Monthly Review | Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade)
Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade)
In “The White Republic and The Struggle for Racial Justice,” Bob Wing contended that the U.S. state is racist to the core, and this has specific implications for our movements’ work going forward, especially the need to replace this racist state with an anti-racist state. Organizing Upgrade is publishing a series of commentaries on this piece, and we invite readers to respond as well. In this installment, Gerald Horne argues that we must reckon with the dynamics of settler colonialism if we are to understand white supremacy. “The attempt to build ‘class unity’ without confronting these underlying tensions often has meant coercing oppressed nationalities—Blacks in the first place—to co-sign a kind of ‘left wing white nationalism,’ Horne writes.
Image: "Internationalism." When white leftists fail to interrogate white supremacy, they invariably place the white blue collar worker in the primary position, leading all others.
Gerald Horne is the author of dozens of books on slavery, socialism, popular culture, and Black internationalism. His most recent book on the beginning of the slave trade is The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Here is his latest article for Organizing Upgrade:
‘The White Republic’: Response by Gerald Horne
The good news is that Comrade Bob Wing’s analysis represents a step forward in terms of the U.S. Left’s understanding of the nation—“republic”—in which it struggles.
The bad news is that the U.S. left has not necessarily kept pace with the U.S. ruling class in terms of similar issues, or even with non-radical African-Americans, for that matter.
Consider the multi-part series on HBO Max (a member in good standing of the much reviled “corporate media”) that premiered recently, i.e. Black filmmaker Raoul Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a sweeping analysis and condemnation of settler colonialism (a term curiously absent from ordinary discourse on the left) and white supremacy. His other credits include the superb docu-drama “The Young Karl Marx.”
Consider the 1619 Project of The New York Times, spearheaded by Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which—inter alia—had the audacity to suggest that a settlers’ revolt in 1776 led by slaveholders may have had something to do with maintaining slavery. Revealingly, the assault on this estimable initiative was mounted by self-described “socialists”, liberals and conservatives: in essence, The White Republic.
Consider the book by Black scholar Tyler Stovall (published by an Ivy League press), White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, which is more advanced ideologically than comparable analyses on the U.S. left.
Consider the response to the concerted effort to deodorize the smelly roots of the vaunted “Founding Fathers”: I speak of the Broadway/Disney extravaganza, “Hamilton,” celebrated by the Cheneys and Obamas alike, not to mention some to their left—but skewered by paramount Black intellectual, Ishmael Reed.
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response. Suffice it to say for now that misconception begins with the origins of the slaveholders’ republic in 1776, a creation myth that Comrade Wing does not challenge explicitly. Those who consider themselves to be sophisticated refer to an “Incomplete Revolution,” as if the founders had in mind “others” not defined as “white” but, perhaps, forgot to include them. This is akin to referring to implanting apartheid in 1948 as an “Incomplete Reform,” as if these founders, perhaps, forgot to include Africans in the bounty that was accorded to poorer Afrikaners. Even the supposedly perceptive term “bourgeois democracy” as a descriptor for 1776 and its fruits is misleading at best since “rights” definitely did not include any not defined as “white” and, thus, this term becomes part of the massive misdirection that now has us on the brink of fascism.
SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS
First, consider the confluence of settler colonialism and the construction of “whiteness.” When settlers arrived in what is now North Carolina in the 1580s it was a multi-class venture—shopkeepers, smiths, etc.—sponsored by the London elite. This was in the midst of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic Spain, which came within a whisker of toppling the London monarchy in 1588, imposed religion as a qualifier for settlement. England, the scrappy Protestant underdog, moved toward Pan-Europeanism—or “whiteness”—incorporating Scots and Irish and Welsh in the first instance, those with whom they had been warring for centuries, and then moved toward incorporating others who had been warring: British v. German; German v. Pole; Pole v. Russian; Serb v. Croat—the list is long. All of a sudden when crossing the Atlantic, in a manner that would make Madison Avenue blush, all are rebranded as “white,” which subsumes many of the tensions, ethnic and class among them, in a new monetized and militarized “identity politics” of “whiteness” based on expropriation of the Indigenous and mass enslavement of the Africans.
As the 17th century roots of Maryland suggest, London was willing to sponsor Catholic settlers, while inquisitorial Madrid continued to bar and expel those not deemed to be religiously correct. Thus, from the inception in the early 1500s, Havana contained African conquistadors who professed Catholicism (a sharp divergence from racialized settlements in the “Anglo-sphere”, leaving a legacy which continues to wrongfoot those seeking to comprehend socialist Cuba) and as late as 200 years ago, settler Stephen F. Austin professed a nominal Catholicism in order to engage in his land grab in Mexican Texas.
