“The weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons.”—the Moor
Cut to the chase: What does this mean to us in practice? What’s different in terms of political strategy & tactics, different in the terrain of struggle? We can begin by outlining first understandings. The previous capitalist world order was bipolar, with everyone visible massed around opposing poles of oppressor vs. oppressed. It was colonized vs. colonizer, white vs. black, invader vs. indigenous. But at its essence, the growing chaos of the neo-colonial world order is that many different peoples—armed with conflicting capitalist agendas—have been loosed to fight it out. As transnational capitalism hides behind & backs first one side and then the other—or both—to indirectly use the chaos they see no class interest in containing.
This chaos is itself a deepening contradiction of the system, one that no one can be certain of riding, not even the ruling class. And on this charged terrain, dis-unity and not unity is the changed strategic need of the oppressed. This is hard to grab, since it goes against truisms inherited from colonial times. And we think that dis-unity is what’s spontaneously going on all around us anyway, when it’s really an unconscious unity around wrong principles. Old slogans used the picture of unity to make people feel strong: “Sisterhood Is Powerful”; “Black Unity”; “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” But these are dead phrases now, not truths but decaying shells.
Racial & gender & nation politics can’t take the form they did across the river back in the old days, in segregated Montgomery, Ala. In 1955 or even pent-up Harlem in 1965. Look closely at the folding contradictions, the living process in all things that drives the coming into being of the new & the waning of the old.
Capitalism absolutely owns the social system, but no longer finds it in its class interest to totally control or regulate every single space. And perhaps couldn’t even if it exerted itself to. This is where our accurate sense of growing chaos comes from.
In the colonial era everything was relatively rigid, over-controlled, characterized by an insistence on euro-patriarchal order. New Afrikans, for example, were not only limited in what jobs they could have, where and how they could live, but were constrained to act towards europeans by rules demanding deference and acted-out inferiority. Like white women act towards white men. Now contrast the 1954 lynching of teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi for supposedly being disrespectful towards a white woman to rapper Ice-T in neo-colonial 1992, who after coming out with a song mock-threatening to rape a 12 year-old white girl, was able to buy himself a $1.2 million mansion on the Sunset Strip.
It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of white people who’d like to lynch Ice-T, but it’s also true that big business itself is grooming and promoting Ice-T’s verbal masturbation act. (and millions of young males, white and Black, are buying the same macho music as though Dick is now their race).
The controversy over Ice-T’s pathetic little cop-killing rap only highlights how our political struggles are no longer simply bipolar. It isn’t as simple as Black vs. White any more. The good side vs. the bad side. There’s many more players and agendas in the game, whether it’s Black Genocide or the break-up of whiteoslavia you’re dealing with. The physics of political struggle has new rules.
Take the Ice-T censorship controversy: on the Ice-T side you had not only Black musicians and artists, teenagers of all races, Jewish record company executives and the giant Time-Warner corporation, but also gay white civil libertarians and Afro-centric muslim activists. “It’s a big country and someone’s got to furnish it.”
On the “gag him” side you had the masses of police, both presidential campaigns, christian churches, and most white settler opinion over age 30 (many white kids were for Ice-T , since as long as he’s only postmodern blackface, only entertaining them, what dif does it make?) Wasn’t a multicultural capitalism backing and using both sides, even though they had clashing agendas?
Trans-national capitalism is driving a certain kind of breakthrough idea, a “multicultural” worldview in which each people and grouping is freed and encouraged to explore its own capitalist agenda no matter what form it takes. From Slavic Holy Russian anti-semitism to lesbian small businesses. The Cuban takeover in Miami is as mellow to Time Warner, Sony and Citibank as Afro-hip-hop stars making millions selling CD’s damning whites as “devils.”
Even when whole nations teeter on the brink of auto-genocide in made-up capitalistic gang-wars—as is happening in Black Somalia or White Yugoslavia this year—it’s chill. Everyone is free to go for it, free to fight it out any way they want so long as they don’t endanger the system itself. No one is protected, either, of course.
