of a war on Iran.) The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice) and has brought the world remarkably close to nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. It is the clear leader in the global march to societal collapse if not human extinction via climate collapse, ecocide (broadly understood), nuclear proliferation, pandemicide, and artificial intelligence” - Glen Brown
Everyone in the US needs to read "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This", by Omar El Akkad and then sit down and reflect on who we are collectively and individually and what to do about that.
I really like this passage from the book. Thought about it a lot during the 2024 election when liberals deluged websites with trolley memes and explained that a genocide carried out by polite people is better than one carried out by openly bigoted people.
“Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: "Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more" starts to sound a lot like "Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too."
In reality, not a single Western politician or party, not a single government anywhere in the world, can be expected to change when constantly rewarded this way. The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.
But to say this-that mainstream liberal parties will never develop a moral compass until they are punished for not having one-produces a level of antagonistic vitriol unmatched in almost any other context. Waves of progressives will take time out from pasting MY RELIGION IS LOVE stickers to the bumpers of their Teslas to let you know that advocating this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you're happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.”
I agree that this is and was powerful to read. Among many powerful quotes, this one also made me think for a while:
“If the system to which I am forced to appeal responds only to attacks on its self-interest, what is there to hope for but that the next glaringly obvious injustice just happens to not quite perfectly intersect with that self-interest?”
Totally agree, and just want to note that included in the quiet type of racism is all the coded anti-black language prevalent among many liberal whites, like calling a neighborhood "bad" because black people live there, among many other examples.
In my country whenever reference is made to a "good" school it means wealthy, highly govt funded "elite" "private' or so-called "independent". I came across a video last night on FB - a moving piece where kids are surprised/overcome by the return from "service" in some US conflict abroad by their father. Filmed for dramatic and tear-jerking effect - which of course it truly is. Responses were from those overcome themselves just by watching and lots of God bless and thanks for the service of the Dad. I merely wondered - on line - what their government was doing waging wars abroad and doing the inhuman thing as well of separating dads from wives and children?
Caitlin, so beautifully expressed and explained! Thank you. Many academics attempt to bring light to some of the same issues you have here - but often fail in adequately explaining it (and the connections to the US Empire and Capitalism) as you have.
There are even intellectuals of 'impolite racism' that are promoted by the elites/power structures/corporations as acceptable (eg. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to name two of them). Instead of focusing on the critical theory of racism and how racism is interwoven into and a crucial ingredient of Capitalism, Imperialism, Western Empire hegemony and colonialism - these authors/intellectuals present views that do not fundamentally challenge the 'status quo and power structures' that benefit from the effects and behaviors/actions of racism that impact the WHOLE GLOBE (and not just the U.S.).
Thank you and much love for this wonderful essay on racism. ❤️🙏
You make a good point, but DiAngelo and Kendi's work, whole limited in the way you point out, is still valuable on its own terms. "Polite racism", the interpersonal kind, is still damaging to the very real people it affects.
You seem to misunderstand by intent Bob. My position is not "interpersonal racism doesn't matter" — it's that structural, economic, and systemic racism causes orders of magnitude more harm than interpersonal rudeness, prejudice, or even explicit discrimination between individuals.
For example, you can have a society of people who sincerely believe they are not racist while structural racism hums along perfectly well through neutral-seeming market mechanisms.
Yes, interpersonal racism hurts real people — but so does poverty, lack of healthcare, predatory lending, mass incarceration, and environmental racism. These latter phenomena hurt far more people, far more deeply, and are far harder to remedy through attitude change. If anything, the emotional salience of interpersonal racism can function as a distraction from these larger forces — which is part of what makes the Kendi/DiAngelo framework politically convenient for powerful institutions.
Kendi's framework of "antiracist vs. racist" as a binary, and DiAngelo's focus on white fragility and discomfort, are frequently criticized for reducing a complex, structural phenomenon to individual psychology and attitudes (as you have acknowledged above). Their style of anti-racism has been captured by elites — it performs radicalism while actually being very comfortable for institutions and corporations to adopt. The Kendi/DiAngelo framework is notably silent on labor, capital, unions, and wealth redistribution in any structural sense, and I have my doubts about their (Kendi & DiAngelo's) proposed solutions.
