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schraubd · 6 years

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(How) Do White Jews Uphold White Supremacy? (Part II)

In my post this morning, I explained how -- given the understanding of "White supremacy" and "upholding" that Tamika Mallory was using -- it is perfectly coherent to state, as Mallory did, that White Jews may "uphold White supremacy" even while we are (as Mallory also acknowledged) targeted by White supremacy. I argued that -- putting aside Mallory's own checkered history on the subject -- much of the present controversy was terminological in nature and that while such a semantic debate isn't unimportant, it is a far cry from the sort of overheated rhetoric whereby Mallory was accusing Jews of being tantamount to Klansmen. In America, pale-skinned Jews of proximate European descent receive many (not all) of the day-to-day advantages of Whiteness. Insofar as White supremacy is understood more as a social condition than a social movement -- the state of affairs whereby White persons are systematically advantaged, not the cluster of individuals and organizations consciously and overtly ideologically committed to promoting the explicit ideal that Whites are superior -- it is fair to say (and almost unquestionably true) that White Jews who look like me are net beneficiaries of that system, and may well act in ways that (implicitly or explicitly) reenact or perpetuate that advantageous state of affairs. This doesn't mean we don't also face antisemitism (any more than White women don't also face misogyny), and it is also wholly compatible with hating and being hated by groups like the Klan. And if you think the above paragraphs are reasonable, but blanch at labeling them "White supremacy", then the debate you're having is -- again -- primarily one of semantics, not substance. That said, if the purpose of the first post was to work through how it is fair to think of White Jews "as Whites" (and thereby implicated in White supremacy), at the end of that post I suggested that there was a more layered and complicated discussion to be had about the relationship between Jews and Whiteness, one that can help explain why so many Jews react so fiercely against the label "White" and which puts important limits on the utility of "White Jews" as a concept. This is a conversation that is short-circuited when people act as if White Jews are not White in any capacity -- a position which, as applied to American Jews with my skin tone, seems wholly at odds with reality. But it is also a conversation that can only occur if it is acknowledged that Whiteness is "of a different color" as applied to Jews -- that the characteristics of Whiteness, including what Jews can "do" with Whiteness, are different than how we might understand Whiteness simpliciter. Start with the question of why many Jews who by all appearances look White seem to so fiercely reject the association. One explanation for this behavior is that it is a rather uninteresting permutation on the practice of many White people to deny the privileges they receive through Whiteness. The retreat to ethnic identity ("I'm not White, I'm Irish") or deracinated individualism ("I'm just a person") are ways to occlude the reality of how Whiteness continues to operate in America. And so, it might be thought, when Jews say "we're not White, we're Jewish", they're simply pulling their own version of that maneuver. Those who are familiar with Whiteness, are familiar with this move, and have long since learned not to take it very seriously. Now sometimes, something like this account might suffice as the explanation for Jews who resist being labeled White -- particularly in cases where there is the most uncompromising insistence that White Jews are completely unassociated with Whiteness in America, that we gain nothing from America's racial bargain. But often, there's more to it than that. As someone who once rode the "I'm not White, I'm Jewish" train (and who tries to remember the I before I changed my mind), I know there's more at work here. One problem with Jews-as-White, which has been raised quite a bit in response to Mallory or anyone else who tries to associate Jews with Whiteness in America, is that Jews have often been oppressed precisely because we haven't been viewed as White. White supremacist violence is an obvious case, the Nazi Holocaust is its apex. Given this history, there is something hurtful and insulting to cavalierly declare that Jews are simply "White". Anyone should understand why statements to the effect of "the Holocaust was White-on-White crime" or "we only care about the Holocaust because the victims were White" provoke an apoplectic reaction in the Jewish community. It is a disgusting erasure, and one that is teed up when Jewish Whiteness is assumed as an uncomplicated truth. It shouldn't surprise, then, that many Jews rebel against being labeled "White" as a means of carving out and preserving space for full recognition of the realities of this persecution. As much as I say a American Jew like me today is functionally White in my day-to-day interactions, that hasn't always been true, it isn't always guaranteed to be true, and it isn't even wholly true right now. To the extent that insisting on Jewish Whiteness denies or diminishes the reality of very real and very live instances of antisemitism, it needs complication. Another problem with Jews-as-White, less discussed but I think potentially more important, is that Jews are sometimes perceived as excessively White. Particularly in the Nation of Islam brand of antisemitism that Mallory has been associated with, Jews are often cast as embodying or exemplifying Whiteness -- the "iciest of the ice people", in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s summation. Bootstrapping onto antisemitic tropes of Jewish hyperpower and control, Jews become a convenient and accessible stand-in for Whiteness at its worst -- its most domineering, its most overprivileged, and its most bloodthirsty (this is a problem I explore in detail in my "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" article). Hence, calls to focus on Jewish Whiteness are sometimes heard as (and sometimes function as) calls to cast a very specific spotlight on Jews as the worst offenders of Whiteness (and look how they try to slither out of responsibility for it!), or as the focal point for an assault on Whiteness and White privilege. What is cast as a general critique of "White supremacy" ends up being a specific, concentrated attack on Jews as its supposedly paradigmatic constituency. Hence, if one reason Jews try to downplay their Whiteness is that the concept of White Jews denies circumstances and scenarios where even pale-skinned Jews are not viewed as White, another reason is that concept of White Jews accentuates tropes and understandings whereby Jews are viewed as the most extreme, blinding iteration of White -- generally via exaggerated notions of Jewish hyperpower and privilege. These can and do very easily slip into their own forms of antisemitism, and so it shouldn't surprise that many Jews view the entire discourse quite warily. These are some reasons why Jews have, I think, an earned skepticism towards Whiteness discourse directed at them, even as I continue to maintain that the concept of Whiteness is fairly and coherently applied to the life trajectory of Jews like me. But I suggested at the outset that I was making a more ambitious claim: not just that we need to be careful when speaking of Jewish Whiteness (lest we stumble into antisemitic tropes of Jewish hyperpower, or erase historical or contemporaneous cases where Jews really aren't being viewed as White), but that Whiteness is different in kind even for those Jews who are (in the American context) raced-as-White. To drill down on this point, let's return to Mallory's original statement. One way of parsing her words -- and how I think many people think of the relationship between Jews and Whiteness -- is something like the following:

White Jews in America are White in all respects save the important fact that White supremacists want to murder them.

I don't mean for that to sound flip -- being the target of violent hatred by a domestic terrorist movement is no small thing! Rather, what characterizes this view is that the Whiteness of White Jews is identical to the Whiteness of any other White person in America save for a discrete and well-demarcated carve-out. Hence, whatever discourse is validly spoken of "Whites", generally, also applies to "White Jews", specifically (save, again, for the highly specific case of "being targeted for murder by White supremacists"). With very limited exceptions, there's nothing about how we talk about Whiteness that isn't applicable or needs alteration in the specifically White Jewish case. But I think this view is wrong. Jews, even as White, are differently situated than other Whites, such that it doesn't always make sense to simply cross-apply a Whiteness frame even onto White Jews. For example, one way it is often said that White people (particularly White women) "uphold White supremacy" is that the majority (or at least a plurality) voted for Donald Trump. To all the White women marching in their pink hats and calling themselves the "resistance", this fact has created a rather compelling demand that they "tend to [their] own garden." As a class, White women are not particularly progressive and not particularly reliable even in the really easy, straightforward case of "don't vote for a naked bigot and unqualified buffoon like Donald Trump." Yet it should be very obvious why it's troublesome to extend this logic to Jews. Jews voted overwhelmingly against Trump in 2016 (and again against Republicans in 2018) -- 70% voting for Clinton overall (and, given typical gender breakdowns in voting behavior, Jewish women almost certainly went against Trump by even wider margins). With the exception of African-American voters, Jews are and have remained one of the most consistently progressive voting blocs in American politics -- voting Democratic at rates equal to or better than women, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. I'm not saying that a Hillary Clinton voter can't be racist, of course. But if voting against Trump is one obligation (perhaps the bare minimum obligation) that any decent person must meet in order to not "uphold White supremacy", then it is fair to say Jews have by and large done our job discharging at least that one duty. That part of our garden looks pretty healthy, all told. So it is fair for White Jews to bristle a little bit when they're lumped in with a broader White demographic which has backed Trump. At least as far as voting behavior, "White Jewish" identity has not, by and large, obstructed White Jews from standing against the avatars of White supremacy. And speaking of tilling your own garden, one common feature of Whiteness discourse is the assertion that White people have a particular obligation to challenge and dismantle racist practices by other Whites. This obligation inheres in part because Whites, as beneficiaries of these practices, have special duties to disgorge any ill-gotten gains, but also because in White supremacist system Whites often are accorded greater power, influence, and credibility enabling them to more effectively disrupt White supremacist practices. Claims or arguments that are made and ignored when raised by people of color are often able to gain consideration when raised by Whites (for example, if you read the arguments in my last post and thought "finally, someone making sense" -- without recognizing that my analysis wasn't really that different from how many Jews of Color had responded to Mallory (see, e.g.) -- (a) thanks for the compliment, and (b) welcome to the problem! So it could be said that White Jews, as Whites, have heightened obligations to publicly challenge and confront White racism, because (for better or worse) we're viewed as "insiders" with greater credibility and pull than non-Whites when making those challenges. But is that actually true of White Jews? I'm skeptical. And, perhaps oddly, my skepticism has been most clearly crystallized through observing the Twitter experience of Sophie Ellman-Golan. Among the many social justice campaigns and priorities of the indefatigable Ellman-Golan, one in particular she often promotes is that need to #ConfrontWhiteWomanhood. It is, as one might expect, a campaign centered around the need for White women to take stock of the ways in which their practices reify White supremacy and other oppressive institutions. And pretty much every time Ellman-Golan tweets under the hashtag #ConfrontWhiteWomahood, she's immediately hit with a torrent of antisemitic abuse of the form "who you calling White, Jew?" It seems (and not just from Ellman-Golan's case) that White Jews who try to confront other White people about racism "from the inside" ... pretty quickly cease to be viewed as insiders. We are in fact presented as the epitome of outside agitators, rabble-rousers, and elitist corrupters. The White Jew who confronts White racism becomes a lot less White, and a lot more Jewish, very quickly. To be sure, I'm not saying its impossible to brush aside an "insider" anti-racism critique made by a White Christian American. But it sure is easier to do it if you can unleash a whole flotilla of "Soros-funded coastal elitist cosmopolitan cultural Marxist corrupting the youth committing White genocide and what about Israel!" antisemitic tropes at the drop of a hat. As it a result, Jews seem particularly poorly situated to engage in these sort of confrontations. Not just because we're at heightened risk of explicitly violent retaliation (though there is that), but because our White-insider status doesn't extend that far: Jews who challenge Whites, aren't recognized as White. Consequently, if White Jews are not or are not successfully "confronting Whiteness", it might not be because we're indifferent to the project or half-assing it. It might be because even White Jews don't have full access to certain features of Whiteness; we are not White in the same way that other Whites are. And while I don't have direct evidence to support this, my strong suspicion is that if and when White identity becomes a more explicitly marked and salient feature of American discourse (whether via progressive efforts to remove it from an unmarked default and "confront" it, or by reactionary programs to reinvigorate avowed White identity politics), the perception of Jewish Whiteness will become considerably more tenuous. In sum: clearly it is the case that White Jews in America are White in important respects -- including benefiting from many elements of White privilege and at least sometimes acting to maintain and buttress that advantaged status. At the same time, the frame of Whiteness is not one that can be plopped down on the heads of even White Jews uncritically or without alteration. For one, Whiteness discourse often genuinely does erase important facets of Jewish experience where we aren't deemed White. For two, Whiteness discourse, as applied to Jews, can act as an accelerant for antisemitic tropes insofar as Jews are cast not just as White but as hyper-White -- the epitome or apex of Whiteness via privilege, power, and domination. Finally, White Jews simply do not experience Whiteness in the same way as do other Whites. If race is, in Sara Ahmed's words, "a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do ‘things’ with", then Jews simply are able to "do" less with Whiteness. We don't have the same capacities to "challenge from the inside", our position as White is too precarious -- and the allure of antisemitic dismissal too powerful -- to allow it. What's necessary, then, is an analysis of White Jews as a specific case, one that isn't fully known even to those who are well-versed in the contours of "Whiteness" generally. A proper situating of Jews into Whiteness will not deny obvious realities about the racial positioning of Jews who look like me in America. But neither will it easily slide into the default modes of understanding of Whiteness, or assume that Jews like me are "simply" White save for a few piercing but ultimately idiosyncratic exceptions emanating from White supremacists. The fact is, a lot of people like to talk about Jews without really knowing about Jews. And they're often buttressed by interpretive frames -- Whiteness very much included -- which purport to fill in those epistemic gaps for "free", without needing any specific knowledge about Jews. But knowing Whiteness doesn't mean you know Jews -- even White Jews. And consequently, if the hostile response by many Jews to being labeled "White" rings familiar to many experts on Whiteness, that familiarity is likely a deception. It seduces us into thinking that we already know what needs to be known about White Jews -- that we can draw on the same explanations, that we can identify the same behaviors, and that we can demand the same duties, without putting in any additional specific work. The virtue of Mallory's statement is that it recognizes both that Jews can back and benefit from White supremacy and also be targeted and hurt by it -- an assertion that, in broad strokes at least, is clearly correct. Zoom in and there is a lot more work that needs to be done: first and foremost, the work of recognizing that there is a lot of work left to be done -- groundwork, foundational work where it accepted that most of us do not yet know what we need to know about the contours of antisemitism and Jewish experience. If you enjoyed these two posts, you might find interesting my essay "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach", forthcoming in the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) Review. via The Debate Link http://bit.ly/2TbfocI