This is not a strategy, but an inescapable consequence of changes in basic production & distribution. The imperialism of the multinational corporations is trying to untangle itself from the outgrown shell of its early national form. Starting to distance itself from, while still utilizing, the very nations and races and genders it grew out of. After all, the faded glories of the British empire and its “Anglo-Saxon civilization” are zero help to outmoded British corporations fighting to survive. No more help, really, than Harvard, the AFL-CIO, and the “American Way of Life” was to General Motors when it was being beaten up in the alley by Honda, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz.
Nations per se are less useful to the imperialism of the multinationals, just as dialectically they become even more vital to everyone else, from emerging capitalist cliques to outlaw communities of the oppressed (since you aren’t going to have any say in the shifting transnational economy going on above you, it becomes even more important to have some territory or space of your own).
It isn’t any outside force, but capitalism itself that is destabilizing white amerikkka. That’s why the far rightwing, who in the past worked with the government and saw themselves as the domestic defenders of amerikkkanism, having given up on this nation, and now call for overthrowing the u.s. government (which they label “ZOG” or zionist occupation government) in Civil War 2. They’ve admitted that the u.s. is already too mix and match to ever be anglo-saxon again, and want to take the five paler states of the Northwest and build their own Aryan nation. So the armed white right spends much more emotion and bullets fighting the IRS, federal marshals, ATF and other government agencies than it does the Black community.
White men are so bone-hostile to multiculturalism not because of their racism or sexism alone, but because they sense that it foreshadows their own demise as a nation. This evolution of amerikkka takes the form of de-settlerization. The u.s.a., historically powered-up as a european men’s settler empire of invaders and occupiers, is being pushed by capitalism to give way to a more cosmopolitan and postmodern society even against die-harder resistance of the white majority. The current trend of multi culturalism being picked up by capitalist institutions—from legitimizing the Gay community to emphasizing the art and literature of Indians, New Afrikans, Asians & Latinos—is the surface reflection of capitalism’s de-settlerization away from the dead white men’s society.
The material facts of economic production & class rule are the basis of every historic change, and nowhere is this more evident than in restructuring postmodern amerikkka, where races and genders are now being erased and rewritten over like software. Our own political-military understanding must keep up with the transformation, and grasp what is the root of change.
The imperialism of the multinational corporations no longer needs either the white settler nation or the once-colonized but still intractable New Afrikan nation. It needs many of their people, particularly white women and Black women for its economy, but not their entire nations, and certainly not in their previous forms. It’s just the bottom line. Both are populations that are in different ways too expensive and politically too untrustworthy from the ruling class perspective.
As we can see all around us, a new multicultural labor force is being imported by the tens of millions to take up the slack. You don’t have to be Einstein to catch on that the media are selling an image that imported Asians and Latinos are “good” citizens, with a work ethic and modest wage demands, while both whites & New Afrikans are criticized as lazy and greedy in comparison—or worse, in the case of New Afrikans. In a recent issue of the Atlantic magazine, Jack Miles of the Los Angeles Times staff writes of how:
“Latinos, even when they are foreign, seem native and safe, while Blacks, who are native, seem foreign and dangerous. In saying this, I am saying something that I shrink from saying and grieve to say, but I think it’s true.”(101)
Now the historic New Afrikan "inner city" is being increasingly depopulated, scattering Black communities to both prisons and a spread of outlying small towns. Which are a new system of reservations, outside the real economy and society, where New Afrikans of the “dangerous class” can be penned up—not for labor but for gradual elimination. While there is still no answer for capitalism’s family contradiction of what to do with the excess millions of useless white men they subsidize both here and in europe.
This crisis at their own center comes dialectically out of their triumph. Out of world domination, a super-parasitism developed that made euro-amerikans, and especially white men, the least productive and most highly subsidized people since the fall of Rome. Even world looting by capitalism can no longer afford to keep subsidizing close to 200 million euro-amerikans in the old way.
