This paper was presented at the 2002 conference of Philosophy Born of Struggle.
The Double Bind
What I want to do is bring together a number of threads of racial and class history of the US that outline a certain contour of the structure of white supremacy. We understand whiteness and white supremacy to be social structures, and race to be a system of social categorization. That is, the two are different levels of social relationship. That the US has been a white society, with a white government, was proclaimed in the naturalization act of 1790, and most fully theorized by Taney in the Dred Scott decision.
Taney focused on the dichotomy between slavery and the principle that "all men are created equal," and resolved it by returning to the practices of colonial society. Though the latter had been overthrown, Taney's new society could not begin without resurrecting it within itself. He argues that when white men established universal principles for themselves, they were to mean only what white men decided they would mean. All subsequent post-revolutionary universality was to be understood in that context. Within the primacy of whiteness, "all men" only meant "all white men," that is, all meant not all. Thus, a Supreme Court Justice, in the name of social justice, speaks against all social justice, and sees no need to differentiate between a former society overthrown as unjust and the act of transforming that society.
He extends this double reasoning to the question of citizenship. Because native born black people had previously been categorized as property, no citizenship was available to them. That is, they could not escape their former status through a claim within a new society because the former history of settlement had considered them unable to make such a claim in the old one. (The law of 1790 limited naturalization white males.) Taney then made the surreal argument that a black person from a foreign country could be naturalized as a citizen (should Congress agree), while a black person born in the US could not because, having been born in the US, naturalization was not a relevant procedure. Thus, a black person was not a citizen because (formerly or presently) property, entrapped within that property status because not a citizen, and ineligible to escape from either of those states because already fulfilling the requirements of citizenship. White doublespeak thus put black people in a double bind. Seeking to appeal to law to gain citizenship, they were caught between property status as the source of social inferiority and social inferiority as the source of their property status. And Taney codified that double bind into Constitutional law. That doubleness is iconic of a structure that threads its way through US history and society from jurisprudence to class relations.
Taney's decision was not the work of one man's demented thinking; it had many antecedents in state constitutions and prior lower court decisions. The issue was central in militating for the two party system.
In Penn., during the 1820s, when the party system was just forming, and many existed, the black vote was not a state issue. Blacks voted in some parts, not in others, depending on the level of harassment or threats by whites. (NP,171) The issue went to court in 1837 when a defeated (Democrat) candidate contested a county election because black people had voted, giving his opponent the victory. (NP,171) The press sensationalized the story, reporting that black people had been armed and threatening, or were being incited by the abolitionists, etc. Against the evidence of prior black participation, the court overturned the results, gave the victory to the loser, and disqualified the black vote. In making his decision, the judge referred back to an earlier Penn ruling that held blacks to be slaves because they had been slaves before the revolution. Because they had not had the franchise in colonial Penn., they did not have it now. (NP,172) That is, blacks should not have the vote because it is contrary to law, and it is contrary to law because blacks had not had the vote.
This same twisted logic took hold in the Penn Constitutional convention of the same year. The debate was whether free black people already had the franchise, because not specifically barred by the earlier constitution (of 1790), or did not have the franchise, because not specifically provided by the earlier constitution. [1] One side said the constitution excluded them because it took no notice of them, the other said that they needed no special notice to be included. (NP,180) White supremacy won, and the convention voted to exclude. The double bind lies in its being an issue of law in the first place. Here, an issue of law (black enfranchisement) was to be decided by the citizenry; but the issue of law to be decided was about who would constitute the citizenry that would decide such issues of law.
Though African-Americans organized autonomously to petition for the vote, deploying the respected modes of expression and influence, and it was all used as one more reason for disenfranchisement. If those petitioning for the franchise through acceptible means are punished for having done so, it suggests that there are two different sets of ideals, ethics, rules, and social structures for whites and for those they designate as non-white -- as a reflection of the fact that whites have to designate some people as non-white in order to apprehend themselves as white.
In denying franchise, the Penn constitution proclaimed the need to take special notice of black people in order to include them. Taking special notice, we shall see, is the central operation of the concept of race. White supremacy depends on a special paradigm of noticing black people (whether present or imaginary) as the condition for exclusion. And thus it generates a double system of jurisprudence.