#anti-semitism #Jews #white supremacy #Whites

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we-are-guildmaster · 7 years

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Art by James Ward

Raulwocket read over the latest rumors and requests that had been delivered to the guildhall. His network of informants and contacts never failed to turn up interesting leads that teams of adventurers could track down. Most of these came directly from the city proper, not an unusual thing but uncommon enough to draw Raulwocket’s attention. As he sorted through each entry he made notes as to which should be posted on the work board and which should be investigated further. While paperwork was never his favorite part of his job, it was an essential part none the less.

Creating random encounters and side quests can add color to any campaign and also can be useful for drawing a group into a deeper plot.

10 city based adventure seeds.

1. It is the Great Annual (Boat, Horse, Chariot, Foot, Flying Animal) Race. This city takes the race so seriously the different permanent teams have turned into the symbols of social and political factions, and post-race rioting (and even violent changes of government) are obligatory. If sufficiently skilled, the PCs are recruited as substitute racers for a down-on-their-luck faction after a mysterious “accident” disabled the previous team. PCs might also be hired as security for a faction or the supposedly impartial judges, and consequently get involved in the political machinations, race fixing, and hobbling attempts.

2. The inhabitants of a large building start a war against an identical neighboring building. At the beginning, it’s because they are accused of stealing their water, but in fact, they have held many petty grudges for years and this way they can vent them out violently. The party is hired by fearful authorities to stop the revolt that threatens to scale into a civil war, but one of the tenants in the rebel building is a PC’s distant relative. Does the party intervene impartially, risking a family feud or do they help the relative exact revenge against his neighbors?

3. An invaluable piece of treasure is thought to be somewhere in the sewers of the city, which leads the PCs to a dumpster. Behind the rubbish a criminal empire rises, financing itself by reprocessing and using what the city no longer consider useful or falls in the trash, like the piece of treasure. Will the party confront the Trash Emperor to recover the treasure, or do they leave it as a sign of good will?

4. The party is mistaken by a wealthy man as carriage caretakers in a shantytown neighborhood. He hands them money to protect his vehicle. The legitimate caretakers challenge the PCs and try to steal the wealthy wagon. Does the party protect the rich man’s vehicle or do they leave the locals to do as they please, risking later persecution by the noble client?

5. The PCs arrive at the inn and find a large group (at least three times their number) of mercenaries leaving for the jail where they plan to execute all the prisoners. The party is connected to one of the inmates (an old, recurrent, but not particularly hated enemy, maybe they put him behind bars in the first place) and wishes him to remain alive for some reason. Do they face the killers, race to save the prisoner first, warn the prisoners or set them all free?

6. A black market thug offers an illegal but coveted article to the PCs; however, he is not carrying it around. Just as the deal is completed, a guard raid starts and the merchant runs away. Does the party run after him, looking suspiciously related to crime, or do they help the guards arrest the thug, risking loss of their money and the coveted item?

7. The impoverished city charges adventurers an entry tax of 10% of their loot. The officers in charge use magical detection spells to enforce the embargo. Citizens in line offer to take care of the largest parts of the adventurers’ treasure to cheat on the taxation, in exchange for a fee. However, some of these citizens are thieves who use the situation to steal treasure from adventurers, and they guard the stolen loot in a nearby cave. Will the party surrender their treasure to tax or will they risk it to a theft?

8. Kindergarten Magic. Street urchins are rumored to have special powers. A representative of the Magicians Guild approaches your party to investigate. In reality, they are learning magic from an unknown source. The children have less inhibition and magical control but have much more mana and capability of replenishing mana, making them dangerous magic users.

9. A string of building construction accidents has occurred lately throughout the city. Fortunately, no one’s been seriously hurt, but the accidents are increasing in size and damage. The local guild has put up flyers asking for help in solving their problem.

10. A wizard, perhaps new to the city, sponsors a scavenger hunt to gain material components for his spells (or for the mages’ guild). Each item has a point value, and competing parties have three days to amass as many points as possible. Some are easy; some are not. Some require combat, others require ingenuity. Astute PC wizards may notice that components on the list are used to cast terrible or destructive spells (perhaps forbidden by the authorities or the guild). The reward promised is huge, and greedy parties may fight each other during the hunt. Perhaps the wizard plans to destroy the city or the guild.

#Raulwocket #we-are-guildmaster #adventure seeds

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popculttome-blog · 5 years

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Refugee’s rights = refugee’s realities..?

Try to picture a person to the following questions:

What is a refugee? Why did the refugee flee? What are the refugee’s goals in the country the refugee is searching shelter in?

How did the person you’ve pictured look like? Male, poor with hope for a better economic life in the new country? Maybe you’ve added to imagination of his backstory, that he is fleeing war. Well actually, a refugee is by the Geneva Refugee Convention, any person, that

“owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” (Geneva Refugee Convention, Article 1.A.2, 1951)

Comparing this to our general imagination of refugees, we forget so many different types of people, that have a legal right to e.g. be in the US, as the United States are part of this international contract. One example are undocumented LGBTQ- persons (Baltazar Pedraza, 2015). People occupying this intersectional status (Collins, 2000), not only have to struggle with micro-aggressions due to their phenotype and sexual orientation at their shelter country (Sue, 2010), but also have to fear for their legal status, which although they are suffering violations of human rights in their home country, they are not recognized by many shelter countries as valid refugees, because “they could just decide to not practice their sexuality” (personal experience with immigration officials in Germany). To be clear here, that is a not legally valid argument, as just the fear of being prosecuted for being part of a social group and therefore explicitly NOT only the persecution based on practices is covered by the Geneva Convention (1951). Taking into account that many countries in the world are criminally persecuting homosexuality many more people should be granted asylum but they are not.

This was just one example of how the practice of our western refugee laws are essentially violating international contracts and our practices therefore should be legally punished by international courts. Nevertheless, this is not the reality due to western hegemony and privilege (Framework Essay 3), that allows our institutions to violate other institutions, which would give privilege to other social groups, without discursively being seen as the violator, because our administrations have the discursive power to legitimize these crimes against human rights.

References:

Baltazar Pedraza, Dulce Paloma. 2015. "Gay and Undocumented: Some, Like Dagoberto Bailón, Must Come Out Twice." in Phoenix New Times. Phoenix, AZ.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. "Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images." in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Rosenblum, Karen E. & Toni-Michelle C. Travis. (2015).” Framework Essay 2” In: The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexual Orientation, and Disability. McGraw Hill. 7th (seventh) edition

United Nations. 1951. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva, Switzerland

Image References:

https://www.facebook.com/InternationalRescueCommittee/photos/a.105766893023.93556.73970658023/10155475465108024/?type=3&Theater, last seen: 5/6/2019 at 10:44 am

https://ilga.org/maps-sexual-orientation-laws, last seen 5/7/2019 at 10:50 am

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stormhavenmedia · 5 years

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Authors note; As always follow the links and research on your own, believing random dudes on the internet is how we got here. Nothing in this should be taken as a reason to in any way hate any group. Racism is bad for you. My purpose here is to set the record straight and present the actual undisputed, but little known facts. Prejudice and Judgement are two different things.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell

Recent years have seen the rise of Somali politicians in North America. The two most prominent examples being Ahmed Hussein, (Axmed Xuseen) Canadian Minister of Immigration during the first Trudeau government, and Ilhan Abdullahi Omar first term US congresswoman and famously leader of the progressive “squad”.

Both Xuseen and Ohmar have similar backstories. They were welcomed by Canada and the US respectively as refugees. Both were supported by generous social systems in their first years in their nations that saved them. I say “saved them” because under the legal definition provided by the 1951 Refugee Convention, to be considered refugees they could not have returned to Somalia “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” So if they were legitimate refugees then de facto Canada and the United States saved them from brutal persecution. Both were given every opportunity to succeed, and succeed they did. Both received high-end educations not readily available to much of the population. Both were elected to high public office that incredibly few citizens can aspire to.

Both Axmed Xuseen and Ilhan Ohmar have shown their immense gratitude by using every opportunity, and the full weight and very real privilege of their offices, to denigrate both societies with a literally endless stream of cringe-inducing epithets. The vitriol with which they assault the people and societies who sponsored them is incredibly vicious in both cases. Every “white” American and Canadian are brutal racists. We have no culture, no history of any note. Our home countries are merely constructs of “white-colonial-settler” supremacy. The societies that provided them with an elite education and elected them to high office, are according to them, irredeemable and inherently racist to their cores. This message is blasted into the national conscience by seemingly unlimited access to the corporate media, the odious CBC, academia and the utter adulation of the economic elite “woke” classes. Their views are even being heralded in the British medical Journal, The Lancet as scientific fact. The piece shown below generally asserts that all evil in the world, from slavery to colonization, originates with “whiteness” which must be swept from the earth.