White reformers may dream of a Scandinavian-style welfare state, but the u.s. already has a welfare state: a settler welfare state oriented not toward social services but toward subsiding high white individual income. This has been the basis of the whole culture. Government welfare is actually centered on the white middle class. Half of all u.s. households have some member receiving government subsidy.(102) Thirty per cent of the total u.s. population directly receives government cash or cash-equivalent aid in some form (VA Benefits, Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps, etc.), but when we add in disguised welfare in the form of tax benefits, it turns out that the average white household with an income of over $100,000 received $9,280 in government subsidy in 1991.(103)
Contrary to the self-serving assumption that Welfare primarily goes to Black and Latino poor, government subsidy is centered on the upper layers of the white population. Even two-thirds of all Medicare funds are estimated to go to the white middle-class. Over $400 billion was distributed in 1991 by the federal government to households with over $30,000 incomes. Nor does this include hidden subsidies such as non-productive government employment (in October 1991, for the first time, the number of people employed by the government was greater than those employed in all u.s. manufacturing).(104)
There are thousands of different ways that white business has been subsidized, from the huge Exxon corporation being allowed to not pay corporate income tax down to the anachronistic and largely unknown system of farm supports. Honeybee farmers receive an extra 100% of their crops’ value every year, for example, while sugar beet farmers get an annual average of $100,000 each from Washington. No subsidy for white people was too outrageous to be considered.(105)
Once the protected monopoly markets of the colonial period vanished, capitalism could no longer afford Michigan autoworkers who make $32 an hour in wages and benefits or construction workers who made almost as much. To say nothing of useless layers of “suits” who just pass faxes back and forth to each other. Capitalism is now cracking down, throwing excess yuppies out of the lifeboat and demanding that white workers start to live low like workers, not like professionals or minor members of the British aristocracy.
What’s intensifying the contradiction tearing settlerism apart is that most white people left production behind them, and no longer expect to do the hard, basic work of society. Here is hubris, the arrogant demands of a master race pushing itself over the edge. It’s typical in this culture that cowboys are “in” now among whites. From “Young Guns” on television to Clint Eastwood’s old-fart western, “The Unforgiven.” Cowboy hats are common gear for macho men, while women in Greenwich Village wear cowgirl boots or their look-alikes. Props for a poser culture. But “Nobody wants to be a cowboy,” observes Oracia Mercado of the Mountain Plains Agricultural Service, which arranges the importation of Mexican ranch-hands for Wyoming farms. “It’s hard work, it’s dirty work, it’s year-round work. It’s not something a U.S. worker wants to do.”
Even in Wyoming, where white unemployment is so high small towns are closing down, young whites are no longer willing to take these jobs. Nor are they willing to live the hard, isolated life of sheep herders or sheep shearers (seasonal specialists who come in to cut the wool off sheep). Sheepherders in the West are no longer euro-amerikans, coming instead from Mexico and the Basque in Spain, Chile and Australia. The shortage of workers for this lonely job is so great that the u.s. government has issued work permits for Mongolian herders now flown in by the farmers associations. White people only want to start as ranch owners or maybe marketing executives. That’s entry-level to them.
Niche by niche the real class structure is being transformed and fought over in the neo-colonial changeover. At expensive Washington, d.c. restaurants the busboys and dishwashers are no longer Black but Salvadorans. On the Mall, the long rows of vending trailers selling tourists everything from Georgetown sweatshirts to hot dogs are not owned by white men but Koreans. In the white suburbs, the real estate salespersons are increasingly white women. Cubans dominate the gas station business in Miami, just as Asian Indians control the newspaper stands in New York City and the cheap motels in the Deep South (as in the film “Mississippi Masala”). Just as women and Asians are making inroads in scientific higher education.
When Xerox corporation needed a saviour to fight back the gains made by copier rivals Kodak and Canon, they made the best marketing executive they could find their Executive Vice-President—even though he is an Afrikan-Amerikan man. Atlanta’s Coca-Cola corporation found they needed a Spanish chief executive to lead their world-wide comeback in the 1980’s against Pepsi, in the same way that a culturally Southern-white Pentagon had to turn to General Colin Powell to rebuild itself.
