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So interesting to read about the origin of the phrase "white skin privilege" and note the enormous distance between what Theodore Allen meant & what people using "white privilege" mean today.
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"White-skin privilege" was originally a way of framing, through a Marxist analysis, how whiteness operated to divide and conquer working class people.
The Marxist analysis -- and the goal -- is completely missing from conversations I see today.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151010173043/http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Perry.pdf
The Marxist analysis -- and the goal -- is completely missing from conversations I see today.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151010173043/http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Perry.pdf
"White privilege" now often functions as a liberal concept: the goal being to attain the same standard of living and way of being as the bourgeois/white person, in essence making becoming (or at least proximal to) white a goal.
More original text here:
http://www.sds-1960s.org/WhiteBlindspot.pdf
More original text here:
http://www.sds-1960s.org/WhiteBlindspot.pdf
I see the transition as something that happened in the 70s when white women (lesbians, in particular) latched onto "white privilege" as an individualist discourse while Black people and others were talking about power, freedom, & rights.
Individualist discourse is not Marxist.
Individualist discourse is not Marxist.
When I say it functions as a liberal discourse, I mean, "get your fair share under capitalism" (as if that's a thing) and the individualism of identifying white people's individual "privileges" or "benefits" under white supremacy https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI/status/1303702565247426560?s=20
By contrast, Allen and Ignatiev were calling for white people to divest from siding with whiteness. They were saying that whiteness offered them token material benefits in exchange for upholding a system that harmed all working class people, including white working class people.
My mom @sotrueradio, who was a Black Panther breakfast program volunteer before she co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework tends to frame things in terms of "power relations" and I think this framing is robust and helpful now that we understand power is not linear.
How does colonial patriarchal white supremacy structure the power relations between us and how can we disrupt that structuring, collectively? How do transphobia, colorism, heterocissexism, misogynoir, xenophobia, racism, and ableism operate as power relation enforcers?
Importantly, the problem everyone has been trying to solve is: how do we enact solidarity, for the purposes of confronting and ending capitalism and its abuses of the working class?
Solidarity is the goal.
Solidarity is the goal.
I have had a wonderful interaction with Peggy McIntosh but I see this as the problem with her invisible knapsack, which is what popularized "white privilege" into the mainstream: people think it's about listing off individual "privileges" https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI/status/1303703436949680128?s=20
This is not entirely McIntosh's fault because she does try to frame it as a structural thing in her intro. But the daily effects listing at the end has translated into people doing "invisible knapsack" exercises, which are practically a whole industry.
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
Where I do fault this work is that in the introduction, she names racism as a structural problem, but she doesn't name the cause of the structural problem. No mention of "white supremacy." And she doesn't name why "white-skin privilege" is valuable: protecting capitalism.
PS: One person my mom has been in dialogue with, my gran Selma James, talks directly about power relations in this:
"The social power relations of the sexes, races, nations and generations are precisely, then, particularized forms of class relations." https://libcom.org/library/sex-race-class-james-selma
"The social power relations of the sexes, races, nations and generations are precisely, then, particularized forms of class relations." https://libcom.org/library/sex-race-class-james-selma
