White Lies

In Counterpunch last week, was an article about the roots of white supremacy in the US. It could, I believe, apply almost equally here in Australia. It concerns a refrain I’ve heard before; “the white male is being vilified” as though under dire threat of extinction. Or the threat of Australia being taken over by ‘others’ as though there aren’t fifth generation Muslims or Asians here, only good old convict or Anglo stock. Why is it that funding minorities or seeking more equality for some groups is seen as a loss, as though the ‘fair’ pot is only so big and because white privilege is so entrenched in the (particularly male) psyche, it’s a threat to their right or way of life? It’s scarcity thinking- like the hoarding of toilet paper. And it’s fuelling male fury.

Perhaps the abomination in Atlanta this week comes under this umbrella when a poor white guy ‘had a really bad day’ and murdered 8 people. One article I read by Moira Donegan showed great insight which shed light on one of the causes of white male supremacy; that machismo is all about power and superiority- over ‘weaker’ men, women, ‘lesser races’… Attractive women caused Aaron Long to feel horny and as he couldn’t control it, it was their fault so they were disempowering him so they had to be punished. This is how cartels and gangs behave and think. He has no self control so his failure is externalised. His reputation is tarnished and punishment has to be meted out to maintain his ego.

Eight people died.

But as always, I digress. The article by Walden Bello is fascinating, tracing racist thinking back to John Locke’s economic and social philosophy that took such an ardent hold on the frontier consciousness and has, for every generation since, kept a stranglehold on our subconscious. And that’s when the trouble started…

You know how I know? Because I'm ashamed to say, that this very morning I awoke with a start, realising (from a dream perhaps) that I have always secretly assumed that men who have female children aren’t as ‘potent’ or virile as men who have male babies. That their testosterone is somehow deficient. Where. The. Fuck. Did. That. Come. From?

It’s been a quiet little seed at the back of my mind. A judgement pulled out when advised of the makeup of a man’s children’s gender. I'm ashamed. I admit it. You know I'm an ardent feminist or humanist…God, the hypocrisy. Perhaps I too would have beheaded Anne Boleyn because she couldn’t produce a male heir. But after reading Bello’s article, it suddenly hit home how wickedly subversive the unconscious is, peppering our deepest held biases with subliminal messages of long dead generations past.

Locke’s thinking, while enlightening and wondrous in many ways, was based on the assumption that individualism was freedom and that the capitalist dream was based on the sanctity of property ownership and was tied to the notion of taking the land for your own and ‘working it’.

“This attachment to individual ownership of small property is deeply embedded in the collective cultural psyche of America…”

It’s what the Great American Dream is based on, despite it being utter tosh for the past couple of generations. It applies equally to Australians. Not only must you grab this land (read suburban house and garden) and work religiously each weekend on its maintenance and upkeep, you also have to ensure that your neighbours do the same as part of the unspoken social contract. Because someone’s sloppy upkeep, (unmown lawns, rubbish, car bodies, discarded furniture…) is not only an eyesore which taints your morning constitutional with Brutus, but can bring down the house prices of the surrounding neighbourhood. It is fiercely contested in vicious verbal battles on the nature strip and in the small claims courts. We are at heart, Hartz’s “petit bourgeois settler” who still carries the peasant’s meagre desire to own a piece of land and fear the loss of that over any aspirations to accumulate more.

But the reality in today’s economy is that many will never own their own piece of settler’s paradise, doomed to forever renting or house sharing. Or horror, living with mum and dad til they kick the bucket and you can take over the last vestige of the generation who could buy their own homes and become land owning gentry yourself.

But something I didn’t know about Locke was his attitude to the Indigenous which flowered from the afore mentioned theory at the heart of Capitalist philosophy, tied as it is to the sanctity of land ownership by working the land:

“Locke saw the Native Americans as creatures who could not be considered property owners since they merely inhabited the land and forests but did not cultivate the soil... To Locke, in fact, the Native American could be equated with “one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security” and who “therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger.” Locke thus provided a most potent ethical justification for racial genocide.”

So racism clearly embedded in the settler’s psyche (see the alliteration there? Tricky huh) becomes the norm as it so often does because, well everyone thinks this way. It’s the accepted wisdom by rule of numbers. Much like the Aussie version of Terra Nullius. And right here, people began to band by way of race instead of the afore practiced European class system.

But there’s something sensible in banding with your ‘class’. There is a shared experience that others can’t understand, hence the sistrenhood and brotherhood of the homeless for example. There’s less judgement and more understanding. It’s how the French Revolution happened- when enough women had lost enough babies to starvation, their shared grief galvanized a rush on the Bastille in fury at Louis’ blatant disregard to their suffering. As with most monarchs before him he was hell bent on enjoying the Divine Right of Rule but forgot all about the accompanying Divine Duty to his subjects. Rights + Responsiblities. Hand in hand. Matching pair. Quid Pro Quo. There is power in numbers to match the power of the ruling class- particularly in a Democracy when pissed off voters= political party beware. Seventy million people voted for Trump because they’re pissed off with the US political system. They were sadly misguided if they thought that a child of the ruling class would for two seconds consider their needs and act accordingly. But there you have it. Race versus class.

The poor whites will actually band with white rulers rather than risk the liberal left because they’re seen to be ousting them from their seat of paltry power and giving it to the Black people. Funny isn’t it. The ruling class are still running a feudal system but the peasants can’t see it. They’ll defend their little bit of tenement misery against the ‘invasion’ of Blacks even while the smiling white leaders cut their funding even more, forcing their kids out of decent education, leaving their parents outside the ER without private health insurance because somehow they have some perceived white privilege to lose.

It’s the Great White Lie and it’s fecking tragic.