The number of capitalist niches reserved for white men keep shrinking, step by step, just as the u.s. economy and wage levels seem to be permanently falling into an unknown 21st century. White men are really confused, like a gunman who keeps clicking the trigger not believing his gun is on empty. But they aren’t going to give up, because they can’t.
De-settlerization is a process already in motion, but its completion is not a given, not a certainty, any more than Civil Rights or Roe v. Wade. What is a done deal is that multinational capitalism is de-settlerizing its own institutions—not only corporations, but foundations, universities—in a global way, taking advantage of new talent while making a necessary show of how unprejudiced they are (which is why the Ford Foundation has an Afrikan-Amerikan president and Ford dealers advertise in Gay community newspapers). But other than that, capitalism is letting the ants fight it out.
The fundamental crisis about nations today extends right into the future of the u.s.a. White men are up in arms and they’re right, of course. Neo-colonialism isn’t just “nice to Negroes week” and fronting off with a Puerto Rican politician or two—it’s everything. From who gets the job to who gets the woman to who gets to be a real person. The whole ball game. For things that Colonialism shaped are coming undone.
White men and their loyal women have no intention of surrendering their nation, and are counter-attacking. So Fords and Rockefellers may fund Planned Parenthood and the government may enact Roe v. Wade, but abortion clinics are being harassed and firebombed out of business in a spreading pattern in county after county, state after state. White settlers make their own laws, after all. They don’t care what the Supremes sing.
Women construction workers are now officially “welcome” by the white boy’s unions and contractors, but mysteriously always get laid off the day before they’re eligible to join the union, get harassed out or never get hired. Especially Black women and Asian women & Latinas. The media gives the mis-impression that this is solely due to redneck construction workers or backward “ethnic” Catholic unions, when it’s simply amerikkkan to reserve the best for white men.
For example, Arnold Diaz of WCBS exposed Tischman Construction (the largest Jewish developer-contractor in New York City) for hiring 0% women workers in both the new Mt. Sinai Hospital building and in the federally-subsidized new wing for Rockefeller University. That’s 0%, as in not one, not any. Pure Dick. When questioned, a spokesperson for Tischman said that hiring men only was approved by Rockefeller’s equal opportunity staff: “They’ve reviewed our record and they’re satisfied.”(106)
This Fall a mob of 5,000 New York City police took over the City Hall grounds in protest against Mayor Uncle Thomas and his plan for a civilian review board. Drunk cops harassed and threatened an Afrikan-Amerikan city councilwoman trying to get into City Hall, derisively calling her “nigger woman” in front of reporters. Mayor Uncle Tom, as all the guys on the street know, may be just a clothing store dummy picked by the white power structure, but that’s not settleristic enough for white people. Today’s Black genocide in the indirect neo-colonial way isn’t fast enough to satisfy the euro-amerikan grass roots, who remember that the first lesson of their “Americanism” is “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
No one wants to say it, but if Civil Rights were ever put to a “democratic” white vote (the concepts “democratic” and “white” are mutually contradictory to each other) it would lose hands-down. All these neo-colonial reforms have been imposed on the white garrison society from above, and they hate it as the horse hates the bit in his mouth.
Diane Sawyer from CBS News was probing the unfairness of “community service” probation sentences. She showed videos of young Black and Latin men doing their court-ordered “community service” by unpaid heavy construction labor, while noting that wealthy white men like Reagan aides John Deaver and Ollie North are assigned farcical non-jobs like giving talks at drug abuse clinics. Sawyer then interviewed a prominent California lawyer who specializes in “fixing” these cases. This is what he was unafraid to say on national television:
Sawyer: “Shouldn’t we have the Norths, the Deavers, breaking bricks just like the Black inner city men who sell drugs?”
Lawyer: (breaks into laughter) “We can sit around and say that. That’s nice to say, but it’ll never happen.”
