HAVE YOU COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN WHITEISM?

White workers are being told they are 'privileged' because they are white. That will be news to the many white workers trying to survive on low wages and even lower welfare benefits...

A SMALL but very lucrative industry has grown up around 'helping' workers come to terms with their own racism, even if they don't think they are racist. Just being white apparently opens you up to the charge of being the recipient of 'white privilege' and perpetuating racist attitudes.

This is pseudo-intellectual bullshit imported from the United States but this is pseudo-intellectual bullshit that both the State and the corporate sector are paying big bucks to have workers dragooned into swallowing. Workers really don't have any choice but to participate in this nonsense - that's if they don't want their careers to suddenly become marooned.

So we have learnt that the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office coughed up some $770,000 in order to send their staff to a course heroically called 'Beyond Diversity: Courageous Conversations about Race'. We might look askance at 'Re-education Centres' in totalitarian countries like China, but we have developed our own homegrown versions here.

Beyond Diversity is run by the Courageous Conversation South Pacific Institute which is affiliated to Courageous Conversation in San Francisco in the United States.

At this course Pakeha workers have been told the bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in what the course calls 'whiteism' - which isn't a word you will find in the Oxford Dictionary. But for all of you who are not up to date with 'the latest definition of racism' (as Stuff journalist Andrea Vance might describe it) 'whiteism' is 'not recognizing White as the dominating colour nor the unearned power and privileges with having white skin'.

The many white folk trying to survive on low wages or a benefit while being screwed by rocketing rents and escalating prices in the supermarket will probably be wondering what 'privileges' they are presently enjoying but, nevertheless, this course insists that whiteism 'is a condition more white people must begin to recognize, understand and acknowledge'. If you don't recognise you suffer from 'whiteism' then you are automatically racist and a potential white supremacist. That's because according to this course:

'We are taught racism must be intentional and that only bad people commit it. Thus a common white reasoning in crossracial conflicts is that as long as we are good people and don't intend to perpetuate racism, then our actions don't count as racism'.

What appalling tripe. According to Beyond Diversity whiteness is baked into our DNA regardless if we believe in equality and a better world. Someone like Karl Marx, if he had been forced to attend a course like this, would of got an 'F' on his report card and advised that he 'must do better'.

There is no escape from the 'wrongness' of being white because a course like this wants us to accept that we are only defined by our racial category. Its of no surprise that Beyond Diversity seems to have lifted many of its stupid 'ideas' from a particularly awful book called White Fragility by American author Robin DiAngelo. Not uncoincidentally the course instructs  the unfortunate participants to assess their own 'white privilege score' while pondering their 'relationship to white fragility'. According to DiAngelo there is no path to economic or political emancipation except by striving 'to be less white' - which is something that Martin Luther King would have never accepted. He insisted that to fight racism we must also fight capitalism - but that bit of the conversation is just too dangerous for a establishment -approved course like this to encourage.

As Professor Adolph Reed and others have pointed out, an overriding emphasis on race and racism means that attention is draw away from much more fundamental issues such as economic inequality, issues that open up capitalism to scrutiny. It's not a coincidence that while New Zealand becomes an ever more unequal society and while symptoms of our distress continue to grow in terms of such things as an intractable housing crisis and long queues at the foodbanks, we are told by the cheerleaders for the political establishment that we must be put race at the centre of our identities. The political elite wants us all to look 'over there' while it continues to behave as it has always done.

In the end, unable to recognise that all New Zealand workers are exploited, regardless of race, white skin privilege theory only tries to obscure the reality that exploitation is the central dynamic of capitalism and the class struggle that must be waged against it. Whiteism is fundamentally anti-working class and its purpose is to both bolster and legitimate the economic and political status quo. Courses like Beyond Diversity are far from being progressive but like some kind of religious cult, they condemn anyone who dares to question the dubious and plain wrong assumptions such courses are based on.