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Settler News and the Racist Creep
Settler Colonialist Tendencies in the North Amerikan Left; Ross Wolfe Exemplified
MerriCatherineMay 15, 2017·21 min read
For the white man looks at the [colonized] man and wonders when it will all end, but the white man knows deep down that a just future is one in which he himself no longer exists in virtue of his ceasing to function at the End, or less ambiguously, the telos of Man. European Man dreads, then, as Lenin once put it, what is to be done.” — Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human
Settler News
The Facebook page ‘Anti-Fascist News’ recently published a review drenched in anti-black, anti-brown, anti-indigenous, anti-Asian sentiment from a purely Eurocentric perspective. Now, thankfully taken down and apologized for by AF News, the erosive piece is filled with clear-as-day racism and colonial-apologetics, tinged with a shade of transparent tokenism. The text being discussed (read invalidated) by author Ross Wolfe is “Settlers: The Mythology of the white Proletariat”. It has been respected by many a far left-leaning majority as one of the most complete, Marxist and historical piece son white settlers and their interactions with indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples they colonized. By posting this article, they support the avoidance, isolation, and thereby erasure of a text that chronicles the struggles, massacres, and revolts people of color have experienced on Amerikan soil. Here, I seek to address the divisive article that splits The Left in two, and in two again — the article written by a Ross Wolfe that consciously spews dishonesty and represents an equally dishonest worldview for the purpose of acquiring a fanbase to bully non-white radicals off social media. Moreso, I seek to turn attention the blind spot against Gramscian cultural analysis and within the Amerika’s current Leftist movements and organizations that may allow for settler-esque and colonial reproductions of power over non-whites within their spaces, beginning with the erasure of non-White history. In doing so, I seek to provide The Left with a draft to a blueprint of a weakness thay will only strengthen and unify the Left further once it is addressed in a consensual manner.
Settler News
An excerpt from the review posted by Wolfe states
As an aside, why limit the category of “settler” to those from Europe? People from Africa were imported to the western hemisphere to produce surplus-value, which was subsequently transformed into capital. Were they “settlers” too? And what about Mexicans and Indians already here, and Chinese imported later? They also produced wealth used to dominate others.
The blatant class reductionism portrayed here obscures the reality of settlers arriving on the shores of North America out of their own volition. A settler is defined as someone who settles in an area, typically one with few inhabitants. North America bursting with human life and culture was not only settled, but colonized. As a result, settler-colonialism is the nomination we use to describe the tactics of genocide and chattel slavery that came with European settlers.
Who did the genociding? Some academics argue that because both African American slaves and indigenous peoples were contracted by militias to clear the land, via mass murder, to produce surplus labor, that they were complicit in imposing the settler movement on Amerikan soil. Again, blatant victim-blaming is apparent as the situation both victims (indigenous and African) were forced to perform these acts of violence. How accountable in genocide are oppressed populations in their own settler-colonialism if they are threatened with death and starvation for refusing to people of color off? I would hope the answer to this question is not at all; even as a basic biological concept, the desire to remain alive is inescapable.
The review goes on to make light of the job opportunities available to Europeans settlers versus the Chinese, African, and indigenous proletariat upon Amerika’s colonizing. Chinese workers being massacred by Irish union workers, labeled as coolies in typical fascistic manner to justify genocide sent a clear message to people of color, the vast majority who did not own land of their own and were no more than slaves. Surprisingly, there was not a single mention of Irish servants during this foundational point in Amerikan history. Often times, these Irish servants are portrayed as slaves alongside the many Black and Brown workers of the time. However, unlike institutionalized chattel slavery, However, unlike institutionalized chattel slavery, indentured servitude was neither hereditary nor lifelong; unlike black slaves, white indentured servants had legal rights; unlike black slaves, indentured servants weren’t considered property. It takes a short visit to any slave-record site in the Caribbean to see that the vast majority of workers in the Caribbean were Irish.
The review by Noel Ignatiev concludes
For European-Americans who think that revolution is necessary, what better use could there be of their time, intelligence, and energy than the effort to crack open white society? To do that, they need a theory that will point out the fissures in it, not deny their existence.
To crack open a white society bent on turning Amerika into a homogeneous utopia where whites are the only population considered people with any claim to well-being, they need to consider that they are all complicit in white supremacy, not be coddled into believing they have any claim to as drudging and horrifying a past as any population victim to genocide has been. This is where Ignatiev falls short of realizing his own internalized racism — not a single Black, Brown, or Asian person would dare to compare the plight of a chattel slave with even a servant during Amerika’s colonization.
