El Oso Rojo
24th June 2011, 23:27
White Nation Privilege and the Ability to be Arrested
October 23, 2010
by Enaemaehkiw Túpac Keshena
This will be short, but it is something that has been bothering me for a while now, and I have to get off of my chest.
I’ve been having conversations lately with several other Kitchener-Waterloo radicals and leftists over the last couple of weeks about privilege – specifically White nation privilege* – within the KW activist scene and how it informs, or rather fails to inform, the thought and practice of a number of more well known local characters.
In our scene, which is mostly defined by the university town nature of the city, many of these more well known local activists come from backgrounds that are marked by great material privilege. By this I mean they are mostly middle to upper class, white, men. There of course women and “people of colour”** but they do not share the limelight to anywhere near the same extent as the White leadership.
I also want to make it clear that I am not aiming this at all people who got arrested at the G8/G20, as many, perhaps even most, are people who struggle every day through oppression: indigenous people, people of colour and (im)migrants. I applaud those people and the bravery that it took for them to risk what they did and stand up against imperialism, settler colonialism and capitalism. This article/rant takes aim rather at a particular layer within the KW radical activist scene that took part in the G8/G20 events.
While material conditions root most privileged people’s political consciousness, these people can break from what is in their material interest in class suicide. Hence. the fact that people come to radical politics from positions of material privilege does not have to be a problem – so long as it is handled correctly.
I myself would be lying to you if I told you that my own upbringing was an entirely ghettoized one. Sure I am a Native person, with all the shit that comes with that and living in settler colonial White Canada, but my family was always able to scrape together enough funds to make sure that we had some nice things and so that my brother and I could attend a private high school and then university and college (even if it put them in ridiculous dept).
That immediately puts me on a much better footing than most Native people, considering for example that a Native women is three times more likely to go to prison than to graduate from university or college. All I can ever say is that my perspective is informed by the time I spent on my reservation, where I saw my relatives live desperately poor, racially and nationally marginalized existences, and that I was raised by a strong Native woman from a working class background who didn’t take shit from anyone.
I self-reflect and self-criticize about my the privilege I have relative to so many other indigenous people, including within my own extended family. Where problems arise in the KW activist scene is when certain people with material privileges – far greater than I because because they are White and petty bourgeois and bourgeois – do not engage in this practice, or, even worse, when they actively try to deny the privilege they have.
This is always best shown for me in a story I have been told by a couple radical comrades of an encounter between one my friends (himself White, but who is a sincere solidarity activist) and another local activist (of the highly privileged variety). The setting was a “know your rights” type of event.
The encounter took place when my friend approached one of the people putting on the event and queried why they did not have any apparent input from actually oppressed groups, meaning the people who really do have to deal with police violence and oppression on a regular basis. My comrade then pointed out the activist’s White nation privilege and how it was implicitly racist and colonizing to exclude colonially oppressed people from the event.
The response from the highly privileged activist was that he knew what it was like to be oppressed. Why you may ask? Because he is an anarchist (I am not fucking kidding).
This for me is exemplar of the fundamentally twisted perspectives of these White activists. Rather than say, “you know what? I didn’t even notice that,” and then proceed to engage in self-criticism and self-reflection over why this was the case, and how it can be righted, the person attempted to actively deny the privilege they are accorded by mainstream society.
They created a fantasy world where they exist as an oppressed person in order to counter the inevitability that someone would notice and point out that they are privileged in our society and that it clearly effects their views and actions.
Where this has come up more recently has been around the question of some activists in town being arrested in relation to supposed G8/G20 actions and their now being treated by much of the activist media as political prisoners. This of course could just as easily become a discussion on organizational practice and the immediate reason as to WHY these people were arrested, but that is something for another time, and so I will keep this within the context of our discussion about privilege.
