LUMPENPROLETARIAT—A friend of mine at a Mediterranean café in Berkeley many years ago commented to a mutual friend about me, as I gorged on shawarma: You know what he needs to read? He needs to read Frantz Fanon. Indeed. I was only familiar with the “Cliff’s” notes version of The Wretched of the Earth. Honestly, I think I was afraid to read Fanon, even as an adult in my 20s, American fascism being what it is and all. People of color are often discouraged from reading, or being associated with, so-called radical or revolutionary thinkers, theorists, and authors. The French government, for example, censored Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
Even studying the fate of Martin and Malcolm leads you down some pretty scary investigative journalism leads. You get called names, if you’re not careful. And, yet, the forbidden writings and ideas of Frantz Fanon might have never been more relevant than today, with the Black Lives Matter movement reaching a critical mass in 2020, perhaps the biggest protest movement in U.S. history.
Even now, something about our society makes it seem like a radical act to even discuss Fanon. Thankfully, we have Dr. Peter Hudis, a welcome scholar and discussant in the body of work established by Frantz Fanon, the French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher.
The philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary militant Frantz Fanon was a key figure in the struggle against European colonialism. Fanon’s innovative thinking on racism and its relationship to class oppression still speaks vividly to the present.
Fanon argued that the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat would serve as the principal force of the revolution, not Africa’s nascent working class.
Peter Hudis, “The Revolutionary Humanism of Frantz Fanon”
Messina
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JACOBIN—[26 DEC 2020] The renewed protests against racism and police brutality over the last year have supplied a fresh impetus for thinking about the nature of capitalism, its relationship to racism, and the construction of alternatives to both. Few thinkers speak more directly to such issues than Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who is widely considered one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on race and racism.
— snip —
These considerations were central to Fanon’s last and most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth. He began writing the book after learning that he had incurable leukemia and died shortly after it appeared in 1961. Scholars often overlook the fact that The Wretched of the Earth does not completely turn its back on Europe. Instead, Fanon set out to critically rethink dimensions of European thought, including Marxism.
Fanon insisted that a Marxist analysis “should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.” In Marx’s analysis of capitalist accumulation in Europe, the development of capitalism had torn peasants from the “natural workshop” of the land and transformed them into urban proletarians, who in turn would become a massive, compact, and revolutionary force through the concentration and centralization of capital. Fanon saw that this process was not being repeated in Africa.
The destruction of the continent’s traditional communal property forms did not lead to the formation of a massive, radicalized proletariat, since the colonialists did not industrialize Africa but rather underdeveloped it through the brutal extraction of labor power and natural resources. The peasantry remained the greater part of the population, while the working class in towns and cities was relatively small and weak. Because of this, Fanon argued that the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat would serve as the principal force of the revolution, not Africa’s nascent working class.
LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Medium is another one of these new “authentic” blogger aggregating websites sprouting up everywhere, like Substack, and I guess old school websites, like this one—Wordpress—which provide easy platforms for bloggers to use. But whereas websites, like WordPress (being among the first), have been pretty utilitarian or basic, Medium and Substack are glossier and offer paths to monetization for bloggers, who can build a following. And these newer platforms seem more willing to stroke blogger egos and build up user personality profiles to entice volunteer writers. So, they’ll have some celebrity bloggers in there and be like, Oh, look, you could be the next so and so. Glenn Greenwald famously moved to Substack recently, after essentially being forced out of The Intercept, which he co-founded… But that’s another story. [1] I guess it’s cool that such websites are looking for “authentic” voices and whatnot. Time will tell…
The main point I wanted to emphasize here was simply the fact that I had encountered an Op-Ed type essay where a black person was calling out brown people for being racist.[2] As someone called brown, at least in the summertime, I do believe this is a first for me, personally. In virtually everything I’ve ever read in print about race and racism and whatnot, it has been either white vs black or white vs brown, even brown vs brown, but never black vs brown. I suppose Richard Rodriguez is one exception, which comes to mind, among other more obscure examples, perhaps. Maybe this is a good sign of greater diversity in the blogosphere.
I don’t have a whole lot of history watching Spanish-language networks, Telemundo or Univision, except when visiting family. But I do know they are quite vocal about the racism of the Republican Party, historically, and more recently the Trump admin’s racism against immigrants and brown people. But it seems those brown/latinx networks largely ignore the plight of blacks in their news reporting. Similarly, the usual American discourse has historically been a dialectical back and forth between white people and black people. So, it’s nice for brown people to be included in a group discussion for a change, even if it is just to be called out for being racist.