One manifestation of this is the two party system. The two party system was designed, or evolved by design, as a system that structurally renders third parties impotent or dysfunctional to prevent them from becoming the tie-breakers (decision maker) between evenly matched major positions. Its initial impetus (cf. the 1820s debates in New York state) was to exclude the black vote to prevent it becoming the tie-breaker between evenly matched positions. In the Penn county case, it was the act of noticing the black vote by the candidate and the court, though blacks had voted within the given party configuration, that bestowed upon them the determining vote. Thus, the issue of black enfranchisement became the focus of hegemony between whites. And it was around the issue of black enfranchisement (or rather, the advocacy of that issue), that coalesced the multiplicity of parties of the 1830s into the two that emerged in the 1850s. [2] Ultimately, they agreed to derogate the black vote, dividing the political arena into two discursive "zones", that of white politics, and that of whites speaking for black political interests.
The Slave Codes as Antecedent
The antecedents of this double structure do indeed go back to colonial jurisprudence. It is found in the slave codes. As Saidiya Hartman has argued, the slave system depended on two systems of law, one which held for white society, and the other a "private" law of the "master" to exact absolute submission from the slave. This was the norm under colonial rule, and it was continued during the first half of the 19th century through court decisions which established the absolute submission of the slave to be essential not only for the maintenance of the slave system, but for the general (white) public welfare as well. The greatest "public good" required that each master insure the total submission of the slave as a "principle of moral right." Public law sanctioned in advance whatever the "master" had to do to bring about obedience, (SOS,91-2) regardless of how minor the infraction, (SOS,62-3) or however violent or brutal the punishment. (SOS,92) In one exemplary case, a white man shot a slave he had hired from another owner to stop her from fleeing a beating he was about to administer for a small infraction; the court found him responsible for damages to the "owner," but not guilty of assault since his power to exact obedience was absolute. (SOS,91)
All sexual conduct, torture, performance demands, laborer demeanor, etc. were "private" matters of ownership beyond the purview of the public law. (SOS,83,96) Thus, slave law established two different social realms, the public and the private, and fulfillment of the private law of laborer submission was seen as a "master's" social "responsibility" toward public society. Part of the "master's" responsibility to white society was to have the slave perform contentment, failure in which was to be considered recalcitrance, resistance, discontent, and was punishable. Thus, obeisence was also demanded. In other words, in the US, the social obedience of bond-labor differs markedly from military obedience in that social obedience demands obeisence as well.
But it is insufficient to say that this duality of systems was based on the contradictory principles of the slave being at once a person and property. The existence of that contradiction was itself contradictory; people can't be property, and thus the term "property" is but a metaphor for the conflation of kidnapping, captivity, torture, and forced labor, juridicaly legitimizing it. The law thus has had to be hypocritical throughout US history, and to resolve that hypocrisy for itself, to generate two systems of law.
The Invention of Race and Whiteness
On what did this double structure depend? This question returns us to the original invention of whiteness in the
continental colonies, before the 18th century theorization of race as biological. (Linneaus, Buffon, Kant). When the English arrived in Virginia, they did not consider themselves white; whiteness did not become an element of their social consciousness until 1680s, and first became a juridical concept only in 1691. Whatever prejudice some may have had against Africans before that, race had no socio-institutional existence. Neither had they a concept of slavery.
The first steps toward a concept of race occurred through exclusion and theft from the indigenous people, defined across an English/Indian binary, rationalized through inferiorization discourses, paranoia, and a demand for English allegiance against them. But two social factors had to evolve for race and whiteness to become relevant concepts for them, a division in the English and African work forces, and a structuring of that division. Three central moments in that evolution can be marked. The first was the plantation system that evolved. It constituted a capitalist agricultural industry mass-producing commodities for an international market, using labor in an indentured, chattel (assignable) form first filled by English, but establishing a socio-juridical basis for African slavery. Resistance took the form of running away, since labor organization was considered sedition. African bond-laborers first became prefereable because running away was more difficult. Throughout the 17th century, English and African bond-laborers made common cause in escaping. Second, in 1662, servitude status was legislated to be matrilineal, contravening the central tenet of patriarchy in the interest of plantation wealth, which counted its laborers as corporate wealth because chattel. Thus, motherhood and womanly being was deployed as the first real basis for a division of Africans from English, which later laid the basis for a biologization of the division created.