A Colonial Throwback to Ontological Oppression
The name-dropping of writers Wolfe indulges in is testament to the very weak-minded, racist, and class reductionist propaganda many see as a true, monolithic Marxism. Not a single original thought of his own is presented to the audience, where quote for quote references alleged “inaccurate” representations of slavery without a single citation.
Wolfe goes even further to tokenize Rashid Johnson of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party in order to further his white supremacist outlook on settler-colonialism in an attempt to create an erasure of the obvious inequalities between settlers escaping an early capitalism, and slaves forced against their will to work and die for them. Speaking of ‘affectual’ minds, his clear misrepresentation of Johnson’s fair critique projects an innocent feat of ‘simply being realistic’, as if every person of color could agree with Johnson simply because he is a Black Panther. However, the internal Black colonies of Amerika are not a homogenous people. Just as we do not all look identical, we also do not think identically. Some of us even come from different backgrounds; could you have guessed!? I can, because I am a Black transwoman myself who would disagree with Mr. Rashid’s earlier writings about LGBTW spaces and the pathologization of identity that takes materials through neocolonial resourcing and dulls the masses, all while stealing their money for Big Pharma… EDIT: I understand why he would say that white people are oppressed too, though I would definitely like to have a conversation with him on why it matters when working class, and sometimes even upper classed Black folks are still being killed by white working class because their victims are Black…My point still stands however… Mr. Wolfe’s tokenizing of Mr. Johnson is a shameless example of cherry picking and exemplifies the racism with which he rejects our history. In other words, Mr. Wolfe should stay in his lane when it comes to deciding who is racist, and who isn’t, not to mention defenders of whiteness are racist. It’s a slogan of the alt-right as well as many the white supremacist group. And now that that’s been made clear, let’s talk about unfounded claims that haven’t been redacted.
Alternative Facts and the Racist Creep
Worst of all is Wolfe’s uncited claim that “Sakai himself no longer seems to think the central thesis of Settlers holds with respect to the contemporary US.” Mr. Wolfe, how dare you cite Sakai’s claim that fascism somehow transcends race and religion, and therefore is explicitly class oriented in its design. Have you not read this essay in its entirety? What you claim is the exact opposite of Sakai’s thesis, and is a prime example of not only your academic dishonesty, but exposes your true intentions to downplay the importance of race and anti-racist movements in Amerika:
J. Sakai explicitly states his main thesis as follows:
Why do we insist that some religious fundamentalist movements can only be understood as fascists? It isn’t that the Taliban or Egyptian Jihad aren’t religious groups. They clearly are, in the sense that their ideology and program are couched in an Islamic framework. And they are part of broader Islamic rightist currents that contain people of differing political programs. Just as the German Nazi Party was part of broader nationalistic currents in Germany in the 1920-30s that shared many of the same racialist views. People have tried to shallowly explain away the Nazis by saying that they were only extreme racists. They were that (which they shared with many other Germans) but they also had far-reaching fascist politics beyond that. In the same way, the Hindu far right in India, for example – which contains perhaps the largest fascist movement in the world right now – is not only a religious movement in form but one which has far-reaching fascist politics in essence. There is no natural law saying that men’s religions have to be benign or humane or non-political. And they seldom are.
But what the West calls “Islamic fundamentalism” is not that at all. First off, like its brother “christian fundamentalism” there’s some kind of relationship to religion but there’s nothing fundamental about it. There’s no similar vibe between white racist abortion clinic bombers today and some outcast Jewish carpenter with illegal anti-ruling class ideas in the Middle East 2000 years ago. And the Prophet Mohammad’s youngest wife wasn’t wearing a burka and hiding indoors, she was riding the desert alongside male warriors and disputing doctrine with male preachers as the head of her own religious school.
To summarize the above, J. Sakai makes the statement that Westerners view Islamic ‘extremists’ through a Eurocentric lens and thus label them as fascists. In other words, fascism is a white construction.
Material Presents, Unanswered Questions
In a world where Nazis kill Black men in broad daylight, in midtown Manhattan, in the middle of busy thoroughfare… In a world where a fascist president is building a wall to fend off starving and violated children from entering and acquiring work, albeit slave labor… A reality in which immigrants are being detained based on the color of their skin, and their ancestral roots… A reality in which indigenous peoples across the world are being isolated and suppressed by reservations… In a world where Asian doctors are dragged off airplanes and bloodied in the process… In a world where supremacists massacre children and families while they worship peacefully, this article is a protraction of pure, unfiltered racism.