Of course, Ottoman—and heavily Islamic–Turkey was an igniting factor in this process. Their seizure of what is now Istanbul in 1453 impelled an existential crisis in Western European Christendom: as Columbus headed westward in 1492, on behalf of Catholics he was seeking to circumvent the Ottomans; 1492 also marks the accelerated weakening of Islamic rule in Iberia, followed by many fleeing to North Africa and to Ottoman jurisdiction, along with the Jewish minority.
Tellingly, London had expelled its own Jewish minority circa 1290-1291 but in the contestation with Catholics, this Protestant power embraced this minority—as did Protestant Holland—and the victorious republicans did so too by 1776. The philosophically idealistic and credulous tried to convince the rest of us that this was a result of “Enlightenment,” as opposed to seeking to broaden the base of settler colonialism in order to confront obstreperous Africans and the mighty Indigenous.
Interestingly, in the late 1930s, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo also embraced a fleeing European Jewish minority and only the naïve would ascribe this decision to “Enlightenment”—as opposed to a crude attempt to “whiten” the population in the ongoing conflict with the bête noire that was neighboring Haiti, whose nationals were simultaneously being massacred along the border.
Speaking of neighbors, it is similarly informative that patriotic U.S. analysts of the left generally refuse to scrutinize the “control group” due north. Canada did not rebel against London and yet now has a health care system that is the envy of the so-called “revolutionary republic”—should not one expect the opposite?
Actually, settlers’ revolts—be they in Southern Rhodesia in 1965 or Algeria in the late 1950s—are generally problematic, especially when driven by white supremacy and/or religious bigotry. To the “credit” of the North American settlers’ revolt, unlike their French counterparts in Algiers, they were not as advanced in seeking to liquidate the monarch himself, as was the case in Paris in April 1961 with Charles de Gaulle in the crosshairs. (For the naïve who continue to guzzle the Kool-Aid and propaganda of “liberal democracy,” on the 50thanniversary of this plot, French military men threatened a coup against President Macron, just as the elite U.S. publication Foreign Affairs reported a disturbing trend of the military bucking civilian rule: see also 6 January 2021 and the recent open letter signed by dozens of retired military brass in the U.S. echoing MAGA talking points and warning ominously against the purported “socialism” of the current regime in Washington.)
Given the troubling roots of this republic, it was inevitable that at a certain point what are described as “cultural” issues—immigration; reproductive and LGBTTQ rights—would leap to the fore as these are perceived as natal matters essential to an apartheid state: maintaining a presumed “white” majority.
Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade)
In “The White Republic and The Struggle for Racial Justice,” Bob Wing contended that the U.S. state is racist to the core, and this has specific implications for our movements’ work going forward, especially the need to replace this racist state with an anti-racist state. Organizing Upgrade is publishing a series of commentaries on this piece, and we invite readers to respond as well. In this installment, Gerald Horne argues that we must reckon with the dynamics of settler colonialism if we are to understand white supremacy. “The attempt to build ‘class unity’ without confronting these underlying tensions often has meant coercing oppressed nationalities—Blacks in the first place—to co-sign a kind of ‘left wing white nationalism,’ Horne writes.
Image: "Internationalism." When white leftists fail to interrogate white supremacy, they invariably place the white blue collar worker in the primary position, leading all others.
Gerald Horne is the author of dozens of books on slavery, socialism, popular culture, and Black internationalism. His most recent book on the beginning of the slave trade is The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Here is his latest article for Organizing Upgrade:
‘The White Republic’: Response by Gerald Horne
The good news is that Comrade Bob Wing’s analysis represents a step forward in terms of the U.S. Left’s understanding of the nation—“republic”—in which it struggles.
The bad news is that the U.S. left has not necessarily kept pace with the U.S. ruling class in terms of similar issues, or even with non-radical African-Americans, for that matter.
Consider the multi-part series on HBO Max (a member in good standing of the much reviled “corporate media”) that premiered recently, i.e. Black filmmaker Raoul Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a sweeping analysis and condemnation of settler colonialism (a term curiously absent from ordinary discourse on the left) and white supremacy. His other credits include the superb docu-drama “The Young Karl Marx.”
Consider the 1619 Project of The New York Times, spearheaded by Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which—inter alia—had the audacity to suggest that a settlers’ revolt in 1776 led by slaveholders may have had something to do with maintaining slavery. Revealingly, the assault on this estimable initiative was mounted by self-described “socialists”, liberals and conservatives: in essence, The White Republic.
Consider the book by Black scholar Tyler Stovall (published by an Ivy League press), White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, which is more advanced ideologically than comparable analyses on the U.S. left.
Consider the response to the concerted effort to deodorize the smelly roots of the vaunted “Founding Fathers”: I speak of the Broadway/Disney extravaganza, “Hamilton,” celebrated by the Cheneys and Obamas alike, not to mention some to their left—but skewered by paramount Black intellectual, Ishmael Reed.
