The Invention of the White Race

[Macrobius]

No, that is not my opinion, but the title of the book, the argument of which is reviewed in this thread.

Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vols.)

The late author (obiit 2005) was a Marxist theoretician, who has written extensively on the topic, and in particular the race-consciousness that evolved in Virginia, [hence the posting in the Dixieland forum] throughout the Colonial period and on through the struggles over Slavery, then down to the present day.

First, to clarify the aims of this Marxist, they are the elimination of race and patriarchal family life:


For those in our country who are committed to ending all forms of social oppression and replacing it with forms of social organization that can succeed in making vital the inherent contradiction between the individual and the collective, the first main strategic blow must be aimed at the most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck, namely, white supremacism.
...
My first and last reaction to this question is to say that in this country the emergence of a multi-racial bourgeoisie (if it were possible) would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. It would mean the end of racial oppression, the historic system of ruling-class social control. That whole system of bourgeois social control in this country is dependent precisely on the denying African-Americans normal social mobility.


http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen%20interview.html

Exactly what a 'multiracial bourgeoisie' would entail can be inferred from the discussion here:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=29737

Substantial extracts from 7 out of 8 chapters of Vol. 1 can be found here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=G4elgqb-MjwC

And a summary of the argument, by the author, which we will be the focus of this threads discussion, can be found here:

Vol 1.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:x-qgvI-Ctm0J:eserver.org/clogic/1-2/allen.html+http://eserver.org/clogic/1-2/allen.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Vol 2.

http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen2.html

The Vol. 1 extract appears to be offline, but is in the Google cache.

The shortest summary of the author's thesis is in the interview, given in regard to the second question:


My book is simply a study of the history of governance as instituted by the ruling class of colonizing powers, particularly, the English and Anglo-American plantation bourgeoisie. I offer the following summary argument of the matter.

In regard to those class societies that I have had a chance to study, in connection with research for The Invention of the White Race, and also those in regard to which I have merely relied upon studies made by other scholars, the following generalization seems justified:[1]

In such class societies there is the ruling class, that part of society which, having established its control of the organs of state power, and having maintained domination of the economy through successive generations and crises, is able to limit the options of social policy in such a way as to perpetuate its hegemony over the society as a whole.

Being itself economically non-productive, the ruling class is optimally a small numerical proportion of the society. Therefore, the maintenance of state power in the form of military forces and their attendant bureaucracy is an indispensable condition for the continued dominance of the ruling class.

Reliance on force alone, however, is ill-advised. Military forces, being economically unproductive,[2] must be compensated by deductions from the gross social resources; therefore, the greater the reliance on the military, the greater this unproductive outlay. Secondly, such reliance on military force for social control tends to political destabilization through military coups conducted with or without the connivance of other partisan factions.[3]

It is for these same reasons that the ruling class, in effect, commissions an intermediate buffer social control stratum, classically composed of self-employed small land-owners or leaseholders, self-employed artisans, and members of the professions, who live in relative economic security, and in social subordination to the ruling class and normally in day-to-day contact with their social inferiors. This is a far less expensive bulwark of ruling-class power than mere military force.

Finally, at the bottom of the social pyramid are those devoid of productive wealth (except their ability to work), who constitute the majority of the population, and whose general condition of extreme dependency and insecurity is essential for the purposes of the ruling class.

That provides a rational basis for explaining the phenomenon of class oppression; but how can the social structure characteristic of racial oppression be explained in terms consistent with this theory of class rule? That simple question contains the alpha and omega of the struggle for a consistent theory of United States history. If white supremacism was brought to these shores as an inborn trait from England, the fundamental nature of the society established here, and the interpretation of its historical development, cannot be analyzed in terms of class differences.

How can racial oppression,[4] with its implicit denial of the significance of social class distinctions, be explained in terms that conform to the simple class theory of bourgeois social control as schematized in the paragraphs above? That is the essence of the issue I sought to address in this work. My study of the historical record of the colonial period in Ireland as well as in Anglo-America led to the understanding of the invention of the "white" race--not as the outcome of some inherent pre-disposition, a "need to know they were white," as Jordan puts it--but as a bourgeois social control formation, inclusive not merely of the upper and the intermediate social classes, but of the very "white" workers who were themselves the subjects of class exploitation.

The essence of the analysis can be stated thus: Where the particular pattern of the establishment and conduct of a colonial economy resulted in a critical attenuation and weakening of the presumptive intermediate social stratum; or, as in the Anglo-American continental plantation colonies, where the colonial economy created a mass of non-essential labor that could not be absorbed into the ranks of a normal middle stratum, the ruling class resorted to racial oppression. Under this form of social organization, capitalist exploitation of labor is intensified, while the potential social control problem that might arise from the combined resistance of the propertyless classes is addressed by: 1) recruiting a strictly defined portion of the laboring classes into the intermediate social control stratum by a conferring on them a system of anomalous privileges vis-a-vis all members of the excluded group; and, concomitantly, 2) by denying to all members of the excluded group, propertyless or otherwise, the normal social distinctions characteristic of class systems.[5]

Thus there was created an anomalous all-class social control formation, the Protestants as the "Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland,[6] and the "white race" in continental Anglo-America. This undeniable fact of life presents the greatest obstacle to "the ascendancy of the working classes"[7] in the United States, and to the most basic premise of the theory of it.

[Macrobius]

I do not intend to use Allen's summary as a strawman, but to adopt most of his historical explanation (which is plain enough, with or without the Marxist trappings), and to use it to cover the bulk of the territory while pointing out some missed points here and there. Starting with the interview, we arrive at the crucial section:


That revolution in relations of production entailed the abrogation of the male privilege for men thus employed; and the women bond-laborers were deprived of whatever benefit they might have had by the rule of "coverture," against direct exploitation, sexual and otherwise, by their owners.


Allen seems to treat English society as a homogeneous mass, albeit a stratified one. He misses the almost fractal texture of historical layers (Norman and Saxon), superimposed on the sub-ethnic differences, as East Anglia vs. Wessex. The former are treated adequately by few historians (legal historian John Zane is an exception), while the latter at least have Hackett-Fischer's Albion's Seed and Phillip's Cousin's Wars.

Coverture (the making of a woman's property in a marriage covert) is crucial in Common Law, but it is well to remember that Common Law is Norman Law imposed on English subjects. Norman ways of patriarchy do not necessarily coincide with Saxon ways. The interplay of Law and custom, over the years, makes for a much more complex landscape that the vignette given by the word coverture, held up to neo-matriarchal scorn.


