POC? No Thank You!

In the United States there is a common folk belief that we are all born with a heritable trait that defines our station in life. To those who adhere to this belief, all of us fall into one of these life-determining bloodlines. In almost all versions of this belief, there is a white bloodline which is dominant and/or superior, then there are other varied darker bloodlines which are oppressed and/or inferior. To most Americans, this ideology is a critical lens by which they view the world around them. It’s how they interpret much of their past and present, their social relations to one another, their economic conditions and their political system.

I’m not referring to American racialism as a “folk belief” because I want to pursue a critique of ideology as such. The Fields sisters have that market cornered especially on the topic of race. I’m also not planning to present my opposition to all bloodline ideologies as a matter of principle; though I must confess a deep bias against them - likely stemming from my Palestinian ancestry. I guess being on the shit end of a European colonial project wrapped in a veneer of bloodline mysticism leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

What I would like to do is give this folk belief a fair hearing on the only basis that an ideology should be judged: it’s function and utility. Who does racial bloodline ideology benefit politically and materially today and who does it harm? What behaviors and practices in our political economic system are best reconciled with a racialized society? What incentives drive those who reproduce and socialize this specific mysticism in our day?

To help me answer this question I’m going to pull a couple of paragraphs on race from Freddie deBoer’s piece in which he outlines his principles entitled: Here Are My Actual Dumb Opinions. He starts out with this:

I believe that contemporary society and many societies in the past have been filled with a large amount of racism and racial inequality. By racism, I mean interpersonal bigotry against people of color; that is, feelings and beliefs that insist on the inferiority of people of color and the superiority of white people. By racial inequality, I mean structures in our society and economy that prioritize the interests of white people above and against those of people of color. The combination of racism and racial inequality, and the preexisting unequal distribution of power and money, contributes to white supremacy, a condition in which the currently-existing advantage in general of white people over people of color in general is enforced and perpetuated. I believe that racism, racial inequality, and white supremacy are powerful and entrenched conditions that cause deep harm to their victims and which prevent our society from being a just and equitable place. Addressing this injustice is thus of paramount importance to a moral political movement.

Freddie views the world as being divided into two racial bloodlines: white people and people of color. Within that context an important moral binary emerges: There are immoral people in society who believe and act as if people of color are inherently inferior to white people. This is called racism and it’s a bad thing. Then there are morally upstanding actors in society who believe and act as if people of color are effectively inferior to white people. This is called recognizing racial inequality and it’s a good thing.

According to this account, escaping this condition of inferiority is an uphill battle for the darker bloodlines. We’re told there is this thing called white supremacy which acts against them precisely because of their non-whiteness. It’s not clear in this telling what white supremacy is exactly. It’s described as the combination of three enumerated factors: racism, racial inequality, and existing political/economic conditions (three things that are basically the same thing). This combination then becomes a “powerful and entrenched condition”. Finally this condition is described as having what can only be construed as agency, with a desire of keeping racial inequality and racism going.

White supremacy in this description seems to echo the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity. You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - three things that are the same, but at the same time different, combining together to create God almighty with power over our lives. For me it’s more entertaining to imagine it as some sort of conceptual Voltron.

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So what do you in the face of an “injustice” so real and severe that political movements are to be deemed morally unworthy if they don’t address it? Freddie continues:

I therefore support policies designed to address these conditions such as reparations for slavery funded through government spending, affirmative action policies in higher education and hiring, an end to the Drug War and larger criminal justice reform, and through hate crimes legislation. I believe that only muscular government intervention can end racial inequality. I believe that, since we can never regulate thoughts or feelings, our focus must be on ending the material inequalities and injustices that afflict people of color, such as income gaps and police violence. I believe that the liberal obsession with linguistic, emotional, and interpersonal dimensions of racism has dramatically limited our ability to address the inherently tangible, material realities that contribute to racial inequality.

Since Freddie is on the Leftist SocDem spectrum it shouldn’t be surprising that “muscular government intervention” is at the heart of his fight against this injustice. The political program advanced here envisions the American government creating a system of tiered bloodlines. Belonging to a specific race would earn one more government dollars and services than those belonging to other racial lineages. Freddie is essentially proposing the adoption of the racialized mathematics of an earlier America and reinvigorating the logic of race a value store for human worth. Except, and this is because he is a moral person in pursuit of justice, we must invert the numbers.

The inclusion/exclusion criteria for being a person of color, whose scope seems to be limited here to the black bloodline, isn’t specified by Freddie. Are we talking one blood rule or octoroons? Are the financial dispensations proportional to purity of bloodline? Is there a government agency that will manage and regulate this new market of human worth? Will the agents of this race bureau arrest cheaters - recent African immigrants trying to pass themselves off as black? Do the agents get to carry guns?

