where the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”55 This meant that not only was racism a tool of capitalist elites, but capitalism and racism were inextricably interwoven.
Post–World War II policy changes sharpened the ways that material advantages were distributed toward white workers. The white sections of the low-wage working class shrank, while poverty among Black and Brown workers expanded. Policy after policy, from the subsidization of suburbs to the disinvestment of cities, reinforced this dynamic. New Deal labor policy purposely excluded labor protections for farm and domestic workers. Mainstream labor organizations raised few objections to the parts of the New Deal that jettisoned workers of color. In this context, two of the most influential, yet divergent formulations of white skin privilege emerged.
In the mid to late 1980s, feminist writer Peggy McIntosh emphasized the day-to-day advantages of privilege through her famous writings on “the invisible package of unearned assets” that white people can count on “cashing in each day.” “White privilege,” wrote McIntosh, “is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”56 Author J. Sakai put forward that, as a whole, working-class white people could never truly be revolutionary due to unbreakable attachments to empire and settler-colonialism. He further argued that the white members of the working-class were not part of the proletariat at all, thanks to their status as settlers, and that the citizenship and labor struggles of groups who later would become white was “nothing more nor less than a push to join the oppressor nation, to enlist in the ranks of the Empire.”57 Sakai’s distinction reverberated through the Committee, for they saw white privilege as the means that the state uses to organize its support base.
The events in New York prisons made it clear that Jim Crow wore a different face outside of Southern states. New York was simply “Up South,” as Malcolm X had described. The normalization of increased Klan activity was rampant. In a blow to the people incarcerated at Napanoch, the New York High Court ruled in April 1977 that prison guards were allowed to join the Ku Klux Klan. Months later, members of the NAACP and Latinos Unidos took over a wing of Napanoch, taking eleven hostages. A grand jury returned indictments against ten of the men involved. The men were then quickly transferred to other facilities, hampering further organizing.58
With legal channels shutting down, it seemed to many anti-racist organizers that the “massive offensive” Siwatu-Hodari urged against the Klan was the only option left on the table. The newly minted John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was more than happy to oblige.
BEGINNING FROM AN AFTERMATH
In the late 1970s, radical optimism was on the ropes. Only a decade before, it seemed that “The Movement” might somehow redeem the violent history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism in the United States. The right’s reaction against the gains of the Black Freedom movement was defined with a wave of conservative politicians winning office. A rancid bouquet of white supremacist ballot-box organizations bloomed, ready to follow the right’s electoral gains with violence in the streets. Many activists remained in the fray. International solidarity work turned toward opposing intervention in Central America and apartheid in South Africa. Domestic organizers stared down bulldozers leveling low-income communities. The Committee’s founders confronted the stark reality of old friends behind bars and the ongoing wars between law enforcement and Black organizers, radicals, and revolutionaries.
The movement against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism shaped the politics of many members of the organization. The war, and the compulsory draft of civilian men, had drawn hundreds of thousands of young people into the anti-war movement. For some, avoiding military service was simply a matter of self-preservation. Others began to see the war as part of a larger system of oppression that reinforced white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. militarism. This analysis saw Black, Indigenous, and Latino people59 living within the United States as internally colonized communities, and imperialism as the main target for radical organizing. The people who came to the Committee were addressing the same questions that were first asked of them in their student years: What is the role of white people in dismantling white supremacy? Is racism a permanent feature of the U.S. American experience? How does fascism harness racism in the United States? How can both be abolished?
These questions remerged as part of the unfinished business of the 1960s, particularly the factional fights that rippled through the U.S. left, and that ultimately ended the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many of the original members of the Committee had been members of SDS. Emerging in 1959 from the remains of the progressive Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, the organization started with great optimism about the redeemability of U.S. institutions. Its inaugural “Port Huron Statement,” written in 1962, identified racism, militarism, and nationalism as the key evils holding back progress. Foreshadowing a later cultural turn towards anti-imperialism, it critiqued exploitation of Third World countries by Western capitalists. Working in projects such as “Friends of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” members regularly delivered white volunteers to support voter registration, nonviolent direct action, and Freedom Schools in the South. Some actions drew the connections to many concerns of the era. The 1968 student occupation of Columbia University, for example, linked military research and the college’s gentrification of Harlem.60
White students’ complicated relationship with the Black Freedom movement mirrored the larger one between the era’s white and Black radicals. Throughout the 1960s, questions of when violence and insurrection might be called for were always under discussion. These questions became more urgent as thousands of young people drafted to fight in Vietnam were killed in battle, injured, tortured, or held as prisoners of war. It seemed that “the system” would, as John F. Kennedy warned, “make peaceful revolution impossible and make violent revolution inevitable.”61
The Black Freedom movement began to demand more of its white supporters. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked white activists to leave the group and to focus on organizing against racism in their communities.62 In fits and starts, the “organize your own” experiment had already begun a few years earlier. Attempts at doing this created the Economic Research and Action Projects of the Students for a Democratic Society, which experimented with community organizing in impoverished communities. It was an attempt to build an “interracial movement of the poor.” Ironically, only one such project, Jobs or Income Now Community Union, gained traction, situated itself in a low-income white community, and made an honest go of heading off reactionary politics there. The rest fell short. Other New Left groups, such as the Sojourner Truth Organization, embraced workplace organizing and sent organizers into factories to address the politics of white privilege within the working class.63
Protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago placed the violence of a Northern city in the national spotlight and peeled back illusions that the Democratic Party could be easily reformed. Multiple factional fights within its ranks ultimately ended the group. The faction that formed the Weather Underground was based on the idea that white youth could challenge the oppressor nation and align with the revolution of Black people. This set of politics abandoned the left’s traditional emphasis on class struggle and promoted the idea that national liberation movements would be the vehicle for revolution in their time. Central to this understanding was the idea that colonies existed internally and externally. For example, Black people living within the United States were colonized as surely as those living under European rule in Africa. SDS was anti-imperialist and committed to organizing through militancy. The murder of Fred Hampton was an important turning point for the Weather Underground organization, eventually leading it to embrace a path of underground armed struggle. Inspired by the writings of Che Guevara and a cornucopia of successful anti-colonial uprisings overseas, the Weather Underground embraced Foco theory—strategies for armed insurgency and guerrilla warfare.
Their