Our Somali heroes/victims claim positions of moral authority due to the inherently superior non “white” culture that spawned them. Their history is not stained with the conquest and subjugation of the “other” as is all “white” culture. They hold themselves literally incapable of being racist.

They both site their adherence to Islam, the religion of peace, and thus cement their position as historical victims. Both like to lecture the inherently racist “white” citizens who elected them about the massive deficits in their culture, and their desperate need to end “white superiority” and “whiteness” itself in a vaguely genocidal incitement. Any dissent is met with furious tirades, and legislation, criminilizing Islamophobia.

What follows is a history both Ohmar and Axmed and the legions of the “woke” hoped you would never learn. Through deliberate and sustained action, our education systems have been manipulated over generations to ensure we forget our history. We are taught only the very selective facts those in power wish us to know. The warping of our education system has been very successful. I have a college level education and have studied history all my life yet much of what this was unknown to me. This has been a long game. It has allowed these two individuals, and many others to perpetrate some of the most epic gas-lighting in human history.

One culturally iconic feature of Somali culture and language neither Axmed Xuseen or Ilhan Ohmar have chosen to share with us putrid “whites” is the word “Jareer”. Jareer is an ancient Somali term of racist derision for the Bantu peoples, and anyone else they feel is racially inferior. Millions of Bantu people were hunted and sold in open slave markets in the ports of Zeila and Mogadishu for at least a thousand years. The fact is that Somalis were beneficiaries of the brutal Islamic wars of conquest that carved out the Maghreb wiping out the indigenous cultures. This meant they also enslaved Oromo and Nilotic people. Somalis had a much different impression of these groups. Their capture, treatment and duties of the two groups of slaves differed markedly, with Oromo favored because Oromo subjects were not viewed as racially jareer by their Somali captors. Both the use of the term Jareer and the deeply held, openly racist, views of the Somali population persist to this day.

In the 700 years immediately before Europeans came to Africa, Somalia was one of the centers of the brutally colonial Islamic Caliphates. The Somalis created an empire based on trading with the burgeoning Islamic world being carved out with the sword from the Indus Valley to Europe, killing millions between the rise of Muhammad and the beginning of the European Age of Empire.

Irfan Husain, Islamic scholar speaking about the muslim conquest of India that began around 1000 AD, “Demons from the Past”

“While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster.

“Their temples were razed, their idols smashed, their women raped, their men killed or taken slaves. When Mahmud of Ghazni entered Somnath on one of his annual raids, he slaughtered all 50,000 inhabitants. Aibak killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands. The list of horrors is long and painful. These conquerors justified their deeds by claiming it was their religious duty to smite non-believers. Cloaking themselves in the banner of Islam, they claimed they were fighting for their faith when, in reality, they were indulging in straightforward slaughter and pillage…”

Much of the lucrative merchandise the Somali Caliphs taxed were chained human beings. While Europeans were busy in their mud huts trying to stitch together the ruins of the Roman Empire, the Somali Caliphates were instrumental in the trafficking on some 12 million human beings. They then continued the practice for another 600 years after European contact, until the Italian colonial administration abolished slavery in Somalia at the turn of the 20th century. Somalia’s slaving empire had lasted over a thousand years.

I will rely on mostly African scholars where possible for historical and cultural contextual telling of this story in detail.

We begin with Nat Amarteifio; historian, and former mayor of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Speaking about the origins of Slavery

“There is a willful amnesia about the roles that we played in the slave trade……….The system already existed,” Amarteifio said. “The Europeans saw it. And thought: ‘Ah, we can try these people in our lands in the New World…..But Amarteifio says the Europeans weren’t going out and capturing Africans. They couldn’t — they got sick and died from illnesses like malaria. Some African ethnic groups went into business, warring with other groups so they could capture prisoners they sold as slaves to the Europeans. Amarteifio says they were organized and intentional about it. “To pursue slavery successfully, you need a highly organized group because somebody has to go out there — somebody has to locate the victims; somebody has to lead an army there; somebody has to capture them, transport them to the selling centers; all the time, keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t revolt,” he said. “And then sell them, and move on.”

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-08-20/willful-amnesia-how-africans-forgot-and-remembered-their-role-slave-trade

Sandra E. Greene. Anbinder Professor of African History at Cornell University Speaking on the origins of African slavery.

“Very few Americans know that slavery was common throughout the world as well as in Africa”, says Sandra E. Greene. Greene’s research focuses on the history of slavery in West Africa, especially Ghana, where warring political communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enslaved their enemies, and the impact can still be felt today. “Slavery in the United States ended in 1865,” says Greene, “but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I. Slavery continued because many people weren’t aware that it had ended, similar to what happened in Texas after the United States Civil War.”

https://research.cornell.edu/news-features/curious-history-slavery-west-africa

Senegalese Anthropologist, Economist and Author; Tidiane N’Diaye spoke to Silja Fröhlich at Deutsche Welle,

“According to N’Diaye, slavery has existed in practically all civilizations. This was also the case in Africa before settlers came….In central East Africa, ethnic groups such as the Yao, Makua and Marava were fighting against each other and entire peoples within the continent traded with people they had captured through wars. Thus Arab Muslims encountered already existing structures, which facilitated the purchase of slaves for their purposes…

..Back then, Arab Muslims in North and East Africa sold captured Africans to the Middle East. There, they worked as field workers, teachers or harem guards, which is why the castration of male slaves was common practice. Muslims, on the other hand, including African Muslims, were not allowed to be enslaved, according to Islamic legal views. Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia, ….But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa.”

https://www.dw.com/en/east-africas-forgotten-slave-trade/a-50126759

The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands,

In: African and Asian Studies

Author: Robert Collins,

01 Jan 2006 Volume 5: Issue 3

Speaking about the ancient origins of African slavery;

https://brill.com/view/journals/aas/5/3/article-p325_4.xml?fbclid=IwAR0bCEvWxYhemcUv4wQkwttRFfoXmJcE7W4OI6iDiQI2yQfCEDVIrLRmJ2s

Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery

By Catherine Besteman, 1999, University of Pensylvania Press, On Somali Identity and racial prejudice.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE ARAB SLAVE TRADE FROM THE SUDAN 7th — 19th CENTURY, Yusuf Fadl Hasan

Chairman, Turkish Studies Unit, U. of K., 2000-(Founding) Vice-Chancellor, University of Sharjah, U.A.E, March 1997-February 1998.President (Vice-Chancellor), University of Khartoum, 1985-1990. President, Omdurman Islamic University, 1984-1985. Deputy Vice-Chancellor, U. of K., 1983-1984.Dean, Faculty of Arts, U. of K. 1975-1979.Director, Sudan Research Unit, U. of K., 1965-1072.Visiting Professor at the Universities of London, Qatar, Mecca, Riyadh, Tripoli, Cairo, Ahmadu Bello, Mousil, Bergen and Aden

Sudan Notes and Records

Vol. 58 (1977), pp. 85-106

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44947358?seq=1

Speaking to the origins of Islamic Slavery

Slavery and Slave Trades in the Indian Ocean and Arab Worlds: Global Connections and Disconnections…Straight, No Chaser: Slavery, Abolition,and the Modern Muslim Mind

Bernard K. Freamon, Professor of Law Emeritus on the Faculty of Law, Seton Hall Law.

http://www.yale.edu/glc/indian‐ocean/freamon.pdf

Speaking about the denial toward its history of slavery in the Islamic world.

Some general historical perspective on the Trans Saharan slave trade and the enslavement of Europeans. 8th and 9th century AD

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-tcc-worldciv2/chapter/transsaharan-slave-trade/

“During the 8th and 9th centuries of the Fatimid Caliphate, most of the slaves were Europeans (called Saqaliba) captured along European coasts and during wars.[2] However, slaves were drawn from a wide variety of regions and included Mediterranean peoples, Persians, peoples from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia, Armenia and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia, English, Dutch and Irish, Berbers from North Africa, and various other peoples of varied origins as well as those of African origins. Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj (Bantu) slaves from East Africa increased with the rise of the Oman sultanate, which was based in Zanzibar. They came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili coast.[3] The North African Barbary states carried on piracy against European shipping and enslaved thousands of European Christians. They earned revenues from the ransoms charged; in many cases in Britain, village churches and communities would raise money for such ransoms. The government did not ransom its citizens.”

Gwyn Campbell

The International Journal of African Historical Studies

Vol. 22, No. 1 (1989), pp. 1-26

Published by: Boston University African Studies Center

https://www.jstor.org/stable/219222?seq=1

Speaking to the fact that the Islamic slave trade carried on without puase all during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and was in no way displaced by it. Here they are speaking about the early 19th century.

An article pointing to some of the implications of the Islamic slave trade on African women.

https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/

“While in the European “New W o r ld ”, the measure of a man’s stature was mapped out and calibrated on the physical dimensions of empire built upon the sinews of forced masculine labour, in the Islamic Orient wealth was a reflection of prestige, young girls the vessel of male h u b r is , the mats of male pleasure ground, the malleable material to be shaped to the master’s will.

Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.”

“The combined effect of all these factors,” says Duncan Clarke, “was a steady demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, which had cover story to be met from wars, raids or purchases along the borders with non-Islamic regions. Although some of these slaves came from Russia, the Balkans and central Asia, the continuing expansion of Islamic regimes in sub-Saharan Africa made black Africans, the major source.”

A paper discusing the modern reality of Somalia for non Somali’s

Mohamed A. Eno, Dean at St Clements University Somalia; Associate Professor of African Studies and Senior Faculty & Researcher in the English Department, ADNOC Technical Institute, UAE.

Mohamed H. Ingiriis ,Graduate student at Goldsmiths, University of London

Omar A. Eno ;Adjunct Professor of African History and Director of the African Migration and Development Research Program at Portland State University, Oregon, USA

Discrimination and Prejudice in the Nucleus of African Society: Empirical Evidence from Somalia

“The long silence of Somali studies toward what relates to prejudice, subjugation, and discrimination against the oppressed Bantu people in the country will be discussed before the conclusion finally wraps up the study with suggestions and recommendations for further research

During post-independence era and despite the repeated praise of the civilian regimes for democratic ideals, the Bantu Jareer (like the outcast groups) were not allowed to field their own candidate for parliament, not to think of cabinet post which was exclusively for Somalis . Often, bureaucratic barricades were used to shut them out at party nomination level. “The state and the SYL party feared that if a Jareer were fielded it would be difficult to defeat him in numerical terms; so they had to formulate strategies to deprive him at preliminary stages by every possible means,” comments Macallin Dhaayoow of Bandhowoow area of Xamar Jab Jab in Mogadishu.

