The Invention of the White People

The Invention of the White People



There are no white people. There are no black people. There are no red, yellow, brown, blue, purple, crimson or any other colour people. These are all socially constructed delusions. Delusions though with real, frightful, murderous, and genocidal consequences.



None of these facts have been hidden to us. There is a vast body of scholarly literature on the social construction of race, gender, and ethnicity.



In his monumental two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race (Revised edition, 2012), as early as in the 1960s Theodore W Allen had documented the manner in which the ruling elite in the United States had devised the category of "white people" by way of economic exploitation of the African slaves and the social control of the emerging polities. More recently, in her Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today (2013), Jacqueline Battalora has offered an examination of the enduring issue of race in the US tracing it back to when "white people" were invented through legislations and enactment of laws.



The problem with this scholarly body of literature is not only the fact that its erudite message does not get through the thick skulls of illiterate racists like Donald Trump's white supremacist supporters. The problem is that such archaeology of hatred does not erase the fact that a massive body of humanity has suffered precisely because they have been branded as "black" or "red," or "yellow" or "brown". Racially constituted to divide and rule, those colourful delusions have become social facts.



Central to all such socially constructed delusions are the relations of power they entail and sustain - whether colour-coded, classed, racialised, or gendered. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman", Simone de Beauvoir declared in her path-breaking book The Second Sex (1949). In later, critical expansion of this idea, scholars like Judith Butler have shown how varied social practices are definitive to the social constitution of gender. The same is true about race or ethnicity. One is not born, we may extend de Beauvoir's insight, but rather becomes white, or black, etc.



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The gross spectacle of racist terrorists in August in Charlottesville, US, and President Trump's unabashed siding with the proto-Fascist white supremacists have now brought this solid streak in American politics to global attention. However limited or extensive this "base" of Donald Trump's presidency might be, the politics of white supremacy has now become openly integral to the racial imagination of the US.



Taking their cues from their president and his chief advisers like (until recently) Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka in the White House, a small but increasingly vocal armed militia calling itself "white nationalists" (a euphemism for white supremacists) march with torches like the KKK, saluting like Nazis, and chant xenophobic and anti-Semitic slogans through Charlottesville. These are the driest and deepest layers of racial hatred from the time of the first slaughter of Native Americans, from the time of mass slavery of African Americans, now finding the right environment to come up to surface.



As a society and a polity, the US has never been cured, never been treated, and it has never resolved its murderous racist history. It has just kept shoving it under a thin veneer of liberal hypocrisy and bourgeois etiquette at home and projected it outward in the form of warmongering abroad. From the Korean, to Vietnam, to Afghan and Iraq wars the US invasions and occupation of other countries are underwritten by racial hatred. The Israeli occupation and systemic land theft of Palestine is an extended chapter in the same book.



The Racist Nexus of US/Israel



The affinity of neo-Nazi white supremacists for Zionism and Israel is a match made in the racists' heaven. Self-delusional liberal Zionists act surprised that a nefarious white supremacist like Richard Spencer has openly admitted on an Israeli TV show that Israelis "should respect him" for he is "a white Zionist". But the world at large is not surprised at all. Of course, he and his ilk are all "white Zionists" - a phrase that is in fact redundant. What the liberal Zionists do not wish to admit (for it exposes their own racism) is that the white supremacists' Zionism is integral to their anti-Semitism and vice-versa.



The roots of Zionism as the dominant ideology of a settler colony are in European white supremacy, evident in their much more universal colonial culture in Asia, Africa, and Latin America - to all of which Israel is now a last bastion.



Israel today is a perfect model, an aspiration in fact, for neo-Nazi white supremacists in the US and Europe. That these neo-Nazis are also anti-Semitic and Zionist is exactly the recognition that now stares American Jew