It is racist to use racism to fight racism (but that doesn't stop some Black radicals)

 Here's a example of the 'whiteness is the problem' trope from London review of Books:

...one of the things that needs to be abolished is the category of ‘whiteness’ itself. The existence of whiteness is dependent on the subjugation of a racialised other. As such there is no way to extract or preserve whiteness from white supremacy. Without the subjugation of Blacks through a project of racial essentialism, whiteness as a category ceases to exist. Whiteness is not a biological reality, but a description of social relations defined by class, ownership and property rights. Hutchinson’s aim to redeem white individuals of racism is fine, but we cannot redeem whiteness itself.

Hutchinson refers here to the brave man who carried to safety a victim of a vicious attack during recent protests in London, an image that captured the attention of millions - the idea we are all human and a sense that amid all the mayhem, humanity persists.

I'm genuinely curious about the idea that, as the quote above suggests, racism is about 'structures of oppression' rather than the act (however instititionalised or protected) of making choices about others on the basis of their ethnicity alone. For the writer - Jason Okundaye - being white isn't a racial description but a photographic negative of Blackness and, while Hutchinson's heroism and Blackness protects him, we still get a hint that his action was not right:

...I wonder where that leaves Black people, or other people of colour, who have no interest in – or capacity or opportunity for – similar acts of heroism; who are not ‘cool’ and ‘good’, but feel righteous hostility towards whiteness...

This is the heart of the problem with structural racism as a concept - it requires that we deny everything beyond the idea of race and believe that black "subjugation" is somehow baked into society without ever demonstrating how. Reading Okundaye's little comment piece, you have to conclude that, if his analysis is right, then the only way to end the structural racism is to eliminate whiteness. Of course, adherents to this thesis of structural racism get round the response that surely needing to eliminate whiteness is racist with the very convenient argument that it "...is not a biological reality, but a description of social relations defined by class, ownership and property rights."

But if skin colour is not a 'biological reality' when the skin colour is what we call 'white', where does that leave us with other skin colours? Are they biological realities or social constructs? Does Okundaye's framing of race as other than biological allow for the commonplace criticism (often in crude racial terms) of black people who reject such a thesis? How do 'yellow' or 'brown' people fit into Okundaye's binary categorising of race? Are other 'people of colour' conveniently slipped into this essentially separatist conception only when it is convenient to paint them as allies?

In the end the argument here falls apart because someone's skin colour is a fact (leaving aside the sun tan) of their biological heritage and to suggest otherwise is to say that we can adopt 'Blackness' or 'whiteness' as our fancy takes us. And if the problem is "class, ownership and property rights" then the issue isn't race but rather, in the analysis of those Victorian racists Marx and Engels, a matter of workers and owners. Okundaye hates the idea that most people - of whatever race, creed or skin colour - can look at Patrick Hutchinson and see a brave man who did the right thing because it grates with his racism and denies his idea of Blackness in favour of humanity.

For Okundaye "...respectable Blackness is a gift to white supremacy..." because it suggests
"...racial aggression as the preserve of a non-respectable, insurgent minority..." of black people. Okundaye wants racial violence directed at white people, he doesn't want harmony and the creation of a just society but violence, albeit an exclusive violence of black on white. I'm guessing, however, that Okundaye would rather other Black people do the actual violence while he pens justifications (for payment obviously) in journals owned and run by white people.

It seems to me, having read this short piece, that not only is Okundaye's thesis of structural racism largely nonsense but worse, he is simply a racist.

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