Muuse Mocoow explains an episode which reveals how it was easier to scapegoat on a Bantu than any other person. “We have had situations in which we had to pay for crimes committed by others,” explains Muuse, a Bantu Jareer construction supervisor based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “My brother and my uncle were arrested for construction materials their boss had stolen from the construction project of his ministry in order to use it for the building of his personal house in Booli-Qaran. His high ranking police kin told him that if anyone could be implicated as the culprit, then he wouldn’t be taken to the National Security Court for stealing public property. Because as Bantu we did not have anyone to stand for our right, we became sacrificial lamb for the crime of every culprit from the ruling clans,” adds Muuse as he gets emotional with tears rolling down his face. “This is one of the reasons why many of us [Bantu] left Somalia because there are no Muslims. The law doesn’t protect us; the so-called revolution didn’t protect us; nothing protects us unless we are absent from the land. That is what we did.” Muuse concludes with these pitiful remarks: “We are here in Saudi Arabia, aged, and will probably die here. It is sad; but because of what has been happening in the country for the past 20 years, there is nothing to go back to. They (Somalis) became much wilder beasts. No human can associate with them.” The account given by Xuseen Juma Shongole reveals an exemplary case of how even the state provided not only a leeway to expropriation of the property of members of the Bantu Jareer community, but actually practically participated in the looting of the fertile farms adjacent to the rivers. According to Xuseen: We woke up one morning only to witness our livelihood including mature crops and thousands of fruit bearing trees bulldozed to the ground. There was a number of heavy machinery equipment because the government had decided to build a sugar factory in the neighborhood and saw it in its benefit to dislodge us from the area in order to establish an enormous sugarcane plantation to supply the factory. To add insult to injury, the staff of the project told us that we should stop ‘crying over land’ and be part of the ‘waged workforce’ that would be employed to work on our state-expropriated farms. That action told us that our livelihood was not important to the government and that the governor who was representing it was very cruel, arrogant and irresponsible.” In order to contribute to the argument related to the theory of heterogeneity of the Somali people rather than the untenable, old concept of homogeneity, we intend to highlight a distinct community that has been and still is the victims of persecution, prejudice and discrimination under the veil of the concept of egalitarian Somalia. The group is the Bantu Jareer ethnic community which, related to its African origin, is “permanently removed from the social boundary of Somaliness ” (Kusow 2004:)

Modern Islamic Slavery

Africa is one of the few places on earth where slavery still persists. In fact African countries were some of the last to actually make the practice illegal. Muslims are once again trading Jareer slaves in open air markets in Tripoli, Libya

“The footage released by CNN appears to show youths from Niger and other sub-Saharan countries being sold to buyers for about $400 (£300) at undisclosed locations in Libya…..These modern slavery practices must end and the African Union will use all the tools at its disposal,” Mr Conde said.”..

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42038451

“Thirteen anti-slavery campaigners were sentenced for up to 15 years in prison in Mauritania last week, for their role in a protest aimed at denouncing the practice of slavery in the country. The government tribunal found members of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) guilty of various counts, including attacks against the government, armed assembly and membership of an unrecognized organization. Mauritania is the world’s last country to abolish slavery, and the country didn’t make slavery a crime until 2007. The practice reportedly affects up to 20% of the country’s 3.5 million population (pdf, p. 258), most of them from the Haratin ethnic group

For centuries, the black Haratins have been caught in a cycle of servitude enforced by the …..descendants of Arab Berbers.

https://qz.com/africa/763470/the-last-country-to-abolish-slavery-is-jailing-its-anti-slavery-

activists/

There Are 46 Million Slaves in the World — Here’s Where They’re Found

A chilling reminder from the Global Slavery Index.

Somalia remains 6th on the Global Slavery Index

An index measuring strength of response against slavery. Canada rates very high Somalia not so much.

Somalia is a failed state. I will not engage in argument here about why it persists in being so since its independence.

Somalia’s population has grown exponentially in the last 40 years despite having no viable economy or government. The country and the U.N. decry its lack of ability to support this level of population growth. Now while the countries of the west like Canada, which without immigration has a steady or declining population already, are exhorted to stop having children, yet no such admonition is given to the loyal followers of Islam.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/somalia-population/

While there is still slavery practiced by Somalis it just doesn’t bring in the big bucks like it used to. Many enterprising Somalis have turned to piracy on the high seas. Success has been mixed thanks in part to the Royal Canadian Navy.

youtube

They have thus far been unable to base their economy on piracy in the same way as slavery and it has made the country less than attractive as a port.

Somalis have also become enthusiastic about once again subjugating their African neighbors to Islam and one imagines this is providing some limited employment. This should be viewed as part of an unbroken thirteen cenutry push to impose the will of Alaah on their fellow human by any means.

From a BBC report

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-15336689

“It emerged as the radical youth wing of Somalia’s now-defunct Union of Islamic Courts, which controlled Mogadishu in 2006, before being forced out by Ethiopian forces.

There are numerous reports of foreign jihadists going to Somalia to help al-Shabab, from neighboring countries, as well as the US and Europe. It is banned as a terrorist group by both the US and the UK and is believed to have between 7,000 and 9,000 fighters. Al-Shabab advocates the Saudi-inspired Wahhabi version of Islam, while most Somalis are Sufis.

It has imposed a strict version of Sharia in areas under its control, including stoning to death women accused of adultery and amputating the hands of thieves.”

Al Shabab executed the passengers of a bus

Al-Shabab’ Somali Jihadists have been welcomed 2020 with lots of Jihad

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) Jan 18, 2020 — At least two people were killed and more than 20 others wounded when a suicide car bomber targeted a construction site along a highway outside Somalia’s capital, police said Saturday. Six Turkish nationals were among the wounded, with two in serious condition, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said. The Turkish construction workers appeared to be the bomber’s target, Somali police Col. Abdi Abdullahi said. Most of the casualties were police officers providing security for the Turkish workers constructing a highway between the capital, Mogadishu, and the agricultural town of Afgoye, 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of the city. The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group, based in Somalia, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the the group’s radio arm, Andalus. Al-Shabab often carries out such attacks in and near Mogadishu. Turkey has invested heavily in Somalia, with technical and development assistance exceeding $1 billion, according to the Turkish government. Turkish companies run the international airport and seaport in Mogadishu, and in 2016 the Turkish president inaugurated Turkey’s largest embassy complex in the world there.”

https://www.keloland.com/news/national-world-news/at-least-2-killed-20-wounded-in-bombing-near-somali-capital/

NPR, December 28, 2019…A truck bomb in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, killed at least 79 people today. More than 100 were injured. It was the worst attack in the city in two years, and the country’s president has placed the blame on the Islamist group al-Shabab”

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/28/792088722/somalia-bombing-kills-at-least-79

Critical Threats Project 2019 assesment of Al-Shabab capabilities and intentions

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/al-shabaab-area-of-operations-october-2018

“Al Shabaab holds territory surrounding the capital, Mogadishu, from which it coordinates complex attacks targeting the Somali Federal Government.[5] Increased counterterrorism pressure may have reduced the overall volume of attacks in Mogadishu, but the city is not yet secure.[6] Key al Shabaab sanctuaries persist in central Somalia, especially in Lower and Middle Shabelle regions, and in southern Somalia in Bay, Gedo, and Middle and Lower Jubba regions. Al Shabaab is able to project force from Somalia and safe havens along the eastern border with Kenya to attack Kenyan security forces and soft targets in Kenya’s Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, and Lamu counties.”

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/al-shabaab-area-of-operations-october-2018

In closing I would set straight a couple of facts about Canada and slavery.

Slavery has been part of all human cultures. It is in the earliest records we have. Europeans were the first Empire in human history to have abolished it. Canada as a Nation State responsible for our own affairs was formed in 1887. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. No human being has ever legally been brought into Canada as the possession of another human being. In fact the colony of lower Canada, now Ontario, and its Canadian political class with the avid support of its citizens were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement. In 1793 the Act to abolish slavery was passed in the Upper Canada legislature

John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant Governor of the colony, had been a supporter of abolition before coming to Upper Canada; as a British Member of Parliament, he had described slavery as an offence against Christianity.[2][3] By 1792 the slave population in Upper Canada was not large. However, when compared with the number of free settlers, the number was not insignificant. In York (the present-day city of Toronto) there were 15 African-Canadians living, while in Quebec some 1000 slaves could be found. Furthermore, by the time the Act Against Slavery would be ratified, the number of slaves residing in Upper Canada had been significantly increased by the arrival of Loyalists refugees from the south who brought with them servants and slaves.[4]

At the inaugural meeting of the Executive Council of Upper Canada in March 1793, Simcoe heard from a witness the story of Chloe Cooley, a female slave who had been violently removed from Canada for sale in the United States. Simcoe’s desire to abolish slavery in Upper Canada was resisted by members of the Legislative Assembly who owned slaves, and therefore the resulting act was a compromise.[2] The bulk of the text is due to John White, the Attorney General of the day. Of the 16 members of the assembly, at least six owned slaves.[5]

The law, titled An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province, stated that while all slaves in the province would remain enslaved until death, no new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, and children born to female slaves after passage of the act would be freed at the age of 25.[6]

This law made Upper Canada “the first British colony to abolish slavery”.[5][7] The Act remained in force until 1833 when the British Parliament‘s Slavery Abolition Act abolished slavery in most parts of the British Empire.

Chief Justice of Upper Canada William Osgoode followed up 10 years later

“In 1803, Chief Justice William Osgoode placed on the law books the ruling that slavery was inconsistent with British law. Although this did not legally abolish slavery, 300 slaves were set free in Lower Canada (the future Quebec). Citizens who wanted to bargain in the slave trade had no protection from the courts. The decline of slavery took place in Upper Canada as well. The short growing season and cost of feeding and clothing slaves, along with abolitionist sentiment stirred by Simcoe, caused more and more slaves to be set free. Future lieutenant governors of Upper Canada, like Sir Peregrine Maitland, continued the humanitarian spirit of Simcoe and offered Black veterans grants of land. The desire to stamp out slavery in Upper and Lower Canada was so strong that an application from Washington, D.C. to allow American slave owners to follow fugitive slaves into British Territory was flatly denied. Judges who favored abolition were handing down more and more decisions against slave owners; as a result, when the British Imperial Act of 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, very few slaves remained in Upper and Lower Canada.

The decades after 1833 saw an increase in abolitionist sympathizers as the fugitive enslaved increased in number and found freedom in Canada. Anti-Slavery Societies also increased. George Brown, founder of the “Globe and Mail” newspaper, and Oliver Mowat, a future premier of the province of Ontario, joined the Toronto Anti-Slavery Society. At the first large and enthusiastic meeting at City Hall, it was resolved that “Slavery is an outrage to the laws of humanity and its continued practice demands the best exertions for its extinction.” The Society further declared that they would raise money to house, feed, and clothe the destitute travelers. Weeks and months spent making their way to freedom took a toll on the bodies and minds of the enslaved. Many died along the way. Still, thirty thousand (a conservative estimate) reached Canada between 1800 and 1860 according to the Anti-Slavery Society. Often upon reaching freedom, former slaves would kneel down, kiss the ground, and thank the good Lord that they were free, and then they would build churches for their spiritual growth and development, as well as that of future generations.”

http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/stories-freedom/abolition-slavery-canada/

By way of comparison Somali Sultan Yusuf Mahamud Ibrahim (1798 – 1848), the third Sultan of the House of Gobroon ruled Somalia. He was victorious during the Bardheere Jihad, which ended with the Baardheere Jamaaca being destroyed and the city of Baardheere being burnt to the ground. Somalia during his entire reign was shipping hundreds of thousands of chained Jareer Bantu slaves all over the Muslim world leaving the Sultan counting his gold.

