A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.)
The comment, on an article about the George Floyd demonstrations, reads in part (in my translation):
One good writer said that modern, so-called civilized society suffers from the strange mental illness of xenophilia, when foreigners are preferred to one’s own, when a brazen aggressive boor cannot be caught because, you see, he belongs to a minority there, which was once oppressed, and so on. And if the disease had not progressed, it is unlikely that anyone from the outside could provoke and manipulate the current protests.
Aside from the (obviously discrediting) fact that there is no “foreigner” and no “one’s own” in the equation here, so xenophilia has little if anything to do with this, the point I want to focus on is that the George Floyd protests concern only “a minority, which was once oppressed, and so on.” (The “and so on” is brilliant, isn’t it?)
We might call this the “What does any of it have to do with me?” response. (“I am color-blind.” “I have black friends.” And so on.) It’s probably the most widespread response by people whose skin color reflects their privilege. Here it is connected to another response, the “it’s only (distant and long-dead) history” trope. (That the same person is likely to invoke historical injustices when it comes to Ukrainian-Russian relations or some other more personally meaningful identity-politics inflection point need hardly be mentioned.)
The problem with this is that it ignores the fundamental fact that’s at stake in the George Floyd protests. This is that racism against African-Americans is not a minor historical artifact, one that concerns only a minority, and only those of that minority who continue to obsess and brood over the long-gone past as opposed to living fully in present-day reality.
On the contrary, it is part of the foundational truth on which this nation was built. The United States of America was founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. It may sound trite to say this, but these are foundational truths onto which the country’s foundational myths have been imposed, violently and otherwise. They are still with us today, because Americans still live their foundational myths — they invoke them every day of their lives, and they contest them deeply. And because their effects still impinge on people’s lives today (as all too many African-Americans know).
Why should this be relevant to observers in Ukraine, or Pakistan, Bolivia, Australia, or anywhere? The reason is only a little less obvious, so let’s identify it.
For all its flaws and all its slippings in the last few years, the United States is still obviously a key player, and in many ways the key national player, in the world. It is certainly the most prominent, loudest, and most imperially successful nation of the last century; in that it has yet to be replaced.
Perhaps more importantly, the foundational mythos of the United States is very closely related to the foundational mythos of the modern world: democracy, freedom (individual, religious, et al), human and civil rights, private property, scientific reason, and all the rest — all are obviously connected to the global order that is and has been spreading, and being contested, in every part of the world today and for the last few hundred years.
And to the extent that these things are all intimately connected to colonialism, imperialism, slavery, genocide, patriarchy, and much else, we are all still living out their tensions.
It’s not that we cannot have one set (the desirables) without the other (the undesirables), modernity without its “shadow.” It’s that, wherever we happen to be situated in the world, all these things came to us in tightly woven packages, and unraveling those packages — determining what of them we may want, what of them we reject, what of them was already ours or never left us in the first place — is something we are all still actively doing. (Of course, that’s a gross oversimplification: they came in waves over long periods of time. “We” may have been part of their coming, or not. Etc.)
As I’ve argued before, the tension between some form of “tradition” and some form of “modernity” is arguably as close to being a universal binary, one that structures people’s global and local identities, as any. Assuming that these things have already been decided “long ago” is both inaccurate and tone-deaf to the realities of people’s lives. It is a kind of blindness that is enabled by one’s privilege, racial or otherwise — for instance, belonging to a group that doesn’t, as a matter of course, get taken to be “foreign,” or as “deviant,” or as “naturally” prone to criminality, or whatever.
In other words: to understand the world we share — fractiously, contentiously, struggling at every step to figure out how much of it each of us gets to share, with whom and at what cost — we need to understand where that world came from. Globality, capitalism, modernity… all these cannot be understood apart from the colonialism, slavery, imperialism, et al. that not only accompanied them but often facilitated them, and that have had to be wrenched out of them (quite incompletely) as their present forms have been negotiated and shaped.
If racism is still an open and festering wound at the heart of the United States of America today (which it is), its analogues — colonialism and coloniality, most obviously — play the same role at the global level. Any way forward toward a viable common world requires working our way through these festering tensions that still mark all of us in one way or another.
