[Marxism] America's deep-seated racism

[Walter Lippmann]

Far more than a mere physiological characteristic, "whiteness" 
is a political and social construct, with the guns and power 
of the state to back it up. Though I don't agree with all of
Noel Ignatin's writings, I've always appreciated his concept:
"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity".

MALCOLM X EXPLAINED WHITENESS VERY WELL IN DETROIT, IN 1965:

So when I got over there and went to Makkah and saw these people who
were blond and blue-eyed and pale-skinned and all those things, I
said, "Well!" But I watched them closely. And I noticed that though
they were white, and they would call themselves white, there was a
difference between them and the white one over here. And that basic
difference was this: in Asia or the Arab world or in Africa, where
the Muslims are, if you find one who says he's white, all he's doing
is using an adjective to describe something that's incidental about
him, one of his incidental characteristics; so there's nothing else
to it, he's just white.

But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he's
white, he means something else. You can listen to the sound of his
voice -- when he says he's white, he means he's a boss. That's right.
That's what "white" means in this language. You know the expression,
"free, white, and twenty-one." He made that up. He's letting you know
all of them mean the same. "White" means free, boss. He's up there.
So that when he says he's white he has a little different sound in
his voice. I know you know what I'm talking about.

This was what I saw was missing in the Muslim world. If they said
they were white, it was incidental. White, black, brown, red, yellow,
doesn't make any difference what color you are. So this was the
religion that I had accepted and had gone there to get a better
knowledge of it.

But despite the fact that I saw that Islam was a religion of
brotherhood, I also had to face reality. And when I got back into
this American society, I'm not in a society that practices
brotherhood. I'm in a society that might preach it on Sunday, but
they don't practice it on no day -- on any day. And so, since I could
see that America itself is a society where there is no brotherhood
and that this society is controlled primarily by racists and
segregationists -- and it is -- who are in Washington, D.C., in
positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same
forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and
North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba, or in any other place on
this earth where they're trying to exploit and oppress. This is a
society whose government doesn't hesitate to inflict the most brutal
form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over
the world.

FULL:
http://www.malcolm-x.org/speeches/spc_021465.htm
LISTEN:
http://www.malcolm-x.org/media/aud/malcolmdetroit.ram

(Walter concluding)
People who are politically conscious and physiologically
white, need to have a political, social and cultural grasp of
what that color implies in a racist society. That's part of
the power of the movie CHILDREN OF MEN, for taking it up:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/


Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California

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WALTER LIPPMANN
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
writer - photographer - activist
http://www.walterlippmann.com
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