To begin, I must qualify my observations, however, by stating that I am not speaking of the European-American upper middle class and the elite who indeed do enjoy “white skin privilege.” I am speaking of the European-American working class, first of all, and even the average segment of the European-American middle class.
Of course we recognize that there is an ethnic and national hierarchy, that European-Americans on average enjoy many advantages over people of color and especially over African-Americans. Actually, I prefer, rather than speaking of these as advantages, to speak of the super—exploitation, the special oppression suffered by people of color and especially African-Americans. The vast majority of European-Americans are kept ignorant, exploited on the job, exploited through inequitable tax policies, through ecological policies that cause enormous damage to the environment and to health in the interest of the profits of the Fortune 500, a health care system which forces the masses of people who can afford insurance to carry a heavy burden in the interest of the insurance companies, trade and investment policies which are causing ever-increasing sectors of European-American labor, including technical workers to become redundant, obsolete, while the rest are being forced into an ever more savage competition aimed at driving down the standard of living to the level of the Global South, a foreign policy in the interest of the Fortune 100 arms makers, the oil interests, etc., to be paid for from time to time with the blood of European-American working people as well as people of color, and certainly contrary to the interests of the masses of people of all ethnicities, at times causing the world to teeter on the edge of total destruction. I could go on and on, but I feel I have made my point sufficiently.
Recently, I came across a collection of essays entitled, “The Politics of Punishment,” edited by Erik Olin Wright and published in 1973, a critique of the prison system written under the impact of the radical movements of the time, including the radical prison movement. Here are descriptions of prisoners with “privileges” which are detailed therein. Of course, the “privileged” prisoners live in better conditions than the general prison population–but can it really be said that they are a privileged section of the population? They are still prisoners, still must live under a regime without dignity, without freedom, still treated as less than human, still kept unprepared for any meaningful future when they are ultimately released. They still must work in prison for a pittance, although the pittance they work for is a little more than the average prisoner’s. They are still exploited, are still engaged in slave labor.
The crumbs they receive are pacifiers, are meant to create divisions within the prison population so as to better control the totality of prisoners, including the “privileged” sector.
The “privilege” enjoyed by European-American workers is the, privilege of being exploited but not super—exploited, of being subject to the authority of a State whose interests are opposed to their own, who are made to feel the repressive fury of the State when they “get out of line,” but enjoy the “privilege” of not being exposed to the day-to-day, routine brutality and humiliation which is the lot of African-Americans, Latinos and other peoples of color, not subject to that degree of savagery by the State reserved to those in the African-American community who dare to challenge the system.
Divide and conquer has been the modus operandi of every ruling class in history and remains one of its most potent tools to this day. It tries to convey a sense of privilege to certain groups, a sense that they have a stake in the system by promoting an extremely nuanced policy with regard to different ethnic or national groups, religious groups, people in different geographic areas, urban and rural, and division by gender. In general — and there are exceptions, of course — the “privilege” bestowed on this or that sector of the population by the ruling class is the privilege of not being as abused or as exploited by the elite as others. This, to me, is not a privilege but lighter chains.
Our primary duty is to demonstrate to the mass of European-Americans that their well-being is not in inverse proportion to the well-being of African-Americans and other non-European-Americans, that the goods of society, jobs, housing, etc., is not a pie of a fixed size, so that more for you is less for me, more for “whites” is less for non-whites, on the contrary the empowerment of African-Americans, the movement of African-Americans, is the only hope for European-American well-being, is the only hope to reverse the downward economic spiral that will consign ever greater numbers of European-Americans to indigence, is the only hope for real power for European-American working people (as opposed to the mock power exercised during elections). But for this reversal of fortunes for European-Americana to take place, they will have to make serious progress in shedding their racism, in changing their world outlook.
Our secondary duty is to fight against the narrow separatism which essentially expresses the Interest of sections of the Black and other non-European-American middle class who view the masses of the people of color primarily as a market or as a means of advancing their own middle class career ambitions. They view the unity of working people, even on an anti-racist basis, as a threat to their ambition, as it is a threat in, a different way, to the racist elite.
But the main problem, again, from the standpoint of the interest of the masses of the people, is white supremacy–the principal obstacle standing in the way of the path to a truly prosperous society.