What I'm essentially saying is that interpersonal racism is a symptom and tool of a deeper system. Treating the symptom while leaving the system intact is insufficient, and may actually serve the system by making it appear responsive while changing nothing fundamental.
Yes, I absolutely see your point. Yet I still think that these authors are in their own way doing valuable work and assume that they're coming from a good place (in the absence of evidence to the contrary, unless you have any.) I don't have any cause to believe that they are intentionally misdirecting antiracism efforts from the larger causes to interpersonal racism, thus trying to undercut efforts against the former (though I can't say I've looked into the histories and motivations of these authors enough to be sure). The fact that the powerful may try to use their work in that way doesn't prove that the authors are coming from that place. I see their work as complementary, not contradictory, to efforts to end structural racism. I didn't think I want to keep going back and forth on this--I'll leave it at that. Cheers!
Recall the key word that came up yesterday here in the comments section to either Caitlin Johnstone or another Substack correspondent's piece (perhaps in Reader Comments): "COMPARTMENTALIZATION."
Only those who can compartmentalize the horrors humans inflict on each other, with or without our personal or communal complicity, whether active or passive complicity, that state of COMPARTMENTALIZATION gives US some sense of imperviousness at the cost of social isolation and lack of intimacy at a cost of social cohesion that will be always beyond our grasp.
We need the in-spirers of our Scriptures sans their holy armies of conquest and shiploads of sacrificial bloodshed along with the prize: Market Monopolies and TOTAL control with enforced DOMINATION under some fallible human we invest with SUPERIOR AUTHORITY. Sounds like life under a Mussolini, Hitler, Czar, Dictator or SUPREME SADIST OF somebody else's choice. We deserve better and need to keep talking whether to the diverse communities in each of our nations and\or surely between our leaders seeing only X's and O's on a blackboard or digital scoreboard of human souls....
In 1932, the "distinguished" British statesman Lloyd George wrote in his diary: 'We have to reserve the right to bomb nig*ers. "But No of course our foreign policy is not racist!"
***
"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.. by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way..has come in and taken their place"
Simply speaking, Brits are the wicked brain (Intelligence services/spy networks - colonial legacy) and the slush fund, and the U.S. is the brawn of the Global (Imperialist) Oligarchy.
CFR in the US and Chatham House in the UK. They are one and the same entity.
MI6 is part of "Five eyes". UK is a founding member of NATO.
Britain exerts influence through partial ownership of the FED. City of London is the headquarter of the global banking cartel. Besides, City of London basically runs all the main offshore funds.
AND It still runs Israel through the Pilgrim Society, Privy Council, RIAA, etc.
If you are familiar with the "Looney Tunes" canon, the british are that little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog around, singing Spike's praises, overestimating his importance to Spike, getting slapped around by Spike, and getting Spike into stupid fights.
Everything you just said, and then add to it the incomprehensible amount of suffering from billions of non-human beings who live their entire lives in darkness, filth and physical torment so we can eat meat.
The structural racism in imperialism is one of the hardest.- Once I discussed with a suppossedly far left woman in social media that was in every liberal fight for the USA, trans, anti racism you name it; when I brought up how Obama drone bombed kids and how does she reconciled that with her strong Democrat advocacy, she just said "That's just how things roll here, but we can focus on the domestic issues". HAH!
“We go about our lives consuming products made by wage slaves under an oppression machine that is defended through constant mass military slaughter, and then we wag our fingers at a viral video of some schizophrenic saying racist things in order to feel nice feelings about ourselves.”
In other words: westerners are the biggest hypocrites on the planet…🎯
racism, misogyny, trans-rights, animal rights,... .. are all weaponized by empire to manufacture consent for exploitation. the particular case might be correct, but the intent is always profit in the end.