Sawyer: “Why?”
Lawyer: “Because we aren’t going to punish our own—as white people who run this country.”(107)
This isn’t something that capitalism can change by simply pushing a button. Any more than they can just order capitalistic men with AK-47s to stop slaughtering to set up their cherished tribal nations in Cambodia or Croatia or Liberia. Because capitalism in its struggle to control the entire world set armies in motion. And these armies, which take the form of entire nations and races and genders, are still out on a mission from colonial days. Just as capitalism created white patriarchal society to be its settler garrison over North Amerika, and after 400 years this has a historic momentum and a stubborn life of its own. Clinton or Rockefeller can’t just make a phone call and get 200 millions of white men and their women to roll over and pull the plug, to stop being parasites. All over the world armies long set in motion refuse to be recalled.
Which is why white men aren’t going to ever give up attacking women. They were empowered by capitalism long ago to own women, and they aren’t going to non-violently give it up. The war over who controls women’s bodies isn’t about values or babies, it’s all about which classes live or die. Multinational capitalism freed white women from being breeders, encouraged them to crash the good jobs and start careers and own property of their own. Contrary to our self-delusions, white women didn’t win any of this. In the 1960’s there were no mass feminist urban riots, no white women with molotov cocktails saying “burn, baby, burn!”, no mass civil disobedience by white women jamming the jails, no militant armed organization of white women, no nothing. The box of goodies came from Great White Father.
Capitalism itself got the idea for this neo-colonial “equality” because it no longer wanted white women to stay home and reproduce larger numbers of even more non-productive white people demanding to be subsidized. That’s the last thing capitalism needs. And on the other hand, that’s why the right wing wants to force women back to the patriarchal bedroom, to jumpstart white demographics and keep this continent a white-majority nation. They say so, too, that their “Western Civilization” is dependent on car-bombing Roe v. Wade and forcing white women back to reproduce overtime. So in the struggle over the ownership of women’s bodies, a number of sides, with not just gender politics but class agendas and nation agendas and race agendas, are freely battling it out with no end in sight.
And in this chaos, we can do much more than we thought we could. Sliding around government pre-occupation with “more important” crises, moving and hiding amidst the chaotic clash of different players, the oppressed learned that in the physics of this new political universe we really can do much more than we thought we could—while others, don’t forget, can do the same to us.
We know of a small neighborhood where feminists were angry at a porn shop being open right on the main business street, where women had to shop. Many women, responding to a leaflet, began telephoning the porn business to democratically tell them to get out—oh, incidentally tying up their phone and clerk. So the porn store changed to an unlisted number and pulled its ad out of the Yellow Pages.
Then, one morning, the neighborhood woke up to find the porn store burned out, its broken windows covered with plywood sheets (on which some persons had sprayed, “STOP PORNOGRAPHY”). If Amazons did do it, they didn’t issue a press statement identifying themselves or a political communiqué daring the f.b.i. to hunt them out. “The action is the communique.” Actually, anyone might have done it these days, not just Amazons. Maybe those religious rightwingers who also are against porn shops did it. Maybe the store was arsoned to collect insurance money, by the Syndicate. Do you think the government is going to sort all this out or bother to protect all those little porn shops? Not hardly. Of course, many months later, after things had cooled, the porn shop re-opened with a blank front of cinderblock and steel, no window display or signs, no sight of the interior and a locked steel door you have to get buzzed through after being checked out. Dick zips it up. The struggle continues, act 2 …
This new political physics is at work in all social dimensions. Technically illegal but tolerated survival economics, for example, have always gone on in the New Afrikan community, from unlicensed after hours clubs to informal street vending. The ruling class tolerated it because they knew it was in their interests, too, since their labor pool had to survive somehow (and most white settlers didn’t care what went on “over there”). Now, that integration has come, many official Afrikan-Amerikan leaders are complaining that Black economics isn’t succeeding because they aren’t being subsidised like white people are, and they insist New Afrikan people need more high-class welfare (“minority set-asides” and the rest) from the government.
