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White, working-class, anti-racist leadership is rising around the country and points us towards the work that must be done to unite white communities away from the death culture of racism and into the life-affirming, liberatory, movement for racial justice and Black Lives Matter. And to help us get there, it’s important to take note of the differences between a middle-class and a working-class orientation to the work of ending racism.
One of the dangers of a middle-class-oriented anti-racism is that it replicates some of the ways middle-class people are institutionally positioned in society. This isn’t about individual people making mistakes, it’s about a political orientation that evolves out of the lived experiences of people trying to survive in a capitalist society invested in the exploitation of the vast majority of people’s labor, hearts, and souls.
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A middle class-oriented anti-racism often operates from:
– A focus on individual achievement rather than collective/community justice. Often, those recently becoming middle-class are encouraged and rewarded for looking “down” on their working class and poor communities, families, cultures, and their pasts.
+ For anti-racist work with a middle-class orientation, this then often looks like an over-emphasis on changing personal behavior, using correct language, and calling out other people who aren’t acting and speaking in the right way. It can lead to a looking down on the communities that you have come from and distancing yourself from your own past by ruthlessly criticizing everyone who acts and talks like you did two weeks ago.
– Fundamental insecurity based on striving towards a vision of the American Dream that puts you in massive debt, overworking, emotional isolation trying to present as “we’re doing fine, we have it all together”. Insecurity which isn’t just imagined, but rooted in the soul-crushing, body-breaking realities of how capitalism functions to make the vast majority of us live in regular fear of losing our ability to take care of and provide for our families and loved ones. Capitalism thrives on mass structural, cultural, and social insecurity and it understandably then shows up in our liberation movements. To be middle class is to be just making it, and to properly internalize and project the insecurity.
+ For anti-racist work this can translate into a wanting everything to look perfect, fear of making mistakes, and external and internal pressure to appear and convince oneself that “we’ve got it all figured out”. This fuses with the individual achievement to again push many of us into an individualistic mode of operating — to work as hard as we can (into burnout), to experience a sense that nothing we do is ever enough, to continually doubt ourselves and doubt the possibility of large-scale transformative change. To deal with the structural insecurity by tearing down everyone around us, to use cynicism and critique to appear more experienced, effective, and sophisticated than others in the movement.
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The enemy is capitalism, not middle-class activists. And a middle-class orientation isn’t something that only middle-class people can have; it’s the orientation that all of us who aren’t ruling class are raised to endlessly and exhaustingly strive for.
A working-class-oriented anti-racism often operates from:
– A focus on structural change and collective/community power and pushes us beyond a focus on unattainable personal perfection and into the long haul person commitment to build grassroots liberatory power. A working class-oriented anti-racism often leads people into seeing the institutional injustices failing their communities, how racism mobilizes working class white communities into active agents of perpetuating everyday acts of racism that serve to enforce and maintain the structural racism that generates wealth and power or the ruling class.
+ For anti-racist work this translates into a vision of organizing white communities in ways that addresses the real ways they are screwed over in this system and unites the demands and efforts for justice to an understanding of how white supremacy helps maintain a lack of economic security in white working class communities, and how racial justice is central not only to economic justice for all, but freeing the humanity of white people from the death culture of white supremacy. This means seeing the messy, contradictory, complex humanities of white people and looking for opportunities to move white people into justice work, rather than a focus on distancing through easy denouncements. This means become experts at seeing and illuminating opportunities for large number so white people to join in the struggle and be on the right side of history, rather than a focus on personal purity of “perfect politics”.
– A focus on long haul change rooted in history, rooted in loving our people, rooted in knowing that our people are not just privileged through socialization into whiteness, but our people are also battered and twisted by whiteness that turns our capacities to love into engines of hate.
A working-class-oriented anti-racism is growing all around us:
With Drew Joy and the Southern Maine Workers’ Center organizing in white working class rural communities for health care and for Black Lives Matter, and being part of national multiracial coalitions that unite white working class leaders with leaders of color to fight for an agenda rooted in racial, economic, gender, social, and environmental justice.
With the leaders and community of the McElroy House: Organization for Cultural Resources in rural working class Arkansas creating community gatherings to learn about cooperative economics, Transgender liberation, and what it means to stand against racism in these times.
With Jardana Peacock calling white, anti-racist healers, spiritual leaders, and activists to share personal practices that help ground them in times likes these and help them take action for racial justice, for Black Lives Matter, and then collecting these practices as a resource for white people to use all over the country.
With white anti-racist leaders like Justin Stein in Jobs With Justice, fighting for $15 an hour minimum wage and a union with fast food workers and supporting other working class white people to join in the Movement for Black Lives.
With Rahula Janowski and Catalyst Project, putting forward a vision of a working class-oriented anti-racism, mentoring and developing white working class leaders from around the country, and helping to illuminate how parenting and families are part of the liberation movement, rather than a distraction from it.
With Zoe Williams in Colorado engaged in organizing a multiracial working class coalition for improved public transportation, through the working class women’s rights group 9to5, while also bringing their leadership to their local SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and nationally through anti-racist toolkits for white families.
A working-class orientation isn’t something that all working class people just have, nor is it something that middle-class people can’t learn. A critical step is learning from and supporting working class leaders and the work they are doing. Another step is developing class-consciousness of our own experiences, taking time to understand our class position (knowing that capitalism does as much as it can to create class confusion), and then making choices about the class-orientation of our work.