Third, a social division between English and Africans was given strict structure as a division of white and black in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion (1676). As Africans became the predominant plantation laborers during the 1680s and 90s, the Colonial Council created a paranoid discourse targetting the English by recalling the hardships of the earlier rebellion, and warning of the threat of impending African rebellion. That is, the first step toward racialization was the racialization of social upheaval. Against this, a paradigm of white solidarity and consensus against this common enemy was called for. This sense of white solidarity was given juridical concreteness in the slave codes of 1705. Then, in the 1720s, the patrols were organized to guard against runaways and expressions of African autonomy as the concrete expression of fear, consensus, and solidarity. As an organizational form of institutional violence against Afams, the patrols' own violence was seen as the proof that black rebellion was an imminent reality. Thus, patrol violence reproduced the paranoia underlying white solidarity, and that white solidarity produced violence as its expression. The structure is circular: violence produces paranoia, paranoia produces solidarity, solidarity produces violence.
In historical terms, paranoia toward the threat of rebellion by the oppressed generated a racialization of labor group division. White solidarity racialized itself against that threat, generating a new form of social identification. And violence marked that racialized identity in practice, consolidating the consensus and answering the paranoid threat. The social dynamics of this process called upon the antecedent ethos of absolute allegiance to the settlement, and created the paranoid demand for absolute submission of African Americans.
The colony came to identify itself as white rather than merely English, as the conretization of this allegiance and paranoia. The white ethos of allegiance made the violence of suppression and oppression unquestionable. While the oppressiveness of the plantation generated an equation between resistance and survival, the drive for profitability of the colony made alleviating the oppression of black people anathema. White violence produces racial paranoia because it understands fearfully the resistance and resentment that violence produces. Racial paranoia produces white solidarity as its defense against what it has constructed for itself in both reality and imagination. White solidarity and allegiance produce racial violence as the practice of inferiorization essential to white self-rationalization. Whiteness could not invent itself, nor can white identity maintain itself, outside this cycle of paranoia, solidarity, and violence. Thus, the ethos of self-superiorization that the English brought as Christians, and emplanted through eschewal of the indigenous, took the concrete form of white supremacy in the codification of plantation slavery.
The Historical Effects of Whiteness and
Two historical trends or motifs emerge from this. The first is an endless recurrence of social and political paranoia throughout US history. The second is the construction of a dual society manifesting itself as a double legal structure and a double class structure. The two together determine the particular mode of violence that has threaded its way through US history: the violence of conquest, of slavery, of segregation, of expansion and Manifest Destiny, of disenfranchisement as the two party, of union suppression, of police profiling and of the prison-industrial complex.
The sense of a paranoid element in the discursive and institutional frameworks of the US has been noticed and discussed. (Hofstadter and DB Davis) Its extension has been generally ignored, but it stretches from the Dec of Ind. to contemporary police profiling. We need only point out a few of its moments. There was an immigration scare of 1830s that was identical in its rhetoric and viciousness to the red scare of 1950s. It proclaimed Austria to be a power intent upon subverting the American way of life, using a foreign ideology (Catholicism), and resulted in violent pogroms against Catholics, the Irish and others. The "free labor ideology" that swept white working class thinking in the north and western territories from the 1820s to the Civil War, as the integument for their anti-slavery stance, was a paranoid idea. Though extolling the honor of "free labor" as the ability of a wage earner to get ahead, it held that free black laborers provided "unfair competition" and reduced overall labor conditions. But though white workers of the north supported the abolition of slavery from the 1800s on, it was only to then exclude them from their organizations and segregate them as workers. White skilled workers boycotted businesses that employed blacks, and sought to politically bar them from employment. Ultimately, this expressed itself politically as a prototype of Jim Crow (disenfranchisement, segregation, and exclusion from the judicial system). That is, the "free labor ideology," which misunderstood the competition of black bond-laborers (brought by white masters) as "unfair competition" and excluded the freed black workers for the same reason, held that black labor brought slavery with it, was naturally subservient, and thus injurious to free white laborers.
Jim Crow, of course, was an expression of mass paranoia which used violence, as Ida Wells has shown, to make a case where no evidence existed, that black men were all criminals and rapists, and needed to be suppressed with special laws and extra-legal violence. White violence became the rationale for the need for white and/or societal violence. We need only add the anti-communist red scare, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism (a story concocted about 911 to meet the war needs of the government), the assault on Iraq, and the "why do they hate us" syndrome. Paranoia is central to white American thinking.