While these neo-colonial beggars in three-piece suits are whining, other unfamous and ordinary working Afrikans are just doing it—and nibbling away at government functions, too. If you stand at a comer along Flatbush avenue in Brooklyn during the day, every couple of minutes an Afrikan-owned gypsy van comes by to take Afro-commuters into downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. Unlicensed, semi-illegal, charging only $1 to the MTA’s $1.25 fare for the B41 bus or subway, the hundreds of Afrikan-owned vans on Flatbush alone are an unpublicized Afro-transit system competing successfully with the subsidized euro-government transit system in the heart of the metropolis. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was a world sensation, but this is going on unnoticed under the snow.
While it’s mostly Afrikan-Caribbean immigrants who do vans on Flatbush and Afrikan guys from the Sudan who drive the livery cars (unlicensed taxi services) in that area, there are unlicensed vans, buses and cars providing public transit in all boroughs of New York City and out on Long Island. Run by whites, also, as well as a dozen other nationalities. The NYPD office of Management Analysis and Planning says that their euro-transit system is losing “Nearly $1 million a day” from illegal carriers. Some MTA bus routes have admittedly lost more than 15% of their riders to Afro-transit.(108)
The MTA has “fear of the Black Planet,” and has its transit cops coming up out of the subway to issue thousands of summons to Afro-transit vans, hoping to harass them out of business. It’s not even a question whether the euro-government could shut it all down. Militarily speaking, the NYPD could do it in one day, to say nothing of the 1st Armored Division. But politically speaking, at a time when capitalism isn’t even pretending to stop drug sales, muggings and burglaries, to do Operation Desert Storm on Black working people providing a needed human service, would raise consciousness too much.
So both sides are maneuvering, with the police writing tickets and trying to harass it back underground. Maybe tomorrow they’ll make a big move and maybe no, in the neo-colonial environment where power, borders and laws have no exact lines. Afro-transit has created itself just as Hip-Hop did, probing the limits day-to-day. This is no big deal, just a small example from daily life. It is the indeterminate environment the oppressed learn to take advantage of, sink or swim. In this chaos, we can do much more than we thought we could, just as others can do it to us.
Nowadays, there are a lot of hopeful illusions going around about multiculturalism; hopeful but definitely not harmless. Illusions that are helping to determine life or death. Nor are these postmodernist illusions any accident. People deliberately misunderstand multiculturalism—if only subconsciously—because of the attractive pull at the core of capitalist culture, which is parasitism. This is the question we’ve been heading for all along.
We’ve been caught off guard by it, but in the neo-colonial transition the culture of parasitism that used to be characteristic primarily of euro-patriarchal society has hopped all kinds of dividing lines, and has now spread deeply into other races, nations, and genders. Materially, this is because parasitism itself is an extreme factor of class, while neo-colonialism has recast social relationships by raising up new capitalistic subcultures, stratas and classes in the formerly colonized. Blurring and mixing up old dividing lines. Cross-over culture at work.
Vincent Chin had never heard of multiculturalism or neo-colonialism before a white man beat him to death with a baseball bat outside a Burger King in Detroit. But that’s what he died from. Chin, a 27 year-old Chinese-Amerikan engineer, was being taken out for his traditional pre-wedding “bachelor party” by his friends that night in 1982.
They were happily drinking at a topless bar, watching Black and white women undress, when two blue-collar white men, thinking the party were the Japanese who had cost them their auto plant jobs, called Chin racist names. He got up and challenged them to a fight. But when he got outside, Chin discovered in horror that his fellow Amerikans weren’t going to play fair. Chin ran away on foot, pursued by the two in their car. Unable to find help in his state, Chin was finally cornered and beaten to death.
The Asian-Amerikan movement got upset when a white Michigan judge expressed sympathy for the white defendants, and let them off with probation. A “Justice For Vincent Chin” committee was formed. There were protests, speeches, press conferences with Congress, the whole routine except for renting Al Sharpton. Years later in 1987 the murderer was retried on Federal Civil Rights violation charges—and acquitted. As he said happily, it was just a barroom fight that got blown out of proportion. End of case.
