On the Mis-Education of the Caucasian American and Toward A Color-Conscious Concept of Marxism

-by Rodney Foxworth

A white classmate of mine, a friend actually, recently disclosed an incident that she viewed as doubly ignorant and racist. Enrolled in an African-American literature course, my classmate, a female, found herself seated in the outside lobby of a library while reading Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery." As she tells it, a white female associate of hers, upon reading the book's cover, stated, "I'd rather die than read that book." This befuddled my friend, who was disgusted that someone would feel it okay to say something of the sort to her. She was genuinely appalled and confused, and I simply told her, "She felt comfortable telling you how she felt because you're white." As she was still confused, I tried desperately to explain my position but it was to no avail.

On Thursday, May 12th, Jacob Fortney was acquitted of manslaughter in the beating death of Noah Jamahl Jones by an "Anne Arundel County jury," as described by the Associated Press. Though the AP mentioned that the victim, Jones, was black, and his accused assailant white, they neglected to mention the racial make-up of a jury that was all-white. The jury's foreman has since said that race had nothing to do with the decision to acquit the accused. Of course, the argument holds that race is irrelevant, as it is the year 2005 after all.

The morning following the Fortney acquittal, "Elder: The Larry Elder Show" broadcasted an episode entitled "Racism within Interracial Couples." One of the show's guests, a white mother of three biracial children, insisted, against her black husband's protests, that their children not be construed as black. "It's 2005" she repeated, as to suggest significant racial progress has been made, despite the fact her son was thrown a racial slur just a year earlier while at a grocery store. Her husband was persistent in his belief that their children be raised "black" because that is how they will be viewed by society at-large; one can't escape from melanin. Author Walter Mosley and U.S. Senator Barack Obama, both of mixed-race heredity, proclaimed themselves as black men in America; you won't find better illustrations of racial relevancy elsewhere.

The relevance of race knows no boundaries. In addition to the physical devastation wrought by the event that is generally accepted by popular American vernacular as "9-11," white Americans were horrified to confront the possibility that they might be hated, when indeed they had lived in the midst of millions who despised, disdained, and distrusted them for centuries: their melanin saturated compatriots, blacks. It was fifty-seven years ago during an address at the Nineteenth Grand Boulé Conclave that the preeminent black scholar in American history, W.E.B. Du Bois, acknowledged the disgust of America from the global community:

We do not realize that today the United States is probably the most thoroughly hated and despised nation on earth, especially among the really cultured and civilized. Its natural resources, industrial techniques, and control of credit make it powerful and feared; but it is not recognized as leading in science, in morals, or toward human happiness (Gates and West 1997).

Unfortunately enough, "9-11" failed to provide the catalyst for true national introspection; instead, "patriots" demanded further delusion and nationalism on the part of the citizenry. The myth of American exceptionalism persists despite a logjam of evidence refuting such an assertion. We Americans continue to err on the side of "culture of life" and all that is good, while more backward (and always dark) countries comprise an axis of evil. Never mind reality: the reality that America has depleted natural resources, forcing our government to rely on foreign product (mainly oil); the reality that two countries, Japan and China, own some forty-four percent of our national debt; the reality that our educational system continually produces individuals ill-equipped to compete in an international job-market; the reality that we are feared abroad only because of our thinning military; and that American mediocrity is a fact. Du Bois once confessed that America is a nation of murderers; this is as true today as it was yesteryear, but all is unseen because we are also a nation of woolgatherers.

To a small majority of those grouped within the various non-white communities, blacks in particular, the concept of a deteriorating American nation-state isn't particularly foreign. James Baldwin, in his canonical The Fire Next Time wrote:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure (Baldwin 1993).

An extension of Du Bois' concept of the gift of "second-sight," Baldwin is able to make clear the fallacies that Americans, principally white, adhere. It is an unavoidable reality that race informs one's perceptions and more. As articulated by author and Yale law professor Harlon Dalton:

How they view life's possibilities; whom they regard as heroes; the extent to which they feel the country is theirs; the extent to which that belief is echoed back to them; all this and more is in part a function of their race (Dalton 2002).

Constantly, consistently, I am posed one question by my white colleagues along the left: how do you explain the relative dearth of visible black faces in the progressive movement? Depending on my mood, I might answer cynically, pointing out Tavis Smiley's departure from National Public Radio born of frustration, and the firing of hip-hop godfather Chuck D from Air America in favor of white gadfly Jerry Springer. Emotions aside, I attempt to present a more intellectual response.

