Salon: We Must Stop White Men To Save The Human Race

In many years of anti-racist work, I have discovered that whites who deny any connection to the racism of the past will also generally deny any connection to the racism of the present. “Please don’t tell me,” cry deniers of systemic white racism. One step removed is the view that we should “accept” the history but must take the good with the bad. This is sometimes known as the “warts and all” theory of history. A variation is the convenient idea that slavery was the “original sin.” Sin, of course, in the Western Christian point of view is inevitable and immutable.

This takes an especially pernicious twist when white racism deniers argue that there has always been slavery as though that itself somehow makes it justified. It’s not true that every society over all time has enslaved people. But even if it were true, the kind of slavery on which the U.S. was built is unlike any other that preceded it. It co-evolved with capitalism and it conflated slavery with “race”—plantation capitalism as the Rev. James Lawson calls it. CSU Fresno scholars Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle put it this way recently in the New York Times: “New research has gone further, exposing how American capitalism and democracy — once thought to be antithetical to slavery — emerged hand-in-hand with it.”

Hard as it may be for propaganda-conditioned whites to grasp, global race-based capitalism is not a system of the past with lingering effects. It is a living,  breathing organism of the present. It is a unitary thing. It is therefore not a good thing with warts. It is one thing. The “good” things always comes packaged with the “bad” thing. The mechanics of how it often works has a name: grand bargains.

There are two aspects to this article that need to be pointed out. One is that Joyce, like almost every pitchman for blaming white racism for every ill of society, is looking to assign blame to one group and to dismiss personal responsibility that is required of every person who wants to progress in this society. By looking backwards, he removes the need of certain groups in society to look forward and to move beyond their history. Everyone has harsh elements in their genealogy. Does it affect every day life? Only if you let it.

Second, Joyce is really not interested in racism at all. The key is to recognize his linking the evils of slavery to the horror of capitalism. And so we realize that Joyce is likely a typical socialist or communist, decrying the evils of capitalism and free enterprise, and using racism as a lever to insist that our form of economy is the very worst that has ever been, and ever could be.

The next step is to insist that his workers’ paradise will never allow such a travesty. But first, the people who are in charge, the white race, must be stopped and seen as the enemy that they are, and must be put in their place. The only way to do that, of course, is to pit one group against another, and to get enough mush-headed, liberal, guilt mongers to play along. And so it goes. All we can hope for is that Joyce and his fellow Lefty academics will shove off for someplace like Cuba where they will find that their ideal of perfect unity is nothing but a chimera.