We are not here to become the perfect, white, anti-racists, to make changing behavior and language the goal (rather than part of the larger process), to strive for an educated white anti-racist elite.
We are here because those of us raised to be white in this white supremacist society refuse to be silent and complicit in this racist society that devours lives, dreams, humanity, and dignity in communities of color, while also poisoning the hearts and minds of white people who then blame our economic miseries and insecurities on communities of color.
We are here because we are ready to rise in love for all of our people, and in rage for the structural nightmare of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
We are here for collective liberation, with the values of socialism rather than capitalism at the heart. And in this white working-class leadership, organization and a working-class orientation to the work are all key to getting free.
- The Practice Showing Up Guide by Jardana Peacock is available for free here:http://www.jardanapeacock.com/uploads/1/6/1/9/16192474/practice_showing_up.pdf
- Towards the “Other America”: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter is available as a free e-book or for purchase paperback here: http://www.chalicepress.com/Towards-the-Other-America-EPDF-P1632.aspx
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Chris Crass is the author of the new book Towards the “Other America”: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter. He writes and speaks widely on anti-racist organizing, feminism for men, strategies to build visionary movements, and creating healthy culture and leadership for progressive activism. He was a founder of the anti-racist movement building center, the Catalyst Project, and helped launch the national white anti-racist network, SURJ (Showing Up For Racial Justice). Rooted in his Unitarian Universalist faith he works with congregations, seminaries, and religious and spiritual leaders to build up the Spiritual Left. He is also the author ofTowards Collective Liberation: anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis, and movement building strategy. He lives in Louisville, KY with his partner and their two sons. You can learn more about his work at www.chriscrass.org.
This post was originally published on Medium and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
I appreciate the theory that the mind of white supremacy is a creation of capitalism and its promotion of individualism over collectivism. However, racism of some sort exists in most every society no matter what the economics. I think racism is a product of what I can only call “selfing”: the innate attempt to distinguish one’s self from another. It is massively distorted in some cultures by a failure of empathy that is fueled by the promotion of desires. “If my desires can’t be filled, then you should have less—because I’m better than you.” The mind’s crudest means of achieving… Read more »
Good article. The fact is that White supremacy is rampant in our culture and must be fought aggressively at every turn.
Really? . Show me where white supremacy, and not merely economic disparity is rampant in our culture. No cliches now. Cops shooting blacks? . How many truly innocent people were shot. Do your homework. Get the data on cops shooting white people too. Otherwise it’s your bias talking.
LOL, “white privilege” … This just came to mind. We just bought a new house (downsized). I called a service to do a yard clean up including cleaning the gutters. A very nice Mexican guy came and gave me an estimate. $400+ dollars, I tried to negotiate the price but he was firm. That’s until my wife got involved later that evening. After 10 minutes on the phone, the guy took $100 off. Of course I didn’t know what was said because my wife was speaking Spanish to him. This was a case where it was clearly not to my… Read more »
Jeez Tom. Why did you have to describe him as a Mexican? . Sounds racist to me!!! . At the university of Minnesota, I kid you not, last year were alot of assault adults against women. Robbery, sexual etc .it was a small Cadre of black men that were doing it. But in the interest of anti racism, the university proclaimed to not only to NOTmention race, but not gender either in their efforts to help police, and to keep students safe. Reported as such. A person in a blue windbreaker made contact with a student. If anyone has any… Read more »
White supremacy isn’t a thing. It’s a buzzword to shut people up when the opposition can’t hold together a coherent argument. Do any of you have a clue what it would look like if white supremacy were a thing? I’ll give you a hint, it wouldn’t look like entitled children running roughshod over college campuses or BLM burning cities to the ground. The West bends over backwards to accommodate all the whining, and the first politician to come along and refuse to cowtow sends everyone into a panic. The left would do well to self reflect and see why that… Read more »
It’s been said many times … minorities can’t be racist. This article like many have shown how journalists these days are viewed in such poor light. They (media/journalists) say it’s XYZ so it must be true. American’s are fed up with all of this trashing and are finally speaking up.
Excellent points dlz. If white supremacy was here you’d know it. And then we’d all be against it. What we’ve got is elitism. Highly educated and insulated people philosophizing and making it look like something worthwhile. It’s junk. But of course being highly educated elitists they are so wrapped in a cocoon of self congratulations they can’t see it at all. Trust me I know many of them. They literally make me want to hurl. Not one of them go out amongst the commoners.
Well you have highly educated, insulated CEOs wrapped up in their little cocoon and don’t bother to go out and talk let alone understand the little guys.
Really? . Is Michael Schultz one of them? . Zuckerberg? Gates? And btw I know a few ceo’s you consistently rail against that are some of the most liberal and progressive people I’ve ever met. Wanna know why? . Because they got to go all over the world and see stuff you only marginally dream about. They know the poorest person in the worst slum of the US lives like a king against the vast majority. Of the world. And in my talks with them I’m humbled by what they’ve done quietly behind the scenes to assist. What have you… Read more »
Oh really and what percentage of CEOs actually go out and meet poor people? If you ever watch Undercover Boss, most of those bosses don’t know what is happening to their workers and the working conditions they face. Live like a king? That is a joke since 50% of American live near the poverty line. You have been listening to the welfare queen tale spew by Reagan far too long. Regarding Gates, he put more time and investment in his operations in India than the USA. Gates complains about Americans not taking math and science classes; however, you know full… Read more »
Oh really. When Obama was elected president, the full force of racism by white people came to the forefront. Proves that racism by white people is still alive and well.