Renewing the Anarchist Tradition
October 19, 2007In early November, I will be participating in the 2007 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in Vermont, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. I will be giving a presentation on "The White Skin Privilege Concept: From Margin to Center of Revolutionary Politics," and I will be participating in a panel discussion on "Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Fascism: Challenges for Anti-Capitalists," alongside Rami El-Amine, Andrea Maria, and my brother, Peter Staudenmaier. Sadly, registration is already closed, so those of you not already planning to attend will have to wait for me to post the text of my presentations here, after the conference is over.
The White Skin Privilege workshop draws heavily on my STO research, but will also include my thoughts on the current state of "privilege" as a narrative device for understanding and resisting oppression in general and white supremacy in particular. I’m hoping to inspire a thoughtful and informed discussion of how anarchists can and should think about race relations. The description from the conference materials reads as follows:
"For better and for worse, much contemporary anarchist analysis of oppression is overlaid with the terminology of "privilege." The original template for this kind of thinking is the white skin privilege concept, which is both popular and contentious among North American anarchists today. This talk will focus on the emergence of the white skin privilege idea within the white New Left during the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially in and around the Sojourner Truth Organization, a small revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during this period. After tracing the entry of these ideas into the anarchist vernacular during the 1980s, this talk will conclude with a discussion of the current state of the white skin privilege analysis, and an assessment of some implications for present-day anarchist theory and practice."
The panel is a follow-up on my presentation last spring at the National Conference on Organized Resistance in Washington, DC, previously posted on my blog here. The other participants include Rami El-Amine, who wrote one of the main pieces that inspired my talk at NCOR, "Anti-Arab Racism, Islamophobia, and the Anti-War Movement." El-Amine has also written a response to my talk, published (along with the text of my original presentation) in the newly released issue 5 of the Canadian journal Upping the Anti-. My brother Peter, who has long prioritized an anti-fascist analysis and a concern with antisemitism, will also participate. And the panel will be moderated by Andrea Maria, a board member of the IAS and an experienced radical. The conference materials describe the panel this way:
"Both contemporary capitalism and resistance against it are in part defined by, and have developed in response to, a series of oppressions that are not neatly reducible to "class." In a post-9/11 world, Islamophobia and antisemitism are particularly contentious examples of this dynamic. To what extent does the continued hegemony of global capitalism depend on these two forms of oppression? In what ways have anti-capitalist resistance movements intentionally or inadvertently replicated these same phenomena? This panel will attempt to come to grips with the contradictory character of both capitalism and anti-capitalism by bringing together advocates of various radical paradigms, including anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the "three-way fight" analysis."