They, then are complicit in the genocidal campaign of US imperialism both domestic and abroad. We need to act. The Eurocentric tenets of ‘white radicalism’ need to be obliterated. By the graces of Mao, Touissant l’ouverture, and Zapata before us, we need to overcome this obstacle within the decolonial movement by following this tide of decolonization away from the orthodox and into the adaptable: the variegated world of theory waiting for us to discover it, beginning with stepping through Fanon’s door and onto the welcome mat of J. Sakai, Butch Lee, Bobby London, Frank B. Wilderson, and many other non-Eurocentric thinkers.
The principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies; they are a continually renewed expression of real historical development. The unity of history (what the idealists call unity of the spirit) is not a presupposition, but a continuously developing process. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
We need to start working, organizing, supporting our communities, and ensuring our future as an autonomous, self-determining people apart from a self-reprocuding system of white supremacy.
The 55,000+ followers Anti-Fascist News’ page has is too much to present this racialized violence towards. As the oft-ignored (in younger Leftist spaces) Gramsci puts it: “Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.” Withoit a well-developed atmosphere that answers as many questions as possible through a systemic method clof consensual analysis by respective parties (ie “staying in one’s lane”), we can make order of the chaos that is a rapidly-growing Leftist movement against a fifth-column fascism in Amerika. We nust not fall victim like German, Italian, and Spanish Marxists had in the past. Following multiple responses to the article in question, and the decision of a popular ‘anti-fascist’ news outlet, multiple people of color were blocked by Anti-Fascist News for voicing their frustrations and concerns. People were gaslit and told which of their histories were valid. Black women were told that they didn’t even read the article, written by a white person invalidating a history all people of color know. And why should they? We experience enough racism on a day to day basis. It must then be a request born of furthering the violence towards those who are non-white. This is an act of racial aggression by none other than a white man.
The Racist Creep
I would like to begin this section by stating that I am not the first to take up issue with Wolfe’s bullying of non-white radicals.
But even if I hadn’t, I’d still take up issue with anyone who benefits frlm the intercolonial and global system of white supremacy that permeates every area of society. As an ideology it reproduces itself on both micro and macro scales, as is evident in this article. Mr. Wolfe is only a single a example of the growing yet finite hubs through which white supremacy is most apparent.
Mr. Wolfe is a white, Jewish citizen of the United States of Amerika, raised in a thoroughly indoctrinating culture that perpetuates consistent harm against Black people across the world. He is working-class. He may not represent the average member white working class, but his work is an example of racism as a systemic violation against human rights, more specifically that of Black and indigenous populations. Though I am sure he does not consciously hate Black people, he does however benefit from a global anti-Black system that dehumanizes every Black person one will ever meet — one that does not simply lose effect just because he is Jewish. Apart from the disregard for Black history he proposes in his article “Don’t bother reading Settlers”, he is an example of what the ruling and upper white class seeks to cement in Amerikan society: that of the disingenuous cheating of the white working class that has lead to the presidency we now all suffer from and therefore makes the white working class somehow capable of being a vanguard tk any movement other than their own: Blacks, Brown people, and indigenous communities alike. And although he may think he has justification to claim that this article may be antisemitic, as he has in the past, he must understand the intersections at play, and must admit that not alk Jews are white, and that even white Jewish men oppress brown Jewish and Black men through colorism and even at a macro-scale, through imperialism in the Middle East by name of Zionist state, Israel.
Yes, the white working class has been cheated by many a New Deal, a curtain over a broken promise of economic and social freedoms made by the upper and ruling white classes in this murderous state. The ruling class has promised the white working class the same safeties and well-beings that every person of color desires, and now that we have had a Black president under which their promise has neither been fulfilled nor restored (as if it had ever had a semblance of permanence), the white working class has sought salvation for “the working man” (who appears white in the mind’s eye of every white citizen of this to-be-forsaken country) in the promises of a crypto-fascist authority that echoes the aspirations of the slaveholding ‘founding fathers’.
Academics like Mr. Wolfe seek solace in the teachings of dead working class white men before him without considering that racism is as tied into the monetary foundations of capitalism in Amerika as colonialism, imperialism, and sexism are, not to mention the internal racism his favorites also harbored which, unsurprisingly, may as well have played out in their theory.
Stolen Land, Stolen Labor
Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Red, White, and Black, makes the point that white people sabotage Black and Native liberation through the co-option of non white theory, such as J. Sakai’s. Once it is appropriated, whites use our theory to envision and materialize theur own liberation. Historically, this has materialized in New Left movements such as inner-colonial anti-imperialist movements lead by non-blacks, yet spearheaded by the vanguard Black Panther Party. Or even earlier, during the 18th century, the image and literal sight of the Slave was entrenched in white spaces enough to inspire a revolt against an “empire”. Although “taxation without representation” is essentially a tyrannical practice of which liberation from is appropriate to every person on Earth, Amerikan Revolutionaries of the time were practicing tyranny on by their own hand as well — in their torture and genocide of Slaves and Native peoples. Thus, it can be said that the Amerikan Revolutionaries were not revolting against tyranny , but were appropriating the liberation that Blacks and Natives fought for.
