Being of mixed racial background, I am void of racial culture. My mother raised me alone, without my father. He was a poor traveling white musician that she met in New Mexico. She was an indigenous woman with the blood of Lenape and Algonquian, carrying hopes into a tent in the desert. She carried psychedelics in her brain, and no birth control in her pocket.
She decided to raise me alone, closer to home in Central Jersey, where she was sure to have support from her family, friends, etc. My white dad came to visit and left twice, fleeing in the night. I was left to my native momma. She was educated enough to pour drinks for truckers and locals, waiting tables to this day, she busted her ass to make sure I got spaghetti or chicken for dinner. Often I didn’t see her, as she was drunk consistently, and worried more about her latest abusive boyfriend, then helping me with my homework. I used to hate her for that shit. Now that I have a better conceptualization of how capitalism and patriarchy operate in their complex ways, I hold much more love and respect for how she battled and struggled. Worrying about her boyfriends was worrying about me and herself, as she relied on their support for us, to fill the gap in her paycheck and social life. She hated those fucking dicks, just as much as I did.
Often I spent much of my non-school life at a sitter. It’s amazing how much abuse a person can dish out to a child that isn’t theirs. I withstood the most outrageous acts of humiliation, psychological demeaning, and even exploitation of my physical labor. During this time, I rarely saw my mother. She worked 60 – 80 hours a week in a different town about 10 miles away. Her appearance was often an act of reuniting, like revisiting an old friend. I begged for her to quit drinking, and to spend more time with me.
Taking on high school was a large task. I had no social life, I was ugly, and quite awkward. I couldn’t do my homework at home, because my mother and/or her boyfriend would be abusing each other and/or me. This led to very bad grades, and even more abuse at home as a result. Expectations of me by my mom flew through the roof, ironically in the midst of an environment that didn’t provide me the kind of support I needed to further my “education.”
Through much of this experience, one thing was apparent to me. I didn’t have a race. None. No culture. There was no space to find a sense of connection with a community. It was gone. It was so void that I didn’t even notice it. I mean, I went to Catholic School, but that kind of community didn’t exist either, due to the fact that community in the church and school meant community with “god.” This “god” did nothing to help me and my mom. Repeatedly, EVERY night I spent much time in the dark, hands clasped together, calling the name of Jesus Christ, holy Mother Mary, Joseph, and ALL the saints, to allow my mother to become healthier, spend more time with me, for her boys to stop hitting her, etc. None of this came to fruition. I decided that my “community” with this invisible guy had to go. He just wasn’t a trustworthy fellow. When people still try to tell me about “faith,” I get the urge to get violent. Would you blame me?
As far as race was concerned, I was taught that I didn’t even exist. The way I discovered I was indigenous went down like this:
6th Grade history class. We were given a project to do, in which we were to paint a picture of the flag of our ‘nationality.’ My teacher seemed to assume that I knew what the fuck she was talking about. Everyone else did, that was sure, as they scurried to grab their colored pencils, markers, and paints. I sat in silence and looked confused. I was afraid of being made fun of by the other kids for not knowing what seemed to be common knowledge, so I decided not to ask for help. My teacher finally noticed my inactivity, and asked me what was wrong. I crept up to her desk and whispered, embarrassingly, “I don’t know my nationality.” She laughed and looked at my light skin, and replied, “ You must be from Europe. Hmmm. You mean your parents don’t teach you your people’s history? Go home tonight and ask your dad where his family came from.”
I didn’t even try to go into the fact that I didn’t have a dad. I just nodded in acceptance of her order and proceeded to do my homework instead. That night, my mother, in a drunken daze, confusingly decided to apply her idea of history into me.
“Tell your teacher, yer from here.”
I inquired where my father was from.
“A mud farm in Louisiana.”
But where is your family from mom?
She smiled, chuckled…“They’re from your living room.” (Ironically, I could’ve taken this literally. The blood of Lenape lay in the soil of the banks of the Deleware river. My town was built on the Deleware.)
But I can’t paint a flag for my living room.
“Tell that teacher yer an ‘Indian,’ and that you’re from ‘America,’ go paint a picture of that shit!”
I understood nothing. So I went into the kitchen and drew the red-white n blue. I carried it to my history teacher the next day, proud to complete my assignment.
She looked grim at me. Her frown accentuated.
“Why did you paint this flag, this is the U.S. flag. Where did your dad say your ‘people’ were from?”
I proudly proclaimed, that “I’m an Indian.”
