Jesse Hirsh could have titled his July 4 column “How to get it and not get it at the same time” but instead he called it “Declaration of Independence from Whiteness.”
“We declare independence from whiteness,” Hirsh proclaims early on, “[n]ot just as critique, but as practice. Not merely against, but toward something better — something freer.”
Hirsh never describes who “we” are but read the piece and it’s clear Jesse means people with white skin.
In support of his argument, Hirsh relies on what is arguably the best and most insightful writing on race and racism in American society and culture, namely the work of historian Barbara Fields and her sociologist sister Karen Fields. You may remember Barbara Fields from the Ken Burns documentary about the American Civil War. She doesn’t turn up a lot but when she’s there, she’s mighty. The people who get agitated about Burns’ master work get upset because the themes in it don’t conform to their more trendy beliefs. They think he is too soft on the Southern states and plays up the Just Cause theme a bit too much.
Burns reflects many things in his documentary, including the complexity and the nuanced of what real people felt and feel about the most momentous war in American history so far. That’s why some people these days, lacking any room for subtlety and nuance and understanding in what they believe is thinking, get upset. Barbara Fields is an historian, and so her analysis tends to be far more subtle and nuanced than any activist might get. Burns relied on good research to make his film and that’s why it holds up now 30-odd years later.
Anyway…
Hirsh quotes right at the start what he says comes from the collaboration of the two sisters, a book titled Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life: “Race is the principle unit of social organization in America.”
Problem for Hirsh right away is that you cannot find *that* quote in the book or indeed anywhere else that either Fields is quoted or has written anything, apparently. I have searched widely for it and pored over my copy of Racecraft and that phrase isn’t there, just as no variation is there, except this one: “Race is the principal unit and core concept of racism.”
Some of you will notice the different spelling of a word that sounds the same when you say it out loud. Principal - as the Fields use it in the book in that quote that does exist - means it is the first, the foremost, the central “unit and core concept of” the set of beliefs we call racism. Principle - as Hirsh’s quote uses it - means a basic or core belief or truth out of which flow other beliefs in a chain of thinking. You can stretch that use of principle in the quote Hirsh offers but it is tortured. That’s a good clue that Hirsh either let an Internet search engine addled by so-called artificial intelligence find it for him or he copied it from some other writer or he just made up his own quote in his notes, misspelled the version of “principle” he meant to use and carried on not realising it.
Either way, Jessie got it wrong from the start and it is a curious and revealing mistake, whatever way you look at it. We’ll rely on Barbara and Karen to reveal the irony in Jesse’s anti-racism and implicitly anti-American rant for American Independence Day. It’s an own-goal for sure. Used the right book but clearly didn’t understand what the book was about.
The Fields’ argument is deceptively simple but it is worth understanding since it runs diametrically opposite to Hirsh’s point. Racism in America is an invented excuse for the enslavement of Africans. Not just American since the American culture of racism is rooted in the racism popular across Europe during the period of African enslavement. But more importantly, a rationalization since humans have enslaved other humans for thousands of years and - in truth and in fact - enslavement, including the enslavement of Africans existed for almost 200 years before the birth of the United States. Physical and economic exploitation existed for all sorts of people *without* the idea that skin colour of people made it so. So too did the justification of war, enslavement, torture, rape, murder and other horrors exist in other cultures as ideas that identified Us - whoever US was - as being inherently better, smarter, wiser, more civilized or just simply stronger (victorious) and so on compared to The Other, who wound up enslaved, killed, or raped.
Even as he understands that point that the Fields make, Hirsh misses the point when he relies on a racial category to focus his discussion. “Whiteness is the crown jewel of racecraft.” That’s Hirsh, not Fields. The point about racism - as the Fields explain - is that it is a theory that justifies a double standard based on superficial characteristics like skin colour. Racecraft, as the Fields explain is not merely a euphemism. It “invokes witchcraft” but not merely because it is a fiction but because both racism and witchcraft turned into ideas that people believed, justified, and acted upon.
Look carefully at what Hirsh does as he makes his argument. Hirsh focuses on white-skinned people. He divides people by skin colour. He gives examples of how “white” people could describe themselves in a way that doesn’t refer to being white-skinned. To make things worse, Hirsh includes Jews in his set of white-skinned folks in need of an alternative description, ignoring entirely that such a definition is the Whoopie Goldberg gold star example of American racism. You may recall Goldberg dismissed the Holocaust as not racism since it involved two groups of white people fighting each other.
“This isn't about moral purity or guilt,” Hirsh offers in his conclusion, rebutting an imaginary criticism of his point. “It’s about power. When we opt out of whiteness, we weaken its hold. When we model joyful alternatives, we offer others the same escape hatch.” Yes, racism is about power. Hirsh gets that much but he misses the importance of that point entirely when he then continues to equate white skin colour exclusively or almost exclusively with power or even speaks only to white-skinned people in his piece.