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response. Suffice it to say for now that misconception begins with the origins of the slaveholders’ republic in 1776, a creation myth that Comrade Wing does not challenge explicitly. Those who consider themselves to be sophisticated refer to an “Incomplete Revolution,” as if the founders had in mind “others” not defined as “white” but, perhaps, forgot to include them. This is akin to referring to implanting apartheid in 1948 as an “Incomplete Reform,” as if these founders, perhaps, forgot to include Africans in the bounty that was accorded to poorer Afrikaners. Even the supposedly perceptive term “bourgeois democracy” as a descriptor for 1776 and its fruits is misleading at best since “rights” definitely did not include any not defined as “white” and, thus, this term becomes part of the massive misdirection that now has us on the brink of fascism.
SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS
First, consider the confluence of settler colonialism and the construction of “whiteness.” When settlers arrived in what is now North Carolina in the 1580s it was a multi-class venture—shopkeepers, smiths, etc.—sponsored by the London elite. This was in the midst of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic Spain, which came within a whisker of toppling the London monarchy in 1588, imposed religion as a qualifier for settlement. England, the scrappy Protestant underdog, moved toward Pan-Europeanism—or “whiteness”—incorporating Scots and Irish and Welsh in the first instance, those with whom they had been warring for centuries, and then moved toward incorporating others who had been warring: British v. German; German v. Pole; Pole v. Russian; Serb v. Croat—the list is long. All of a sudden when crossing the Atlantic, in a manner that would make Madison Avenue blush, all are rebranded as “white,” which subsumes many of the tensions, ethnic and class among them, in a new monetized and militarized “identity politics” of “whiteness” based on expropriation of the Indigenous and mass enslavement of the Africans.
As the 17th century roots of Maryland suggest, London was willing to sponsor Catholic settlers, while inquisitorial Madrid continued to bar and expel those not deemed to be religiously correct. Thus, from the inception in the early 1500s, Havana contained African conquistadors who professed Catholicism (a sharp divergence from racialized settlements in the “Anglo-sphere”, leaving a legacy which continues to wrongfoot those seeking to comprehend socialist Cuba) and as late as 200 years ago, settler Stephen F. Austin professed a nominal Catholicism in order to engage in his land grab in Mexican Texas.
Of course, Ottoman—and heavily Islamic–Turkey was an igniting factor in this process. Their seizure of what is now Istanbul in 1453 impelled an existential crisis in Western European Christendom: as Columbus headed westward in 1492, on behalf of Catholics he was seeking to circumvent the Ottomans; 1492 also marks the accelerated weakening of Islamic rule in Iberia, followed by many fleeing to North Africa and to Ottoman jurisdiction, along with the Jewish minority.
Tellingly, London had expelled its own Jewish minority circa 1290-1291 but in the contestation with Catholics, this Protestant power embraced this minority—as did Protestant Holland—and the victorious republicans did so too by 1776. The philosophically idealistic and credulous tried to convince the rest of us that this was a result of “Enlightenment,” as opposed to seeking to broaden the base of settler colonialism in order to confront obstreperous Africans and the mighty Indigenous.
Interestingly, in the late 1930s, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo also embraced a fleeing European Jewish minority and only the naïve would ascribe this decision to “Enlightenment”—as opposed to a crude attempt to “whiten” the population in the ongoing conflict with the bête noire that was neighboring Haiti, whose nationals were simultaneously being massacred along the border.
Speaking of neighbors, it is similarly informative that patriotic U.S. analysts of the left generally refuse to scrutinize the “control group” due north. Canada did not rebel against London and yet now has a health care system that is the envy of the so-called “revolutionary republic”—should not one expect the opposite?
Actually, settlers’ revolts—be they in Southern Rhodesia in 1965 or Algeria in the late 1950s—are generally problematic, especially when driven by white supremacy and/or religious bigotry. To the “credit” of the North American settlers’ revolt, unlike their French counterparts in Algiers, they were not as advanced in seeking to liquidate the monarch himself, as was the case in Paris in April 1961 with Charles de Gaulle in the crosshairs. (For the naïve who continue to guzzle the Kool-Aid and propaganda of “liberal democracy,” on the 50thanniversary of this plot, French military men threatened a coup against President Macron, just as the elite U.S. publication Foreign Affairs reported a disturbing trend of the military bucking civilian rule: see also 6 January 2021 and the recent open letter signed by dozens of retired military brass in the U.S. echoing MAGA talking points and warning ominously against the purported “socialism” of the current regime in Washington.)
Given the troubling roots of this republic, it was inevitable that at a certain point what are described as “cultural” issues—immigration; reproductive and LGBTTQ rights—would leap to the fore as these are perceived as natal matters essential to an apartheid state: maintaining a presumed “white” majority.