Do you know, the Asian-Amerikan movement still hasn’t figured it out (the glory of integration is that former Third World people get to be as stupid as white men are). Hey, Vincent Chin already got justice. It wasn’t nice, but it was just. If you want to be like white men, if you want to hang out in porno bars with them, if you want to get drunk and roll in the gutter with them—then it’s on you. This isn’t Mao we’re talking about here—you gotta deal with the consequences of your own class-cultural choices. It won’t be any other way, anyway, no matter how much someone complains about it.
Get real. Those protesting middle-class Asian-Amerikans weren’t that upset. If they were, the millions of them would have brought some justice to that white settler, who wasn’t exactly hiding out in Detroit there. Two young Chinese-Amerikan women film-makers even hung out for days with the killer in his home, doing an “anti-racist” documentary on him. If they were that upset, they could have pulled a .45 out of their camera bag and expressed him to redneck heaven (but no, they didn’t have a grant for that).
The thing is, middle-class Asians wanted the government to do the hard part for them. That’s their whole point, that protection should come from the oppressor—maybe in the mail like your credit card. When nothing happens, they say “it’s racism.” No, it’s beyond racism. It’s the real Multiculturalism. Listen up. It’s just like when whites protest that they’re being edged out of their customary goody positions by Asians or other immigrants—the government isn’t even listening. Could care less.
Last year’s freshman class at UCLA was 40% Asian, marking their replacement of euro-amerikans as the largest racial group (while the number of entering Black students was quietly cut in 1991 by 23%—Asians aren’t protesting that, are they?). The University of California system as a whole is already 26% Asian, and everyone admits that in the 21st century whites are just going to be another minority there. Formerly white-majority City College of New York is so Third World now that the student Italian-American club has mostly Latin and West Indian members. This is the ticket to real jobs, the middle-class “union card” we’re talking about. Whites are loudly whining about their kids being unfairly out-competed academically by hordes of “over-achiever” Asian students. And you know, imperialism doesn’t care one way or the other. Increasingly, it’s if little Whitey Jr. can’t cut it, then later for him.
Under neo-colonialism, imperialism is going to lay back and let everybody, parasites included, fight it out. It has little alternative, really. If it took 500,000 U.S. bozos, NATO, Islamic men’s armies, plus jet squadrons and a giant “U.N.” naval fleet just to temporarily settle Iraq vs. Kuwait (two small artificial nations most folks never heard of before), how can imperialism simultaneously handle Corsicans vs. French, Sikhs vs. Hindus, Tutsi vs. Hutus, Sunni vs. Shiite, Canadians vs. Quebec, Clarence vs. Anita, and ten thousand other conflicts? And why should it? Do you know how many wars and rumbles there are right now?
No, they’ve given up trying to impose even their old-style order on the world, and are letting their nations and races and genders fight it out while they lay back in the cut and manipulate the chaos as profitably as possible. Unless it directly attacks their interests or de-stabilizes things too much, Imperialism is forcing everyone to go freestyle. This is the beat of the neo-colonial age.
It’s all come as a big shock to the Civil Rights babies, to the generation who grew up after colonialism in amerikkka had been replaced by neo-colonialism—i.e. civil rights, integration, and equal opportunity.
White women are confused with our new Pandora benefit package. Along with our box of newly opened up career opportunities, is packed sexual harassment, women-hating violence of all kinds, rape and murders. This mixes up our synapses. We think, if we’re getting political rights, equal opportunity, condos and all, then we assume we’re supposed to get more protection and safety, too. But it’s the reverse.
The ruling class program is that if you want to leave the harem and compete out there in the big world, then you have to take your chances with everyone else. If you can’t defend yourself, then it’s all on you. Big Daddy in Washington will go through the motions, but he really isn’t going to hold your hand (which is what these white equal opportunity women really want, to have it both ways). Violent men get equal opportunity, too. It’s the real Multiculturalism.