Somalia remains today a dystopian failed state desoite sustained efforts of the African Union and International actors. Its failure is driven by deeply ingrained racism and clan rivalry. Somalia’s disintegration was not caused by its brief European colonial period. Unless you want to argue that ending slavery was the sole cause of its downfall. Somalia’s current state and any hope for its future lies soley in the hands of Somali’s. I truly do wish them the best.

The truth is that neither Axmed Xuseen and Illhan Ohmar, nor the brutal xenophobic Somali society they originate from have anything to teach anyone about tolerance or morality. Anything they know about pluralistic society they learned here in North America.

Axmed and Ilhan have been working a very deft con on all of us. They are not the descendants of slaves, they are descended from some of the most brutal slavers the world has ever known. Somalis are not in any way the victims of history. Somalis are among its most stubornly unrepentant perpetrators.

William Ray

Somalia; A Racist Islamic Slave Empire Authors note; As always follow the links and research on your own, believing random dudes on the internet is how we got here.

#Ahmed Hussein #Axmed Xuseen #Canada Politics #Ilhan Ohmar #Liberal Party of Canada #Mp Ahmed Hussein Canada #Politics #Somali #Somalia #Somalia Slavery

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/supernaturals-mark-pellegrino-say-defending-twitter-backlash/

'Supernatural's' Mark Pellegrino has his say on defending yourself and Twitter backlash

A few weeks ago, I was able to chat with Mark Pellegrino aka Lucifer, on Supernatural – about the backlash that he was receiving regarding some recent fandom drama. We've covered this type of incident recently in two in-depth articles that many people within the #SPNFamily can relate to. If you have been cyberbullied or someone you know is being victimized, here's a great place to go to help stop it. Now we let Mark take the floor: HOW IT STARTED: I've been a very controversial social media figure since I came out politically four years ago. I say controversial because one’s ethics dominates the political discourse today and to say anything that opposes that narrative is to be... controversial. Add to that the fact that one's politics reflects one's notion of the 'good' and that one's notion of the good is highly personal and you have a recipe for conflict. So, for my controversial views, I've been attacked in a generalized way since the beginning of my entrance onto the social media platform. Go figure. The focused hatred, however, started two years ago with my insertion into the social media lynching of Travis Aaron Wade. Travis was an actor on Supernatural whom I had met at a couple of conventions and whom I knew to be a pretty decent dude. Unbeknownst to me, someone had accused him of sexual harassment at a convention. As the months passed (and I think the controversy had been going on for a year by the time I stumbled into it) accusations grew and grew until he was being accused of a spectrum of crimes from harassment, to stalking, to actual rape and pedophilia. Serious crimes ALL. Now it's my belief that the march towards civilization is, essentially, the struggle to contain violence. The more violence is contained, the more civil our society. We have erected a system for just such containment. It's called Due Process. Due process is the means by which violence is subordinated to reason. How? By a system of objective law. Law defines the terms of proper interaction; the nature of property; and the types of force that are proper and improper in a society whose social goal is the containment of violence; it defines rules for evidence (what constitutes evidence and what does not); Procedures for admittance of information; and protections of the natural rights of each and every person; both victim and the accused. All of that process is for the purpose of attaining justice. Justice, in sum, is the end result of a rational process. It is the attempt on the part of the executors of the law to get it right. What are they getting right? Reality. Facts. Guilt or innocence. Now oppose this concept of justice by Due Process with mob rule. Mob rule has no process. It is governed exclusively by feelings. Usually feelings of outrage. Now, these feelings could be reflections of reality, a true wrong may have been committed, and outrage is certainly a justified feeling to have when one is wronged. But the mob is not interested in pesky little things like truth or reality. Truth is only discovered by a rational process of thought, and a disciplined process of rational thought is not the strong suit of ANY mob. Emotional satisfaction is. If justice is the attainment of truth through a process of rational thought, and the object of Due Process, then vengeance is the satisfaction of rage and the object of the mob. What I walked into two years ago was a mob hot at the task of destroying a human being. Now, you may say it wasn't my business to butt into another man's struggles. But my humanity would allow no other response. In the same way that you'd feel compelled to help someone in the midst of being assaulted (assuming you had the skill and ability to help) so I felt the impulse to try to insert perspective and civilization into what was the savaging of a man's reputation and life. Once I entered the fray, the mob turned its attention on me. By simple association, I was as guilty as the accused of an ever-escalating series of crimes. The fact that most of the accusers disagreed profoundly with my politics added fuel to their fire. When I asked for evidence I was accused of defending the accused (go figure innocent until PROVEN guilty is the mainstay of American jurisprudence). When I suggested they take their case to the police they claimed they had. When I suggested further that they pursue those channels rather than private vengeance, they continued to accuse me of demeaning those who were suffering, as if their suffering was a moral sanction on right; As if the very fact of an accusation was proof enough. This was the beginning of a permanent schism within the fandom between those who felt the persecution of Travis was good, and those who thought it wrong. Regardless of where you come down on the issue, a few things are clear: He was unofficially tried without the privilege of addressing his accusers in court. He was unofficially convicted without recourse to any rational process of appeal, and his reputation was officially and permanently destroyed. Furthermore, this mob has gone on to attack other people for their variant opinions, to dox fans, and to drive others to near-suicidal lengths. HOW IT CONTINUED: Now, as I continued to be actively engaged in political debates on Twitter (known as Tweetabating), I'd accumulated a LONG list of Tweets. Somewhere in the range of 50k. It wasn't so hard, then, for those who didn't like me to build up a list of 'incriminating' tweets. The problem was they were ALL out of context. Sans context these folks attached their own meanings to them and began to spin a narrative of their own about my beliefs. These amounted to several Strawmen which I would address from time to time (incidentally giving them more time and attention than they deserved): 1) For believing that Affirmative Action (legal race-based preferences) was racist legislation and that legal preferences or denigrations of any person for any reason whatsoever was contrary to the object of legal equality, I was labeled a racist; 2) For criticizing BLM (Black Lives Matter) for their several endorsements of violence, segregation, and subversion of due process, I was labeled a racist; 3) For defending due process and NOT equating accusation with convictions, I was a labeled sexist; 4) For criticizing violence within an ideology (an ideology which victimizes its own adherents most), I was smeared as an Islamophobe; 5) I was labeled a homophobe for no clear reason I can come up with other than my strict policy against legal preferences of any kind; 6) I was labelled a xenophobe for no clear reason either (I'm an open borders man). As I said, I would openly discuss these issues from time to time, and this fact would always put me at odds with the same mob who perpetrated violence against TAW (and anyone who supported him) and never resolved anything (as reason often has no effect on those intent on satisfying their rage). At a certain point the vigilantes who had victimized once decided to try their lot again. The flash point of their renewed crusade was a three or four tweet exchange between William Shatner and I. Bill had noticed a toxic tweet thread attacking Jared which I had weighed in on. He commented on it. He had noticed particular people as the epicenter of all the drama and recommended the cast unfollow those people he took to be rather toxic individuals. I agreed that this would indeed rob them of a great deal of their phony moral authority. No person was mentioned by name. No fans were encouraged to do anything to them. Now as I said earlier, truth and justice are achieved by rational processes. The mob is NOT interested in these things. They are interested only in the satisfaction of rage. And this is what proceeded. With typical dishonesty, they spun yet another strawman. This one was of a man who abused his power by urging his fans to attack an innocent person. This narrative, combined with unanswered accusations of racism, sexism, and bigotry coalesced with the unresolved hatred I'd stirred up with my defense of civilization re: TAW, and became an internet-wide campaign to have me fired. In response to this flagrant disregard for truth and misapprehension that celebrity deprives a person of rights, I fought back with the only weapons at my disposal: Truth, Reason, and positivity. Since reality is easier to defend than negativist rationalizations, we've managed to beat back the hordes for now.

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

#cyberbullying #Featured #Interviews #Mark Pellegrino #Supernatural #Travis Aaron Wade

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thefabulousfulcrum · 7 years

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White supremacy is everywhere: How do we fight a concept that has so thoroughly permeated our politics and culture?

via Salon

ANIS SHIVANI

Mr. [David] Duke pledges to oppose any new tax increase. He wants to toss the able-bodied off welfare, stop payments to drug users and freeze benefits to welfare mothers who keep having children. He favors tougher penalties for crime and an end to “unjust affirmative action,” i.e., all reverse discrimination, whether quotas or racial set-asides. … He opposes gun control, wants the United States to halt illegal immigration, and would slash foreign aid. — Patrick J. Buchanan, 1991

In the first part of this series, I focused on some of the history of white supremacy, particularly its late 20th-century versions, which continue to have so much influence today upon the current alt-right movement. It’s important to understand this history — some of which enters into truly exotic terrain — to understand the continuity of ideas, and to realize that we are not facing anything really new in the current manifestation of white supremacy.

But there’s a more mundane side to white supremacy, which deserves to be studied with as much attention: the way in which white supremacy works in and through institutions that we otherwise think of as legitimate to the core, and even essential to the workings of liberal democracy. If we explore how this has occurred recently, then we can no longer push white supremacy aside as an ideology that can be prevented from infecting so-called “mainstream” institutions. I’m thinking primarily of political parties, but once we admit that white supremacy is a fundamental influence on how parties reinvent and calibrate themselves, then this necessarily sweeps the social organism as a whole into the indictment.

White supremacy implies a certain logic that is inimical to that of the Enlightenment (the foundation of modern democracy). It is no coincidence that much of contemporary white supremacy continues to focus on the Illuminati and Freemasons as the disseminators of “secular humanism” (i.e., the core values of the Enlightenment), or that conspiracy theory mines the same territory when it takes on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (attacked as a worldwide conspiracy to bring about godless materialism) or such obsessions as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the rest of the institutions associated with the New World Order (largely meaning the forces of globalization). Against the Enlightenment, which is said to lead to the weakening of the nation as an embodiment of the pure idea of race, the white supremacist insists on separation of races as his natural right. Against mongrelization, the white supremacist desires purity.

This would not be so worrisome if it were a fringe notion, but has the logic of white supremacy become the predominant American value system? If this is the case, then to identify and persecute secret fringe groups is not only a waste of time but counterproductive, since it ignores the larger problem of the thought process that has taken over the way we conduct business publicly.

Can the alt-left’s irrationality fight the alt-right’s irrationality?

The critique of the conspiracists — with their usual aforementioned targets of the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc., all passing under the rubric of the NWO, orchestrated by the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) — has merged too much with the mainstream populist critique of the globalist elites for us to treat conspiracy theory as a separate entity.

