There are a lot of different ways that people talk about what is happening the US right now. Fascism, authoritarianism, nazism, white supremacy. What I’ve seen generally falls into two categories: people that throw around nazi references and 1930s Germany like candy–“THIS IS JUST LIKE THE NAZIS!” with no context or development of exactly how a particular situation is just like the nazis. What it usually boils down to is the nazis and the right wing in the US are doing very similar things like banning books or targeting trans people. Their analysis rarely, if ever, develops a power analysis that explains how the nazis used their power to ban books or target trans people. By refusing to engage with a power analysis, the problem becomes ‘the right wing is mean like nazis’ rather than a more useful ‘this is how the right wing is manipulating power to achieve similar means as the nazis.’
The other way people talk about what is happening in the US right now is to use very Big Words I’m the Smartest. For example, the other day I saw a big fight on twitter between two ‘experts’ over if we’re in a moment of fascism: yes or no. The fight involved detailed analysis and lots of snark–but I admit, even I didn’t read through the end of the thread. I realized about halfway through the thread, you know, I don’t really even know after all the time what fascism even is. I have no functioning definition of fascism and most people that are in debates like this operate from the space that people do or should or could at least look it up.
When I went and looked up ‘fascism,’ I disagreed that our current moment meets the definition of fascism, although there are obviously key elements of fascism playing out. But that’s when I realized–the moment we’re in doesn’t need us deciding/fighting over which expert is right. What it needs is a way for all of us to understand how power is playing out, both in our individual lives and collectively, so that we can better understand what is happening and more effectively fight power with power.
In that light, I decided that it’s time for me to sit and detail, in a more permanent space than twitter, the language I am using to make sense of this moment. My hope is that it’s useful, and that it stays useful.
White Supremacy
First: My Context
Years ago, when I was organizing in Detroit, the buzzword floating around the social justice world was ‘white privilege.’ Everybody had some form of ‘privilege’ and ‘white privilege’ was everywhere. Being able to go to college. Not ever worrying about being the only white person in the room. Not worrying about your hair or name stopping you from getting jobs. There are benefits to being white, and those were some of them.
Many white people resisted the ‘privilege’ framework. While a lot of that resistance was just good old white defensiveness, there was also the inherent classism of the ‘privilege’ framework. And, indeed, the ‘privilege’ framework came from a college classroom. The woman that synthesized ‘privilege’ as a framework was a university researcher and the privilege framework was used in university classrooms where the typical student of that time would’ve been white, upper/middle class, just out of high school.
But there was also a more insidious problem, and it’s where I resisted the ‘privilege’ framework. People went from pointing out how ‘white people won’t get overlooked for a job because of their name.’ to ‘That white cop killed a black person because of white privilege.’ There was something inherently awful to me imagining that killing a human being was a simple ‘privilege’ of being white. The paradigm of ‘privilege’ was not able to answer my questions: Who gave white people the privilege of killing black people? Who enforces this privilege? That is, who (or what?) makes sure every single new generation of white people get the privilege of killing black people? How do white people make the decision–they are going to kill a black person today? What makes other white people NOT claim this privilege to kill black people?
I began talking to black elders in Detroit about how frustrating the constant battles over ‘white privilege’ were and they pointed out something to me that has stayed with me ever since. Why are we talking about ‘white privilege’ when we already have the framework of white supremacy (which we haven’t even come close to dealing with)? I couldn’t answer that question. The only thing I knew about white supremacy was white hats and burning crosses. I didn’t understand that there was a difference between white privilege and white supremacy.
Social Sorting
At the same time I was struggling to understand ‘white supremacy’ as a framework, I attended the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. One of the workshops that I’ve long since forgotten who was leading introduced me to the concept of ‘social sorting.’ What this means, according to the workshop, is that in the US, people are assigned different identities and ‘sorted’ according to those identities. Women to the left, men to the right. White men to the left, other men to the right. White gay men away from ‘real’ white men. White Christian straight men, ‘real.’ Everybody else sorted according to how close or far they are from ‘white Christian straight man.’
I was especially interested in this concept of ‘social sorting’ because as a light skinned queer daughter of a Mexican man and a white woman, I often felt like I was a ping pong bouncing around the social sorting queues, not belonging in any line, getting yelled at because I didn’t know what line to get into.
