[Indigsol] settlerism and racism

[Sylvia Smith]

Thanks for passing this on Matt.  I think it is so important, as we work to
dismantle the oppressive structures that we work and live within, that we
labour at the same time with our heads, to grow intellectually.  Getting
the heart and the head together in an action-orientation leads to
transformation.  Now that's exciting!

By the way, does anyone have any idea how much money we were able to raise
after Friday's event for walk4justice?

Sylvia

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 11:38 PM, <mattm-b at resist.ca> wrote:

> 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.
>
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-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvia Smith
Teacher,
Elizabeth Wyn Wood Alternate Site
613.225.8826 x 235


Coordinator, "Project of Heart"
projectofheart.ca
info at projectofheart.ca
2 Craftsman Private, Ottawa ON K1Y 4W9
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