Michael Barkun, one of the leading scholars of religion and the far right, calls the kinds of knowledge that conspiracy theory traffics in “stigmatized knowledge.” Among the kinds of stigmatized knowledge, he includes “forgotten, superseded, ignored, rejected and suppressed knowledge.” Much of the time conspiracy theorists are trying to bring to the fore these kinds of knowledge, which, for Trump supporters, the peddlers of “fake news” are said not to be interested in treating seriously.

Yet I would argue that the broader culture has become so invested in its own conspiracy theories that the knowledge the extreme right owns and disseminates as stigmatized knowledge is easily assimilated in regular channels. In a culture of general irrationality, there cannot be an oppositional culture of irrationality.

Is the left any less immune to paranoia or hysteria than the right? The mania for physical perfection, the aversion to the reality of aging and death, the belief in a kind of identity politics that hinges on deliberate avoidance of the structural foundations of empire, the prevalence of narcissist/confessionalist expression in all the arts and creative endeavors, the constant self-justification in the form of demonizing various deplorables — all these urges seem to me typical of the irrational, anti-Enlightenment, conspiratorial mindset of what we might call the contemporary alternative left, or alt-left. I will elaborate on my concept of the alt-left in a future essay, but to the extent that the underlying structures of white supremacy (which actually benefit the “meritocratic” neoliberal elites) are not part of the alt-left’s critique, these structures are left alone to fester, to thrive, to become more important than they need to be.

The difference from the alt-right is that the alt-left can claim cultural legitimacy for its forms of conspiracy, one of whose main targets is, ironically, white supremacy. Some scholars think that conspiracy theory inevitably leads to racism. The link between conspiracy and white supremacy is predictable, they believe. But if this is true, then why shouldn’t it apply to conspiracy theory on the left? Under neoliberalism, which separates the personal from the political, the alt-left has operated along the same basic philosophical continuum as the alt-right. The last election, in my view, was contested between two forms of irrationality, the alt-right and the alt-left.

The two Pats (Robertson and Buchanan) show the way to normalize white supremacy

But perhaps not in the way you might think. Let’s take Pat Robertson first. In September 1991 he published the book “New World Order,” propagating his fears of a “one-world government under a centralized authority.” Writing a new foreword to his book, Robertson noted that the coup that had attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia was a stage-managed affair, a harbinger of great turmoil in the coming decades because of the excessive power of the elites this coup revealed: “There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge.” This probably meant the end of Christianity as well. Robertson, with such views, competed in the 1988 Republican primaries and remained a mainstream political force all through the 1990s.

The question that arises is why those with similar (though more radical) views, such as Francis Parker Yockey (author of the fascist tract “Imperium”) or George Lincoln Rockwell (founder of the American Nazi Party), could not dream of contending for the leadership of a major political party in the 1950s and ’60s. Robertson did get in trouble for relying on anti-Semitic sources such as Nesta Webster, and sought to preserve his innocence against such charges. But much of his critique, if removed from racism, turns into something the conventional left of the time could have bought into. Whereas Robertson believed that the first Gulf War was orchestrated in order for “the nations of the world to forget for a time their own claims of sovereignty in order to submerge their interests into that of a worldwide authority such as the United Nations,” the left need only replace the word “United Nations” with the “United States” for the conspiracy to fuse.

Here is someone we would think of as an archetypal (Christian) white supremacist uttering such thoughts as “during colonialism the wealth of the colonies was used for the benefit of the mother country, the white plantation owners, and the white traders and business men.” Updating this to modern times, Robertson observes that “the United States [is not] anxious to have Zaire become a net exporter of agricultural products in competition with … [its] own farmers.” When Robertson expresses his concern that “At the central core is a belief in the superiority of … [the Establishment’s] own skill to form a world system in which enlightened monopolistic capitalism can bring all of the diverse currencies, banking systems, credit, manufacturing, and raw materials into one government-supervised whole, policed of course by their world army,” would Occupy-style activists take much issue with this worry about what is, in essence, the 1 percent?

For Pat Buchanan too, the idea of the forgotten middle class has been a convenient receptacle for aspects of white supremacy that seemed palatable enough for electoral politics. In various stages of philosophical development, the extinction of the middle class has become seen as equivalent to extinction of the white race.

The lines between supremacy and populism have become (mostly) indiscernible

A central bank — for Robertson, for Buchanan, for Ron Paul — is an instrument of tyranny by which the traditional freedoms of the people are gradually taken away. The late 20th- and early 21st-century white supremacists seem to have been articulating a vision of the world that is obsessively money-centric. Power is always hidden, but it has gone behind more impenetrable screens in its postmodern manifestations, so that science, academia and government — authority in all its forms — are suspect. If there are false messiahs to be exposed, then logic suggests that a real messiah must be discovered. Both right and left share in this form of spirituality, where the “grand design” of the elites is defeated by forms of anarchism, recognizing our organic interdependencies. To the alt-right, this recognition entails racial separation; to the alt-left, identity politics (another form of racial separation).

Buchanan’s detailed intellectual foray, “The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy” (1998), is his explanation of the two Americas: Second Wave America (“a land of middle-class anxiety, down-sized hopes, and vanished dreams, where economic insecurity is a preexisting condition of life, and company towns become ghost towns overnight”) versus Third Wave America (the “bankers, lawyers, diplomats, investors, lobbyists, academics, journalists, executives, professionals, high-tech entrepreneurs…. [who are] buoyant and optimistic”).

White supremacy enters the picture for Buchanan because he thinks we did it to ourselves: Our elites destroyed our standard of living by committing to a globalist agenda, bringing about the division between Second and Third Wave America, and opening up our borders to immigrants and unfair trade (thus ending white supremacy, which in paleoconservative circles can go by the designation “Western civilization”). Again, the connection between the central bank’s illegitimate power and the destruction of our way of life, by way of the age-old master plan working its way from the Illuminati to the Trilateral Commission, is manifest. The most charitable explanation for Buchanan (as a crucial forerunner of Trump) we can come up with is that he deploys white supremacy as a subsidiary appeal in his fight against the plot to undermine American national sovereignty.

Let’s bring Ann Coulter and Michael Savage into the picture

Ann Coulter is probably fixed in the left-liberal imagination as an unabashed white supremacist, since she has openly expressed support for genocidal strategies and tactics. Exhibiting an extreme form of Islamophobia, she has argued that “we should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Yet I would argue that Coulter can be seen as more of a populist, who has admittedly used forms of white supremacy when necessary to buttress her argument, which betrays the same concerns about the hidden sources of power that more conventional white supremacists — such as Yockey, Rockwell, Willis Carto, and others — exhibited throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Coulter’s 2011 book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” for instance, demonizes liberals more than any other group. If nonwhites come under fire it is mostly because they support liberals or because liberals support them, not for their existential condition per se — or so it seems for the most part. The self-presentation of Coulter, like recent white supremacists who have preceded her, is as the voice of reason, resolutely opposed to the liberty-destroying “mob,” namely modern Constitution-hating liberals. Interestingly, she presents conservatives as skeptical interrogators of their own leaders, compared to the messianic quest of liberals (manifested through figures like Obama and the Clintons). Her primary argument seems to be that it is liberals who unfairly demonize conservatives, and she even takes on, repeatedly and obsessively, liberals’ preoccupation with conspiracy theories.

I suggest that a figure like Coulter is able to turn liberal rationality on its head because there is no such thing as liberal rationality to contend with anymore; otherwise, she would be a universal figure of fun, defeated and discredited in a moment. She blames liberals for dehumanizing white working-class voters and suggests that conservatives retain skepticism toward what the government tells them; if they fell, for example, for the weapons of mass destruction claim about Iraq, well, liberals did too, and conservatives eventually came out of their stupor. And she expresses the familiar (white supremacist) concern about the elites’ undertaking to reshape the mass mentality (as with Hillary Clinton’s famous “politics of meaning” speech during her husband’s first term), the fatal illness bequeathed by the French Revolution that all supremacists seem to worry about.

In essence, Coulter is attacking the character of liberals as demented, mob-like, conspiratorial elitists — the ultimately un-American temperament. One would think that she was upholding some kind of anarchic standard as a way forward, but for someone whose main job is character assassination the path forward is not a big consideration.

So far, at least on the record of a text like “Demonic,” there is nothing overtly white supremacist about Coulter, and the same is true of Michael Savage’s 2014 bestseller “Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth.” Here too, demonic liberals are making war on the culture (by opening up borders), on the U.S. military (by emasculating it), on the middle class (by favoring the rich), on medicine (by supporting Obamacare), on civil rights (by taking away guns), on science (by believing in climate control) and on schools (by affirmative action). But where is white supremacy in all this? Is this the form white supremacy has assumed lately, becoming so implicated in “conservative” policy that it can barely be detected?

Has white supremacy expanded beyond strictly drawn boundaries?

“Hate” is said to be crucial to white supremacy because it is the impulse whereby the detested other is expelled from the pure constitution of society. This means that for white supremacy to function, the in-group would have to be clearly defined, as would various others in need of expulsion for their own good and for the good of the host society. Hatred can be incited in the form of hate speech, and ultimately hate crimes, whose final manifestation is the state embarking on ethnic cleansing. The protection of the nation-state comes into the picture (as with the two Pats, and as with Coulter, Savage and other talk show propagandists) as the locus for the protection of the race; the nation must be protected to keep America for Americans. The purpose of violence is to demonstrate, from time to time, the power of the purist elements.

This is the standard explanation of white supremacy, and it rests on the existence of the mass politics that came into being at the beginning of the 20th century. The problem of homogeneity, of fighting against conformity, suddenly became the paramount spiritual issue with the victory of industrial civilization. Propaganda is the tool whereby the conformity imposed by the conspiracist cabal can be defeated by the embattled in-group. Hence, modern explanations of forms of supremacy rely on a separation between the normal personality and the authoritarian one (susceptible to propaganda). Such explanations as Theodor Adorno’s in “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950) — which have found a lot of traction with American intellectuals in the wake of Trump’s triumph — offer sociopolitical justifications that abound in questionable definitions of abnormality.

On the other hand, the socioeconomic explanation — whose major American exponents were Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab in “The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970” (1970) — relies on the “losers” from modernization constructing defense mechanisms, such as racism, to protect their lost cultural authority. This would apply to the vast demographic and social changes taking place in America in the 1960s and ’70s, and the even more significant changes due to globalization from the 1990s onward. This “politics of backlash” explanation would apply to the Trump phenomenon as well, but note that ultimately this explanation also relies on personality as the hinge. Economic changes are important only insofar as they trigger personality changes leading to racial prejudice, particularly among the white lower middle class. These are not theories of causality, nor do they have much predictive value. How in earth do we — as in the case of the Trump victory — separate expressions of frustration from expressions of ideological support?

But more importantly, to the extent that the standard explanation is utterly confounded in contemporary times, the whole structure falls apart. Here we get into the mistaken identification of Coulter, et al., as designated white supremacists, when they are merely part of a structure of psychological exchanges that spares no one. Is hatred exclusive to the right? How is it even possible to define hatred? If liberals want to deprive white supremacists of certain rights necessary to the continuation of their propaganda, does that also classify as hatred? Have white supremacists succeeded in defining and closing off their in-group, or is it susceptible to penetration by outsiders? Is the nation-state a sacred precinct for white supremacists in general, or are some or all of them moving past the nation-state ideal?

