So there was a bit of a heated discussion recently on the topic of "anti-white" or "reverse" racism and we (some of the mods) figured we would clarify some rules for this community:
- "White people" is a very vague term. Having low expectations of people in the imperial core is understandable for someone in the Global South, but it's better to be specific. Saying "I'm racist against white people" when you mean "I don't trust the average person in " is going to cause misunderstandings
- People who were racist in the past are not necessarily racist in the present. Many of us were liberals before becoming Marxists, and there's a significant overlap between liberals and racists
- No matter your ethnicity, don't use terms like "subhuman" or "orc" to describe yourself and your group; it may make others uncomfortable
- Don't call for violence (particularly against ethnic groups, but it's best to avoid it in general so the instance doesn't get in trouble)
- Stick to Lemmygrad's rules of good-faith discussion
that's all, folks
My thoughts on this aren't that well put together yet but I still think I want to add some things to the discussion.
To me this is just the class struggle of decolonization and national liberation of the third world. Much like in the class struggle of proletariat vs the bourgeoisie in the imperial core where the goal absolutely is for the proletariat to oppress the bourgeoisie by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in the long term, of course the goal is achieving communism). That same concept applied to race and colonial relations is solved not by putting the colonized on the same level as the colonist but by putting the previously oppressed on top. As Frantz Fanon says in The Wretched of the Earth: 'Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: "The last shall be first."'
I think the situation is different before and after the revolution and when considering the particular circumstances. Look at what Che said in 1954:
'Given this background, with American reality being what it is, it’s not difficult to suppose what will be the attitude of the working class of the North American country when the problem of the abrupt loss of markets and sources of cheap raw materials is definitively posed. (...) Let us prepare, then, to fight against the entire people of the United States...'
The ultimate goal is no division by race but that cannot be achieved simply and quickly as currently racialized people (by the very fact that they're racialized) are still not fully accepted into the category of people into which white people are fully accepted (white men specifically).
Again to quote Fanon: 'This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species. The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure.'
And: 'It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the "ruling class." The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, "the others."'
I think that to truly be against racial divisions we must be anti-white, just as to build a communist world we must first have a revolution and oppress the bourgeoisie out of existence. The concept of "white" presupposes and necessitates the existence of the other "black, or colored in general". The whole concept of "white", we know, comes from the colonial exploitation of the world by the imperial countries of Europe and North America so I think we as Marxists should be "anti-white" and not talk dismissively about race as it currently exists.
I am not saying you're chauvinistic but when talking like this about colonized and racialized people I think we can easily fall close to what Domenico Losurdo warns about in his book Class Struggle with regards to internationalism: 'This is a general rule: when it ignores the national question, internationalism turns into its opposite. The repression of national particularities in the name of an abstract ‘internationalism’ facilitates things for a nation intent presenting itself as the embodiment of the universal; and this is precisely what chauvinism—in fact, the most fanatical chauvinism—consists in.'