... On behalf of generations of "fornicators" whose backs had been bloodied, their bondage extended, and their children made "bastards," these demands intended the restoration of the right of laborers to marry and to have a (yes, patriarchal) family life. Here, in the course of Bacon's Rebellion, was demonstrated the connection between the weakening of the male privilege and the breakdown of ruling-class social control.


We often forget that 'Race' and 'Marriage' have rather a lot to do with each other, and that one can hardly discuss one without the other. It is not a matter of the world spinning out of control and the patriarchal centre failing to hold however -- that is hardly likely in the 17th century. Slavery, in continental Civil Law (and thus in the sort of 'Common Law' that the Normans or rather Angevins brought with them from the continent, drawing on their expertise in melding Germanic tribal custom with Roman Civil Law) -- always descends through the matriarchal line. We will revisit this point when we see, later on, the surprising sense that the patriarchal line ought to be decisive -- this indeed is the sense (almost of outrage) our modern perspective, if it is just a bit conservative, demands, But it is important to understand, as Allen does not, that in this respect our modern, protestant, patriarchal sensibilities are on the vanguard, and it is the moderns, not the medievals, who think this way. To the medieval (and thus Catholic) mind, the slavery-follows-the-womb principle seemed just as natural.


What the "white race" did that was unique was to confer that privilege on an entire set of laboring-class men over the women of another set of laboring people, and underwrote the privilege by making it a capital offense for any African-American man to raise his had against any white man. This privilege was exercised not only with regard to African-American bond-laborers, but to free African-Americans, who lived under general writs of proscription of racial oppression.


What Allen is doing in this passage is anachronistic. It is proper to speak of 'the White Man' in this period, but the term 'the White Race' -- and all it implies about social theory -- cannot come until a century later than 1691. However the point is well-taken despite objections to his phrasing: in the late 17th century, English and Negroes in Virginia and Maryland had, substantially, the same rights -- that is, the White Man was just as degraded in servitude as the Black Man, and vice versa. One man's story of oppression is another's story of liberation and freedom. The development of the uniquely racial castes of America -- a social construction that has by no means been dismantled in the present day -- is a matter of differential development of the civil law, as regards two groups, whites and blacks, who were initially in the same position. (This is, of course, a very broad characterisation).

However, we can agree with Allen's central point, which I choose to summarise in my own way:

Although the Glorious Revolution is not usually regarded as a turning point in colonial history, or even of more than minor importance, since the northern colonies were in agreement with the Revolution and the southern ones resigned to it, nevertheless it is, on further consideration, the single most important event in American Colonial history, before the Revolution of 1776. First, the Revolution of 1776 was an attempt to restore the 'Old Whig' doctrine of the Revolution (this point is made by Colbourn in his Lamp of Experience). But second and more importantly, The Glorious Revolution as not only decisive for the constitution and societies of England and Ireland, but it is the inauguration of the racial apartheid regime in America.

The *reasons* why the construction of White and Black begin, precisely, at the time of the Glorious Revolution is a matter for serious investigation, and demands that we apply Historical Revisionism to our own history, in light of it.

[Julian Curtis Lee]

This idiot can't even write: "would be a consummation devoutly to be wished." As in "I wished that consummation!"

Let this adolescent nincompoop hiss, spit and retch all he likes. He is no threat to sanity.

[Empress Cheesatine]

Why would Marxists spend so much time attacking white people? Because we're the single largest obstacle in their path to world domination? If we didn't exist, then I ask why so much energy is spent trying to convince everyone of this. Marxism died with the Soviet Union. These people are stuck in the wayback machine.

[Macrobius]

Well, Allen writes in the approved Marxist style, beloved of European and American academics alike, which is to say briefly and with great clarity, giving an admirably precise summary of his thesis, and we will benefit from the short compass to which his summary (but not his book) has reduced the question. Necessarily, we will treat his discussion with even more brevity, if not clarity, as we are discussing this topic in blog format. Thus, we are reduced to being even briefer than the topic requires.

Allen's first point, and well-taken, is that Biological Race has nothing to do with socially constructed race. Instead, par. 3:


"However one may choose to define the term 'racial'-- it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one group of human beings by another."


At par. 14, he will amplify this:


The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group.


That is, by racism he means class stratification, rigidly enforced, which is to say a caste. It is on this basis -- the social construction of race -- that he projects 'race' back in time, before the word is even used. Race and class oppression, to the Marxist, are one and the same. Anglo-Norman treatment of Irishmen is 'racial oppression'. Nobles oppressing serfs is 'racial oppression'. Indeed, any oppression is, at its root, racial. That is to say, as an American, who is thus himself racist, he cannot conceive of a world, even a Marxist world with its classes and its proletariat, as a world *without* 'race'.

We do not need to follow him through the ins and outs of deconstructing race as a 'social construct' -- for there is little need of such exercise. First, we agree with the conclusion (race is a social construct, so much so that Marxists and Liberals alike use it reflexively, in American society) -- but also because he says


When, therefore, a group of human beings from "multiracial" (the anthropologists' term) Europe goes to North American or South Africa, and there, by constitutional fiat, incorporates itself as the "white race," that is no part of genetic evolution. It is, rather, a political act: the invention of "the white race." Thus it lies within the proper sphere of social scientists, and is an appropriate objective for alteration by social activists.


To which the obvious rejoinder is, that when a group of academics from "academia" (for that is what they call their homeland) shows up in a conversation and there, by methodological fiat, posits a sphere called 'social', and persons called 'social activists', and 'scientists' who are 'social scientists' -- he has already located his relativised society as that of Positivism and Sociology, which is to say in the Prussian academic context of the early 19th century. In this context, all oppression is indeed, by a social construction common in academia and 'academic' societies derivative from it, racial oppression, and while the 'academic' may be a good German and a better Marxist, though probably an indifferent Negro, he is nevertheless showing his prejudices, and the narrow, nay provincial, perspective, of his social and class blinders.

We may thus pass to par. 15


A comparative study of Anglo-Norman rule and"Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland, and "white supremacy" in continental Anglo-America (in both its colonial and regenerate United States forms) demonstrates that racial oppression is not dependent upon differences of "phenotype," i. e., of physical appearance of the oppressor and the oppressed.


and give him high marks for understanding (but not at all explaining) the importance of the Glorious Revolution -- and the passage of the Protestant Ascendancy, for which the term 'Tory' was invented,[**] to the American South, and on to Upper Canada.

[**] The original meaning of the term is a brigand, in Ireland. It was used to indicate a supporter of King James II, whether Protestant or Catholic (there would have been no overt Catholic Tories in Parliament of course, until after Catholic Emancipation, if then).