Time and time again, whites appropriate non-white revolutions and turn it into their own, from Castro and the Haitian Revolution to the New Left and the Black Panther Party.
Time and time again, our theory will not only be appropriated, but used against us. It will consistently lead to another non-white revolutionary vanguard with new tactics, only to be appropriated, while at the same time being labeled as invalid. Mr. Wolfe does the invalidating as the New Left takes a “decolonial turn” once again.
It is our duty to spread awareness, as a heterogeneous working class, of the fact that the white proletariat’s trust in the white upper classes must be disintegrated, that their broken promise must be recognized among their communities, for the consciousness of a united working class: to understand that the selfish promise made was nothing but poison dipped in hope to keep communities of people of color as degenerative as possible to benefit the monetary growth of the monster which this nation was born and built to thrive as. We can not divide ourselves any longer by ignoring the truth of race realism.
Many arguments on how Anti-Fascist News has neglecting the needs of people of color, after having my comments deleted multiple times. Goddess forbid they posted it because they see my featured photo on my pages: the inner title page to Settlers SIGNED BY CECE MCDONALD, the only Leftist I know in Amerika who has killed more Nazis than the recent Antifa movement has. We need to protect our internal non-white colonies, our class bound by insufficient wage, our populations divided by an inert caste system based on race, gender, and ethnicity. Do not let any population of the working class’ history get lost! We don’t deserve it. All we want is a history, the same as white people… Why is that a problem?
UPDATE (July 2017)
Two weeks after I made a post calling out Ross Wolfe on Facebook, posts on my page had been getting reported for two weeks straight, some of those posts dating back months… Two days before I was banned, a Tim Larkin and another person involved in the call-out thread added me. No one was commencing on the Ross Wolfe thread so you really have to wonder why these two people were even having thoughts about me while I had already forgot about the entire incident… Anyway, my account was eventually “disabled”, apparently because I somehow was either soliciting sex, sharing sexually explicit photos, or sharing content that contains sexually explicit language:
Transmisogynoir aside, things have only gotten worse since I have shed light on this particular example I made of racism on the Left; since then, I have not been able to maintain a Facebook account for more than two days. I have tried VPN’s, not posting, not adding friends, using my deadname, etc., and I even tried making a couple of accounts while in Vietnam for a couple of weeks. Each time I made one, Facebook asked either for my ID, or a pictute of myself. The IDs nor the picture ever worked. It’s same to assume I was somehow blacklisted from Facebook, all because people defending Ross Wolfe did not agree with me. Somehow, I had pissed them off enough to deserved a two-week long reporting spree on their behalf. Although I will never be able to use Facebook again due to its facial recognition software, I will continue to writer and publish pieces on decolonial Leftist theory wherever else I can.
As for the working class as a whole, it is our absolute duty to come to our best senses and to understand how we oppress each other so that we are no longer divided under capitalism. To do so, we must not only become anti-fascist, but anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, anti-transphobic…
To do this, we must not censor works hailed by the subaltern as masterful pieces of our history, but instead celebrate them if the subaltern says it should be so. J. Sakai’s Settlers is one of these books, cataloguing a history of suffering, pain, and intergenerational suppression still existent today. Most of these tools are lost to us Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples in Amerika…
First, I propose a preventative measure: beware of the Fascist Creep. Beware of the Racist Creep in dual regard, the white supremacist in Red cloth of the October Revolution et al that pretends to have the answer to our salvation as a working class people of many ethnic backgrounds: class-reductionist theory.
The answer is available to you. It has always been a problem, albeit a problem well suppressed by Amerikan mass media and settler’s educational systems. That is why you need to read the Marxist historical piece by J. Sakai. Unlearn all you know by considering the plight and perspectives of subaltern peoples.
The problem is not simply that Wolfe’s publication has critiqued J. Sakai’s piece, but that it attempts at burying it under unwarranted and poorly cited suspicion, and quite literally tells people to not read it. Why is that necessary? These are questions to ask our white allies (or as the original Black Panthers demanded, race traitors) and of their intentions.
If you own a page and support the decolonial movement, if you support the destruction of white supremacy and fascism,
if you want to prevent the erasure of Black, Brown, and Asian history from evolving any further —
make sure you share this. Even if you would rather copy and paste.