"We are in need of drastic, revolutionary change, more extensive than probably most of us can imagine at this point in time." Yes we need change on so many levels it is sometimes difficult to take it in. Capitalism needs to go, racism needs to go, sexist attitudes need to go, thinking children (or anyone) need to be smacked around for any reason at all. Thinking that bombing people is going to solve any problems is stupid. We are a living in a fucked up world that is getting increasingly more fucked up.
Mankind is tribal. In group preference is completely normal around the World. White people are finding this out the hard.
What's hard to understand is why the Left are cheering on the Capitalist class importing millions of cheap workers, suppressing pay and conditions and demographically replacing the indigenous peoples of Europe?
Its called "Country Club Racism."
Liberals love having Brown servants and workers that they can be benevolent to, but they don't have to interact with them on any other level.
Liberals love to say how "Progressive" they are while wearing clothes made by child slaves. They're just as much hypocrites as the Conservative who preaches "Right to Life" for fetuses, but then hustles their daughter to an abortion clinic as soon as her Abstinence-Pledge boyfriend knocks her up.
Hypocrites.✌️
"One Battle After Another" is the perfect depiction of the corrupt murican "Elites"
My in-group is people with similar values. Yours is race-based it seems. In-groups are chosen not allocated.
Raj, are you Indian. I live in East London with many Indians. They are the groupies group that ever grouped
I would say that's none of your business. It is of course a progressive point of view, but labelling it progressive isnt an argument. And if I am sitting next to a white man, brown man and black man on a train who start a drunken fight, I really dont care who wins. I shall move to the next carriage. I would prefer all three to be "wiped out" to follow your simile.
That's a yes then. When India gets captured by the Capitalist class and they have mass replacement migration, come back to me then.
Europeans have the right to remain a majority in their ancestral homeland just as anyone else from Palestine to India to China.
Your kind is pond scum. I am pretty sure nothing else would want to be associated with you "race warriors". Then again pond scum seems to have been pretty successful in DC of late, so perhaps you are pleased at the comparison.
#Groupiest
Did you choose your family?
Only Liberals in the West have your framing.
Peoples that don't tribe, up get destroyed by peoples who do.
Only liberals in the west? You speak with the confidence and knowledge of an ass. The donkey kind.
Liberalism is overwhelming a Western ideology.
I recently had someone say that the genocide in Gaza is a partisan issue, since one of the political parties in my country names it for what it is. I guess that's the polite kind of racism.
There are two sides to the Israel story someone told me. Yes, I told him: There's the right side (Palestinians), and the genocide (Israelis).
U.S. Sen. Scoop Jackson started the project after 1967 to use Israel as a major U.S. proxy in the Middle East.
***
No difference b/w political parties when it comes to support of the endless Imperialist wars.. The kickbacks work both ways..
UNIPARTY cabal..
***
youtube.com/watch?v=ejqYrzEX14E
Eretz Israel was formally established as a British and American military proxy in 1948, for control of access to all of the fossil fuels of the Middle East and North Africa, and for control of navigable shipping routes to British colonial India/Pakistan and China. India, Pakistan and China have shed their official colonial status but the economic ties are a different matter.
The UK and USA have both been sponsors of the genocide.
Exactly.
One should think of Israel as the biggest of 800+ overseas U.S. military bases, "Unsinkable ? carrier", created to control (bomb) this whole oil-rich region.
Especially the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil transit chokepoint.
***
youtu.be/tOfXpW5lSMM?t=93
youtube.com/shorts/A-WThZHZpEw
youtube.com/watch?v=mVVtDd9c94c
***
It allows Western Imperialist Oligarchy to control the Oil prices and maintain the hegemony of PETRODOLLAR.
***
rumble.com/v6tuvs5-explained-how-the-petrodollar-rules-the-world.html
The American Empire is really the current transmogrified form of its collapsing British parent.
The petrodollars will become meaningless as the world transitions to clean energy and abandons the need for fossil fuels. Unlike the American Empire, China is leading the way, large scale, with various EU countries also making the transition.
Of course, climate catastrophe or global nuclear war could also bring the game to a rapid ending, soon.
Too bad Imperialist war pigs don't realize they can't print food, medicines and ammunition like they print dollars..