The essential point is this: 'racism' (that is, legal impediments based on something approximating phenotype, such as the Virginian endogamous colour line) have arisen historically not when Blacks and Whites or Race X and Whites are thrust in proximity, but when two disparate groups of Whites have been thrust in proximity with a common enemy. That is, racism arises when normal White-White oppression switches to White-White unity in the face of a common enemy who 'looks different'. This is not at all the same as xenophobia, nor is it a simple case of familiarity (with inferior races) breeding contempt. It is a case of White Unity requiring, mutual, contempt of a common enemy.

We will fast-forward through his (albeit interesting) accounts of irrelevant oppression through the ages. A few highlights:

Adam Smith, speaking for Scottish Liberals everywhere about the primitive savage -- Adam Smith in 1759 touched the essence of the matter of racial oppression. "Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind," he wrote, "than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of Europe." A century later the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional principle that any "white" man, however degraded, was the social superior of any African-American, however cultured and independent in means.

It took that long for the Supreme Court to recognise a social construct that started in Virginia in 1691? That's a rather long time to take to admit the obvious fact, alleged to be in the interests of the ruling class, who are not known for their shyness in in-your-face-oppressor-is-my-middle-name domination!


In 1867, the newly freed African-Americans bespoke the tragic indignation of generations yet to come: "The virtuous aspirations of our children must be continually checked by the knowledge that no matter how upright their conduct, they will be looked upon as less worthy of respect than the lowest wretch on earth who wears a white skin."


Well, it must have been one of those Marxist style Liberations, since they jumped from the frying pan of slavery into the fire of White Racialism.

I have a simpler explanation for the plight of Southern African-Americans in 1867. They were no longer Slaves. For the first time, they were Black. Lucky them. Lucky us.

His discussion of Anglo-Irish relations is instructive, for those who do not know that sort of thing, or are unfamiliar with the history.

But back to the main action, in the 18th century:


In 1792, Edmund Burke pointed out the peculiar nature of the system of Protestant Ascendancy in terms that are equally applicable to white supremacy. Burke compared various forms of the normal principles of social hierarchy characteristic of class societies, as exampled by the Venetian oligarchy, on the one hand, and the British constitutional combination of aristocracy and democracy on the other. In the former, the members of the subject population are excluded from all participation in "the State."


What Allen doesn't say (perhaps he assumes the reader knows), is that the Venetian constitution was the ideal of the Whigs in their 1688-9 Glorious Revolution. William said, famously, 'I will not be a doge' -- alluding to the intent to tweak the unwritten English constitution in the direction of Venice. Burke, of course, was a Rockingham Whig and a member of the Protestant Ascendancy (and perhaps a crypto-Catholic), and knew his party line well.

Allen's summary comparison of the Black-White colour line as it evolved in Virginia, and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, once Tory, but in the 18th century increasingly moderating towards Whiggism, under the influence of the Whig Oligarchy of the Hanoverians *before* the neo-Tory turn, post 1745!, of George III--


The essential elements that gave to Protestant Ascendancy after 1689 in Ireland and white supremacy in continental Anglo-America the character of racial oppression were those that first destroyed the original forms of social identity among the subject population, and then excluded the members of that population from admittance into the forms of social identity normal to the colonizing power. The codifications of this basic organizing principle in the Penal Laws of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and the slave codes of white supremacy in continental Anglo-America present four common defining characteristics of those two regimes: 1) declassing legislation, directed at property-holding members of the oppressed group; 2) the deprivation of civil rights; 3) the illegalization of literacy; and 4) displacement of family rights and authorities.


We must bear in mind, of course, that by the time of Burke and the Jacobin scare (England, a Republic? Like Venice? Never!), the '45 was 50 years in the past -- indeed, the 'Tories' in the strict sense, were a political deadletter from 1750 on (that's 1763 to us Americans). 1763 to 1776 is the period known, in South Carolina history, as the 'Tory Ascendancy'. The term is apt for all the Southern colonies, actually.

Now par.34 is the meat of his argument:


"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there."


(of course, one might ask how there could be White Racists, without Whites, but never mind).

He means, of course, that 'White Race' developed, as a Racialist consciousness, after Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831. This was the traumatic event, parallel to the Glorious Revolution (which triggered the 1691 legislation in Virginia), that led to Racialism in the Ohio River Valley.

In par. 44ff., we arrive at the first substantive discussion by our Marxist aurhtor, of 'Christian' (we have jumped back in time before Ireland intruded itself, so distinctly, on American politics).

The heart of the point:


Under English common law Christians could not be enslaved by Christians; presumably, Scots and Dutchmen were Christians; but Africans were not.


(So it wasn't race after all -- it was religion. In fact, before the late 18th century, and specifically before the Scottish Enlightenment reached these shores, Relgion is what mattered and 'Race', whatever its practical and biological aspects, was not the heart of the legal and the political. That distinction, and the millions of related deaths, was left to the enlightened 19th and 20th centuries, the Age of Race.)

In any event I will leave off here for now -- for we are on the threshold of the most interesting question, the status of Irish bondsmen (as Catholics of servile status). It is surprising that the 'Protestant Ascendancy' would treat Catholics as Christians and remit lifelong servitude imposed on Blacks. The get lumped, in all the standard treatments, with 'indentured servants', who merit no abolitionist sympathy. Were there, in fact, White Slaves? The question is not without its interest.

[elbwgreez]

Marx thought niggers were sub-ape beasts and supported the South (at least White workers) during the Civil War. How could something that sounds so bad feel so right?

[Macrobius]

Marx thought niggers were sub-ape beasts and supported the South (at least White workers) during the Civil War. How could something that sounds so bad feel so right?

Marx and Engels' view is, I suppose, given here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/11/07.htm
['The Civil War in the United States']

'If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.' (Historical Original Sin? No religion in that thar Marx guy!)

And:


"The South," however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.


Reviewed:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/1938/02/01.htm

There is little one can say of the view of the War, except that Marx appears to be enjoying it.

Marx notes that Germans are on one side and Slaveholders on another, in Texas:


From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up Texas, where the German population plays an important part, into even two states without giving the party of free labour the upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the best proof of the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in Texas itself.


Interesting observation on Lousiana:


Between 1856 to 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders' party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.


(Louisiana had a three tiered 'race' scheme, more like South Carolina, Florida, and the Caribbean, than in other parts of the South)

His summary judgment on the whole affair:


One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the "South" and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.

[Macrobius]

In their joint efforts to defeat the Confederacy, Engels favoured the Sherman strategy....