She took this in for a moment. To this day, I swear she must’ve been scared by her own response. I truly believe she chose her words VERY carefully, and thought about having to live with her own convictions. The thing that scares me the most now, when I look back on the situation, is that I think she struggled real hard not to believe in herself.
“That’s not true. Indians don’t exist anymore. We killed them all off a long time ago.”
What goes on inside a person’s head, when they reluctantly identify themselves with a force of genocide? How do they contain their posture with such composure, and stoicism? How can they pass a lie like this in a furthering act of displacement?
I don’t have a people. She is right. The U.S. media machine works hard to homogenize us into a blurry ‘whiteness’ or ‘other.’ How do I resist this occupation on how I identify? I don’t have a dwindling community to fall back on. I don’t have a nationality or even a race to stand together with and raise my fist in defiance and pride. I don’t have a place on a map that I can point to, pack my bags, and find my past. I can’t organize with my people, because my association with them has now been erased.
How does identity affect me then? Now that I have a better understanding of resistance and its potential, how do I find my place to fit in, where people feel like I belong with them, as they do with me? This has posed a problem when dealing with racism, and organizing for anti-racism within communities of color, and anarchists of color.
I have found that the answers most organizers fall back on are formulaic. They’ve made up their minds, that in order to deal with racism, you must struggle with ‘your people’ and organize autonomously. Those with white privilege take cues from these communities, and work to “reeducate” other white people. This helps me NONE.
I have found that my experience in organizing around these principles have run into limits. I haven’t even seen too many short or long-term results. Especially since muuch of my anti-racist organizing has been me organizing with other people of color, around issues that affect “our” communities. First of all, I don’t have a racial community to defend and organize in. They are a scattered people that I am quite uncomfortable in claiming an association of experience and struggle with them in a unilateral way. Another problem with this assumption is that it’s just ‘our’ problem. I believe that those that are welcome in the ‘white’ club are affected by racism as well. Sure, in some small material ways, and a handful of psychological ways, working class descendents from europe gain power through ‘whiteness.’ I don’t think it is in their best interests though. This lie of ‘whiteness’ is clearly a separation dedicated to suppressing working class white people’s class solidarity and identity as well as people of color’s. During colonial times, this was much different, but race and class have changed drastically over the centuries.
It has become clear to me, that my experience and struggle has left me with many identities. At the center of this collection of identities, I feel the most affinity with working class people. I grew up with and shared jobs, space, school classrooms, food, love, hot nights, and hazy summer afternoons on front porches with working class people of almost all nations and races that can possibly be in this world. The way in which I’ve experienced racism directly has been through various means. I’ll get a job much less often, if I put my race as “mixed,” or “Native” instead of simply, “caucasian.” So I lie.
I’ve had MANY encounters with murderous white nationalists and neo-nazis of various sects that have made it clear that they know I’m not aryan, and that they are willing to attack me. They have numerous times. I am forced to fight back and defend myself.
I’ve been left out of many radical organizations, that identify themselves in a binary way of ‘white’ and ‘not.’ I don’t fit in either, simply because explaining where I fit in is an adventure in itself. I’m tired of it, as it’s humiliating, and stressful, and I sick of ‘proud-to-be-darker-than-you-people of color’ worrying that I ‘pinken’ their group up too much, and guilty white people saying that I’m not white so why would I want to be my own “ally?”
So much for alliances, huh?
My struggle has always been rooted in paying the bills, feeding myself (and others at times,) holding a job long enough, staying away from dope, and too much liquor, and worrying myself about my lack of health and insurance to maintain it. I’ve stood besides peoples of all races and nationalities while being pulled over, harassed, detained, arrested, beaten, and targeted by police.
I see the statistics that point to how some races experience repressions more so than others in various ways. I believe these stats to be nebulous, and non-consistent. The rules have been changing around the world throughout all of history. Europeans have enslaved people for centuries, but they don’t own the copyright for slavery. There have been ruling classes worldwide that have taken slaves in warfare. Jews, Christians, Pagans, and Muslims alike have controlled empires that thrived on slaves won through warfare. No one nationality or race is immune to greed and power! We would be foolish to think so. The ruling class will always shape-shift its own policies in order to survive. I see our struggle to end racism as one that should transcend the present. We must destroy the class society, as it is the root of all forms of slavery, from outright chattel to stay-at-home wives, from child labor to a 40-hr work week, from indentured servitude to the high school grad joining the armed forces, due to lack of education and employment options.
