Campbell X

In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.

Racialized chattel slaves were thecapital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory.

The legacy of anti-Black racism is that Black struggle gets deemed the property of all other social justice struggles. The symbols and tactics of Black struggle are deemed the common property of all. Black people are required to show solidarity with other people of color, without other people of color owing solidarity to Black communities. Black oppression is always analogized to other forms of oppression in a manner that disappears Black oppression itself. It is presumed we already know everything about Black oppression, so we can just use it as an empty signifier to explain other oppressions.

A basic introduction to African feminisms delivered as part of the MATI 2014 training organised by Ssonke Gender Justice and STEPS in Cape Town, South Africa by Nana Darkoa Sekiyamah

“Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I’ve heard educated white people say, ‘slavery was 400 years ago.’ No it very wasn’t. It was 140 years ago…that’s two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That’s how recently you could buy a guy.”

While Black elites were well intentioned in their efforts to uplift the Black poor, the politics of respectability undermined efforts for Blacks to challenge societal barriers that accounted for Black subjugation. As historian Kevin Gaines argues, the focus by elites on the behaviors and habits of ordinary Black folks - particularly surrounding the failings of Black families - amounted to “unconscious internalized racism.” Gaines wrote that “the racist and antiracist preoccupation with the status of the patriarchal family among Blacks and the notion of self-help among Blacks as building an promoting family stability came to displace a broader vision of uplift as group struggle for citizenship and material advancement.” The politics of respectability “misplaced equation of race progress with the status of the family” and consequently “blamed Black men and women for ‘failing’ to measure up to the dominant society’s bourgeois gender morality.” As Gaines further explained, Uplifters “seemed to forget that it was the state and the constant threat of violence, not some innate racial trait, that prevented the realization of Black homes and families.” In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the politics of respectability survives not only as an ideology promulgated by the Black middle class and directed at Black economically left behind in an era celebrated as “postracial,” it survives also as a public philosophy trumpeted by Black elites who have entered the inner sanctums of mainstream American institutions. These select few not only make up today’s Talented Tenth, they are also part of the nation’s elite. Thus as Black leaders became partners in the nation’s dominant institutions - in business, media, entertainment, politics, and academia - the politics of respectability has moved beyond the protected precincts of Black America into mainstream American politics.