White Skin Privilege
April 17, 2006Ah, white Skin privilege. Years before I ever heard of the Sojourner Truth Organization, I had heard this term, perhaps initially in some sort of workshop for white people confronting racism. By the time I graduated from college, I was familiar with the journal Race Traitor, whose primary editor I knew was Noel Ignatiev. By the time I met Noel in person a year or two later, I was just becoming aware of the past existence of STO. All of this is fitting, in a way, because probably the single greatest legacy of STO to the white left of the last two decades has been precisely the notion that people who are socially designated as white have specific privileges as a result.
Given the broad acceptance of this analysis within the contemporary white left, and particularly among anarchists, it is hard to imagine how marginal it was in the early 1970’s. At that time, within the white left, STO was one of only a handful of small, far-left groupings that advanced the white-skin privilege line as central to the functioning of white supremacy in North America. In an interview, one former member of STO recalled presenting the basic outline of this analysis at a conference in Atlanta in 1974; Bob Avakian (then of the RU, now maximum leader of the RCP, living in France) denounced STO’s approach as “bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt!” Throughout the 1970’s, this was probably a broadly representative response within the white left. (This is probably still the line of the RCP on this question, although I honestly haven’t paid much attention recently; perhaps the folks at Red Flags can enlighten us.)
The basic idea of white skin privilege comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in his classic work Black Reconstruction in America discussed the “public and psychological wage” (p. 700) that white workers received in exchange for their complicity in the continued functioning of white supremacy. For many decades, such an analysis was welcome in black circles, but had no currency among white radicals. In the 1960’s, two white revolutionaries, Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen, began to popularize this approach to understanding and fighting racism.
The “wage” identified by Du Bois amounts to a series of easily identified relative privileges that are granted to white people in the United States, regardless of their economic class: preferential treatment by cops and courts, being hired first and fired last from most jobs, access to higher quality schools, and so forth. There can be little doubt that these privileges continue to exist in general terms up through the present day, even (or perhaps especially) when they are enforced without reference to (or in contravention of) the law. This was even more clear when Ignatin and several others founded STO in 1969/1970.
STO’s version of white skin privilege analysis differed from that put forward by some others in the white left during the 1970’s. On the one hand, groups like the Weather Underground and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) argued that white skin privilege so poisoned the well of the white working class in North America that there was no point to the sort of workplace organizing that STO prioritized for much of its existence. As a former member of STO explained in reference to PFOC, “They totally unmoored themselves from the class, and we hadn’t; that was what distinguished us from them.”
On the other hand, especially during its middle period, when it embraced national liberation struggles as the centerpiece of communist revolution, STO was criticized in some circles (including those clustered around Ted Allen) for putting too much emphasis on the complicity of the white working class in the functioning of white supremacy. The basis for this critique was Allen’s historical work, which purported to demonstrate that the development of white supremacy was almost entirely the result of top-down action by the bourgeoisie. (Allen’s The Invention of the White Race was the eventual culmination of this line of thinking.)
In the end, STO steered a sort of middle course, recognizing both the problems and potential of the white working class in North America. In this sense, the white skin privilege analysis of white supremacy can be seen as an example (albeit the most important one by far in the US) of the dual consciousness that I wrote about previously.
The interesting question, then, to which I do not have a clear answer, is “how did (a version of) the white skin privilege analysis become so widely accepted within the white left, and even among progressive liberals?” The transition must have begun sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s, with the growing acceptance of this approach within the campus left in the US.