Marx and Engels followed the military aspects of the conflict with the closest attention. “The General” in particular was absorbed by the tactics and strategy of the contending forces. He was justly impatient with the Fabian policies of McClellan and his “anaconda plan” for surrounding, constricting, and crushing the South, advocating instead a bold and sharp stroke launched at the middle of the South. He thus anticipated in 1862 Sherman’s decisive march through Georgia two years later. Exasperated by the manifold blunders and half-heartedness of the Union generals as well as the reluctance of the Republican bourgeoisie to use revolutionary methods in waging the war, he at one time despaired of a Northern victory. But Marx, with his eye upon the immensely superior latent powers of the North and the inherent weaknesses of the South, chided him for being “swayed a little too much by the military aspect of things”.


Whereas Marx found it more practical to mobilise the London mob to prevent the Government from forming an alliance with the South:


Marx kept close surveillance over the efforts to embroil England in a war against the Union and exposed the factors that kept the Palmerston government in check: the increasing dependence of England on American foodstuffs, the superior preparedness of the United States for war, the rivalry between the Whigs and Tories in the coalition cabinet and, last but not least, the fear of the people. Marx played a leading role in frustrating the plans of the war-hawks by mobilizing the English workers in huge public meetings of protest against the Southern sympathizers among the English upper crust.


(both quotes from Novack's 1938 article, cited above)

But I suppose it would be cruel to retitle this thread 'How Karl Marx Invented Blacks'

[Macrobius]

7. Nevertheless, the thesis of "race as a social construct," as it now stands, despite its value in objectifying "whiteness," is an insufficient basis for refutation of white-supremacist apologetics. For, what is to be the reply to the socio-biologist and historian Carl N. Degler who simply says that, "...blacks will be discriminated against whenever nonblacks have the power and incentive to do so...[because] it is human to have prejudice against those who are different."?7 Or, what if the socio-biologists say, "Fine, we can agree that racial ideology is a social construct, but what is your 'social construct' but an expression of genetic determinants--another version of Winthrop Jordan's 'unthinking decision'"?8


This is useful. Much ink has been spilt as if the issue of racialism or the tenets of White Supremacy were decided on the basis of whether Race is biological or a social construct or nothing at all real. The true argument must lie elsewhere.

Of course, the term 'social construct' is itself a social construct and a Marxian one at that, or at least a Sociological one, which is to say impossible of articulation until immediately before the War of Secession -- perhaps, even, in an indirect way, the cause of it. Social constructs can be bloody real. To say that we live in a 'society' is already to take onboard some political and philosophical baggage.

The old use of 'society' is, like the Latin term societas, an alliance, putatively of closely related tribes, or one's kin. Within a polity, it can be an alliance of related persons, an intermarried Oligarchy of nobles, say. Social contract theory from the 17th century on is full of terms like 'the society of men united against the common enemy'. It is easy to read back an anachronistic notion of what 'society' is into this theory of Covenanted Kin-groups.

The Minutemen, for example, are clearly a society of men who have banded together to fight a common enemy (illegal invaders). However, our modern use of 'society' is different from this older use. If I were to say 'illegal aliens are not part of society' I would surely receive, from most English speakers, a reply along the lines of -- 'even though they are not citizens (part of the polity) they are nevertheless part of society, and their presence has a direct social impact.' Even those opposed to immigration, still less illegal immigration, agree on the 'costs to social welfare' and acknowledge economic and social impacts -- leaving aside the essential political question, which revolves around citizenship, amity and enmity.

The new social construct of the social is impossible, theoretically, however much it might have been intuited in the bourgeois day-to-day experience that was abstracted to form the philosophy, before Hume's analysis. Hume in particular makes the mechanism of social relationship automatic, rather than consciously willed, so that if Race enters into the picture, it must be at the level of the passions, of hatred and threats, rather than 'self-identity'. Hume's self is a passionate automaton, a 'consumer' in fact, whose desires are translated into actions without the mediation of 'Will'. I desire a candy bar, find a dollar in my pocket and one I can sense in front of me, and I automatically purchase it and eat it. I may articulate to myself 'I desire a candy bar' -- but this articulation is rather like a baboon's scream of pleasure or pain. It is simply a sign, or token, accompanying the event of my automated economic transaction, the sum total of which, so far as they force humans into relationships (whether the economic relationships of the marketplace or the bedroom), constitute society. The mechanical character of the relationships is what makes the science of Economics possible -- and of Sociology. The subject of these sciences requires, of course, the scientific view, posited by Hume, Smith, and their common teacher Hutcheson, that renders the science a science.

Hume took the Moral Epistemology of Frances Hutcheson (who posited a moral sentiment as a sensitive faculty capable of informing us of the rightness and wrongness of our moral choices) and tied it to a profoundly anti-Aristotelian view of the ends of political life -- in fact, he replaced the coordinated function of all members of the polity, for the highest good of the Republic, with economic trade relations directed towards the automatic and self-correcting satisfaction of consumer desires.

This view of the Social could have only evolved in Scotland, after the 1707 loss of Sovereignty. At that point, 'The Political' is precisely what was denied to the Scots, and 'The Social' what remained. The natural response was to refashion Social Contract theory -- previously part of politics -- into a theory that had no politics, but only explained the remaining political functions permitted to Scotland (and that period included two rebellions, the most serious in 1715, and the most catastrophic in 1745). Society, then, is the ghost of a departed Polity.

One consequence of Hume's substitution of his mechanistic theory of the passions (and the implied purpose for the state) for the inherited Aquinas-Aristotle theory, is that Property is made absolute. Aquinas had argued that the good of the people required, under conditions of extreme necessity, a return to 'primitive communism' -- if your family is going to starve, you may steal, provided you have no alternative to their deaths, are prepared to make restitution later, take no more than necessary [to each his needs], etc. In this respect, Marx was simply re-injecting a base element, common to Protestant [and Catholic] Aristotelianism generally, back into the line of economic thought that emerged from the Scottish school.

In any event, to say that Race is a 'social construct' does no more than clarify its relationship with its native habitat, Classical Liberalism, or Capitalism. The reduction of Race to an Economic relationship by no means vitiates the connection to 'Biology'. In fact, it is precisely the biology that results in the 'oppression' occurring in the first place, automatically and without human will to intervene.

If one disagrees with this picture -- Racism cannot be eradicated because it is predicated ineluctably on the Economic, unless perchance Marx was right about human evolution making a classless 'society' (non-oppressive economic system) inevitable -- and we are still waiting on that one -- then there is little choice except to reject Hume's construction of the social, and with it all 'social constructs' as misguided analysis.

A rejection of modern economic society (and the depoliticised domain of Liberalism, i.e., Capitalism, on which it is founded), and a return to a more traditional conception of the polity, is a natural conclusion.