While there are many different nationalities, races and genders in the u.s., the supposedly different cultures in multiculturalism don’t like to admit what they have in common, the glue to it all—parasitism. Right now, there’s both anger among the oppressed and a milling around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully, what it means. The key is the common need to break with parasitism. Which is a hard thing.
While recognition of Black Genocide is openers to being a player and not a pawn in amerikkkan politics, that alone is not sufficient to grasp what is in motion.
The most significant side of Black Genocide right now is the paradox of parasitism—of how many New Afrikan people have an individual and class interest in Black Genocide. Are dependent for their well-being on Black Genocide. To understand anything scientifically, we have to see it as a paradox, an unfolding contradiction. In that light, it’s pathetic to hear old nationalists from the 1960s still talk that stuff about “Black Unity”, when it’s precisely that unconscious unity around wrong principles that prevents the Black Nation from finding life or death answers, from saving itself.
You think those guys dealing drugs don’t know they’re helping capitalism kill people off? They may be doomed, but they’re not out of it. What they say is “Hey, it’s too bad, but somebody’s going to do it, so it might as well be me who gets the ’benz and the Alpine.” Yet and again, how’s that different from the “good” people with Master’s degrees and Mastercards, who might belong to NAACP, NOI, or Jacks and Jills, whose home and cars in the suburbs comes from being a supervisor in the social agency.
Maybe they’re even worse, since they cry “urban crisis” and talk that talk about “endangered species”—but only to pressure for more government funding for their bureaucracy (and capitalist welfare-type agencies can’t be any answer, since they’re part of the problem). They aren’t professionals in any way at stopping genocide—to name the precise problem—but only professional at helping capitalism pretend to be doing something about its intensifying destruction. Intellectual crack.
Only different on the outside from those “angry” Hip-Hop artists who know inside that the message they send out is in part propaganda conditioning men to violently attack Afrikan women. If you read up on your Malcolm, but now rap about “fucked that bitch” and “made that pussy pay”, you know what you’re doing even if you don’t want to admit it. But someone’s going to get those big bucks for doing it, so why not you? euro-capitalism can’t very well have white men do commercials urging the genocidal terrorism and repression of Black women and children, can they? No, gotta have some Black men do it. And if on the side you mix in some fast talk about shoot-outs with Porky or admiring Afro heroes, then you can claim to just be “angry.” “Anger” is a neo-colonial commodity now, too.
Point is, there are significant numbers of neo-colonized Afrikan-Amerikans today whose class interest is in going along with Black Genocide. Under neo-colonialism, their individual careers, interests and survival were unbundled from the common braid of their former colonized people. They’re sorry about it, worried about it, but aren’t going to fight their own “American” interests any more than the Jewish community in the u.s. was willing to risk its privileges to save those other Jews threatened by the Nazi Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s ugly, but true.
You can’t say “Black Unity” as though things haven’t changed. Folks used to say “Uncle Tom, the Preacher,” but now it’s “Uncle Tom, the Supreme Court Justice”, “Uncle Tom, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff”, “Uncle Tom, the Police Chief.” This is really a different situation, where capitalism is enrolling as citizens some of Afrikan descent while isolating many others for eventual extermination—all based on class.
A whole Afrikan-Amerikan capitalistic subculture has shot up, marked not only by tasting real money but by being so neo-colonized that it produces not a few folks too stupid to survive. Which is why you get star-fucker Desiree up in dim-witted Iron Mike’s hotel room at 2 a.m. Two folks peddling their bodies and dignity for capitalism’s show & tell games (some women think they shoulda put her moms on trial first). A young New Afrikan sister lives down the hall was saying one night how late it is for all these folks, not just Desiree and Mike but all the stupid hustlers and crimies, the dopeheads, who can’t get it together. “Maybe,we’ll have to just let them die out,” she said. The oppressed have to break with parasitism—which means dis-unity with everyone who can’t give up parasitism or won’t. By any means necessary.