One can argue that the Dec Ind is a paranoid document. Though a settler society sworn to allegiance to the King, it accuses the king of "repeated injuries and usurpations," among which are the quartering troops in the colonies, keeping judges and legislatures dependent on himself, preventing the new "appropriations of lands" (to be stolen from the indigenous), and "exciting domestic insurrections" (meaning of slaves and the indigenous). Thus, the colonial oppressors pretend to be the oppressed in order to supply themselves with an enemy to unite against. But it expressed the transformation of their identity and social identification from being English to being white, and which led to the building of an independence movement. [3] The immediate event that consolidated that movement was the king's veto of a Carolina bill to stop the slave trade; the bill's purpose was not to end slvaery, but to preserve the estate value of the plantations, part of which was measured in slave market value, which was eroding due to an overabundance of slaves on the market.
Police Profiling
One contemporary form this traditional paranoia takes is racial police profiling. Let us look at its inner structure. Police profiling establishes a dual legal structure in the following way. First, it is not law enforcement, but its inverse. In law enforcement, a crime is discovered and the police look for a suspect who might have committed it. In profiling, a suspect is discovered, and the police look for a crime for him/her to have committed. On the one hand, there is crime, and on the other, a police act of criminalization. The legal device that legitimizes profiling is probable cause, which gives the police the right to stop, search, or detain people if they have "probable cause" to believe a crime is or has been committed. To run upon seeing the police is profiled as guilt, and provides probable cause to stop the person (preponderantly if they are black, sometimes if they are white). Profiling and probable cause combine to form a structure of guilt by association; the person is stopped under probable cause because they are associated by the police with a profile that criminalizes them apriori. Profiling is by nature racializing, since it is visual, and depends on what is singled out to be noticed and criminalized, as opposed to what is not noticed (whiteness). And finally, police profiling is self-referential since it generalizes persons, appearance, or behavior through an autonomous police decision, based on their own data.
To be stopped by the police is to be subject to the full authority of the law in the person of the cop. Any directive the cop gives translates into law since "disobeying an officer" is a crime. Refusal or resistance to a directive subjects a person to possible arrest, punishment (such as beating), or both. This gives the police the ability to create legal standards for street encounters that have the weight of actual law, that is, the ability to make law in the moment, to constitutes an alternate judicial system. Having been noticed (generalized), profiled (criminalized), and stopped (absorbed into the judicial system), a person detained becomes subject to two systems of law, public law and the cop of the moment.
It also gives the police the ability to transform a profiled (criminalized) person into a de facto criminal at will. The cop has but to find a directive that an individual will resist simply out of self-respect, a sense of dignity or justice, or a feeling that the directive is extreme and unwarranted. Such a stance will be construed as disobedience, and be cause for arrest, the use of painful restraints, torture with pepper spray, and charges of resisting arrest. If the officer choses to beat the person, the person can then be charged with assaulting the officer since the judicial presumption is that an officer will use violence to make an arrest only in self-defense. The cop's use of violence becomes presumed evidence that the cop was threatened or assaulted. Thus a person's sense of dignity, self-respect, or justice can be criminalized. In short, profiling implies that the police have the power to determine who will be human, whose self-respect will be respected, whose autonomy and independence will go unpunished, and whose not. [4] Its effect is to divide society into two domains, the profiled and the unprofiled, subject to two separate systems of law and juridicality. (Herrenvolk)
Clearly, this draws the two ends of US history together. Under the "slave codes," the "master's" private abusiveness was to be "balanced" in the public law by legal safeguards for the slave against public abuse, assault, etc. -- just as police impunity is understood to be "balanced" by the Bill of Rights. The "laws" safeguarding the slave's person were worthless in court since slaves could not testify against whites. And constitutionally guaranteed rights against unreasonable searches and seizure of person or property similarly become worthless in the face of impunity, since due process gets postponed to after the fact (as with asset forfeiture), and civil rights are sidestepped by charges of resisting arrest, disobeying an officer, etc.
The analogy becomes worrisome insofar as it implies police impunity similarly divides social authority into public and private realms, for which the police constitute the "private" domain. They are sanctioned to make law arbitrarily, to criminalize self-referentially, and to establish submission and obeisence to the public social structure. Thus, while the public realm gets mapped onto white (mainstream, unprofiled) society, the private realm gets mapped onto police impunity. Impunity is not authorized by public law because it is authorized to stand beyond the purview and control of public law. In proclaiming a crime problem, and sanctioning violence, the public law's relation to this "private" domain reveals the elements of racialization, paranoia, violence, and white sanction as consensus.
