The term “privileges” was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. But – they have more to lose than their chains they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor”. White workers might “have a ‘world to win’. The “ only way possible” for “white workers to fight against white supremacy” was “by repudiating their white-skin privileges”. White workers were co-conspirators with their bosses in depriving Blacks and people of the Third World of their rights. ”Īn “opportunistic ‘contract’ resulted”, according to Ignatin, “between the exploiters and a part of the exploited, at the expense of the rest of the exploited”. The terms.are these: you white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force, and we will repay you befitting your white skin. “The US ruling class has made a deal with the mis-leaders of American labor, and through them with the masses of white workers. Two long-time members of the Provisional Organizing Committee, Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen, would become known for their 1967 pamphlet White Blindspot, presenting the arguments for white-skin privilege theory: These two views formed the political context in which white-skin privilege theory developed. The Provisional Organizing Committee’s split was based on two fundamental policies: defence against all criticism of Stalin’s anti-working-class oppression, and establishment of a separate Black republic in the South as the answer to American racism. The specific use of white-skin privilege concepts, which date back to US slavery, to analyse oppression began in one tiny section of the Stalinist left, the obscure Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist Leninist Party, a 1958 split from the Communist Party. The roots of privilege theory extend deep into the factional political atmosphere of early American Maoism. White-skin privilege theory would come to play a major role in the destruction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by extreme sectarians. Only later, during the tragic crisis and disintegration of the New Left at the end of the 1960s, were privilege politics able to gain a hearing – among white, middle-class students, most of whom had had no involvement in the civil rights movement. The privilege model was unable to find a foothold among the hundreds of thousands of anti-racists involved in the country’s massive and often integrated struggles for freedom. Many of today’s well-intentioned advocates are unaware of the theory’s class roots – roots that continue to profoundly impact privilege politics today.Īt the height of the American civil rights movement, when theories of oppression might be expected to have some resonance, privilege politics were virtually unknown. The privilege model of oppression, often encountered in today’s liberal and radical circles, has evolved since the 1960s. The article was first published in Socialist Worker in 2015. Cohn was an activist and revolutionary socialist in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and one of the first women accepted into the carpenters’ union. She became a labour and civil rights lawyer in the 1980s. This article by Candace Cohn outlines the origins and problems of privilege theory.
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