This isn’t about me. It is about the future of people of color internationally
As this article is not being hailed as a testimony to the imagined illegitimacy of the history of people of color by many white activists, I draw inspiration from Baldwin’s words: the future of America, and life’s potential to be better for all of us (people of color and white people alike) depends on defending our movement.
We need to make an example of this to expose racism that white people inject into “Leftist” movements in North America. Once the racism is dealt with perhaps we can discuss what we expect of one another and unify to reverse settler colonialism. This is the strategy and we need to build a movement off of this.
We need Anti-Racist Action to organize more than ever; in a country so heterogeneous in ethnicity and race, built and sustained on settler colonialism and imperialism, racism is inherently tied into the destruction of capitalism. But saying so is only an untruth. The truth is that all anti-racist movements in Amerika are anti-capitalist.
It is necessary to mention the importance of this event in building our movement against racism and all its tenets (white supremacy, capitalist oppression, imperialism, etc.), Anti-Racist and Decolonial movements that are each individually infinitely more comprehensive that a anti-fascism and the mere application of Marxist thought (all fascists are racists).
Time after time the question of why Amerika hasn’t fallen by the hands of Amerikan revolutionaries is asked without consideration of the racism many people of color experience from Leftists who participate in bad politics, who are too naive and self-righteous to understand their position within the white supremacist system of neocolonialism and imperialism. As our compañeros and comrades overseas beg of us to put a halt on the impairment of socialist and communist governances constantly under threat from capitalist media and their respective intelligences, they need us more than ever to strengthen our working class for proper revolution by coming together and understanding what it means to be an honest, non-racist, and genuinely altruistic human being who seeks to understand comrades of color.
Make an example and don’t let your friends fall victim to racism in white-dominated Leftist spaces.
“The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.” —James Baldwin
More information on Ross Wolfe’s racism, misogyny, transphobia/transmisia, antiblackness, and being anti-indigenous/anti-native:
Harassing Indigenous activists:
On Ross Wolfe’s racism and misogyny:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20141208031623/http://wastedideology.blogspot.com/2014/01/ross-wolfe-piece-of-shit.html
- http://archive.is/hRFzx
Being against decolonization:
UPDATES:
Ross Wolfe has been effectively and is currently still being outted as a racist— a condemnation beyond simple class reduction. This article has been shared with multiple Anti-Racist Action chapters. We are demanding a public apology, and reparations to all those censored on Anti-Fascist News. We are demanding justice for the damage done to our communities by giving racists a platform.
UPDATE
Anti-Fascist news has published an apology for their disregard of our history as people of color as something ‘divisive’ after recognizing Mr. Wolfe has divided the Left between class reductionist, and comprehensive Leftists.
UPDATE:
Demands of Mr. Wolfe’s are currently being made:
After Wolfe apologizes, they will also make a public statement denouncing the piece and critiquing themselves. This will be published to their site and within their portfolio permanently. This will serve as semi-reparation to the history being erased by Marxists™ who believe they have a say in the autonomy of subaltern populations.
After that is posted, monetary reparations will be made to the multiple Black and indigenous people who have had to defend their history from the devaluation of a white person for their labor.
Multiple dormant racists within multiple Leftist™ groups have consumed this article and are also being addressed because this article has been shared. It has done damage to the working class by further erasing the oppression that both white supremacy and capitalism have endorsed on the working classes across the globe, particularly of the colonized peoples of the world. That is damage that must be undone before it propagates exponentially.
We conclude that no longer will a cracker (racist white person) propagate such racist trash again.
Update: 08/21/2017
Members of Ross Wolfe’s group “Aftermath” are still leading cyberops to undermine and suppress my presence online, meanwhile the fifth column that white supremacists are leading in the US intensifies. I, myself, have turned to reapproaching Gramsci and culture, since Marxism’s insistence on industry-obsessed capitalism and socialism lead to the underdevelopment of cultural theory in places like Germany, which concluded in Marxism’s loss to fascism in Spain and Germany. Again, I hope the Left continues to decolonize their theory and broaden their range in strategy and tactics.
Update: 05/07/2018
I asked mods to post a summary a reflection from an essay in Futures of Black Radicalism (“On Race, Violence, and ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’” by Nikhil Pal Singh). I got dog-piled when someone shared it to Communism 101. After bullying with haha’s and sea lioning and derailing occured, attention calmed down. Then I noticed there was 13 shares on the post. Peter Woods reacted. Then Ross Wolfe. It’s been almost a year.
May 19th, 2018
Anti-Fascist News continues to share posts from anti-decolonial “The Charnel-House” run by Ross Wolfe.
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