Allen is correct about one thing: Race (Black and White) is part and parcel of Capitalism and Liberalism. Only a radical critique of the latter can free us from Racialism, which is as ingrained in American culture as Capitalism, Liberalism of either the Left or the Right, and Free Trade -- indeed, it is synonymous with the social construction of 'society' itself, as an economic sphere independent of, or containing, the Political.

Liberalism, in so far as it forces the Political outside it, inevitably seeks to project upon itself a sort of imaginary Occupation Government, which supplies the missing political function. It imagines that its economic mechanisms generate a sort of Paternal Deity who is sovereign over the marketplace -- an England and English Parliament for poor oppressed, but Economic, Scotland.

This sado-masochistic tendency of Liberal 'society' to will its own domination is, and construct fantasies about being dominated is, in fact, incurable, having been bred in from its very genesis. It is the nature of Capitalism to be an-archic -- the passions unleashed know no law -- and the paranoia of having 'killed our father, the King' in fact drives Liberal economic society, not only as a figure of speech but in stark, murderous fact, insane.

Thus, the high cost of ending slavery and agriculture, and replacing it by what we are pleased to call 'a modern industrial society, based on technology'. Which is itself a social construct, like Race.


8. The logic of "race as a social construct" must be tightened and the focus sharpened. Just as it is unhelpful, to say the least, to euphemize racial slavery in continental Anglo-America as "the Peculiar Institution," instead of identifying the "white race," itself, as the truly peculiar institution governing the life of the country after emancipation as it did in slavery times; just as it is not "race" in general, that must be understood, but the "white race," in particular; so the "white race" must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.


It is indeed a cool admission that there is nothing peculiar about the institution of Slavery. Indeed, the universality of the institution previous to the somewhat different arrangements of Industrial Society (i.e., the conversion of slaves into proles) is indisputable. The particular status of blacks vis-a-vis whites was certainly one of inferiority of terms, as to servitude -- in the end Blacks were slaves for life, whereas whites were typically emancipated at the end of their indenture. However, this is jealously of white escape from servitude. The Blacks were not worse treated than the White, Catholic slaves (serfs) of occupied Ireland, who were not I suppose indentured unless they managed to migrate to America.

It is important to note, however, that Marxist polemic has now reached the point, in academia, that it can easily be 'turned on its head' into an apologetic for the South. The claim of Marx to moral superiority in the matter of Racism is disingenuous, as I have shown above that he agitated for a victory on behalf of the Racialist, Capitalist, Liberal Bourgeois North, on the grounds that economic progress -- towards Capitalism -- is necessary to achieve the Communist Utopia. To achieve this end, he support the expansion of Lincolnian racialism, with its preference for Segregation or expulsion, and its social construction of biological and ethnic Negroes into The Black Race (and the transformation of the Anglo-German Yankee alliance into the White Race, which was indeed to be Supreme).

Marx's promotion, then of a Capitalist and Racialist occupation of the South should be remembered, if Southerners are ever tempted to look towards Marxism as anything but a calculated hypocrisy. After all, what would we say of an Orthodox Jew who promoted, as a matter of convenience, Palestinian terror bombings, in order to promote an eventual Theocracy in Israel more to his liking? Yet, Marx's policy in regard to the South is exactly this.

In light of that, Southerners have Marx, among others, to thank for the imposition of the depoliticised, neutralised economic domain of Capitalism and Liberalism, as well as its concomitant social construct, The Black Race, on the South. Before Reconstruction, there were no Blacks in the South, only African Americans. It is the social construct of the Black Race, implicit in northern theories of Apartheid and Segregation, that made Southerners Whites and their former household field-hands and personal servants into Blacks.

Thus, we can indeed thank Marx for Capitalism and the creation of the Black Race, Segregation, and White Supremacy. That Marxists should wish to unmake their own monster is understandable, but maybe we have had enough of their 'social' tampering, then?

[Empress Cheesatine]

What is interesting about leftists is how they bash the way that European-derived peoples choose to identify themselves, while demanding that European-derived peoples call other groups by their chosen identities. The double-standard again rears its ugly head. Rhetoric on this topic is always a one-way street. Our culture (white) does not exist but theirs does so respect it and embrace multiCulturalism and diversity.

[Stanley]

When I saw the title of this thread I thought it was going to be about the Nation of Islam and the mad scientist Yacub.

[Empress Cheesatine]

Interesting that two of the loudest anti-white Marxist authors I know of are white themselves, both of the WWII generation. This clown is one, Jurgen Habermas the other. Behold, the power of brainwashing.

Allow me to offer my respects for the late Mr. Allen:

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c176/lagergeld/gravedance.gif

[Macrobius]

Cheesypie -- you will be delighted to know, then, that Mr Allen's book, which we are discussing, was quoted as an authority by Dr Shakti Butler, who wrote the indoctrination materials for the University of Deleware's 'Residential Life' brainwashing program:

http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/3d0208922083e5d59664be8371ab5f0f.pdf (PDF file)

Dr Shakti is


described on her website as “an African-American woman of biracial West Indian and Russian-Jewish heritage”


[Quoted from Derbyshire article, reference below]

However, he did neglect to inform the students that Mr Allen was a Marxist. Allen's thesis is taken, now, verbatim, showing up in the work of other academics without any signposting as to the nature of historical interpretation being pimped. However, I suppose White students, who have the intellectual capacity and always check secondary sources against primary and never take their word on mere authority, will not be harmed by this.

I do not know, however, whether Dr Shakti is a Marxist on her West Indian side or on her Russian-Jewish side.

Story and links at this VDARE column by John Derbyshire:

http://vdare.com/derbyshire/071119_delaware.htm

[Empress Cheesatine]

Cheesypie -- you will be delighted to know, then, that Mr Allen's book, which we are discussing, was quoted as an authority by Dr Shakti Butler, who wrote the indoctrination materials for the University of Deleware's 'Residential Life' brainwashing program:


Butler obviously hates whites, so why does this Afrokike still hold a job? Because she's an Afrokike!

Not really surprising on either count. That whole anti-white narrative had Marxism written all over it. Nice to know its source is a brainwashed, white self-loather from the WWII generation. I imagine if we saw a biography of this man, he'd go on about how touched he was by the poisecution of the Jews in the post-war newsreels. That was certainly the case with Habermas.

[Vindex]

People who take this shit serious are sheepish and are the new-xtain.