Slavery and racism are about power but this is the crucial part of Barbara Fields’ argument Hirsh really missed. Slavery existed without the excuse of skin-colour when owners beat, sold, and killed indentured servants of the same skin colour as their own with impunity under laws at the time. Meanwhile, Hirsh clearly accepts skin colour as a legitimate way of distinguishing among people and that white-skinned people have collective power not just over themselves as all of us do as individuals, but the socially transformative power that would come from collectively rejecting what Hirsh calls their “whiteness.” Skin-colour doesn’t determine who has power and who doesn’t and, more importantly, skin-colour is not proof against harm even in a racist society where most of the powerful have white skin.
Hirsh’s argument is racism, unrefined, in action, pretending to be anti-racism. To quote the Fields: “And the first principle of racism is the belief in race, even if the believer does not deduce from that belief that the member of the race should be enslaved or disenfranchised or shot on sight by trigger-happy police officers or asked for identification when crossing a university campus where he teaches, just as believing that the sun travels around the earth is geocentrism” even if you don’t believe people who think the earth is not the centre of the universe should be persecuted. You cannot aim an argument at white-skinned people about their “whiteness” without believing that skin-colour is an acceptable way to sort people.
It’s like the political science professor in Sin Jawns who a few years ago offered whatever expertise she had in actual politics to help get women and “racialized” people elected to office. Anyone but white males is who she meant would be left out of her pool of candidates to get help and she used words to that effect in one media interview. In the process, she’d have been willing to help elect yet another member of local elites - by income, education, employment, and social status - but not elect someone from a group that was genuinely disenfranchised and socially, economically, or politically disempowered and do so based solely on the renewed popularity of racism and the fixation on skin colour. Powerful brown-skinned women would get her help. Less powerful white-skinned women might not and certainly white-skinned, less powerful men would not at all.
The Americanization of Canada and the related resurgency of popular racism among Canadian elites is a theme around these parts so when a piece like Jesse Hirsh’s Friday column appears on his Substack, the thing leaps up at you. There are links at the end of this column to four pieces on Americanization and the related topic of racism in Canada. Feel free to explore although for most of them, you will need to be a paying subscriber since they are now in the archive.
As far as Jesse Hirsh’s column goes, let’s make three quick observations and then *my* point.
First, Hirsh does not make a new argument. Many modern American - and hence Canadian - self-described progressives have made many times before the same point Hirsh does. And they all finish their claim the same way that Hirsh does, by arguing against a fictitious opposition or criticism - “this is not about moral purity or guilt” - before promising that goodness, glory, and salvation will come by taking whatever simple act they recommend.
Second, Hirsh embodies the point made by the Fields, namely that otherwise sane, rational people, folks who would consider themselves modern and progressive at their time in history, can be seduced by racism or witchcraft or some other widely held but ludicrous or hypocritical belief. Martin Luther believed witches and demons were real. Both the French and American revolutionaries in the late 18th century either owned slaves themselves at the time they argued for the rights of all Men or could rationalize the enslavement of Africans in which their countryman took part. Jesse Hirsh tells white people to disavow their whiteness and imagines this is somehow being anti-racist, and possibly, an implicit anti-American twist) since he published the piece on July 4.
Third, what Hirsh is doing here demonstrates yet again the extent to which American and Canadian cultures are intertwined. Not a new idea for regular readers and this ability for Canadians to accept American views without question and or filtering is especially obvious in the resurgent popularity in the United States on the political left and right of authoritarianism and racism.
For me, it’s worthwhile to go through those points and then get to this socially= and politically- difficult point: if you want to be an anti-racist, you have to understand what racism is and fully reject it, without hesitation every time you see it. That’s way harder than it looks, if only because you will inevitably have a hard time being accepted socially among people you might want to mingle with if you point out you don’t share their views or don’t want their job.
Good example: Hirsh works sometimes for CBC. The federal broadcaster is one of the most overtly racist institutions in Canada, having adopted the acronym BIPOC and “racialized” (synonyms for the racist term “coloured”) in its policies and editorial content and all the twisted, Americanized, racist thinking that goes with it. CBC has produced more than a few examples of both Americanization and Americanized racism. but Jesse would have difficulty doing what he is doing if he didn’t fit in politically and socially with the folks at the CBC and its left-American culture. That’s exactly the same as people on the Canadian right who are often equally Americanized.
One of the big differences between the Canadian left and right is that the people on the left imagine they are Canadians who are *not* Americanized. At the same time, they’d be the ones who protested in Canada when the American Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade or who accused the Conservatives of polarizing people but said nothing when Justin Trudeau referred to people in Canada who had “unacceptable views.” A bit more passive aggressive than Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of “deplorables” but easy enough to know who he was talking about and t’wern’t Grit and Dipper voters.
We live in an Americanized country. Folks might spend a bit of time trying to figure out whether they really are Canadian or not and what being Canadian really means, that is if being Canadian really means anything in itself.