***
youtube.com/shorts/_1SHEtsbevc
youtube.com/shorts/1tG7BwcbVjo
The large-scale ignorance of the electorate is deliberately maintained by the ruling elites.
BTW Zionists in the 1930s proudly called themselves "Fascist Zionists" and greatly admired Benito Mussolini and how he bombed Ethiopian civilians:
youtu.be/aNEBW-DWHWc?t=47
***
The founder of Revisionist (far-right) Zionism Ze'ev Jabotinsky also founded the "Jewish legion" of the British army during WW1:
youtu.be/jKtIyRyS3Xk?t=121
***
And today's Israeli ruling parties come from Jabotinsky's far-right wing of Zionism.
youtube.com/watch?v=aQeU3XiESfQ
***
Revisionist Zionist ideologue Abba Ahimeir openly praised Hitler and Mussolini in 1930s
youtu.be/jKtIyRyS3Xk?t=272
Which party is that? Because it is not the mainstream Democrats under whom the genocide started, with official US enthusiastic backing.
I'm in Canada and the implication was the New Democratic Party (NDP) whose new leader, Avi Lewis, openly names genocide for what it is. https://lewisisleader.ca/https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KS8N4IsAuYE
I’m pretty sure Diana is Canadian.
Who’re we kiddin here? The only totally condemned form of “racism” here in AmeriKKKa is >cough< the incorrectly-named “antisemitism “.
Anyone else is fair game.
Yeah ever wonder why they call it the "cold war" even though plenty of actual wars were fought during that period? it is not like no one died; people died, just not white people so I guess it didn't count. Real racism is so vast, so huge, so big that it is basically invisible. When the fighting and dying happened to black, brown, and asian people, it was treated as a mere sideshow to the superpower rivalry and considered cold since the people whose lives really matter (i.e. western european whites) did not die en masse and saw their nations burn.
History is written by the victors and so it will forever be remembered as the "Cold War" because in the eyes of the victors the millions of people who died outside of Europe and North America just do not count.
"You’re allowed to vote on whether or not your government will become more abusive to immigrants and other marginalized members of your society, but you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue."
There's the rub. The war machine can never be shut down, which only fuels more "impolite racism" at home. As they say, "Fascism is imperialism come home." To end fascism, imperialism must end. The war machine must be shut down. Forever.
Hi Caitlin, I completely agree that it’s the acceptable type of racism that enables a genocide to be carried out, through biased framing and emphasis, omission, false equivalency and outright lies favouring a particular group.
But I’d like to point out an editing error in your essay: “Without the imperialist extraction of labor and resources from the global south at extortionate prices…”—the last three words should be: “through extortionate means”. “Extortionate prices” can only mean extremely high prices, whereas you are trying to say “extremely low wages/prices”.
Fair enough. Changed.
You cannot separate foreign policy from domestic policy. To understand this, just follow the money.
"Fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'ni**ers' of Mrica."
-Aimé Fernand David Césaire
***
Simply speaking, Fascism is Imperialism brought home..
youtube.com/watch?v=k17q7hdVsTA
“In his book Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, the political scientist David Michael Smith calculates that the US has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people between 1945 and 2020. Add in domestic social killing and move the time back to the founding of the American Empire in 1776 and the body count climbs to 300 million. In his 2013 book America’s Deadliest Export, William Blum reported that the United States after World War II: worked to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments; interfered in elections held by 30 sovereign nations; tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed more than 30 nations; and tried to suppress nationalist, leftist, and populist movements in at least 20 nations. (These numbers need to be updated for the last three years of the Obama administration and the Trump and Biden presidencies to include, among other things, US funding and protection of Israel’s 2023-20?? genocide in Gaza, Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s sovereign elected president, and Trump’s reckless and failing fiasco of a war on Iran.) The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice) and has brought the world remarkably close to nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. It is the clear leader in the global march to societal collapse if not human extinction via climate collapse, ecocide (broadly understood), nuclear proliferation, pandemicide, and artificial intelligence” - Glen Brown
Everyone in the US needs to read "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This", by Omar El Akkad and then sit down and reflect on who we are collectively and individually and what to do about that.