Cheesypie -- you will be delighted to know, then, that Mr Allen's book, which we are discussing, was quoted as an authority by Dr Shakti Butler, who wrote the indoctrination materials for the University of Deleware's 'Residential Life' brainwashing program:

http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/3d0208922083e5d59664be8371ab5f0f.pdf (PDF file)

Dr Shakti is



[Quoted from Derbyshire article, reference below]

However, he did neglect to inform the students that Mr Allen was a Marxist. Allen's thesis is taken, now, verbatim, showing up in the work of other academics without any signposting as to the nature of historical interpretation being pimped. However, I suppose White students, who have the intellectual capacity and always check secondary sources against primary and never take their word on mere authority, will not be harmed by this.

I do not know, however, whether Dr Shakti is a Marxist on her West Indian side or on her Russian-Jewish side.

Story and links at this VDARE column by John Derbyshire:

http://vdare.com/derbyshire/071119_delaware.htm

[Macrobius]

People who take this shit serious are sheepish and are the new-xtain.


Apparently, it was required and implemented coercively, if you read the account by F.I.R.E. Unconscionable for a publicly funded school. Parents and students paid for the privilege of being or having their children brainwashed, though many were surprised by the program and reacted to it, um, badly. Though all were treated by sheep, but not all were sheepish in response.

[Burrhus]

This idiot can't even write: "would be a consummation devoutly to be wished." As in "I wished that consummation!"

Let this adolescent nincompoop hiss, spit and retch all he likes. He is no threat to sanity.

"‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die; to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there is the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil" -- W. Shakespeare

Literary allusions are often used to evoke unarticulated metaphors. Here the author seems to be wishing for the death of the white race.

"adolescent nincompoop"? You are too gentle, Mentious. Race-traitor and menace seem more apt.

[Macrobius]

Race-traitor and menace seem more apt.

Evidence that Allen is White, please?

ADDED:

Hunh. Whaddaya know. I figured they let him off easy because he was black.

http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/Perry.html

[Macrobius]

Using books.google.com, it is possible to search masses of past literature for phrasing with searches such as:


white race anglo-saxon date:1830-1850


for various date ranges, with or without the additional term protestant or clarifying quotes.

Here is what such a search for 'when the white race was first noticed' :) turns up.

Findings:

-- before 1800, such a search only brings up one reference in Ireland

-- early uses of the term 'race' use it in the sense of descendants of a single hero-ancestor. It is used interchangeably with ethnicity and nationality, both conceived as having a hypothetical eponymous ancestor, even when that cannot be supplied. Thus, 'the Spanish race', 'the race of Brutus'.

-- Before the 1830s, you will get several references to Sharon Turner, in reference to Celtic mythology (a white race of giants)

-- there are maybe 10 references before 1840. Bancroft (1837) in his history book is a
very interesting 'early adopter':


Virginia was humane towards men of the white race; was severe towards the negro.


Who is George Bancroft, Historian besides Secretary of the Navy and founder of the U.S. Naval academy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bancroft


His family had been in Massachusetts Bay since 1632, and his father, Aaron Bancroft, was distinguished as a revolutionary soldier, a leading Unitarian clergyman[1] and author of a popular life of George Washington. Bancroft was born in Worcester, and began his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and entered Harvard College at thirteen years of age. Abroad, he studied at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin. At Göttingen he studied Plato with Arnold Heeren, New Testament Greek with Albert Eichhorn and natural science with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.


-- Suddenly, from 1843 on, you start to get a few references each year, among medical persons and ethnologists

-- The term 'Anglo-Saxon race' is much more common than 'white race' early on, and there seems to be an initial supposition that Anglo-Saxons and no others are 'white'. ('the Teuton race' will be added later, as an exception to this). This is found side-by-side in works using the old White man/Black man/Red man paradigm and the 'human race' terminology. In any event, we can conclude that Romantic ruminations over the Anglo-Saxons and Gothicism are the first vector of the term.

-- after 1847-1849, the contrast 'white race' and 'Anglo-Saxon race' on the one side, and dark Mexicans on the other, is an essential feature of Mexican War era propaganda. Foreigners comment on the regimentation and militarism of American society, esp. the profusion of military titles. This newly-militarised society will proceed directly to Bloody Kansas and the War Between the States. In the era of Manifest Destiny, 'the white race' is essentially a synonym used to express Anglo-Saxon (and American) exceptionalism.

-- in the 1850s, the rhetoric of slavery and abolition take up the White vs. Dark meme and expand on it in terms of White vs. Negro. From 1847 on, the term 'white race' can be found in more conservative writers, including Southerners engaged in the national debate on Slavery. Whigs and followers of Henry Clay (Lincoln's model) are the most likely to say 'White race' rather than 'the Anglo-Saxon race'.

-- Ecclesiastical sources begin to engage Agassiz (later, Darwin and Huxley) in from the late 1850s

Of course, from the post-Reconstruction era on, the 'White Race' is a fixture in American political discourse, and to the extent Southerners are re-integrated into national political life, they use this mode of speech. This is found in writers known as Southern apologists (such as Nelson writing in 1904) who did use this locution in their earlier works.

None of this denies the pre-existence of the White/Black 'Colour Line' before the Mexican war, only that the spread of the 'White Race' meme down the Ohio River and Mississippi valley coincided with the period in which 'Anglo-Saxon race' came into contact with Mexico.

In the words of Unitarian minister William Channing (comparing Manifest Destiny to Napoleon's fate):


I am aware that these remarks are met by vicious reasoning, which discredits a
people among whom it finds favor. It is sometimes said, that nations are
swayed by laws, as unfailing as those which govern matter; that they have their
destinies; that their character and position carry them forward irresistably to
their goal; that the stationary Turk must sink under the progressive
civilization of Russia, as inevitably as the crumbling ediface falls to the
earth; that, by a like necessity, the Indians have melted before the white man,
and the mixed, degraded race of Mexico must melt before the Anglo-Saxon. Away
with this vile sophistry! There is no necessity for crime. There is no Fate
to justify rapacious nations, any more than to justify gamblers and robbers in
plunder. We boast of the progress of society and this progress consists in the
substitution of reason and moral principle for the sway of brute force.
[N.B. 'progress' in society was a novel idea in the late 1840s -ed.] It is
true, that more civilized must always exert a great power over the less
civilized communities in their neighbourhood. But i may and should be a power
to enlighten and improve, not to crush and destroy. So did the late conqueror
of Europe; and destiny consigned him to a lonely rock in the ocean, the prey
of an ambition which destroyed no peace but his own.


He is arguing against the annexation of Texas, however his characterisation of the other side must have some echoes of arguments actually made. The question is, if we have here the 'Liberal' Unitarian (and one presumes WASP) voice, as in abolition, who among the Anglo-Saxon Race is beating the drums of Manifest Destiny and War?