White supremecy isn’t the only form of racism that exists on the planet. It is the most obvious and extreme form of racism that exists in the U.S. and much of Europe right now, but it doesn’t stand alone. Many Southeastern Asian countries have ruling classes that discriminate against certain nationalities within their borders. In the Middle East, there are countless nationalities crossing over man-made state lines, suffering repression from the current party or dictatorship that “represents” the ruling nationality at the moment. There is violence between dozens of various African nationalities within many nation/states on the continent. Russia has used racism and anti-Islamic propaganda as an excuse to continue assimilating the labor and resources of their former “soviet” satellites. One just needs to look at the West Bank to see the unique occupation that exists there.
All of these are examples of racist policies set by current ruling classes. I repeat – CLASSES. The ability for one group of people to have a relative power over another has always been based on the equation of how any one group exists in relationship to the outcome of their production. The variable in the power equation has always been “which race,” and “how” racism is used to divide the opposing class(es). The constant in the equation has always been the existence of classes themselves. Caste society. The economical, political, cultural, and/or religious acceptance and support of a ruling class exploiting the labor of a subordinate class(es), controlling production and distribution, and maintaining superiority through the protection of private property.
Throughout the world, and throughout history, racism has always been an excuse used by ruling classes to divide the opposing working classes within and outside of the states they anchor themselves in. We are even moving toward an anchor-less international ruling class. One that can dispose of their national alliances at will, and buy whole countries out as if they were playing god with the globe. I forsee that this makes Internationalism the most important movement in the coming century. In order to take down this capitalist madness we must understand how the ruling class(es) operated in the past, and how it(they) is(are) changing policies and tools to manipulate our minds and bodies worldwide. We must not fall into the mistake of limiting our view of racism to reflect the policies exclusively within any one state and national borders.
Often, I see people of color claiming a certain issue as something that is ‘ours’ more so than other folks. I can understand the desire to create a space where people would want to feel like their voices must be central to resisting a certain type of oppression, but often the act of creating a culture of absolutely little or no tolerance for dialogue at all, stifles any chance for mutual empowerment between people of different races. NO, ending racism and class society is EVERYONE’S fucking problem. It’s EVERYONE’S experience, and EVERYONE must deal with it. If we truly intend on winning this fucking battle, we must get past how we are told we are different, and how we tell each other we are different, and see that oppression exists on so many levels, that we can’t just chalk up issues as being monolithically exclusive to any one race, or groupings of races. No ONE race in the world, or even in the U.S., is being beat down by capitalism exclusively. We all are.
“Comfortatability” will not bring revolution. Having open dialogue with people that benefit from skin privilege is a part of our struggle. We need to deal with that. Sometimes we may even have to get into fucking arguments. So be it. We have far more difficult uphill battles to win against ruling class regimes, so if we can’t sit still and put up with a bit of ignorance from white working class comrades once in a while, then we might as well give the fuck up. Problem is: WE CAN’T, being reactionary is not an option if we intend on liberating each other and ourselves.
Part of building class struggle is creating dialogue about common interests with working class “whites.” They are our neighbors, our workmates, our friends, sometimes even in our families. They are, will be, and must be part of the revolutionary struggle. Sometimes they can act stupid, say stupid things, and not understand us to the point of being ‘offensive,’ but unless they literally have a weapon in their hands, threatening to attack us, they are being far less ‘offensive’ than the ruling class does daily to exploit and opppress us. They are our allies, even when they are assholes, and even when they make us feel ‘uncomfortable.’ We gotta struggle with that, ya know?
The fact that I wasn’t raised with any sense of belonging to any racial or national culture, combined with the fact that I believe that, in order to bring down patriarchy, racism and capitalism, we must think past “people of color,” I feel an identity and an alliance with something of a higher common denominator. I am forced to identify with the working people around the world. When I mean working people, I also mean those not traditionally considered a “worker,” in the Western World, such as the single mother taking that extra hour to put on the right amount of makeup to meet the beauty standard for tips. I mean the unemployed picking up recyclable bottles for a return deposit. These people are working too.
I have and will struggle with the poorest of the poor. The hungry, the homeless, the transitional, the precarious, the beautifully ugly, the laid off, the stay-at-home mommas, the unskilled, the street-smart, the survivors, the sex workers, the hood rats, the addicts, those with nothing to lose. These people have been peoples from Argentina, Ireland, Cambodia, Mali, Quebec, Jamaica, Italy, Ukraine, Mexico, Israel, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Palestine, Germany, China, Columbia, Iceland, Korea, England, right here in the U.S.
My race is my class.
– Floyd Peterson