I really like this passage from the book. Thought about it a lot during the 2024 election when liberals deluged websites with trolley memes and explained that a genocide carried out by polite people is better than one carried out by openly bigoted people.
“Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: "Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more" starts to sound a lot like "Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too."
In reality, not a single Western politician or party, not a single government anywhere in the world, can be expected to change when constantly rewarded this way. The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.
But to say this-that mainstream liberal parties will never develop a moral compass until they are punished for not having one-produces a level of antagonistic vitriol unmatched in almost any other context. Waves of progressives will take time out from pasting MY RELIGION IS LOVE stickers to the bumpers of their Teslas to let you know that advocating this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you're happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.”
I agree that this is and was powerful to read. Among many powerful quotes, this one also made me think for a while:
“If the system to which I am forced to appeal responds only to attacks on its self-interest, what is there to hope for but that the next glaringly obvious injustice just happens to not quite perfectly intersect with that self-interest?”
Totally agree, and just want to note that included in the quiet type of racism is all the coded anti-black language prevalent among many liberal whites, like calling a neighborhood "bad" because black people live there, among many other examples.
In my country whenever reference is made to a "good" school it means wealthy, highly govt funded "elite" "private' or so-called "independent". I came across a video last night on FB - a moving piece where kids are surprised/overcome by the return from "service" in some US conflict abroad by their father. Filmed for dramatic and tear-jerking effect - which of course it truly is. Responses were from those overcome themselves just by watching and lots of God bless and thanks for the service of the Dad. I merely wondered - on line - what their government was doing waging wars abroad and doing the inhuman thing as well of separating dads from wives and children?
“…you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue.”
Caitlin, so beautifully expressed and explained! Thank you. Many academics attempt to bring light to some of the same issues you have here - but often fail in adequately explaining it (and the connections to the US Empire and Capitalism) as you have.
There are even intellectuals of 'impolite racism' that are promoted by the elites/power structures/corporations as acceptable (eg. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to name two of them). Instead of focusing on the critical theory of racism and how racism is interwoven into and a crucial ingredient of Capitalism, Imperialism, Western Empire hegemony and colonialism - these authors/intellectuals present views that do not fundamentally challenge the 'status quo and power structures' that benefit from the effects and behaviors/actions of racism that impact the WHOLE GLOBE (and not just the U.S.).
Thank you and much love for this wonderful essay on racism. ❤️🙏
You make a good point, but DiAngelo and Kendi's work, whole limited in the way you point out, is still valuable on its own terms. "Polite racism", the interpersonal kind, is still damaging to the very real people it affects.
You seem to misunderstand by intent Bob. My position is not "interpersonal racism doesn't matter" — it's that structural, economic, and systemic racism causes orders of magnitude more harm than interpersonal rudeness, prejudice, or even explicit discrimination between individuals.
For example, you can have a society of people who sincerely believe they are not racist while structural racism hums along perfectly well through neutral-seeming market mechanisms.
Yes, interpersonal racism hurts real people — but so does poverty, lack of healthcare, predatory lending, mass incarceration, and environmental racism. These latter phenomena hurt far more people, far more deeply, and are far harder to remedy through attitude change. If anything, the emotional salience of interpersonal racism can function as a distraction from these larger forces — which is part of what makes the Kendi/DiAngelo framework politically convenient for powerful institutions.
Kendi's framework of "antiracist vs. racist" as a binary, and DiAngelo's focus on white fragility and discomfort, are frequently criticized for reducing a complex, structural phenomenon to individual psychology and attitudes (as you have acknowledged above). Their style of anti-racism has been captured by elites — it performs radicalism while actually being very comfortable for institutions and corporations to adopt. The Kendi/DiAngelo framework is notably silent on labor, capital, unions, and wealth redistribution in any structural sense, and I have my doubts about their (Kendi & DiAngelo's) proposed solutions.
What I'm essentially saying is that interpersonal racism is a symptom and tool of a deeper system. Treating the symptom while leaving the system intact is insufficient, and may actually serve the system by making it appear responsive while changing nothing fundamental.