Who excels at demonstrations of violence as power, of propaganda as bludgeon — the state or race supremacists? We think we understand Timothy McVeigh’s frustrations, but what is the (intended) demonstration effect of all the recent violence committed against African-Americans, particularly in the concluding years of the Obama administration? What was the power of establishment propaganda (and to what ends?) in the 2016 election, compared to the power of the propaganda of Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and similar provocateurs? When Barack Obama’s anti-immigrant machinery was ramped up to the tune of millions of deportations, was that white supremacy in practice? What happens to explanations of the authoritarian personality, or even socioeconomic triggering changes, in such a setup? Is there more than a touch of the authoritarian personality in the modern liberal, whether or not we care to admit it?

If we traced all the manifestations of the modern American liberal authoritarian personality, what threads would unravel in the story about white supremacy we are trying to tell ourselves? Does the preservation of empire (not the nation-state, as is said to be the case for petty-minded lower-middle-class whites) compel forms of authoritarianism among upper-middle-class whites that constitute a form of supremacy we are not ready to come to terms with? Moreover, in a spiritual sense, do educated white liberals — those we think of as the winners — feel themselves “losers” in the global economy in ways that we haven’t understood?

Certainly, “secular humanism” is the adversary for the religious right, but I would argue that the alt-left betrays equal concern about the anarchic (and certainly individualistic) manifestations humanism compels; both alt-right and alt-left are united today in fighting forms of depravity, only their definitions differ. Most revealingly, both alt-right and alt-left share equally horrifying apocalyptic visions, only their manifestations being different.

The American party system is a dual transmission belt for white supremacy

To give credence to the contemporary popular image of white supremacists, one would have to accept that they are in some sort of Herculean contest with the political party structure. One would have to grant that the grassroots white supremacist movement has mostly been a failure, for the movement to still feel so embattled and on the fringes. But if we look at the policy level, for both Republicans and Democrats, on nearly everything white supremacists support — from their exaggerated belief in the “free market” to conspiratorial scapegoating of others, from their support of the patriarchy to orthodox religion — the country has shifted dramatically toward their camp.

Anti-Communists, racists, Christians and neoconservatives — the division Sara Diamond famously came up with for right-wingers between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War — no longer function as separate categories. Each of these manifestations of the right has merged and blurred to such an extent that to pose a classification such as white supremacy, standing somehow apart from the others, is no longer tenable. Of course these groups still contest each other — the neoconservatives would not like to be thought of as racists, while the Cato Institute thinks of itself as libertarian rather than social traditionalist — but what has happened is the transmutation and reformation of white supremacy as an ideology that has absorbed elements of libertarianism, neoconservatism, social traditionalism, anti-Communism and anti-immigration to become something that defines the progress of both the parties.

This is one way to understand how the Christian right — which seemed to be the major bugbear of liberals at one time — does not seem to have risen to dominance in the way we would have expected in the 1990s; the Christian right too became absorbed in an intellectualized version of white supremacy. This also puts paleoconservatives in their true context, as having been absorbed into the irrational narrative of white supremacy. The Reagan coalition was doomed to be assimilated into the grand narrative originating in white supremacy, and this has already happened.

Perhaps we have been looking for the enemy in all the wrong places. Is there a transcendent dimension where the John Birch Society and neoliberalism come together? Which elements of George Wallace’s platform have already been absorbed in the dual party apparatus? From “law and order” (code for the state’s demonstration effect of violence) to the defense of forgotten “real” Americans against welfare mothers “breeding children as a cash crop,” which of the arch-racist Wallace’s prognoses and prophecies have not already come true?

If you’re thinking that I will point to Trump as the culprit, I was actually thinking of Bill Clinton, our own democratic savior, for enacting so much of the white supremacist agenda we associate with Wallace. Though there was no practical need to revive anti-alienism in the 1990s, it was done, and with a flourish. The patriotic outburst we associate with the extreme right has in fact been completely absorbed — repackaged and modernized — by neoliberalism, which is forever seeking out new aliens to bring into disrepute and hunt down. If we are looking at any imminent revival of the Ku Klux Klan — which long ago ceased to be a major factor in our politics — as an indicator of white supremacy, we are looking in the wrong place.

While watchdog groups and law enforcement vigorously demonized and contested elements on the far right, from The Order to The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), from Posse Comitatus to White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the ideas propelling white supremacy were being enacted into official policy by both parties, piece by piece. Anti-alienism is rampant again across the land — though for a quarter-century we are supposed to have lived through a neoliberal ascendancy of transnational elites, with little love for the nation-state and its obsolete forms and rituals — because the spirit of the Klan and McCarthyism, of the American Party and Father Coughlin, is utterly compatible with neoliberalism.

It’s not white supremacy but the cultic mindset that has absorbed liberal democracy

The alt-right dominates in its own social realm, while the alt-left flourishes in its own. We live in two often non-intersecting countries. What unites the two spheres is a similar paranoid mindset, so that each group sees itself as the defender against social conformity. Ironically, the only way either group can seem to fight conformity is by taking conformity within its own group to the highest possible level; whatever does not fit into the conformity of one’s own group is defined as “hate,” which compels bringing into action all the mechanisms the group can muster to fight it and save the sanctity of the group.

Colin Campbell came up with the idea of the cultic milieu in the early 1970s, defining it as “the cultural underground of society.” Has globalization pushed so much knowledge out of its purview that it has actually expanded, quite radically, the scope of what falls under the cultural underground (including new forms of white supremacy)?

Globalization would almost seem to desire an occult or magical oppositional terrain in contrast to its construction of homo economicus (the marginal utility maximizer), pushing the “seekers” in cultic milieus to count on “revelatory experiences” to salvage their spiritual losses. The main contest in this battle would be over the definition of truth (as indeed we see in Trumpism); deviant science (IQ studies, such as Herrnstein and Murray’s “The Bell Curve”), deviant religion (Christian Identity and other theologies separating the Adamic and pre-Adamic races), and every other form of deviant knowledge is supposed to seize the truth from monopolist elites and make it known again.

To think of white supremacy as being conventionally theological in nature is to overlook its mainsprings; this misunderstood psychic energy has been so strong in America over the last five decades that, in Campbell’s terms, it has succeeded in being a “major agency of cultural ‘diffusion’” of its ideas into the “host culture” (established institutions), and has also been a “major agency of cultural innovation.” Most of the resonant ideas have come in this time period from this movement, and continue to do so, even if discrete white supremacist “cults” like the Aryan Nations or Posse Comitatus seem long past their heyday. Cults need underground media; no matter how powerful a cult’s media becomes, it must present itself as embattled and surreptitious: hence, Fox News’ or right-wing talk radio’s self-image as underground fighters.

White supremacy is a form of pursuit of exotic or forbidden knowledge (stigmatized knowledge, as Michael Barkun would have it). We think of globalization as rational, calculating, efficient, anti-state and anti-religion — in short, anti-cultic. One way to think of the current dominance of white supremacy (like other forms of irrationality) is to see it as rising in opposition to globalization. The other, more interesting, way is to see it as embodied in globalization itself; that is to say, white supremacy is a form whereby globalization manifests and strengthens itself, just as it deploys all other forms of irrationality (from Hollywood’s apocalyptic scenarios to campus identity politics to consumerist remolding of the body).

Again, is globalization really an open process, or does it create vast new openings for stigmatized knowledge, by repressing so much of it that doesn’t fit into its parameters? Is the modern alt-right just a creation of neoliberal globalization, in other words, just as the impoverished dreams and visions of modern alt-left protest movements, such as Occupy, are yet another creation of globalization?

Constitutionalism is for white patriots only

The nexus between constitutionalism and whiteness has become interesting. All of our resonant constitutional debates — from abortion to taxation, from welfare to affirmative action — can be interpreted through the prism of the normalization of white supremacy. The Constitution has become the primal test for separating the pure and the impure, those who belong to the organic (puritan, neoliberal, white) order versus those who do not. Patriotism is shifted to legalistic terrain, where daily the defense is mounted against the (liberal) mob who want to annihilate the Constitution and therefore whiteness itself. The modern civil rights movement prompted this crisis of identity, which shows no sign of abating on right or left. On both sides we can view every recent national election as a referendum on race, contested on mystical “constitutional” terrain.

The rhetoric of white supremacy keeps apart neo-Nazis and hardcore environmentalists, though they share many points of agreement (particularly on survivalism), which is a fantastic accomplishment of neoliberalism. Likewise, natural alliances between Middle Eastern and Islamic nations and the American far right, or separatist black groups within the U.S. and separatist white groups, are possible, and have occurred to some small extent, but neoliberal inequality prevents their potential realization. The tedious constitutionalism — for example, the Second Amendment defense of the individual right to bear arms — prevents natural political alliances. The orthodoxy of neoliberal globalization is so extreme that it has compelled a worldwide resurgence of mystical thinking, shared by both the alt-right and the alt-left, as well as various fundamentalisms. And the more that government reacts against mystical thinking, the more it provokes it. Neoliberal governments are only able to act in ways that fuel paranoia.

To think of white supremacy without regard to the total cultural environment is to fail to come to grips with it. Contemporary white supremacy can be viewed as simply another manifestation of technological utopianism, an area where it predictably merges with the alt-left. The alt-right is seeking purity by means of technology (which will realize the Constitution’s hidden virtues), whereas the alt-left is also looking for purity by means of technology (which will similarly achieve the Constitution’s hidden virtues). Between technology and social life, however, is the intervening factor of inequality, which prevents the promise of technology from ever coming true.

White supremacy, a form of anti-globalization, gets its impetus from power discrepancies. To harp on white supremacy as if it were an isolated phenomenon is to avoid the problem of income (and therefore political) inequality. Political inequality disempowers, among others, rural whites and poor whites, who then articulate white supremacy, which renders them even more powerless. The greater the increase in inequality, the more the disempowered groups disempower themselves. In 1992, when Pat Buchanan announced a war for the soul of America, it didn’t catch fire; now it does. How would candidate David Duke (who had mixed success in Louisiana politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s) fare on the national stage today as a fresh face? Even at that time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted during the welfare debates that “all this originates with David Duke. He started talking about the ‘threat’ of people on welfare, and it struck a nerve.”

Concluding thoughts on white supremacy’s normalization

White supremacy has never operated outside the political system; it is not the philosophy of radicals on the fringes. The soft-pedaling of racism and anti-Semitism by the paleoconservatives as well as the New Right — for instance, William F. Buckley’s distancing from such open expressions — has been removed since the end of the Cold War. During the civil rights movement, the Citizens’ Councils took over from the KKK, the George Wallace candidacy transformed both parties for good, and the success of the Southern strategy was eventually realized during the post-Cold War years (when we would have least expected it). Anti-Communism had allowed the lid to be kept on overt racism, but since then various post-World War II conservative factions have fused. Trump, for one, has greatly accelerated the transformation of white supremacy into mere populism, not for the first time in American history.