This paramilitarization of the police as a private domain explains why demands for civilian review boards, and community policing, have gotten nowhere. They address a political structure that has set the police beyond that structure, out of reach of such demands.
The Dual Class System
A final historical note. This dual legal system threaded through US society also adumbrates its dual class structure. Colonial plantation slavery was a labor intensive form of agricultural mass-production, in which the slave population represented the working class, pushed to the absolute limit of exploition and surplus value production. (Wright and DuBois) White workers and artisans were marginal to this economy, servicing the plantations in ancillary occupations secondary to bond-labor mass production. The colonial governing council, as a corporate state, had the reponsibility to provide and regulate resources and labor, to guarantee overall social profitability, and insure marketing the colonial product. And poorer white farmers and workers served on the patrols (ICS), thus integrating themselves into white society, and constituting the control stratum that guaranteed its preservation over the black working class. Thus, while class division existed among whites, the main class relation was between white society as a whole and the black working class. The dual class relation of white workers was doubly productive of economic value as workers and of whiteness and white society itself as the control stratum.
When, in the early 19th century, white workers in the north pressed for the abolition of slavery, only to exclude the freed black workers in a prototype of Jim Crow, they were doing two things. They were seizing the identity of "the working class" for themselves from those who had been, and they were acting to proletarianize black workers insofar as barring them from all but unskilled labor deprived them of the skills they had mastered even as slaves. White workers thus inverted their status from marginal to central, and established a class relation between themselves and black workers, insofar as their whiteness integrated them into white society, and provided a form of property that protected them from similar proletarianization. Thus, they constituted the boundary between two class structures, a structure of traditional capitalism on the one hand (white workers and white employers), and a racialized class structure on the other (black working class and white corporate society in its entirety as the ruling class).
Subsequent history confirms this dual class structure: the segregation of black labor after the Civil War, the NLU's insistence that black workers have separate locals or unions, the return of slavery as debt-servitude after emancipation, the ideology of Manifest Destiny, etc. In considering themselves the working class, yet playing that double role, white workers have rendered working class solidarity essentially impossible. They are in class contradiction with capital as workers, in collaboration with capital and in contradiction with black workers as white. As white workers, their identity depends on collaboration (white solidarity) with capital to be white, and thus to be the working class.
The fact that three distinct class relations can be discerned, dividing US society into two distinct class structures, implies that class relations in the US cannot be understood on the European model. There, class relations were founded on nation and nationality; here they are founded on race and racialization. The white class system constituted by a white corporate state and a white working class, and the racialized class system constituted by white corporate society and the exclusion and proletarianization of people of color, mark two different and incommensurable class structures separated by a white working class control stratum whose identity depends upon white class collaboration. [5] In other words, racism is not primarily a capitalist strategy to divide and rule the working class; it is the way the working class has defined itself. To think the former is to ignore the role of racialization in the formation of working class identity, and to obviate understanding why it has worked so well -- and still works, even after decades of civil rights upheaval and argument. Socialism has always had minimal presence in the US, even in the face of a violent labor history, because the socialist call for class unity, which addresses itself to white workers as workers, has had no meaning for white workers as white. Socialist ideas have never addressed the basis on which the white working class had defined itself as a class, and it has not seen that, in the US, the very condition for working class unity is the condition for its disunity.
The Prison System, a Model for the Dual Class System
An analogical model of this double class structure can be found in the prison system. In a prison, the administration (and the state) governs both inmates and guards, and treats each oppressively in a different manner, as part of its modus operandi. Where the inmates are the source of the prison's existence and constitution, the guards are the instrumentality through which it works, the control stratum over the inmates. The juridical status of guards and inmates is incommensurable; the first have social legitimacy as workers, whose social role is one of violence against the inmates, while social legitimacy has been taken from the inmates, and they are defined as those subjected to this control stratum. Where the prison administration corresponds to the white ruling class, the juridical difference between guards and inmates corresponds to the proletarianization relation between white workers and workers of color. Though the guard/inmate relation is not racial, it functions in a manner analogous to the structure of racialization (and is becoming racialized in fact).