Yes, I absolutely see your point. Yet I still think that these authors are in their own way doing valuable work and assume that they're coming from a good place (in the absence of evidence to the contrary, unless you have any.) I don't have any cause to believe that they are intentionally misdirecting antiracism efforts from the larger causes to interpersonal racism, thus trying to undercut efforts against the former (though I can't say I've looked into the histories and motivations of these authors enough to be sure). The fact that the powerful may try to use their work in that way doesn't prove that the authors are coming from that place. I see their work as complementary, not contradictory, to efforts to end structural racism. I didn't think I want to keep going back and forth on this--I'll leave it at that. Cheers!
Recall the key word that came up yesterday here in the comments section to either Caitlin Johnstone or another Substack correspondent's piece (perhaps in Reader Comments): "COMPARTMENTALIZATION."
Only those who can compartmentalize the horrors humans inflict on each other, with or without our personal or communal complicity, whether active or passive complicity, that state of COMPARTMENTALIZATION gives US some sense of imperviousness at the cost of social isolation and lack of intimacy at a cost of social cohesion that will be always beyond our grasp.
We need the in-spirers of our Scriptures sans their holy armies of conquest and shiploads of sacrificial bloodshed along with the prize: Market Monopolies and TOTAL control with enforced DOMINATION under some fallible human we invest with SUPERIOR AUTHORITY. Sounds like life under a Mussolini, Hitler, Czar, Dictator or SUPREME SADIST OF somebody else's choice. We deserve better and need to keep talking whether to the diverse communities in each of our nations and\or surely between our leaders seeing only X's and O's on a blackboard or digital scoreboard of human souls....
Tio Mitchito
TM
In 1932, the "distinguished" British statesman Lloyd George wrote in his diary: 'We have to reserve the right to bomb nig*ers. "But No of course our foreign policy is not racist!"
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"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.. by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way..has come in and taken their place"
-Colonial Secretary and a racist pig W. Churchill
Wasn’t Churchill’s mother a white American, similar to Barry Obama’s?
Yes. It was the fashion at the time for rich Americans to marry their daughters to impoverished englishmen with titles.
And this is why British and US establishments are closely intertwined, they're basically one and the same
substack.com/@beeley/note/p-164625270
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Simply speaking, Brits are the wicked brain (Intelligence services/spy networks - colonial legacy) and the slush fund, and the U.S. is the brawn of the Global (Imperialist) Oligarchy.
youtube.com/watch?v=KaooeJzsRU8
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CFR in the US and Chatham House in the UK. They are one and the same entity.
MI6 is part of "Five eyes". UK is a founding member of NATO.
Britain exerts influence through partial ownership of the FED. City of London is the headquarter of the global banking cartel. Besides, City of London basically runs all the main offshore funds.
AND It still runs Israel through the Pilgrim Society, Privy Council, RIAA, etc.
If you are familiar with the "Looney Tunes" canon, the british are that little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog around, singing Spike's praises, overestimating his importance to Spike, getting slapped around by Spike, and getting Spike into stupid fights.
This should all be taught in high schools as a prerequisite for graduation. The ruling class is opposed to that.
Everything you just said, and then add to it the incomprehensible amount of suffering from billions of non-human beings who live their entire lives in darkness, filth and physical torment so we can eat meat.
The structural racism in imperialism is one of the hardest.- Once I discussed with a suppossedly far left woman in social media that was in every liberal fight for the USA, trans, anti racism you name it; when I brought up how Obama drone bombed kids and how does she reconciled that with her strong Democrat advocacy, she just said "That's just how things roll here, but we can focus on the domestic issues". HAH!
“We go about our lives consuming products made by wage slaves under an oppression machine that is defended through constant mass military slaughter, and then we wag our fingers at a viral video of some schizophrenic saying racist things in order to feel nice feelings about ourselves.”
In other words: westerners are the biggest hypocrites on the planet…🎯
racism, misogyny, trans-rights, animal rights,... .. are all weaponized by empire to manufacture consent for exploitation. the particular case might be correct, but the intent is always profit in the end.