“While we need organizing that is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, our organizing must also be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, and against all forms of exploitation, subordination and discrimination.” – Andaiye, The Point is to Change the World
When I was 21, I thought I had everything figured out – then I met Andaiye. With compassion, patience and a sardonic wit, I quickly realized under her guidance, the limitations existing in my worldview. She would repeatedly instill the importance of recognizing how one’s experiences formed beliefs and how those beliefs drove motivations for how we navigate the world.
Often, we hear of the need for objective truth and actions. There is a fierce reliance on the concept of objectivity. I do not believe in the pretense of objectivity. Truth and the actions that follow it are for the most part never objective. They are always shaped by where and what we are born into, what we live through and what is happening globally at the time. Our experiences create differences in how we see the world and how we react to those differences. Too often however, these differences create a further divide that can seem unbridgeable.
Whether we are aware of them or not, whether we believe in them or not, we are all born into societal hierarchies. With these hierarchies come limitations or opportunities that follow us throughout life. Many seek to address these hierarchies by ignoring or distancing themselves from them. What this does is ensure that the power or lack of power implicit in these hierarchies remain unchallenged.
A lot of our politics as individuals and groups often stems from feelings of oppression – oppression against our gender, race, dis/ability, religion and sexuality. Our organizing is centred on identity. Organizing on this basis can be useful. It removes us from the limited analysis of just class relations, as individual groups are able to show the similarities and differences in how capital consumes us all. It provides the opportunity to work on and put a spotlight on the disadvantages certain groups face.
The problem arises when identity politics is focused solely on what one can achieve for one’s group and is not interested in working towards cohesiveness and the shared interests of other groups. There can never be revolution in isolation. There can never be liberation for the individual. So while we should organize within our groups, we must also seek to organize for and within that of others. Building group power is necessary for our advancement as a people who exist within several spheres of oppressive isms.
In order for us to dismantle the various systems of power that oppress us, we must be keen to transform how this power is wielded between us. Whether we organize as men and women, African, Indian and Indigenous, or working, middle and upper class people – we must aim to dismantle all the power structures that serve to divide us rather than working towards self-interest.
The isolated movements towards liberation can best be seen in our race relations with each other. There is always the attempt to pander to the long spun illusion of peaceful Guyanese style ethnic-multiculturalism. Anything that deviates or seeks to expose the realities of racism hiding under this performance is willfully and quickly suppressed. We cling to the illusion that because we may eat, drink and laugh with each other; racial tensions do not exist between us. This tension it is said, only ever rears its head during election season. The ethno-political fear, mistrust and violence that reaches a boiling point every five years however, is only possible because it is something that resides within us every single day.
The illusion of unity has found solid ground because it benefits those who utilize statements of unity and division given their aims at the time. All of our systems of power are set up on class and race domination, our laws, politics, policies, businesses…they are all founded and centred on these two, so maintaining the illusion is necessary for maintenance of these systems to continue unchallenged.
This illusion shapes our race narratives with regards to how individual group wrongs are passed down through generations. Whenever the hostility of one group is acknowledged, it is not done from a place of seeking understanding or growth but rather from one that seeks to promote self-defense or retaliation for actual and perceived wrongs. History is edited, reshaped and utilized to suit the agendas of their individual ethnic groups. The only stories that are retold with vigour are the ones in which their race is the oppressed and the other side, the oppressor. These accounts contrast sharply with each other without recognizing how similar they are in their divisiveness.
The poor often are the most vulnerable to buying into and upholding our age-old race war. A war that benefits only the ethno-elites and their compadres while those who are poor are steadily pushed into a more tenuous existence. Despite their common relationship of poverty, race concerns see a refusal to build common relationships with each other to challenge the limitations of capital they live within.
Certainly, not everyone is racist, but the majority of us are not anti-racist. Because we believe we cannot be racist, there is a stark refusal to recognize how certain dialogues; views and behaviours perpetuate racism whether intentionally or unconsciously. There should be more willingness to work across and understand the dynamics of race without discounting each other’s experiences. This must be done from much more than just a theoretical perspective, with an active interest in learning, exploring and challenging the systems that exploit us all and pit us against each other. One race domination will continue to take us nowhere but down.