Traditional Marxism appears to be the default ideology of both white and black leftists, as if it were a prerequisite; often ignored are radical reinterpretations, such as those voiced by Du Bois. It was Du Bois who first opined, in the intellectual sense, that 'whiteness' was a social class variable, and his intellectual descendents have echoed this sentiment. As spoken by Dalton, ".race determines social position.race and hierarchy.are indelibly wed" (Dalton 2002). This is often ignored in the Marxist dialogue, as emphasis is placed on the struggle between the capitalist and laboring classes. But, as recognized by Anthony Monteiro in his essay "Race and the Racialized State: A Du Boisian Interrogation," America is a racialized nation, and Marxist thought should reflect this. In an 1883 testimony given before the Senate Education and Labor Committee on the Relations between Labor and Capital, John C. Calhoun, grandson of the South Carolina statesman of the same name, admitted the following:

There is really very little conflict between labor and capital. The conflict in my section, if any should come in the future, will not assume the form of labor against capital, but of race against race (Allen 2002).

Frederick Sorge, an activist within the National Labor Union and personal friend of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, said the following:

The race prejudice of the Caucasians against the Negro prevents the rise of labor organizations in many southern states, and the beginnings of a healthy labor movement (Allen 2002).

In his oft-forgotten text, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois compares the slave revolts of the West Indies with the ineffective slave revolts in the Southern portion of the United States:

In the West Indies, the power over the slave was held by the whites and carried out by them and such Negroes as they could trust. In the South, on the other hand, the great planters formed proportionately quite as small a class but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves. Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own "niggers." To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white (Du Bois 1956).

Du Bois would develop the concept of the "public and psychological wages of whiteness" in order to help explain the divide between the white and black laborer. University of California, Santa Cruz professor George Lipsitz would elaborate with his idea of "the possessive investment in whiteness." From the pen of Lipsitz:

The long history of the possessive investment in whiteness stems in no small measure from the fact that all subsequent immigrants to North America have come to an already racialized society. From the start, European settlers in North America established structures encouraging a possessive investment in whiteness. The colonial and early national legal systems authorized attacks on Native Americans and encouraged the appropriation of their lands. They legitimated racialized chattel slavery, limited naturalized citizenship to "white" immigrants, identified Asian immigrants as expressly unwelcome, and provided pretexts for restricting the voting, exploiting the labor, and seizing the property of Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans (Lipsitz 2002).

In American pigmentocracy, those of white skin are afforded tangible and intangible benefits relative to people of color, or better stated, non-whites. Placed in a historical context by Ricky Lee Allen, "poor whites understood that there were more social rewards for those who were poor and white than for those who were people of color." This continues till this day. The aspiration and ability to attain 'whiteness' are not confined to European ethnics however, and non-European immigrants have come to understand this. Toni Morrison once said that "in race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American black as the real aliens" (Foley 2002).

A study by Harvard University professor Jennifer Hochschild concluded that Asians and Hispanics identified most with whites and least with blacks. The "whitening" of Asian and Hispanic Americans is the topic of Tamara Nopper's essay, "The Browning and Yellowing of Whiteness," and it is founded on historical patterns. For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens fought to establish their 'whiteness' in previous decades (their modern-day descendent, the National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian Latinos, continues that noble fight), while some 6,400 Asian Indians applied for American citizenship on the basis that they were Caucasian (and thus white) by 1920 (Foley 2002). All of this has traditionally been done off the backs of blacks.

The language of this essay places emphasis on the black-white relationship for the two reasons as explained by Jacqueline Johnson, Sharon Rush and Joe Feagin:

We focus on the case of white-on-black oppression for two reasons. First, the U.S. ideology of racial classifications is grounded in a system of hierarchy and privilege maintenance originally designed to legitimate the subordination of African Americans. "Race," as we know it, is not merely an account of the color of one's skin or ancestry but has been embedded in the social, economic, and political structure of northern Europe and the United States for centuries. This racist system placed Europeans, including the American colonizers, at the top of a hierarchical chain of human evolution largely because they had the power to control resources and designed the system. Africans, centrally known to Europeans at that time as slaves, were placed at the bottom. Thus began a rationale that legitimates as "natural" or "divine" the subordination of Africans, African Americans, and other people of color, while greatly privileging those whose skin is socially defined as "white."