Essentially what it comes down to in the end is this: those people who were arrested and are now being called political prisoners by-in-large could afford to be arrested, and may have even intentionally triggered their arrests in order to snatch the limelight (away from actual PP/POWs in the wake of the G8/G20. As one person close to me put it regarding one particular arrestee who has been getting the most press, he is a “poor little rich white boy who can afford to get arrested because his father makes the big bucks to bail him out.”
Again, I am not talking about all of the arrestees, or all KW activists, just some in particular whose plight has become a cause célèbre in town.
This is why their arrests and the actions that lead up to them, including the second arrest of the one with the most news coverage, must be examined through a rubric of White nation privilege. I for example cannot afford to be arrested.
Due to my status as an immigrant, and also because of the socio-economic situation of my family, I simply cannot afford to get arrested, in either the economic sense, or in a legal sense. As a Native person I am also likely to suffer quite a bit in other ways once under the control of the White power pig force. If I pulled the kind of BS that the White activists do I’d have the lights beaten right out of me by the White pig. The same goes for many of my comrades in town.
Many of them are from extremely depressed national and economic backgrounds, barely able to make ends meet. They cannot afford to go to prison. They will lose their savings, custody over their children, would be likely to suffer violence from the White pigs, and will permanently be branded, making it often times impossible to find employment in the future, among many, many other things.
For those local celebrity arrestees however this is definetely not the case. Because of their White nation privilege and higher than usual socio-economic background, they can afford to engage in the kinds reckless and machoistic actions that they did. The rest of us, those of us who actually suffer from oppression, cannot. It is that simple.
*NB: I use the term White nation privilege instead of the more usual formations of White skin privilege and simply White privilege because I hope to make it clear that I am not talking ideology and race, but rather national oppression which gives a serious material basis for the privilege. See my note right below this one on the PoC term as well.
**NB: I do not actually care for the phrase people of colour, because it defines our existance by focusing on what we are not, which is White. It’s also part of the trend, which I reject, that boils the White-non-White contradiction down to worldviews of ideological race privilege. I see it instead as contradictions between oppressor and oppressed nations, which gives a material basis to White privilege.
Opinons?
October 23, 2010
by Enaemaehkiw Túpac Keshena
This will be short, but it is something that has been bothering me for a while now, and I have to get off of my chest.
I’ve been having conversations lately with several other Kitchener-Waterloo radicals and leftists over the last couple of weeks about privilege – specifically White nation privilege* – within the KW activist scene and how it informs, or rather fails to inform, the thought and practice of a number of more well known local characters.
In our scene, which is mostly defined by the university town nature of the city, many of these more well known local activists come from backgrounds that are marked by great material privilege. By this I mean they are mostly middle to upper class, white, men. There of course women and “people of colour”** but they do not share the limelight to anywhere near the same extent as the White leadership.
I also want to make it clear that I am not aiming this at all people who got arrested at the G8/G20, as many, perhaps even most, are people who struggle every day through oppression: indigenous people, people of colour and (im)migrants. I applaud those people and the bravery that it took for them to risk what they did and stand up against imperialism, settler colonialism and capitalism. This article/rant takes aim rather at a particular layer within the KW radical activist scene that took part in the G8/G20 events.
While material conditions root most privileged people’s political consciousness, these people can break from what is in their material interest in class suicide. Hence. the fact that people come to radical politics from positions of material privilege does not have to be a problem – so long as it is handled correctly.
I myself would be lying to you if I told you that my own upbringing was an entirely ghettoized one. Sure I am a Native person, with all the shit that comes with that and living in settler colonial White Canada, but my family was always able to scrape together enough funds to make sure that we had some nice things and so that my brother and I could attend a private high school and then university and college (even if it put them in ridiculous dept).
That immediately puts me on a much better footing than most Native people, considering for example that a Native women is three times more likely to go to prison than to graduate from university or college. All I can ever say is that my perspective is informed by the time I spent on my reservation, where I saw my relatives live desperately poor, racially and nationally marginalized existences, and that I was raised by a strong Native woman from a working class background who didn’t take shit from anyone.
