>>2704922 (You)
A lot of the issues today, is from the failures of white radicals to organize white people, to educate them. There is an apparent disconnect between white leftist intellectuals and the white proletariat they nominally seek to organize. This disjuncture cannot be understood merely as leftist tactical error, but rather as a structural positionality within academia. A significant body of white radical practice costantly exhibits what I call vicarious radicalism; the displacement of organizing energy from one's own class-racial formation toward the political struggles of others. This phenomenon operates through several mechanisms -
White radicals often enter Black and Brown organizing spaces under the guise of "showing up and letting them lead," yet this frequently functions as a status seeking behavior within leftist subcultures rather than genuine coalition building. The affective rewards of proximity to "authentic" struggle substitute for the more arduous work of class struggle within one's own community.
In the act of attaching to existing Black led movements, white radicals circumvent the difficult labor of understanding white working-class consciousness on its own terms. They need not interrogate the internal heterogeneity of whiteness, its regional, occupational, and generational fractures, the history of assimilation into whiteness across the varying euro ethnic groups, none of it, because they have outsourced their anti-racism to spaces where racial dynamics appear more transparent to them, where they can ride on the efforts of black organizers while abandoning their own communities.
The white radical's inability to "pass" in blue collar white spaces represents more than personal awkwardness or autism levels; it signals a class-privilege cultural contradiction at the heart of contemporary western leftism.
The generalizing of radical theory within the university has produced a professional-managerial class of activists whose speech patterns, cultural references, and general existence marks them as outsiders in the very spaces they seek to organize. This is not merely aesthetic problems; it represents a structural position within the division of labor that reproduces class distinction even while rhetorically being a group who is vocally opposing it.
When many white radicals do enter true proletarian white spaces, they often carry what we all might recognize as emotional labor expectations; the demand that working-class whites immediately adopt frameworks (intersectionality, white privilege, structural racism, anti-colonial) developed within academic marxist communities far outside of the white working-class's existence; in fact most of these academic hubs are way closer physically to black communities than most poor white ones. This is something that results in a mutual recoil, radicals experiencing "whiteness" as embarrassment and guilt to overcome through "voluntarism", while white workers end up experiencing Communist radicalism as condescension from privileged brats.
When this occurs, there is surely always a vacuum left by failures of communist organizing of the white worker, and this does not remain empty. It is filled by what we might call reactionary counter-organizing; the systematic recruitment of materially deprived whites into white nationalist and proto-fascist movements. White supremacist movements succeed where white leftists fail precisely because they offer ears, eyes, and general recognition rather than condemnation. They validate the lived experience of economic abandonment while providing an explanatory framework (racial antagonism) that, however false, resonates with the material reality of deindustrialization, opioid crisises, and status degradation (white people are losing some of the privileges they were bought out with, check home ownership rates vs their grandparents).
White supremacy does not merely "fool" the white working class. It offers genuine, if partial, material benefits; white leftists are structurally incapable of matching this because they refuse to engage the white working class on terms that acknowledge their specific grievances as whites.
These white radicals seem to have overlooked class suicide, and instead put white guilt at the pinnacle of organizing. That is not what I'm calling for, and I've vehemently clashed and bumped heads with plenty of your bullheaded "anti-racists" within the left. Education on racism and capital cannot mean "teaching" white workers what they should think. It requires what Paulo Freire termed dialogical praxis; starting from the concrete problems of white working-class life (job loss, healthcare, addiction) and working through how racial capitalism produces these conditions, rather than arriving with prefabricated analyses to force down people's throats.
White radical spaces must abandon the moral economy of anti-racism wherein the goal is to demonstrate how militantly anti-racist you are and instead embrace a strategic yet militant anti racism oriented toward actually shifting material power relations. This requires tolerating the discomfort of organizing among those who may hold retrograde views, with the understanding that political transformation emerges through struggle, years of education, not some spreading of your gospel.
https://libcom.org/article/amilcar-cabrals-theory-class-suicide-and-revolutionary-socialism-tom-meisenheldertl;dr I am more than aware that people who hold my ideas and conclusions on race, when white, can be at risk for some very horrible praxis when it comes to organizing poor white folk, and in part this is why we are in a situation where it seems like white poor people have been pushed right.