Second, this racial typology and configuration have endured the longest of all systems of racialized oppression-indeed, now for at least four centuries. Its current reality can be seen in modern cultural representations and negative stereotypes found in most U.S. settings (Rush, Johnson and Feagin 2000).

That said, the author is cognizant of the oppression of all peoples of color, though said oppression affects each group differently and to varying degrees. In an interview with Lynnette Curtis, famed author Walter Mosley stated bluntly, "To say that black people feel uncomfortable in the white world would be to say that black people feel uncomfortable in America. You don't have to be among white people to be in a world dominated by Anglo-Saxon Christian culture." bell hooks went so far as to say that America is a "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." The problem of the color line continues into the 21st century. As a racialized nation, 'whiteness' as a social class variable must be examined within a Marxist discourse. The realities of race are apparent and visible, and yet these realities are often subordinated and minimalized in favor of a narrow interpretation of "class." As acknowledged by Ricky Lee Allen:

We [whites] seem to be unable to realize that our diminution of race has alienated those who do not have the privilege to ignore white supremacy-no matter what economic form it takes (Allen 2004).

As it stands, the "color-blind" or "race-neutral" tactics of the Marxists are as detrimental to the "movement" as "capitalist oppression." By habit, traditional Marxists are anti-imperialist and yet, they have failed to heed the words of one Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

Rather, Marxists would rather dismiss race as secondary to "class," while, as stated before, never contending that race in itself assists in the formation of "class." Richard Dyer, himself a white male, noted that despite rising "hybridity" and "pluralism":

We have not yet reached a situation in which white people and white cultural agendas are no longer in the ascendant. The media, politics, education are still in the hands of white people (Dyer 2002)...

As long as economic class is the point of reference for Marxists (as opposed to social class, though the two are interconnected), there will never be a diversification of the progressive movement. Color-blind Marxism is incompatible with American history. As Ricky Lee Allen notes:

No social and economic changes were [are] likely to occur unless whites were [are] willing to deal directly with how their own racism prevented [prevents] cross-racial solidarity (Allen 2004).

Thus, Marxists must understand that race is an integral component of "class oppression," and should assume a decidedly anti-racist dialogue as it pertains to social and political matters. Or, just as with everything else, the movement will continue in the hands of a disproportionate number of whites.and get nowhere.

Law professor, author, and critical race theorist Derrick Bell argues that "racism is a permanent part of the American landscape," that it isn't good enough to rely on law to secure equity (Bell 2002). He suggests that a "realistic appraisal of racism's crucial role in the society.would enable us to recognize the potential for effecting reform" (Bell 2002). His character Erika Wechsler, a white woman, believes that "America's race problem is a white problem. We have determined to take personal responsibility for racism" (Bell 2002). Erika's philosophy is one based on struggle:

We believe in fulfillment--some might call it salvation-through struggle. We reject any philosophy that insists on measuring life's success on the achieving of specific goals--overlooking the process of living. More affirmatively and as a matter of faith, we believe that, despite the lack of linear progress, these is satisfaction in the struggle itself (Bell 2002).

What sort of vehicle would allow for such action and reflection to take place? What measures would be required for whites to take initiative in the dismantling of racism? Much has been made about the lukewarm and often times irate response towards multicultural education-the governor of my home state referred to it as "bunk"-but little has been mentioned in regards to anti-racist education. One of the more visible anti-racist activists/educators, Tim Wise, is a name that would not register on the radar of the typical American citizen. What is anti-racism education and what are its goals? A visit to the British Columbia website on education revealed the following:

Anti-racism education promotes the elimination of racism through identifying and changing institutional policies and practices as well as identifying individual attitudes and behaviours that contribute to racism.

