Link Salad, the Time of the Whites Edition

Some of what I've been reading

Abhi Sharma, Flickr

— What’s New About Woke Racial Capitalism (and What Isn’t) - Enzo Rossi and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Spectre, Dec. 18, 2020

“The fact that there has been a material change is part and parcel of racial capitalism’s ideological strategy: wokewashing offers itself up as an explanation for the real and substantive changes in political economy, though it is a largely misleading explanation, as it centers individual success stories as evidence of supposed progress towards full inclusion, which obscures the largely class-bound nature of the changes in racial hierarchies. The potential small numbers of the middle class of racial minorities to enter the increasingly multiracial global elite has often come alongside the cementation or even acceleration of exploitation and vulnerability for working class people of all races. Since the global and horrifically violent campaign of repression and terrorism against the Left (particularly anticommunism) helped eliminate the basis for alternative explanations, the neoliberal racial progress narratives go without substantive challenge.¹⁷”

— The Path to American Authoritarianism - Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Foreign Affairs, Feb. 11, 2025

“The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.”

— Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. - Eugene Ludwig, Politico, Feb. 11, 2025

“I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.”

— The Time of the Whites - Rahmane Idrissa, London Review of Books, Feb. 20, 2025

“For Singaravélou, colonisation stages an encounter between the West and the Rest. But if we believe, as the contributors to Colonisations do, that cruelty, misapprehension and incommensurability are woven into colonial contact, we’re bound to conclude that the encounter is hopeless, despite the fact that colonisation is a geopolitical reality defined by relations of power, not a clash of civilisations. Even an arch-imperialist like Kipling knew that colonisation was not a matter of fundamental, unbridgeable differences between coloniser and colonised so much as a test of power, ideally resolved by a pact of freedom and fraternity. The most well-known line in his ‘Ballad of East and West’ – ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ – is often quoted without its resolution: ‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’ Harmand put it more realistically: colonisation in the modern era amounted to domination by foreigners, no more and no less. But it was a political cataclysm, not the ontological showdown that both the colonial and anti-colonial romances envisage. Colonisations does at times acknowledge that colonisation is not quintessentially European, but too often its contributors fall into the essentialising trap of figuring the encounter between France and its colonies as asymmetrical and the outcomes as inevitable.”

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Currently reading: Satantango - László Krasznahorkai

Currently listening: Dead Bodies Everywhere - KoRn