This effort ultimately aspires to end “material inequalities and injustices that afflict people of color, such as income gaps and police violence.” Again, Freddie doesn’t show the math. Do Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffet get added into the income calculus? Does their extraordinary wealth get averaged out over white people who are born, live, and die in relentless and crushing misery. Does “equality” in the metaphysical dimension of race get calculated through means or medians?

The political vision goes further still. Broader political issues, such as the exercise of state power through violence against its own citizens is to be pursued through a racial framing. The goal is to reduce people of color being brutalized by the state enough that we’re confident that state violence is being apportioned fairly among the races. An alternative approach I might suggest is we simply increase the number of white people brutalized by the state. Freddie seems to be thinking along those same lines. He suggests that while we can’t “regulate thoughts or feelings” we would still want to pursue “hate crime legislation”. By giving the state the ability to dispense more violence against white people who commit crimes animated by hateful thoughts or feelings about people of color we can turn the knob towards an equitable distribution of state brutality. A truly inspiring vision for the future.

Of course all of this makes perfect sense because we’re operating according to bloodline rules. The abstraction of race already comes preloaded with certain properties, key among them is the ability to store and transmit grievances and liabilities across time within color-coded demographics. All people designated as black today are bound equally and indiscriminately as inheritors of all black people in the past through a racial quantum. The same applies to white people, each one born carrying with them the phantom of whiteness, and all that implies of crimes and degeneracies. The property of racial heritability was key to the early construction of race in the US since it created a self-reproducing market commodity for the slave-owner. It seems that some traditions refuse to die.

In the end, it seems like all justice amounts to here is the application of Tort Law to the metaphysical racial plane. I can’t imagine a more quintessentially American combination - except for maybe an eagle feasting on apple pie.

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Given Freddie’s account of his ideological narrative on race and what he seems to imply it necessarily suggests as a political project - how are we to judge it? I’ll take myself out of the equation for a second and borrow from a (morally repulsive) version of Freddie from a couple of years ago:

I have, at this point, essentially abandoned the concept of justice, at least as a political phenomenon. I'm sure I still often use the language of justice casually. But in a fundamental sense I do not understand who the concept of justice is helping. Justice, as a target, has made the left into a cult, one that appeals constantly to a higher power that never appears and never delivers on anything. The appeal to justice is the most common act of left-wing practice and the most useless. I have never seen a single bit of good done through an appeal to justice. Instead I only see millions of people, ringed around a ziggurat, praying to a God who isn't there. Justice does not exist in the corporeal universe. There is no justice. There is only power.

What are we to make of this? Why is the more recent Freddie, the race-conscious Freddie, embracing what the older Freddie might label as “useless” and “cult” behavior? Why are his beliefs and political program with regards to race built entirely on pleas for “justice”, injunctions towards morality, and lacking even a minimal accounting for “power”. If justice doesn’t exist in “the corporeal universe” what universe was Freddie writing his principles of racial justice from? Did he some find the “God who isn’t there” and regain his faith in praying around the ziggurat?

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To figure out which version of Freddie is right, let’s take a look at how the embrace of his version of race ideology expresses itself in political domain that we actually live in. What concrete material interests does it clarify for voters in our mortal plane? Which alignments would it recommend to them?

Every white person, ~58% of the population, would believe that the quality of their lives, no matter how meager or desperate, was in part achieved by the explicit exploitation of people of color. That there is this unquantifiable and unfalsifiable thing called white supremacy that is deeply biased towards them and works diligently to maximize the quality of their lives - no matter how meager or desperate. That they are in a de facto alliance with all other white people - rich, working class or poor - since it is the relative position to people of color as a whole that is the true key to their conditions. From the point of view of vulgar material interests of a white person, Freddie’s perspective is indistinguishable from that of the KKK.

Every black person, ~13% of the population, would believe that the quality of their life is to be measured primarily by its relative position to white people as a whole. As such they are all in a de facto alliance with all other black people - rich, working class or poor. The material conditions they experience and suffer are the function of a racially bigoted phantom called white supremacy that’s working explicitly against them. This phantom stands in the way of any advancement that a black person might seek. From the point of view of vulgar material interests, black people would understand that, absent the defeat of white supremacy, improvements in their quality of life are impossible. The political horizon of a black person would be limited to achieving a balance of misery relative to white people as a necessary first step to progress.

Given the dearth of options, the balance of the voting population is left with a conundrum. Do they ally themselves with the perpetually dominant race that has the power of white supremacy working on its behalf and be branded as morally unworthy by Freddie? Or do they ally themselves with the perpetually oppressed race so they can earn their reward in Lefty heaven? The political program advanced by Freddie seems to offer them a giant FUCK YOU. Their needs, their exploitation, their suffering, any violence they might experience at the hands of the state is of no concern to race-drunk Freddie. What he offers them is schadenfreude in the form of knocking down the abstraction of whiteness a peg or two - a metaphysical triumph that I hear is of great concern to the working masses of this country.