Anti-racism education involves:

. proposing the need to reflect about one's own attitudes on race and anti-racism

. understanding what causes racism in order to achieve equality

. identifying and addressing racism at both the personal and institutional level

. acknowledging the need to take individual responsibility for eliminating racism

. working toward removing systemic barriers that marginalize groups of people

. providing opportunities for individuals to take action to eliminate all forms of racism, including stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination (www.bced.gov.bc.ca)

Not surprisingly, there was no mention of anti-racism education on the U.S. Department of Education website. This is endemic of a society content with "color-blind" and "race-neutral" programs that deny racial realism and relevancy. In their essay calling for a non-racist United States, Johnson, Rush and Feagin write the following:

We argue that racism is much more than a set of racial prejudices and propensities held by a few individuals or extremists. Now nearly four centuries old, racism is a complex and embedded system of oppression that encompasses several major dimensions. In the North American case, this system of racism was originally created by whites, beginning in the seventeenth century, and has since that time encompassed at least four major dimensions: the white attitudes, emotions, practices, and institutions that are integral to the long-term domination of Americans of color. Central to this domination are the well institutionalized practices of whites that have for centuries routinely denied black Americans and other Americans of color the dignity, opportunities, positions, and privileges generally available to most whites of all backgrounds (Rush, Johnson and Feagin 2000).

In order to arrive to a "nonracist" American society, Rush, Johnson and Feagin propose two major acts: 1) "the re-education of white and other Americans to address the previous and current miseducation about racial differences and racial history" and 2) anti-racist activism (Rush, Johnson and Feagin 2000). Here we must distinguish between being "anti-racist" and not being racist. When persons suggest they are "not racist," they are denying the prevalent existence of racism in a society that "naturally" indoctrinates racist tendencies. As noted by the trio of Rush, Johnson and Feagin:

Efforts that solely target individual racism do not root out the structural embeddedness of racism. Many programs, for example, that stress a liberal ideology of tolerance or color-blindness encourage people to accept individuals, opinions, and cultures that are different from their own, but require little or no work from those in dominant groups to critique and confront systematically their own privileges and power (Rush, Johnson and Feagin 2000).

Within the re-educational framework, the trio demands a critique of the U.S. Constitution and its intended purpose. The ratification of the United States' founding document denied the participation of all women, blacks and Native Americans, while preserving the interests of an "elite group of white men" (Rush, Johnson and Feagin 2000). All subsequent court rulings and amendments have been made with the intended purposes of the founding fathers in mind, and it is suggested that this be called into question, as it is thus acknowledged that the Constitution is a racist, sexist and classist document. This view might seem "inimical to their world view" (Bell 2000): "their" refers to all liberal and "color-blind" individuals unable to recognize either the seeming permanence of white hegemony or its negative, tangible effects. But isn't that the point of anti-racism education, to challenge established assumptions?

Marxist color-blindness has aided and enabled the continued disparity faced in American society. Not only is the applicability of Marxism across color lines a farce, but it offers no alternative to the "public and psychological wages of whiteness." Consider that affirmative action, which benefits white women in droves, and welfare, which supports millions of children, are categorized as "black issues." How often is affirmative action considered a "woman's issue" or welfare the life-support of millions of American children? An anti-racist dialogue enables whites to consider their role in the maintenance of a system of rampant inequality founded on racism, specifically white supremacy. This echoes the sentiments of Du Bois and his suggestion that poor whites maintained the institution of slavery; an anti-racist interpretation of Marxism might provide the tools to prevent this reoccurrence. The goal isn't to offend whites, but to divest them from their "possessive investment in whiteness," thus allowing for the cross-racial solidarity deemed necessary by activists and theorists.

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Rodney Foxworth, 20, is editorial intern at Baltimore's City Paper, and can be reached at theboyfox21215@aol.com Bibliography

Allen, R. L. (2004) Whiteness and Critical Pedagogy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36:2, pp. 121-136.

Allen, T.W. (2002) The Invention of the White Race, Volume One (New York, Verso). Baldwin, J. (1993) The Fire Next Time (New York, Vintage Books).

Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The permanence of racism (New York, Basic Books).

Dalton, H. (2002) Failing to See, in: P. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York, Worth Publishers).

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1953) Black Reconstruction in America (New York, Russell & Russell).

Dyer, R. (2002) The Matter of Whiteness, in: P. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York, Worth Publishers).

Foley, N. (2002) Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and Whiteness, in: P. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York, Worth Publishers).

Gates, Henry and West, Cornel (1997) The Future of the Race (New York, Vintage Books).

Lipsitz, G. (2002) The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, in: P. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York, Worth Publishers).

"Multiculturalism and Anti Racism Education." bced.gov.bc.ca.

Rush, S., Johnson, J. & Feagin, J. (2000) Reducing Inequalities: Doing anti-racism: Toward an egalitarian American society, Contemporary Sociology, 29:1, pp. 95- 111.