Among anarchists, the turning point was clearly marked with the creation of Love and Rage in 1989. At least two former members of STO were members of L&R at various points, and Race Traitor was a common point of reference for the group throughout the 1990’s, even among the substantial portion of the membership that disagreed with its analysis. By the time Love and Rage disbanded in 1998, the face of North American anarchism had changed dramatically, and no more so than in the area of understanding and confronting white supremacy. In the end, the legacy of STO for anarchists has been most visibly built around the increasing acceptance of a white skin privilege analysis over the past fifteen years.
hi mike,
interesting stuff, to be sure. like STO, i think the WUO & PFOC (& May 19 and other splinter groups) did a lot to make fighting white supremacy & white privilege a centerpiece of radical motion among whites. that was what attracted me to writing about them and what i see as their greatest legacy, just as it is for you and STO. in terms of these notions gaining currency in the 70s and 80s, i think the women’s movement had a lot to do with it, as did the fact that lots of radicals and folks influenced by radical movements were starting to enter academia.
the WUO & PFOC sector of the left is always criticized for totally writing off the white working class–and there is some truth to that, for sure. but it wasn’t necessarily so. the founding “weatherman” statement spoke about white workers as being both the privileged and oppressed (albeit without the “double consciousness” notion, and in a way that noel ignatin criticized shortly after it first appeared), and the first thing the weatherman bloc of sds did was to move into white working class communities in the summer of 1969 to try and organize among white working class youth–actually, this started in some places even before the “weatherman” statement was written although by some of the same people. their organizing style was too macho and arrogant to get very far with this, which only fostered, at least for a time, some anti-white working class rhetoric. but it wasn’t like weather was at the outset and always fundamentally opposed to white working class people, even though it didn’t organize them the way STO tried to do & its active base was generally more among political counter culture types.
i think another difference b/w STO and WUO-PFOC is that the former saw themselves as building a communist party, whereas the latter generally did not (with some exceptions, namely toward the end of the WUO’s existence around 76). it’s interesting that the STO was able to navigate, not without tensions of course, between the WUO-PFOC-May 19 end of things and the various groups among the party-building left.
ok, enough rambling on my end. keep up the great work!
dan
Comment by dan — April 17, 2006 @ 8:43 pm
Hey Dan,
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your assessment of Weather’s initial approach to the white working class, although I think by the time PFOC was started, the last vestiges of that initial perspective were all but lost. (You, of course, know this material much more thoroughly than I do, so I’m very happy to have you “ramble.”)
I also think you’re on the right track about the women’s movement and the increasing radical presence in the academy as a source for the growth in white skin privilege rhetoric in the 80’s. Certainly that is consistent with my own experience: as I indicated, I’m fairly sure I first encountered the concept in some sort of confronting racism workshop I attended while in college, and which I seem to recall was led by feminists.
As for party building, STO always had an oddly ambiguous approach to this question, I think partly because they saw the relative maginality of their own position as a largely white organization. Plus, the concept of the “party” itself seems to have meant very different things to different members at different times during STO’s existence. As you say, it is interesting that STO managed to bridge the otherwise substantial gap between the anti-imperialist left that WUO/PFOC/M19 represented and the party-building/new communist movement groups that Elbaum talks about. I think in part it was because as a group they couldn’t decide between the relative merits and demerits of the two poles, and partly because this approach reflected their understanding of dual consciousness. It is something I want to pursue further.
Solidarity,
Mike
Comment by Mike — April 17, 2006 @ 9:47 pm
[This comment was posted to the Oread Daily, which reposted my piece on White-Skin Privilege here. I’m reposting the comment here, with permission of the author.]
This brief introduction to STO unfortunately perpetuates some vulgar anti-WUO/PFOC views held by STO. “They unmoored themselves from the class…” There were differences within the Weather Underground and within Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, betwen those two organizations, and between PFOC and STO on questions of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege, and of the character of the working class(es) inside the US in both a domestic and international context. Some of the people who joined the WUO or were later involved in PFOC had also been engaged in point of production organizing, as well as other forms of organizing among working class “white” people.
If you look at matters exclusively from the perspective of STO, it is difficult indeed to understand how awareness of white privilege (and white supremacy, a term STO did not use so much) has become more generalized in the white left. Certainly, the WUO, May 19th Communist Organization, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and various of the successor organizations established by former cadres in those groups played a significant role.