In any event, 2008 may offer a comparison between a militarised society, rent over the justice of a foreign war against the darkies and the America of 1844 or 1848. Let us hope we do not follow a similar path in a decade, and use our newly acquired militarism against ourselves, in a repeat of the bloodiest war this hemisphere has ever known.

[calvin]

"Nevertheless, the thesis of "race as a social construct," as it now stands, despite its value in objectifying "whiteness," is an insufficient basis for refutation of white-supremacist apologetics"

Everything in a society is to a greater or lesser extent a social construct. Race is, specifically, a method of categorizing human beings. The fact that "racism" persist indicates that for a significant percentage of the population "race" is a USEFUL socially constructed system of classification. The fact that anti-racism is such an all pervasive social construct, indicates that for a significant percentage of the population a belief in the validity of racial categorization is perceived to be damaging to their interests.

Racism is a socially constructed concept that is compatible with the self-interests of a number of groups in our society. For Blacks it is a convenient excuse for their below average socio-economic status and above average criminality. For Muslims it is a shield against accusations of homo-phobia, misogyny and religious supremacy. For Jews it dilutes the power of their major ethnic rival group by dividing European societies into tense ethnic jigsaws. For sate functionaries in the public sector any social initiative that creates the need for increased administration, regulation and policing improves employment security and expands job opportunities. For business owners a constant flow of immigration arrests wages. Now we come to the dregs, for a large number of ex-students armed with useless degrees, being racially aware is a psychological status symbol that lets him or her feel superior to the uneducated person helping them to stack shelves for minimum wages. For low IQ members of the working-classes anti-racism is simply a fashion.

I find race to be a meaningful way to categorize human beings, (i.e, I am a racist) because I have lived on the margins of the White underclass in a mainly White city, and I have lived close to Black and Asian underclasses in far more multicultural cities. Mixing with the White underclass was far less dangerous than mixing with the Black and Asian underclasses, therefore, it is not in my best interest to be anti-racist, and that doesn't come with an apology.

[Hakluyt]

I find race to be a meaningful way to categorize human beings, (i.e, I am a racist) because I have lived on the margins of the White underclass in a mainly White city, and I have lived close to Black and Asian underclasses in far more multicultural cities. Mixing with the White underclass was far less dangerous than mixing with the Black and Asian underclasses, therefore, it is not in my best interest to be anti-racist, and that doesn't come with an apology.
Nothing wrong with that, so long as you acknowledge the pedestrian nature of this categorisation. Race may be relevant when it comes to a few day-to-day things like crime, but keep it out of political theory.

[calvin]

Yeah! It would be really stupid to let my real life experience inform my political opinions when I could be reading the Guardian.

[Hakluyt]

The Guardian is pretty much at your level of discourse (pro or con). And naturally they are just as race-focused.

[calvin]

That brilliant refutation of my previous point says quite a lot about your level of discourse.

[Hakluyt]

You didn't make any new points. You were saying the same thing as you were in your first post. You repeated yourself, but didn't explain why your personal experience with crime should be relevant to political theory. My point restated: it's irrelevant, because the categories you are trying to vindicate only apply to pedestrian things like underclass life.

[calvin]

"Pedestrian" being that which lies outwith your grandiose conception of real life as defined by political theory?

[Macrobius]

Returning to our topic (the summary of Allen's book, the standard school text on Racism in general and Whites in particular -- a Marxist-inspired work quoted with authority in our academies), which summary has now emerged from its missing status and is here:

http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html

... we were at paragraph 14/15 I believe


14. The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group.

15. A comparative study of Anglo-Norman rule and "Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland, and "white supremacy" in continental Anglo-America (in both its colonial and regenerate United States forms) demonstrates that racial oppression is not dependent upon differences of "phenotype," i. e., of physical appearance of the oppressor and the oppressed.


The italics are the author's and thus indicate the essence of his definition. As usual in this bolding is my emphasis added.

Thus, to our author, Racism is a species of the genus Oppression -- in the Marxist sense, which includes patriarchalism, that is the family. In fact, Racism is a socially constructed excuse for what is *actually* (our author says) a form of sexual oppression, namely the availability of the women of the underclass to the White male hierarchy, but the absence of reciprocity as to the converse availability of White women to Blacks. Racism, then, is a failure to miscegenate on equal terms, a restriction of sexual availability on the part of some men primarily against other men, of the under class, and of course against all women generally, as the family itself is oppressive. So much, then, for the frankness of the Marxists in *defining* what they mean by Race. Both they and we would discard the Liberal bourgeois notion that Race is a mere social construct. To the Marxist, that construct takes second place to the real issue, which is that the Marxists can't get any. Oppression means the absence of a suitable quantity of sexually available females, presumably to the Marxists, and promised to their followers as so much 'booty'.

His conclusion -- and well merited -- is that actual phenotype is not the issue. This can hardly be denied under the 'one drop rule' that is law in America today. 'Blackness' is indeed an invisible social token, in some instances, having no standing even in genetics, much less phenotype. In fact, as our author is well aware, both Black ancestry and physically black features were not sufficient to make a 'White' into a 'Black' in the ante bellum South. Under the system of blood fractions, a man who was 1/8th Black or 1/16th Black (depending on the state), was White in the only sense our author acknowledges, namely he was allowed to marry a White woman without civil disability, and enter fully into the White Male patriarchy that is the special aim of Marxist ire.

We will skip over the next few paragraphs, about African Americans and Cherokees, and move to what our author has to say about the Irish -- a topic of more interest to this forum I am sure.

Collectively, he is moving towards this conclusion:


26. Given the common constitutional principles of the three cases--the Irish, the American Indian, and the African-American--the abundant parallels they present are more than suggestive; they constitute a compelling argument for the sociogenic theory of racial oppression.