It’s not that Black people didn’t know how racist a lot of White, Black, and Brown people were, but it’s nice to have my Black experiences finally validated. America is racist as fuck, and White people can’t deny it anymore.
Ouch. She called out “Brown people”, as racist. Dang. It only hurts because it’s true; and it hits close to home. Have I done enough to call out the racism in my brown raza, especially among my own family and friends? Clearly, we haven’t done enough. I mean those crazy Cubans in Florida are always going to be conservatives with a bloodlust for Cuba. But how do we explain the other conservative Latinos, voting against the collective wellbeing of all people of color, not just harming other Latinx?
As a brown person, it hurts me to read that being said by a black person about brown people. I grew up looking up to black freedom fighters since before I wrote a book report on Frederick Douglass in the fourth grade for Mrs. Bullock’s class at Sunnybrae Elementary School in my hometown of San Mateo, California. Before I learned about the 1960s Chicano Power movement and other brown freedom fighters, as a curious teenager in the 1980s, black freedom fighters served as surrogate political role models for brown people like me. Brown people, like all Americans, have learned a lot from watching black people, black leaders, fight white institutions for freedom, justice, and for the betterment of America.
Upon closer reading, I later noticed the Medium writer, Marley K., also called out some black people, too, for being racist! The times, they are a’changin’. Now, I always thought it was a contradiction in terms to call a person of color a racist because racism is the abuse of institutional power. American institutions are predominantly white institutions. The dominant culture is white, so white people are in a position to wield institutional power, not people of color. I guess if a person of color buys into the me-first notions of American capitalism as a path out of self-ghettoization, then I guess that might explain the black and brown folks in Trump Nation. It seems like tragic cognitive dissonance, Stockholm Syndrome, or trauma bonding of some sort. Correct me, if I’m wrong, but… I thought when a person of color hates on a white person, that would be bigotry or ethnocentrism, but never racism because racism, again, is the abuse of institutional power, which in the American context is the abuse of white privilege.
In her exquisite rant, Marley K. acknowledged that not all black and brown people are racist. And there’s some hope for brown people, too. The invasion of the bodysnatchers ain’t got all of us yet.
Black and Brown people stood in the rain. We lost days of work we couldn’t afford; we voted early and did the electric slide in line waiting to vote. Black and Brown folks took ballots to nursing homes, took our 100-year-old elders to the polls, and registered millions of new voters to counter the voter suppression during a pandemic. Many of us didn’t vote for Joe, we just voted against Trump. We weren’t voting to save America and White people as much as we were voting to save ourselves. Joe Biden even had to admit he owes his presidency to Black people. If it were left up to White people, we’d be reelecting the Trump crime syndicate for more of the same.
But make no mistake, America hasn’t changed.
For people of color, naturally, our understanding of racism is always less theoretical than that of the average white person because it comes from a lifetime of experiencing racism. Not every American has a fully formed capacity to empathize with others. And when you are little kid, who is brown or black, and you experience racism, that is some fucked up shit. Racism, when you’re a child, is child abuse. We can’t be surprised when kids don’t grow up to be model citizens, when they were exposed to racism, poverty, and other societal ills at an early age. Most white people, well-to-do white people, don’t seem to understand this. Right-wingers blame personal agency, poor personal choices, deny the impacts of early childhood development, and ignore basic psychology literature. Those in power clearly don’t understand. Poor, working class type white people, who grew up around people of color, have a better understanding than so-called educated liberals.
Some white people are like brothers and sisters to people of color, allies. But some 74 million people, maybe more, most of the entire Republican Party (mostly whites, but people of all colors) are not allies because they voted for four more years of Trumpism. That’s a whole lot of pro-racist willpower right there. And, if the Republican insistence on overriding the will of the majority of American people succeeds, we might have a lifetime of Trumpism, if Trump were to have his dictatorial druthers. Yesterday, “December 8 was a statutory ‘safe harbor’ deadline by when states were to finalize voting results certification, though the Trump legal team stated it would disregard the deadline. Every state, but Hawaii, had certified its results by December 7.” So, we may or may not be out of the woods yet. But those 74 million Americans backing Trump have no problem with institutional racism and support ever more draconian legislation targeting people of color. They still want four more years of Trump’s racism and authoritarianism.
And where was the opposition to Trump Nation? The Democrat Party and Biden 2020 had no platform to speak of, and they beat back Bernie Sanders and others, who actually did have a platform, campaign promises, and an agenda to make it happen. The only reason Biden beat Trump was because people of color, mainly blacks, voted against Trump and shifted America’s political pendulum away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrat Party. But, says Marley K., there’s about to be a problem because America has been exposed as racist. It is now patently undeniable. And, yet, liberals and other ostensibly non-racist Americans are showing no indications of any meaningful reconciliation.