STO, PFOC and May 19th in their time did in fact see themselves, sometimes uncomfortably, as part of a common political tendency. I worked in Chicago (as part of PFOC) in a unity-struggle-unity relationship with many comrades from numerically-larger STO chapter there. We were jointly involved, for example, in creating a Puerto Rico solidarity organization that responded to the leadership of the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (at that time a joint Puerto Rican/Mexicano organization) and the Liga Socialista Puertorriquena that supported the clandestine Puerto Rican freedom fighters in the US and Puerto Rico such as the FALN and the Macheteros.
Such principled relationships with and support for anti-colonial struggles is what enabled STO, PFOC and other groups in this tendency to avoid the sectarianism and irrelevance that dragged most of the other remnants of the New Left into doctrinaire Maoism.
Comment by ARA-Los Angeles — May 27, 2006 @ 6:27 pm
Nice to see people are still struggling about these issues and the politics. The reason that the critique of “white privilege” (less so, the struggle against white supremacy and settler colonialism) has become so widespread is that the failure of the left that denied these realities was so total and so devastating (right along with that of the ‘internal’ national liberation and decolonization movements they opposed) that the realities of ‘domestic’ imperialism and colonialism have become so stark as to be undeniable. Despite a generation of condemning “identity politics” and ridiculing “political correctness” (that is, anti-racism and anti-sexism), the contradictions that emerged in the 60s have never been suppressed or liquidated but have only matured. These are the material realities that underpin concsciousness, and what it says to me is that anti-colonial, anti-white-supremacist consciousness IS class consciousness in this period of history.
Comment by Michael Novick — May 28, 2006 @ 3:09 am
I’m happy to find that the usual short life span for internet texts has is not universal. When an article I wrote over a month ago is still provoking comments, it must be a sign of something good. (Special thanks, of course, should go to the Oread Daily, which introduced this blog and the piece on white skin privilege to a whole new audience.) At any rate, a couple quick comments:
ARA-LA: You are right to point to the variety of perspectives and experiences on “class” based organizing within the WUO/PFOC/May 19 milieu, and your comments on the common efforts of PFOC, May 19th, and STO in the late 70’s are greatly appreciated. This is an aspect of STO’s history that I haven’t written about much yet, but I will hopefully get to that soon.
At the same time, I think my difficulty in conceptualizing how white skin privilege went from marginal to commonplace in revolutionary discourse has less to do with seeing things “exclusively from the perspective of STO” and more to do with age differences. I’m 33, and it is only through historical research that I have learned how unpopular the white skin privilege analysis was, say, at the time of my birth. If you think that, from the perspective of PFOC (for example), this analysis was never as marginal as I claim, then I would definitely like to hear about it. In any event, I think Dan’s hypothesis about feminism and shifts in the academy is compelling, and I don’t pretend that STO as an organization played any significant role in the process. I would guess that PFOC was more important here, in part due to its greater openness to feminism (another topic I need to write about at some point.).
Michael: You’re right about the failures of two competing sectors of the left (the largely white-led maoist party builders, and the “internal” national liberation movements). However, I don’t think these failures alone are enough to explain what has happened to the white skin privilege analysis, precisely because, as you point out, the growing popularity of this conceptual framework has not been coupled with an increasing focus on the struggle against white supremacy or (neo-)colonialism. As above, I think Dan’s explanation makes more sense to me.
Also, I must disagree with you about the equation between anti-colonial/anti-white supremacist consciousness and class consciousness. Sadly, just as there are white supremacist tendencies within (white dominated sectors of) anti-capitalist movements, so too are there essentially pro-capitalist tendencies within anti-colonial and anti-racist movements. The point, I think, is precisely to push for the pairing of these two forms of consciousness, while always remembering our positioning and the privileges (including white skin privilege) that influence our perspective on these struggles.
Finally, it’s great to hear your comments on all this; if my project is to succeed, it will be partly because a number of older comrades take it seriously. Please continue to challenge me on political matters and correct me when I make factual errors.
Solidarity,
Mike
Comment by Mike — May 31, 2006 @ 7:23 pm