And, in anticipation of this conclusion, here is the section on the Irish, quoted in full:


The Irish

21. From early in the thirteenth century, until their power entered a two-and-a-half-century eclipse in 1315,21 the Anglo-Norman English dealt with the contradictions between English law and Irish tribal Brehon law by refusing to recognize Celtic law, and at the same time denying the Irish admittance to the writs and rights of English law.22

22. In 1277, high Irish churchmen, having secured support among powerful tribal chieftains, submitted a petition to English King Edward I, offering to pay him 8,000 marks in gold over a five-year period for the general enfranchisement of free Irishmen under English law. The king was not himself unwilling to make this grant of English law. But he thought he ought to get more money for it, and so the Irish three years later raised the offer to 10,000 marks.23

23. What was being asked was not the revolutionary reconstitution of society, but merely the abandonment of "racial" distinction among freemen ruled by English law in Ireland. In the end the king left the decision to the Anglo-Norman magnates of Ireland, and they declined to give their assent. Referring to a replay of this issue which occurred some fifty years later, Sir John Davies concluded that, "The great [English] lordes of Ireland had informed the king that the Irishry might not be naturalized, without damage and prejudice either to themselves, or to the Crowne."24

24. Irish resentment and anger found full voice in the wake of the Scots invasion made in 1315 at the invitation of some Irish tribes. In 1317, Irish chieftains, led by Donal O'Neill, king of Tyrone, joined in a Remonstrance to John XXII, Pope to both English and Irish. In that manifesto the Irish charged that the kings of England and the Anglo-Norman "middle nation" had practiced genocide against the Irish, "enacting for the extermination of our race most pernicious laws."25 It presented a four-count indictment: 1) Any Englishman could bring an Irishman into court on complaint or charge, but "every Irishman, except prelates, is refused all recourse to the law by the very fact [of being Irish ]"; 2) "When...some Englishman kills an Irishman...no punishment or correction is inflicted;" 3) Irish widows of English men were denied their proper portion of inheritance; and, 4) Irish men were denied the right to bequeath property.

25. Whatever exactly the remonstrants meant by their word "race," their grievances, like those of the African-Americans and the American Indians we have cited, bore the hallmark of racial oppression. From the Petition of 1277 to the Remonstrance of 1317, it was specifically the legal status of the free Irish men, rather than the unfree, which was at issue.

The really peculiar feature about the situation in Ireland is that the free Irishman who had not been admitted to English law was, as far as the royal courts were concerned, in much the same position as the betagh [the Irish laborer bound to the land].26


All this leads (without much comment by our 'White' author, except for how it impacts the poor Blacks) to the stunning revelation that some White women were slaves in the ante bellum South, an institution transported from medieval Ireland. That is, the beginning of the oppression of Blacks was actually a matter for celebration in the White community -- a partial liberation of the slaves. Only someone with a chip on their shoulder the size of Macolm X's would begrudge fellow slaves their freedom. But of course the Marxists do not have any interest at heart but the sexual availability of women 'equally' to all (non-White men). So this topic gets passed over without the comment it deserves:


27. If, from the beginning of the eighteenth century in Anglo-America, the term "negro" meant slave, except when explicitly modified by the word "free,"28 so, under English (Anglo-Norman) thirteenth-century law, the term "hibernicus," Latin for "Irishman," was the legal term for "unfree." 29 If under Anglo-American slavery , "the rape of a female slave was not a crime, but a mere trespass on the master's property,"30 so, in 1278, two Anglo-Normans, brought into court and charged with raping Margaret O'Rorke were found not guilty because "the said Margaret is an Irishwoman."31 If a law enacted in Virginia in 1723, provided that, "manslaughter of a slave is not punishable,"32 so under Anglo-Norman law it sufficed for acquittal to show that the victim in a slaying was Irish.33 Anglo-Norman priests granted absolution on the grounds that it was "no more sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any other brute."34 If African-Americans were obliged to guard closely any document they might have attesting their freedom, so, in Ireland at the beginning of the fourteenth century, letters patent, attesting to a person's Englishness, were cherished by those who might fall under suspicion of trying to "pass."35 If the Georgia Supreme Court, ruled in 1851 that "the killing of a negro" was not a felony, but upheld an award of damages to the owner of an African-American bond-laborer murdered by another "white" man,36 so, in 1310 an English court in Ireland freed Robert Walsh, an Anglo-Norman charged with killing John Mac Gilmore, because the victim was "a mere Irishman and not of free blood," it being stipulated that "when the master of the said John shall ask damages for the slaying, he [Walsh] will be ready to answer him as the law may require."37 If in 1884 the United States Supreme Court, citing much precedent authority, including the Dred Scott decision, declared that Indians were legally like immigrants, and therefore not citizens except by process of individual naturalization38; so, for four centuries, until 1613, the Irish were regarded by English law as foreigners in their own land.39 If the testimony of even free African-Americans was disallowed as uncreditable;40 so, in Anglo-Norman Ireland, native Irish of the free classes were deprived of legal defense against English abuse because they were not "admitted to English law," and hence had no rights which an Englishman was bound to respect.


The objection, then, is to the Anglo-Norman (White) male patriarchy. This hated patriarchy, that is, the families of the likes of George Washington and Robert E. Lee, living in their ancestral style, inherited from the plantations of Ireland and Wessex, primarily, which is to say the squirearchy or gentry of Virginia, is hated tout court for oppression -- namely, the oppressiveness of holding other humans in bondage, and particularly for the asymmetry or inequality of sexual relations (alleged) to exist between planters in both Ireland and Virginia, with regards to the their bond women, whether 'White' Irish or Black, and the reciprocal denial of that sexual availability, and certainly availability of upper class women, to the lower orders held in subjection.

Thus, to the Marxist, Racism is not objectionable because it condones Race slavery, but because the male patriarchy, and in particular the inherited social forms of the Anglo-Norman males as found in Ireland or Virginia, are particularly oppressive -- along with all forms of family in any culture but the post-revolutionary proletarian one that supports both miscegenation and temporary free liaisons among consenting adults. That is, the object is the destruction of society and culture, and its replacement with a form that has never been tried in any society at all.

To wish otherwise is, clearly, to be a Racist.

[Columnist]

What is interesting about leftists is how they bash the way that European-derived peoples choose to identify themselves, while demanding that European-derived peoples call other groups by their chosen identities. The double-standard again rears its ugly head. Rhetoric on this topic is always a one-way street. Our culture (white) does not exist but theirs does so respect it and embrace multiCulturalism and diversity.
That is slave morality for you. Liberals accuse Conservatives of a double-standard; Abortion is wrong, but abortionists can be killed.

[elbwgreez]

That is slave morality for you. Liberals accuse Conservatives of a double-standard; Abortion is wrong, but abortionists can be killed.

I think biblical anti-abortionists are internally consistent with their logic. Abortionists kill people (babies/fetuses/living humans according to their definition) and murderers are to be destroyed according to the bible. Biblical law supersedes man's law.

It would be internally inconsistent for a liberal who rejects the death penalty to wish death upon anyone (at least performed by the state).

[Columnist]

I think secular anti-racists are internally consistent with their logic. Whites oppress people of color and racists are to be destroyed according to political correctness. Marxist law supersedes capitalist law.

Leftards are internally consistent too. It is in the view of outsiders that the double standard is apparent.