Are actual power relations radically different than their appearance? To the extent that neoliberalism is responsible for this divergence, resistance in the form of conspiratorial narratives of the right or left cannot be ascribed independence. American nationalism, racial purity and middle-class interests have become too closely connected. I’m aware of the irony of describing white supremacy as a form of populism, which is the term Carto — one of the movement’s late-20th-century intellectual leaders — chose for his influential 1982 book “Profiles in Populism,” which lionized such figures as Robert M. LaFollette, Burton K. Wheeler, Robert A. Taft, Thomas E. Watson and William Randolph Hearst. In the late 1980s and early 1990s (that is, around the time the communist enemy was unraveling, and the future direction for white supremacy in America wasn’t clear), the banner of the Populist Party, with which Carto was affiliated, attracted such figures as David Duke.

It is true of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Trump that the avowed white supremacists — from Carto’s Liberty Lobby to the Aryan Nations — have simultaneously been attracted to and repelled by the idea of someone close to their ideology gaining ultimate power. Yet the more interesting reality is not white supremacy’s effects on the Republican Party but on the Democratic Party; the party’s transformation in the 1990s, in response to white supremacy, was far more interesting than the Republican Party’s mutation. At times people on the respectable right like Buckley and his affiliates have protested against anti-Semitism, but they haven’t always protested all forms of racism. The groundwork for “middle-class populism” (or cultural nationalism), operating through both major parties and through all of our political institutions, was laid 50 years ago, and is only now bearing fruit.

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The Authorial and Historical Context behind To Kill a Mockingbird.

The 1930s to the 1960s saw a range of significant historical events that greatly influenced the literature of the time. One of these historical events would be that of The Great Depression, one of the most catastrophic economic downturns that the world has ever seen. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee was one of these texts that surfaced during this time. The novel was set in the 1930’s where America, and specifically the town of Maycomb were faced with a range of social, political and economic issues. A fictional town that displayed the true colours of peace and justice had ultimately switched into a crippled town which dispersed such arrogance into the Alabamian lives. The friction caused between the coloured and the white folks had lead the Jim Crow Laws to be intact. The Jim Crow Laws existed mainly in the South and was known for restricting the freedom of African Americans by the owner himself; Jim Crow. It was proclaimed by the owner of this law that this was the way of life, which began in the late 19th century till half way of the 20th century.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, was a novel set in this problematic time. Beginning on October 24th 1929, The Great Depression resulted in a traumatic crisis for many American families. The psychological, economic and social strains resulted in many broken marriages and poverty-stricken families.

As the novel was set in Alabama, the economic downturn was reflected most significantly through their agricultural industry, as Atticus conveyed in Chapter Two “The Cunningham’s are country folks, farmers and the crash hit them hardest” (Lee 23). Due to the lack of money, jobs and resources, the racial divide was amplified, creating a social friction between the Coloured and the White Folks, which permanently legalised the Jim Crow Laws in the South.

What motivated Harper Lee to write To Kill A Mockingbird?

While Harper Lee expressed that To Kill A Mockingbird was not necessarily an autobiographical piece, it can be read as a powerful reflection of the racial inequality experienced in Alabama in the 1930s. Harper Lee, also known as Nelle Harper Lee, was born on the 28th of April 1926. Daughter to a loving father; Armasa Coleman Lee and mother; Francis Cunningham Finch Lee. As the youngest of four children, she witnessed the premises of Jim Crow Laws take place in her town in Monroeville Alabama. In many ways, Monroeville was just like Maycomb County, they both had stately court houses, there was no privacy when it came to town gossip, and of course a reclusive resident that was fascinated in terrifying children. It is evident that the people in Harper Lee’s life were mirrored in some of the key characters within the novel. One of her first childhood friends Truman Strekfus Persons displayed similar characteristics as Dill, an imaginative, oddly and articulated fabulist boy. They bonded instantly which maintained a life long friendship. Harper Lee’s father was a lawyer, like the child protagonist’s father; Atticus. Her father was in defense of two negros; son and father, for being allegedly accused of murdering a white clerk. During the 1930’s the southern laws were not equally protected of the Coloured folks. Like Atticus, he wasn’t able to save their innocence due to the phenomena back then. Two black men were hanged as for their punishment. Through the character of Scout, Harper Lee was able to project her own opinions and emotions in regarding the social injustices.

The Use of Characterisation- Who is Racist?

Aunt Alexandra

In Chapter 12, Aunt Alexandra arrives to Finch’s landing waiting at the front porch, and is quickly discovered by Calpurnia and the children. In a blink of an eye, Aunt Alexandra says to Calpurnia “Put my bags in the front bedroom.” (Lee 140)It was an order not a request, which portrays Aunt Alexandra’s feeling of superiority over Calpurnia. The way Aunt Alexandra treated Calpurnia reflects the common notion of the time that Coloured people were immoral to society, and merely servants who were not worthy of respect or recognition.

Aunt Alexandra considers herself as a traditionalist, and believes that her actions displayed towards Calpurnia are normal and civil due to her social values. In Chapter Thirteen, she stays in the Finch’s home to reconnect with her niece , nephew and brother, during this time she also expresses her disapproval of to Calpurnia. Furthermore she doesn't like to talk about important matters "in front of Calpurnia and them". This further develops Aunt Alexandra as racist as she expresses the opinion that Calpurnia is the least significant figure in the household, an idea which is rejected by Atticus as he argues on behalf of his children that Calpurnia is the last person he needs to kick out, as she acts as a mother figure for his children.

Miss Gates

Miss Gates is also conveyed as a racist in To Kill A Mockingbird. She is Scout’s third grade teacher, who idealises herself as an optimistic and considerate individual, when in reality she is seen to be a hypocrite. In Chapter 26, Scout’s classmate Cecil Jacobs did a presentation on Hitler's treatment of the Jews, where Miss Gates abruptly intervenes the discussion correcting Cecil’s mistake of prosecuting to persecuting. The current discussion becomes very obsolete between persecuting and prosecuting under this circumstance, because one means to convict people of their crimes and the other means to treat in justly because of race or religion. A curious student asked why this had happened although they were white, and Miss gates ignores the student’s objection and proceeds to explain that Hitler’s actions are vilified and wrong but Scout catches her persecuting the Blacks to Miss Stephanie Crawford in Chapter 25.

The Cunningham’s

The actions of the Cunningham family in To Kill A Mockingbird can be seen to be one of the most extensive portrayals of racism in the novel. After the trial of Tom Robinson, the family were involved in an attempt to lynch Tom, almost mirroring the actions of the K.K.K., who were the most extreme racist group in America at the time.Through their actions and behaviours throughout the novel, it was clear to see that the Cunningham’s believed that they had a ‘right’ to treat the Coloured people with disrespect as being White, they ultimately saw themselves as superior.

Mr Gilmer

As the prosecutor of Tom Robinson, Mr. Gilmer worked to contradict nearly everything that Atticus stated during the trial, clearly bias as a result of Tom’s skin colour. While Atticus treated everyone with respect despite their race or social status, Mr. Gilmer immediately degraded Tom Robinson throughout the trial, calling him a ‘boy’ and doing his best to frame him in being guilty. Its obvious that this is due to his skin colour, as Mr. Gilmer even treats the Ewell’s with respect despite of their social status.

The Use of Characterisation- Who isn’t Racist?

Atticus

Atticus is a loving father of Scout and Jem, and a defensive lawyer for Tom Robinson. Acting as a role model, his values are gradually passed on to his children, in believing that justice and equality makes a human more humane, in essence of how To Kill A Mockingbird was only preluding into the opposite values set by Atticus. There are many ways that Atticus is presented throughout the novel, one of them being having values that are different to the majority of the White community in Maycomb County. This is displayed as he defends on behalf of Tom Robinson, and despite of what the town had thought of this outrageous crime, Atticus carried on believing that he is serving the community the justice needed. As for his children, he believes his values are a great sense of gratitude that will certainly allow them to view the Maycomb County more of a bias town.

Scenes

The Courtroom

Harper Lee utilises the courtroom as a platform to clearly display the divide between white privilege and black discrimination. The trial begins in Chapter 16, where the Black community all must sit together in the balcony, while the White community sits down below. They also must wait for the Whites to enter the court house before they go up stairs. Ironically in this chapter, Scout, Jem and Dill managed to make it into the trial, as there were no available seats for the children, four Coloured men had to stand to make room for the children to sit. This part of the novel outlines the reality of the Jim Crow Laws being intact and also conveys how the Coloured men continued to be generous and polite despite being faced with constant racism. During this chapter, Atticus is in defence of Tom Robinson, which shows his willingness to go beyond the rules of Segregation and fight for his values; equality and justice. Atticus does this by treating the Black community as their equals, deserving of respect and fairness.

The Fire at Miss Maudie’s House

In To Kill A Mockingbird, Miss Maudie’s house caught on fire. The way in which both the Coloured and the White community united to stop the fire demonstrates a strong sense of courage and unity that the town doesn't often see. Despite the presence of the Jim Crow Laws, both blacks and whites joined together as a “family” to unite together to diffuse the fire. This part of the novel highlights the idea that racism isn't a natural human instinct, and ultimately conveys the notion that racism is learned, and could possibly be ‘un-learned’. In this moment where everyone worked together to diffuse the fire, the idea of racial segregation disappeared, there was no social hierarchy, just a community working together for the greater good. This scene presents readers with the belief that there is hope for the future, and that the County of Maycomb may not always be one of bitter racism.

How are the African-American characters portrayed in the novel?

Calpurnia is presented in To Kill A Mockingbird as the African American cook and housekeeper for the Finch family. Calpurnia acts as a mother figure and disciplinarian in the Finch’s home. Despite the racial segregation displayed in the 1930’s, Atticus trusts and relies on her willingness and determination to keep the household in shape. Scout had describes Calpurnia as a “wicked-step mum”, this clearly shows that even though Calpurnia is simply trying to care for the children, Scout’s perception has been heavily influenced by the racial atmosphere in Maycomb, as she has grown to believe the evil assumptions of the Coloured community are “immoral to society” and “are just a lie”. In the first couple of chapters of the novel, Calpurnia is eluded as less humane and considered nonexistent in Scout’s perspective as she feels that her presence doesn’t match the needs of a regular “white” mum. The element of racism that is displayed through Scout is discrimination. As Scout is only six years old, it is evident that her values and beliefs are influenced by the people that surround her, for example Aunt Alexandra and Miss Gates have led Scout to question whether Calpurnia deserves respect and ultimately starts to see herself as superior to the Black community. As a house cook, Calpurnia does not perceive herself any better than the white, which Scout doesn’t often see as she is blinded from the racial stereotypes in the 1930’s.

Conclusion

The award winning bildungsroman To Kill a Mockingbird presents readers with a depiction of racism in Southern America during the 1930s. While Harper Lee’s authorial context influenced her to write this novel, it was her use of characterisation and utilisation of the Courtroom and the fire scene, which was most effective in allowing readers to understand the extent of racism and the reality of segregation and the Jim Crow Laws that had a significant influence over American society at the time. Through Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the diminishing effects of racism can be seen, and while it is evident that racism is learnt, Harper Lee sheds light on the idea that racism can also be ‘unlearned’.

#Alabama JimCrow HarperLee Innocence Racism

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