America needs a post-Civil War, post-slavery American Truth and Reconciliation process, like post-apartheid South Africa did when they finally decided they had to make amends for their racist past. Unfortunately, we have a two-party dictatorship, which colludes to block alternative political parties from the presidential debates and from ballot access in states across the nation with top-two primary laws and whatnot. So, we must admit that the Democrat Party is not a sincere opposition party, as Marley K’s essay rant seems to understand (although it doesn’t state explicitly). Without a sincere opposition party, what political power do people of color and their allies have? Given all of this, it sure does look like white people love racism more than they love humanity.
White People Love Racism More Than They Love Humanity
White people overwhelmingly chose racism, inequality, hate, and white rage in 2020.
White People Will Let You Down Every Time
I knew it. I told you so.
Black people, per usual, have saved this shithole country from the grips of fascism and Jim Crow. We voted for overwhelmingly Joe Biden on election night, despite having better, more progressive options, because we knew enough White people wouldn’t do the right thing to save Black and Brown folks from hate, fascism, tyranny, and White domestic terrorism. I’m thankful for Trump’s presidency because White people can no longer deny racism doesn’t exist. Trump’s presidency also revealed racism, white rage, and White domestic terrorism are alive, well and thriving.
The results of the 2020 Election revealed White America is moderately to extremely conservative and incoherently racist in ways that have yet to be examined. Racism, White Supremacy, and righting the ship was on the ballot this election cycle, and a large majority of White people overwhelmingly chose Donald J. Trump and his brash style of racism. Seventy million people voted for that dumb asshole.
[1] Glenn Greenwald helped co-found The Intercept to be a publication, which gave its writers the type of editorial freedom, which he always enjoyed, and which blog aggregator websites, like Medium and Substack, are promising “authentic” people, who use their platforms to write and blog.
[2] And, as I often do, I suppose I wanted to share this article with others because I felt it was an important perspective, which needs to be heard, and which is not often heard in the dominant media. Simply re-posting an article is sometimes considered “Spam”, as Medium.com does. Maybe it is. I dunno. I expect to be able to do whatever the fuck I feel like doing on my blog, as long as I don’t engage in plagiarism, and as long as I give credit where credit is due. I wish I had more time and resources to create a proper website; but it’s all good. We’ll do our best and keep moving forward.
LUMPENPROLETARIAT—As France has passed a new law outlawing copwatching and the filming of cops, and cops in America seek to do the same, urban areas look more and more like a police state. And cops increasingly act like it, at least in black, brown, and poor communities. Another young person of color has been gunned down by cowardly cops, this time in Ohio. Another life has been gratuitously and extrajudiciously been snuffed out by the American state, by an increasingly despotic state, if we think about it, if we start to do the math on all the carnage, economic damage, human suffering, and environmental destruction.
As reported on Democracy Now!, Casey Christopher Goodson Jr., a 23-year-old black man, “was fatally shot Friday by a Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy outside Goodson’s home in Columbus.” Police said Casey Goodson matched the description of a suspect and was seen driving by waving a gun. So, they killed him. Shoot first, ask questions later, is the refrain. Goodson’s family said he, “was carrying a Subway sandwich and was returning from a dentist’s office when he was shot in the back three times by the sheriff’s deputy.”
Meanwhile, a lot of white people are unhappy with the Black Lives Matter movement for some reason. I wonder why. It’s true: “Black lives matter ‘cos all lives matter”, to quote Jeru Tha Damaja. Justice for murder is a reasonable request: Jail killer cops. Yet, right-wingers have come out with reactionary slogans like “Cop Lives Matter” and waving “Thin Blue Line” flags. All those white people, and a few confused persons of color here and there, on the right and in Trump Nation evidently don’t see a problem with killer cops killing with impunity.
Messina
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DEMOCRACY NOW!—Back in the United States, in Ohio, activists are demanding justice for Casey Christopher Goodson Jr., a 23-year-old Black man who was fatally shot Friday by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy outside Goodson’s home in Columbus. Family members say Goodson was carrying a Subway sandwich and was returning from a dentist’s office when he was shot in the back three times by the sheriff’s deputy. Authorities had been searching for a suspect in the area Friday afternoon, when they say a man allegedly drove by waving a gun, prompting deputies to confront him. Authorities later said they recovered a handgun, but did not say where it was found. Family members say Goodson had a concealed-carry permit for a handgun. They are demanding the release of bodycam footage, police reports, and for an independent autopsy and investigation.