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I really need somebody to explain how this is supposed to work in the political universe we inhabit. In what world does a politics framed as exclusively benefiting an eighth of the country while excluding, with unrestrained spite, the vast majority of voters create a meaningful political coalition that can deliver power and results FOR ANYONE. Maybe the Left is banking on people happily dismissing their material interests motivated by a project of moral revival.

Maybe this politics is mediated by a social revolution. That by engaging in a program of hyper-racialization, digging deeper trenches and taller psychic walls between one another, something positive and magical will happen. By continuously pressing a politics (which cannot practically succeed) that aims to materially benefits one group in the country, even as the economy crashes and people’s lives deteriorate, Freddie might suspect that an obvious recipe for racial scapegoating will turn into one of mutual solidarity.

Maybe we live in a multi-party parliamentary system and nobody told me. Little narrow-interest parties, elected by self-selecting groups, are extracting concessions during periods of coalition formation. Maybe we live in a racial-confessional system, with seats apportioned based on racial demographics. Who wouldn’t want to follow in the inspiring footsteps of the Lebanese model. These systems would of at least make this nonsensical garbage somewhat plausible. But apparently, in this country, none of this stuff is even necessary to sell this shit as good “politics”. It seems that the various “representation” avatars selected by our benevolent two-party system can act as faithful conduits of their race’s collective will.

Perhaps we don’t need to worry about the obvious contradictions that this ideology introduces. The plan might simply be that Lefties will whisper customized ideologies and political messages in the ears of each person they are trying to appeal to and keep it a secret from everybody else. Or just sprinkle a little “intersectionality” on top of the contradictions and they go away.

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Leftoids tell me a few things when discussing the implications of propagating racial ideology as political tool:

1. The “white supremacists” are doing it so we have to do it too
   The brilliant logic underlying this response amounts to believing that when somebody says “black people suck” you cancel it out by saying “white people suck”, or something along those lines. The truth is that in this country, given its demographics and political structure, the math of racializing society works to the benefit of somebody who belongs to a clear majority race. Could Freddie be a part of a sleeper cells of the KKK?

2. We need to build a coalition and bring in marginalized communities
   This to me is the most revealing and sinister of responses. The basic implication is that the darker skinned among us, and this is something I’ve personally experienced, are incapable of understanding the system of economic domination that governs the quotient of misery they receive. Their daily and relentless experiences of labor exploitation and market extraction for basic needs is apparently beyond their ability to understand on its own terms and we must appeal to concepts more familiar to them - such as tribal animosities and mystical phantoms.

3. But Intersectionality
   The concept of “intersectionality” stands in such perfect opposition to what it claims to be doing that I can’t help but assume that the Left engaged in a mass act of self-lobotomization. I’ll reiterate the statement I made earlier that the obsession with justice in politics for the Left boils down to Tort Law. This is why moving a legal concept such as “intersectionality” - where grievances of a plaintiff add up to maximize damages - into the political realm makes perfect sense in their brains. The reality is the only intersectionality that makes sense in the political sphere is the one emerging out of Set Theory. The compounding number of friend/enemy distinctions you bring into your politics necessarily shrink your base. Of course you get the benefit of blaming the unpopularity of your shitty clubhouse on your own moral purity and the moral shortcoming of everybody else. I’ve explained this phenomenon before here: Palestinian Solidarity and the Perpetual Virtue Machine

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The only effective function that racialism plays in American society today is the function that it’s played at every point in American history. Do you want to make sure than no coherent unit, economically or politically, can coalesce around their shared material interests? That easy: invent, reproduce, socialize, and deepen any mysticism that fragments them and pits them against one another. What can be explained compellingly through a lens of a Concrete Universal (a pronounced instance of a common condition) is better reimagined, for the benefit of Capital, as the product of intra-working class trans-historic animosity. That the elite universities that pump out the ghouls that inhabit the board rooms and operate the political machinery responsible for working class exploitation are the same ones manufacturing the social ideologies that enflame animosities within the working class should be no surprise. The phrenologists of the past who revealed the innate nature of abstract groups through skull measurements have simply been replaced with a variety of specialized humanities departments who reveal the innate nature of abstract groups through academic gibberish.

This is the socio-economic universe from which the Left activists emerge. This is where the mantras that Freddie recited came from. Their adoption of these noxious ideology aren’t an error in judgement. Like everybody else, the ideologies that the Left believes are ones that reconcile them cognitively and emotionally with their material interests. It’s nothing more complicated than that. I’ll leave Freddie to close us out with another bit from his justice essay:

The darkest possibility is that the left is fixated on identifying injustice without doing anything about it because its members don't actually want things to change. They are better served by the status quo, either because they benefit from the unequal distribution of power in the world or, as I think is true for very many, they are more comfortable being beautiful losers.