The guards, when they form organizations, or unionize as workers, do so not to free themselves from the administration's control, or to transform the prison, but to enhance their standing in prison operations, to acquire modes of participation in policy-making whose aims are a better life for themselves and more efficient control of the inmates. Though they organize against the administration, the context is one of solidarity with the administration over the inmates. Should the prisoners attempt to organize autonomously, both guards and administration will suppress them brutally. The guards will not cross the juridical boundary to make common cause with the inmates; and the inmates as workers themselves in general will not make common cause with the guards as workers because they are guards and civilians.
One could say (and classical Marxism would agree) that the exploitative class relation across the "means of production" of the prison is between the administration and the guards. On such a view, the relation between the prison and the inmates is secondary; the inmate is the "product" that the prison is built to produce. The collaboration of administration and guards is coherent because of the existence of the prisoners. And class conflict within that conjunction is beyond the purview of the prisoners. It is an administrative dispute over conditions of internal stratification that doesn't involve them (as class struggles in the US, or various reform movements, third party efforts, etc. have often concerned conditions of class stratification that have not involved black workers). And the solidarity of administration and guards gets its force from the fact that the prison-inmate relation is primary, the reason there are guards in the first place who happen to be workers.
The prison then functions as the concrete, the structural, and the discursive (tropological) link between the dual legal structure of which police profiling is the continuation, and the dual class structure, for which the structure of racialization is the primary inner dynamic. Prison, profiling as a dual legal system, and the dual class structure, all reflect the three elements of white supremacy: paranoia, violence, and white solidarity or consensus. Paranoia, violence, and white solidarity thread their way through US society and culture, as the structure of white supremacy, from beginning to end.
The first common interest, then, between black and white workers, is the destruction of the social structures and culture of white supremacy, for black workers to free themselves from their proletarianization, and white workers to free themselves to be a real working class. This does mean simply combatting "racism." The term "racism" can thus be seen to be an empoverished term. Racialization pertains to social categorization, a cultural structure whose foundations are a violence that hierarchizes. In making reference to race rather than racialization, the term "racism" falls short. It also hides the fact that profiling and paramilitarization are today the basis on which white people obtain their whiteness and their sense of being normative. For black or brown people, any attempt at common cause between white and black workers, as long as the dual class structure (and the structures of racialization that produce it) exists, will be a form of opportunism on the part of whites, and of further subordination to white society on the part of blacks.
1- The earlier constitution had guaranteed the vote to "freemen", but not to "free men," (NP,181) and the debate concerned whether free black men were "free men" or "freemen."
2- Historically, the Republican Party emerged as an amalgamation of several anti-slavery parties. The proslavery party (Democrats) recognized that freed slaves would align themselves with the anti-slavery party; thus, it opposed the franchise for black people where it could not preserve slavery. The antislavery party knew that it would get the votes of liberated black people for having opposed slavery, but it also knew it would lose white votes if it advocated black suffrage. Thus, the anti-slavery party vacillated on the issue of black suffrage. It was not the African-American vote as such that was the issue, but rather the ancillary (white) question of whether one advocated African-American suffrage or not that decided the balance of power between (white) parties.
3- The colonists had constructed an alternate identity for
themselves that was other than English, and thus saw such things as
taxes and governance as assaults. To gauge its degree, consider that,
from a society comfortable with alien and sedition laws, Haymarket
martyrs, lynch law, and the Diallo and other police murders, a major
charge against the king is "For protecting [his troops], by mock trial,
from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the
inhabitants of these States." The justice or direness of taxes and
governance was not the issue, but their structure.
4- As a demand for obedience, this self-arrogation of power constitutes a political demand for obeisence and abjection. The name of this structure is "impunity." It names the hyper-political context in which the police not only stand above police regulations and legal prohibitions against torture or murder, but become a law unto themselves.
5- Today, the ICS is constituted by racism in the working class, the
two-party system, tacit segregation, racism, police profiling, and
white worker active allegiance to all this). When white workers opposed
affirmative action, it was not only out of racism, but out of their
self-identification as the working class, whose whiteness is not only
their identity, but their standing in white society as an ICS. Because
their allegiance to whiteness is also an allegiance to social
profitability as defined by the corporate state, even massive class
struggles within the white class system have rarely looked beyond white
consensus to question the tenets of profitability and allegiance that
consolidate white corporate society.