The analysis of social sorting helped me to see for the first time that ‘social sorting’ came with rules on how people are sorted/sort themselves. And that the rules that easily sorted some people into the ‘white christian straight man’ group were not so clear for me. White but not quite. A person that ‘couldn’t make up her mind’ about her sexuality (bisexual). Buddhist (oh lord). Ambiguously a girl/woman. I finally understood that the sorting rules were crap. That there was something wrong with them. Not me.
So why do we need these ‘social sorting’ rules then? Why do they even exist?
Resource Hoarding
As I continued to study ‘white supremacy’ I was beginning to understand that white supremacy was a system. I know in this day and age after years of the right rolling their eyes over ‘woke’ and ‘systemic racism’ and actively working to ban Critical Race Theory from k-PhD, ‘systemic’ and ‘system’ is not sexy to talk about. But just as many of us don’t really understand what ‘fascism’ is (even though we are against it!), many of us don’t necessarily know in real world language what ‘systemic’ means. Or why it’s important to understand ‘white supremacy’ as a ‘system.’
So what is a ‘system’? To draw on the dreaded ‘post-modernist’ Foucault: our entire world is made up of an intricate web of ‘power’ that allows the world to function. Those webs of power start on the individual level and expand all the way to worldwide scale. The webs become so normal, you don’t even notice or see them, most times. But there they are.
Some of the webs: governments, federal, state, local. And ALSO: the food system that grows food, delivers it to stores, sells it to people. The water system that pulls water out of nature, cleans it, delivers it to people, charges people for it. The education system that develops education criteria, trains educators, builds/funds schools, makes the laws the require children to attend school. The medical system that decides how to treat illness. The insurance system that decides if those treatments are allowed.
Each of those systems exist as a spiderweb of power. When you destroy one strand of the web, it grows a different strand in a different place. There is no spider that controls this web, the people that build up each of the systems control the web. Revolutionary movements have made this mistake repeatedly through the decades. If we kill the person in charge, we win. If we blow up the place in charge, we win. It rarely happens that way. Because power doesn’t exist in just one space, even under authoritarian fascist regimes. And that’s why the right wing in the US in this moment have been so spectacularly successful.
For whatever reason, they understood from the beginning that power existed throughout multiple spaces and in multiple ways. So their goal, unlike Democrats, has never been ‘get the presidency’ exclusively. Their goal has been to get the presidency, the court system, the police, the churches, the water/food systems, etc.
And they’ve done this, with remarkable success. While Ds had people out frantically trying to get HRC elected because at least some people understood what was at stake if Republicans got to name people to the Supreme Court, Republicans had already, for decades, been in control most of the apparatus that decided who would be interns at the Supreme Court, what law firms those interns would be fed into once they graduated, all major narratives about what made a judge ‘qualified’ (originalist! constitutionalist! NOT ‘understands a flexible constitution is necessary part of becoming a better nation!). Republicans were also in control of the actual judges–understanding ‘networking’ as a site of power. Networking became recruiting and friendship became obligation.
Republicans controlled everything except deciding who would be named as the next judge. Because they understood power exists throughout the entire web and that a web was made up of multiple other webs and that if you get block on one strand, you can just jump over and use resources to get what you want anyway.
Resources are what make the webs of power run. Resources are why we have webs of power. There are certain resources that everybody wants or just plain old needs to survive–and there needs to be systems set up to decide where and how those resources will be used or distributed.
For example: There is water. If everybody can just go to the stream and get water, the people that can’t get to the water get no water. The people that are too weak to get the water get no water. The people that aren’t strong enough to fight bigger people for access to the water either get no water or don’t get enough water.
Some societies decided that system of distributing water was good enough. But that system of getting water is not efficient and means that people need to spend most of their time working to get water instead of working. So we decided to create water treatment plants and a system of pipes that brings clean water to each home. At one point, we felt like it was best that ‘the public’ controlled that water treatment plant and the system of piping, but over the course of time, we were convinced that corporations or private equity firms could control the water better.
The water system is a system of resource distribution. And while Foucault argues that that system becomes so normalized, you don’t even think about it anymore–the water just magically appears–in this day and age, in 2023, in a world that is living through a pandemic and experienced Donald Trump in power and now sees extremist and radical right fundamentalists taking control of a frightening amount of our systems in the US–those systems are no longer as invisible or just ‘there’ as they used to be.
And that’s meant that we’re starting to see all the dangerous ways that republicans are using their power. Book banning, criminalizing genders, banning abortion, allowing vigilantes to report on people that have abortions, restricting the ability of people to travel across state borders, etc. Those are all restrictions on resources that used to be mostly available, if only in name.
