NM's blog

A 'black' woman said that she didn't knew she was black until she was 16. Does that mean 'blackness' is like 'whiteness' a social construction? Yes, an individual not realising they are Black until later in life directly illustrates that  both "Blackness" and "Whiteness" are social constructions rather than biological absolutes.  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]  While the physical trait of skin pigmentation is biological (determined by melanin), the act of grouping people into rigid racial categories and assigning meaning, status, or identity to those categories is entirely a human invention.  [4, 6]  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ HUMAN VARIATION │ └───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘ │ Is organized by society into: ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ ...

“Our deepest conceptualisation of the world to our ways of relating to one another, is in part a product of the (neo)imperial boomerang effect .”

Europeans began to see themselves as "white" primarily during the early modern period, especially from the 17th century onward, in the context of colonial expansion, Atlantic slavery, and the development of racial thinking. Key Phases in the Construction of Whiteness: 1. Medieval Period (before 1500s): Europeans did not have a unified concept of "race" as we understand it today. Identity was based more on religion, ethnicity, language, and region (e.g., Christian vs. Muslim, English vs. French, noble vs. peasant). The idea of being “white” did not function as a self-identifier or category of solidarity. 2. 16th–17th Centuries: Early Colonialism and Slavery As Europeans colonized the Americas and encountered Indigenous peoples and African slaves, new hierarchies were constructed. The transatlantic slave trade and European justifications for slavery helped formalize distinctions between Europeans (later “whites”) and Africans or Indigenous peoples as “non-white” and i...

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually reinforcing.  The progress of the humanistic era of the Enlightenment”, she remarked sarcastically while commenting on German colonialism at the end of the 18th century, could be seen in how the captain of a ship transporting slaves from Guinea to Guyana in South America, “to alleviate their [the slaves] melancholy and to keep them from dying off, allowed them to dance on the ship’s deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the more brutal Spanish traders had not resorted. Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 209])

Capitalist Colonial  departs from Kaminer's previous work by “ centering questions of coloniality and race , but the departure is not a total about-face, because the last thing I want to do is abandon the labor process or class analysis. At a fundamental level, the book is proof of Stuart Hall’s well-known theorem that “race is the modality through which class is lived.”

Race as a social construct Related The invention of 'heterosexuality'

Michael Mann, 1999 The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century—economic, social and political progress. Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially antimodern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the c...

Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.” “But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?” Marx : “ Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Mediating the error between class and race

“My examination of the limitations of the racial binary of black vs. white as an analytical category to address the racialization of migrants in the North African context allows for a more nuanced approach to racial categorizations—one that challenges these simplified binaries without erasing the psychic violence of racial labeling or the historical stigmatization of blackness produced by the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the project of nation-building. This approach is necessary to challenge the construction of migrants as the ‘racial other’ and to support their human right to mobility and belonging.” Contemporary notions of race in Morocco A photo by Chermiti Mohamed

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

Arguable, but very interesting. An interview with the author. Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article . “Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class. The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy. The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees. I was criticised for arguing in  The New Class War  that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.  There are two working class...

“America on the Brink” review

This is a very good novel. Extracts from The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so. A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. In those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in his declaration of our country’s independence.  In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin Engl...