[Peace-discuss] Letter to the editor

[David Green]

This responds to Sundiata Cha-Jua’s “White supremacists areon a rampage” (June 4th), supporting Carol Anderson’s emphasis on “whiterage” as fundamental throughout U.S. history.
When the notion of “black rage” was popularized in the1960s, it referenced the historical, material, and social conditions thatprovoked such rage. The term was not used to define cultural pathology. That insidiouswork was concurrently done, in academic racist fashion, by the Moynihan Reportin 1965, characterizing black families as mired in a “tangle of pathology.”This flawed approach was appropriately called “blaming the victims” by itscritics.
Generalizations rooted in notions of culture, character, andemotion, whether in reference to nation, religion, race, or ethnicity, poorlyserve our understanding of social conflicts rooted in fundamental materialconditions; that is, class struggle based in the means of economic production, currentlytaking the form of neoliberal warfare of the one percent vs. the rest,globally.
The notion of “white rage” no better serves us, analyticallyand practically, than the hoary notion of “Muslim rage,” popularized by scholarBernard Lewis and his Islamophobic acolytes since 1990. Nor have lurid accusationsof collective Arab anti-Semitism served our understanding of Israel/Palestine.
Regardless of ongoing and despicable racial violence, DonaldTrump was elected because enough members of the white working class in a fewkey states correctly observed that the Democratic Party has for decadesbetrayed their efforts to lead dignified lives. Anderson and Cha-Jua aregreatly mistaken in their neglect of structural analysis for thinly-disguised racialstereotyping.
David GreenChampaign217-840-3979
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