Readings for Black History Month, several days late

My recent reading has included Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. It first came to my attention when Upping the Anti totally missed the point and Karl Kersplebedeb defended it.*

I can see why Upping the Anti didn't like it, as it says some Not Very Nice Things about white radicals. (Before someone leaps on me, yes, I know that there are people of colour in Autonomy & Solidarity. But it's still dominated by the sort of framework that Sakai savages.) The book is essentially a catalogue of betrayals by white liberals and leftists, and it's valuable because of that. It's well-researched and Sakai is one of the few writers to tackle the trade union movement with a race analysis, and he uncovers a whole hidden, unpleasant history. The Not Very Nice Things he brings up are, unfortunately, quite true.

And, even when he's writing about the early history of the U.S., the race dynamics he talks about seem completely contemporary; a trade union movement that ignores the most oppressed in favour of small layer of privileged white workers, waves of "Americanization," divide-and-conquer tactics, and a white working class that lacks class consciousness. It's a harsh read. One doesn't want to read about one's socialist heroes (Eugene Debs, sigh) harbouring some incredibly backwards ideas. But they did. And so you should read this.

To get this out of the way, he has a few unkind things to say about the IWW, though not as much as I'd feared. (You can read that excerpt here.) In the context of what he says about trade unions and other primarily white organizations, though (not to mention a lot of Black organizations), he's fairly positive about the Wobs, referring to us as the last genuinely proletarian and radical white group in the U.S. His criticism is overwhelmingly organizational (because the Wobs are an industrial union, not a party), which can be grouped in with friendly debate between communists and anarcho-syndicalists. The isolated instances of racism are just that—isolated—and the IWW, together with such illustrious groups as the St. Patrick's Battalion and Irish Republicans, rate relatively high for honkies. (Of course, he attributes this to the influence of European radicals rather than homegrown white American radicals. But this is probably accurate.)

I have some problems with his analysis, of course. He ascribes psychological motives to masses of people; attributing to malice what could very well be explaind by ignorance or blindness to privilege. He attempts to divide history into heroes and villains, but reality is never so neat. When he describes compromises that Black socialist leaders made with white America, for example, he never sees these failings as legitimate survival strategies. Nothing but nationalist separatism is good enough.

I also wished that he'd talk more about the "model minority" fallacy, given that he's from a Japanese background. He touches on it very briefly at the end, but I wanted some more contemporary material. Ah well. Basically, he's strident and dogmatic, but he needs to be, because he's primarily writing about unexamined territory.

Speaking of demolishing myths around race and colonialism, I also read The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal by Afua Cooper. Oh, hey, you didn't know that Canada had slavery? That's understandable; no one talks about it. I am pretty sure that I didn't know that slavery existed in Canada until some time after I'd graduated high school.

This book is also harsh, and also a must-read; Cooper does an amazing job of reconstructing colonial Canada and the story of a remarkable and heroic woman who resisted slavery in the only way she could. She argues that Angélique's story, related primarily through transcripts of her trial and torture, constitutes the first written slave narrative in North America. It's a different sort of history, focused and filtered through one woman's experience, and considerably more powerful than the usual sort of historical book as a result.

Highly recommended, and it should be compulsory reading in history classes.

* Why this is weird: Autonomy & Solidarity claim to be anti-imperialist commies of some sort and Kersplebedeb is an anarchist. Sakai's politics are closer to the former than the latter.

Readings for Black History Month, several days late

My recent reading has included Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. It first came to my attention when Upping the Anti totally missed the point and Karl Kersplebedeb defended it.*

I can see why Upping the Anti didn't like it, as it says some Not Very Nice Things about white radicals. (Before someone leaps on me, yes, I know that there are people of colour in Autonomy & Solidarity. But it's still dominated by the sort of framework that Sakai savages.) The book is essentially a catalogue of betrayals by white liberals and leftists, and it's valuable because of that. It's well-researched and Sakai is one of the few writers to tackle the trade union movement with a race analysis, and he uncovers a whole hidden, unpleasant history. The Not Very Nice Things he brings up are, unfortunately, quite true.

And, even when he's writing about the early history of the U.S., the race dynamics he talks about seem completely contemporary; a trade union movement that ignores the most oppressed in favour of small layer of privileged white workers, waves of "Americanization," divide-and-conquer tactics, and a white working class that lacks class consciousness. It's a harsh read. One doesn't want to read about one's socialist heroes (Eugene Debs, sigh) harbouring some incredibly backwards ideas. But they did. And so you should read this.

To get this out of the way, he has a few unkind things to say about the IWW, though not as much as I'd feared. (You can read that excerpt here.) In the context of what he says about trade unions and other primarily white organizations, though (not to mention a lot of Black organizations), he's fairly positive about the Wobs, referring to us as the last genuinely proletarian and radical white group in the U.S. His criticism is overwhelmingly organizational (because the Wobs are an industrial union, not a party), which can be grouped in with friendly debate between communists and anarcho-syndicalists. The isolated instances of racism are just that—isolated—and the IWW, together with such illustrious groups as the St. Patrick's Battalion and Irish Republicans, rate relatively high for honkies. (Of course, he attributes this to the influence of European radicals rather than homegrown white American radicals. But this is probably accurate.)

I have some problems with his analysis, of course. He ascribes psychological motives to masses of people; attributing to malice what could very well be explaind by ignorance or blindness to privilege. He attempts to divide history into heroes and villains, but reality is never so neat. When he describes compromises that Black socialist leaders made with white America, for example, he never sees these failings as legitimate survival strategies. Nothing but nationalist separatism is good enough.

I also wished that he'd talk more about the "model minority" fallacy, given that he's from a Japanese background. He touches on it very briefly at the end, but I wanted some more contemporary material. Ah well. Basically, he's strident and dogmatic, but he needs to be, because he's primarily writing about unexamined territory.

Speaking of demolishing myths around race and colonialism, I also read The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal by Afua Cooper. Oh, hey, you didn't know that Canada had slavery? That's understandable; no one talks about it. I am pretty sure that I didn't know that slavery existed in Canada until some time after I'd graduated high school.

This book is also harsh, and also a must-read; Cooper does an amazing job of reconstructing colonial Canada and the story of a remarkable and heroic woman who resisted slavery in the only way she could. She argues that Angélique's story, related primarily through transcripts of her trial and torture, constitutes the first written slave narrative in North America. It's a different sort of history, focused and filtered through one woman's experience, and considerably more powerful than the usual sort of historical book as a result.

Highly recommended, and it should be compulsory reading in history classes.

* Why this is weird: Autonomy & Solidarity claim to be anti-imperialist commies of some sort and Kersplebedeb is an anarchist. Sakai's politics are closer to the former than the latter.