I self-reflect and self-criticize about my the privilege I have relative to so many other indigenous people, including within my own extended family. Where problems arise in the KW activist scene is when certain people with material privileges – far greater than I because because they are White and petty bourgeois and bourgeois – do not engage in this practice, or, even worse, when they actively try to deny the privilege they have.
This is always best shown for me in a story I have been told by a couple radical comrades of an encounter between one my friends (himself White, but who is a sincere solidarity activist) and another local activist (of the highly privileged variety). The setting was a “know your rights” type of event.
The encounter took place when my friend approached one of the people putting on the event and queried why they did not have any apparent input from actually oppressed groups, meaning the people who really do have to deal with police violence and oppression on a regular basis. My comrade then pointed out the activist’s White nation privilege and how it was implicitly racist and colonizing to exclude colonially oppressed people from the event.
The response from the highly privileged activist was that he knew what it was like to be oppressed. Why you may ask? Because he is an anarchist (I am not fucking kidding).
This for me is exemplar of the fundamentally twisted perspectives of these White activists. Rather than say, “you know what? I didn’t even notice that,” and then proceed to engage in self-criticism and self-reflection over why this was the case, and how it can be righted, the person attempted to actively deny the privilege they are accorded by mainstream society.
They created a fantasy world where they exist as an oppressed person in order to counter the inevitability that someone would notice and point out that they are privileged in our society and that it clearly effects their views and actions.
Where this has come up more recently has been around the question of some activists in town being arrested in relation to supposed G8/G20 actions and their now being treated by much of the activist media as political prisoners. This of course could just as easily become a discussion on organizational practice and the immediate reason as to WHY these people were arrested, but that is something for another time, and so I will keep this within the context of our discussion about privilege.
Essentially what it comes down to in the end is this: those people who were arrested and are now being called political prisoners by-in-large could afford to be arrested, and may have even intentionally triggered their arrests in order to snatch the limelight (away from actual PP/POWs in the wake of the G8/G20. As one person close to me put it regarding one particular arrestee who has been getting the most press, he is a “poor little rich white boy who can afford to get arrested because his father makes the big bucks to bail him out.”
Again, I am not talking about all of the arrestees, or all KW activists, just some in particular whose plight has become a cause célèbre in town.
This is why their arrests and the actions that lead up to them, including the second arrest of the one with the most news coverage, must be examined through a rubric of White nation privilege. I for example cannot afford to be arrested.
Due to my status as an immigrant, and also because of the socio-economic situation of my family, I simply cannot afford to get arrested, in either the economic sense, or in a legal sense. As a Native person I am also likely to suffer quite a bit in other ways once under the control of the White power pig force. If I pulled the kind of BS that the White activists do I’d have the lights beaten right out of me by the White pig. The same goes for many of my comrades in town.
Many of them are from extremely depressed national and economic backgrounds, barely able to make ends meet. They cannot afford to go to prison. They will lose their savings, custody over their children, would be likely to suffer violence from the White pigs, and will permanently be branded, making it often times impossible to find employment in the future, among many, many other things.
For those local celebrity arrestees however this is definetely not the case. Because of their White nation privilege and higher than usual socio-economic background, they can afford to engage in the kinds reckless and machoistic actions that they did. The rest of us, those of us who actually suffer from oppression, cannot. It is that simple.
*NB: I use the term White nation privilege instead of the more usual formations of White skin privilege and simply White privilege because I hope to make it clear that I am not talking ideology and race, but rather national oppression which gives a serious material basis for the privilege. See my note right below this one on the PoC term as well.
**NB: I do not actually care for the phrase people of colour, because it defines our existance by focusing on what we are not, which is White. It’s also part of the trend, which I reject, that boils the White-non-White contradiction down to worldviews of ideological race privilege. I see it instead as contradictions between oppressor and oppressed nations, which gives a material basis to White privilege.
Opinons?