Historical Whiteness Contra Univeral Whiteness

Gentrification and White Flight, respectively.

Do you not like “woke-ism”? Go to somewhere without it. Maybe come to North Tyneside where I am, a 95% white city. Maybe white flight is the answer. Although in South Central LA I think “woke-ism” is also not liked, so maybe move there. (African American is 50% and Latino about 40%). Do you have to worry more about woke-ism than racism? Is woke-ism racism? A lot of edgy sentences here, don’t worry, there’s more blog still—

White flight isn’t a new tendency, but it is not a popular discourse anymore, it has been replaced by its opposite. Now the discourse focuses on white arrival. The colonizing other coming into the inner city and raising prices, the gentrifiers. Having gotten married to a British woman, I have de-facto white-flighted from a city with a majority hispanic population to this area. I have noticed some differences in the discourse. The dream of white people qua whiteness which is the most obvious to me, given my significant amount of time in both South Central and North Tyneside, is the universalizing of whiteness.

White will never be the new black, despite white insistance that it is in many ways. The historical significance of whiteness will never equal the historical significance of blackness. Whiteness is rightly linked to the history of colonialism. If we complain today about wokeness in small settings, what does woke-ness have right? It is that whiteness and blackness are not universal equals. Rather, they are telos-antagonists, dialectical antagonists, historical-discourse negatives.

Where whiteness and blackness come together as universals are in Orders which obscure race, this is the great dream of the white liberal today. Something along the lines of, “Can we not all just get along? Can we please forget that I am white? I do not want my identity being seen as bad. It isn’t even my identity.”

The great nightmare of the white socialist is, “yeah, ok, working class solidarity, but how do you take advantage of being white, do you think?”

There are internal white arguments, which get a lot more breathing room in a white city. The great nightmare of the white working class is the white middle class. Stories of white woman on white woman discourse violence (arguments) are common. The working class relays tales of being lectured on the “poor” by an irate middle class interlocutor quite often.

Currently, the United Kingdom is checking out how to re-book flights to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda, no matter their country of origin. Conservative politicians are calling people who disagree with the policy as racist. To state the obvious, this is a tongue and cheek joke with a logic to it: {Racism is bad? Then prove it, go to Rwanda. Clearly Rwanda is bad, and Africa is bad, but you have to pretend it isn’t because you are a woke person.}

Interestingly enough, this joke is entirely ignored by human rights groups, and they follow the Tory (British Conservative) logic that yes, Africa is bad, and it is inhumane to send people there.

It is not that difficult to add a socialist analysis is here. The conditions of Rwanda, a country recently recovering from mass scale genocide, are not economically friendly conditions. Additionally, they are indiscriminately adding culture shock to people of all countries. And finally, it is policy in the form of a racist joke. That last part is the one that is left out by the mainstream discourse.

In case you have not noticed, jokes win elections, just look at Trump.

Negating the Negation

In capitalist society, we are bombarded by the stripping away of what is important to us via lowercase “m” minimalism. All things are cheapened, all efforts reduced, all social projects stripped of their revolutionary core. Minimalism has a highly capitalist and reactionary vector potential. To use stripping away intentionally rather than out of motive for the capitalist lowering of social deliveries and increasing the burden of labor on the working class can be a force which would aptly be called a left-accelerationist tendency.

To negate the negation we must re-inforce the non universalizing of race, it must be looked at as teleologically present. Anti-racism will otherwise be obscured and doomed to reactionary politics and misguided, anti-dialectical analysis.

The antagonism between white flight and gentrification is not one which can be solved in a universal mode. It is antigone, but the antigone is a reflection of historical economic conditions. The conditions of slavery and prejudice have forever affected the meaning of white and black. The universal dream can never be, because it is just that, a dream.

Order can obscure race in a moment, to work towards a common goal. Race is obscured officially but lives unofficially. Only until that split is taken into consciousness, inserted into the discourse as a historical, teleological idea rather than a universal one, can we truly negate the negation of racism.