They are hoarding resources (Donald Trump gets a new ball room, people with cancer get research and treatment defunded), and in doing so, they are recalibrating how resources will get distributed.
Bringing it all Together
Which brings us back to white supremacy and social sorting.
Why are Republicans hoarding resources? What is the benefit to them? Why are they seizing control of the way resources are distributed? What is the benefit to them?
While it may seem an obvious answer (people still need those resources no matter who is in control of how they get distributed, and whoever is in control of the resources is in control of the money to be made off those resources), this is slightly more complicated when you recognize that resource distribution is systemic.
Enslavers realized very early on that we (very literally) needed a systemic way to sort people. Specifically, how do we decide who should be enslaved versus who should be owners of the enslaved? An entire system was set up with rules through the courts and Congress that followed each human being in the US through entire lifetimes and generations that decide who would be enslaved and and as such, who would be owners of the enslaved. The same people that set up the ‘slave’ sorting system also figured out that they needed to decide who got to own all the resources (land, water, trees, etc) not, just enslaved humans. Deciding who had the actual rightful claim to the resource of land/water became entrenched in the project of deciding who had the rightful claim to enslaved laborer’s bodies.
Rich white men that became the slave owning aristocracy in the US recognized that England and Europe had their own social sorting systems, and that social sorting system was actually why so many of those white men wound up in the ‘New World.’ Kings, queens and popes were the official sorters of social orders in Europe. They, even as white men, could never become official sorters, not when kings and queens or popes were being chosen by God.
So these white men moved to the New World and created their own social sorting system where they could be the ones in charge. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are projects of social sorting, each in their own ways. Each document positions white land owning men as the new king/pope. Each document declares how ‘natural’ it is (When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,) that white men hold and should always and forever be entitled to the positions of power they were assigning themselves (and not the ‘merciless savages’ the British were inciting against ‘us’).
The ‘us’ and ‘we’ of ‘the people’ in the Declaration and Constitution were never women or black people or indigenous peoples, and they were never intended to be.
We the people was exclusively the white men that wrote the documents and the people they wrote those documents for. Those documents were not a privilege bestowed upon them because they were white. They were systemic power they gave to themselves.
And that systemic power meant that not only did they own the resources (thanks merciless savages), they owned the means of production as well (enslaved people). Resources were free (to them) and the means of developing those resources into objects to be sold were also the lowest cost its ever been before or since. That is, the cost of an enslaved person paid once for the entire lifetime of that person with the added benefit that all that enslaved person’s offspring became free laborers as well.
Do you see how much power a person that gets to be in charge of sorting gets? Do you see why Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act is what has truly upset the slaver aristocracy? Each of these things challenged or outright eliminated the systemic power that kept the slave owning and then plantation owning aristocracy in place. It empowered non-white people to challenge the way they had been sorted (black people–cooks and field workers, white women–wives and baby machines) and encouraged them to challenge the idea only white men could be sorters. It even to a certain extent, allowed people to decide on their own what standards the social system should even follow. Maybe this person with a penis is a woman, in other words. Maybe this person with a Mexican father and a white mother is multiracial. Maybe we all get to decide our own destinies.
Some could tolerate this dreaming and the systemic changes these dreams built. Many could not. And those people are the ones that have, over the centuries, shifted into what we now see as MAGA. Yes, they were mad about Obama. No, they don’t like immigrants. Yes, big cities scare them. But it’s always been desegrgation. And the end of slavery. Always.
And that’s why we’re living through what we’re living through today. They don’t give a shit about some kid getting his ass beat in DC. They want power. They don’t give a shit about abortions. They want power. They couldn’t care less about cancer research or vaccines. They want power.
And the power they want is the power to control as many resources as possible for as cheaply as possible, the power to control the means of production for as cheaply as possible, and the power to decide how those resources will be distributed. They get that power through the system of white supremacy that positions them as natural inheritors of and controllers of that power.
They want power. They want a particular type of power. If we don’t work to understand that power and how they’re seizing control of and rebuilding that power (it’s just like the Nazis! it’s fascism that I’m never going to explain to you!), then we will never build an effective resistance, much less a powerful justice filled alternative that grows and builds the dream of people supporting each other as we build our own destinies.
May we become the experts in power analysis we were always meant to be.
En Lucha
