[Indigsol] settlerism and racism

[mattm-b at resist.ca]

hi,

we talked briefly about the word, "settler".  i wanted to pass on this
excerpt of a J. Sakai interview where he talks about his analysis of what
being a settler means, and what racism means.

the full article is pretty long and is available at:

http://raimd.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/when-race-burns-class-interview-with-j-sakai/

he also wrote an excellent book called, "settler: the mythology of the
white proletariat".

matt

EC: How is settlerism different from racism?

JS: This is a useful question, because people are confused about the two.
Some people think that “settler” is just a fancy way of saying “white
people”, and that it’s all just about racism anyway. Racism as we know it
and settlerism both had their origins in capitalist colonialism, and are
related but quite distinct. Settler-colonial societies started as invasion
and occupation forces for Western capitalism, social garrisons usually in
the Third World, as Western capitalism expanded out of Europe into the
Americas, Afrika and Asia. Racism as we experience it today didn’t exist
before capitalism, which is why many revolutionaries see rooting out the
one as requiring rooting out the other. To Europeans before modern
capitalism the most important “races” were what we would call nations.
Indeed, until well into the 20th century it was widely assumed by
Europeans that even different European nationalities were biologically
different, and had different mental abilities and propensities. Slavs were
thought to be biologically different from Nordics, and Jews were thought
to be an exotic race all by themselves. Pre-capitalist and even early
capitalist Europe was a lot different from our racial stereotypes. It
wasn’t that oppression and bigotry didn’t exist. Obviously, for example,
there was a long tradition of anti-semitic and anti-romany persecution in
“Christendom”. But the whole context of “race” was unlike what we usually
think of. i was astonished to learn that in early 18th century Germany, a
leading philosopher, Anton-Wilhelm Amo who lectured at the University of
Halle and the University of Jena, was a Black German ( born in Africa, he
also signed his name in Latin as “Amo Guinea-Africanus” or Amo the
African). Or that Russia’s greatest poet, the 19th century aristocratic
Pushkin, was Black by American standards. And nobody cared. And in the
time of Marx and Bakunin, the major leader of early German radical
unionism was also very visibly Black, and his part-Afrikan heritage
accepted. Well, what we’ve been saying all along is that “race” in modern
capitalism was originally changed from an undefined difference into a
disguise for “class”. Capitalism, after all, always prefers to restructure
class differences in drag of some kind (all the better for their
manipulations). Like Northern Ireland, where there is supposedly a
“religious” or “ethnic” bloody conflict between Catholic Irish Republicans
and Protestant Loyalists. Actually, this has been an up-front class
conflict between British capitalism’s historic settler garrison population
(the Prots) and the historic colonial subjects (the “Catholics”). Both
sides European, both “white”. The Northern Ireland Protestant settler
working class has always had relative privilege, including the best jobs
(sound familiar?). Belfast’s traditional blue-collar “big employer”, the
Harland & Wolff shipyard, had always been so dominated by Protestant
settler workers that the shipyard union called a pro-imperialist political
strike in the 1970s, closing down the yards, to oppose granting any
democratic rights at all to Irish Catholics. ( Now, of course, the
obsolete shipyards are going out of business, and a globalized British
imperialism has much less need for their loyal Unionist servants).
The”Orangemen” settlers in Northern Ireland have hated the Irish with just
as much crazed viciousness as white u.s. workers hate the oppressed. Irish
revolutionary Bernadette Devlin McAliskey picked up on this same
comparison in real class when visiting the u.s. in the 1970s. She said
afterwards: “I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own
level. ‘My people’—the people who knew about oppression, discrimination,
prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce– were
not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those
who were supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who knew about
English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil rights movement at
home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem,
looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things
about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York I was
given the key to the city by the mayor, an honor not to be sneezed at. I
gave it to the Black Panthers.” So settler-colonialism usually has taken
racial form, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, one of the newest
examples—the Chinese capitalist empire’s Han settler occupation of
Tibet–is all Asian. What we never should lose sight of is that these may
be socially constructed differences—but they are real. There’s a certain
trend of fashionable white thought that claims that race (or nation) is
nothing more than a trick, an imaginary construct that folks are fooled
into believing in. So we even find some middle-class white men claiming
that they’ve “given up being white” (i can hear my grandmother saying,
“More white foolishness!” with a dismissing headshake). Needless to say,
they haven’t given up anything. Race as a form of class is very tangible,
solid, material, as real as a tank division running over you 
 tank
divisions, after all, are also socially constructed! About another form of
this same white racist game—white New Age women deciding to play at
“becoming Indian”—Women of All Red Nations activist Andy Smith used to
wearily suggest that if they really really wanted to “become Indian” they
should live on the rez–the u.s. colony– without running water or jobs,
without heat in the winter or education for their children, with real
poverty, alcoholism, and violent oppression. So both racism as we know it
and settlerism each had their origins in capitalist colonialism and are
related, but are also quite distinct. Settler-colonial societies have a
specialized history, because they started as invasion and occupation
forces for Western capitalism. Usually as social garrisons in the Third
World, as Western capitalism expanded out of Europe into the Americas,
Afrika, Asia.