1 00:00:02,029 --> 00:00:05,733 As individuals, our racial identity is so intimately inscribed 2 00:00:05,733 --> 00:00:07,609 into the ways that we see and experience the world, 3 00:00:07,609 --> 00:00:08,780 and other people in it, 4 00:00:08,780 --> 00:00:12,104 that it's often taken as a natural and unchanging fact of life 5 00:00:12,104 --> 00:00:13,665 Race is a social construction, 6 00:00:13,665 --> 00:00:16,602 meaning that the stigmas and divisions associated with it 7 00:00:16,602 --> 00:00:18,460 are born out of political and cultural, 8 00:00:18,460 --> 00:00:21,186 rather than purely biological factors. 9 00:00:21,186 --> 00:00:23,050 But it's also a material reality 10 00:00:23,050 --> 00:00:25,073 – one that plays a central role in shaping the ways 11 00:00:25,073 --> 00:00:27,474 that power operates in a specific society. 12 00:00:27,474 --> 00:00:28,864 Given the current wave of racist 13 00:00:28,864 --> 00:00:30,912 and nationalist reaction sweeping the globe, 14 00:00:30,912 --> 00:00:32,452 it is important that anarchists 15 00:00:32,452 --> 00:00:34,578 develop a shared understanding of race, 16 00:00:34,578 --> 00:00:36,225 and the role that it plays in constructing 17 00:00:36,225 --> 00:00:38,245 and reinforcing oppressive hierarchies. 18 00:00:38,245 --> 00:00:39,663 So... what is race, exactly, 19 00:00:39,663 --> 00:00:41,693 and what do anarchists have against it? 20 00:00:41,883 --> 00:00:43,938 Well, a broad definition would be to say 21 00:00:43,938 --> 00:00:45,997 that it's a particular type of caste system, 22 00:00:45,997 --> 00:00:49,116 or a way of classifying people into rigid social hierarchies, 23 00:00:49,116 --> 00:00:50,660 based on perceived ancestry 24 00:00:50,660 --> 00:00:53,300 and intimately associated with notions of nationalism, 25 00:00:53,300 --> 00:00:54,751 citizenship and class. 26 00:00:54,751 --> 00:00:56,949 Most commonly associated with the global system 27 00:00:56,949 --> 00:01:00,046 of European colonial dominance known as White Supremacy, 28 00:01:00,046 --> 00:01:01,934 race has other close parallels, 29 00:01:01,934 --> 00:01:03,735 such as India's varna system, 30 00:01:03,735 --> 00:01:05,765 the ethnic constructions of Hutu and Tutsi 31 00:01:05,765 --> 00:01:07,247 in Rwanda and Burundi, 32 00:01:07,247 --> 00:01:08,960 and even religious sectarian divides 33 00:01:08,960 --> 00:01:12,167 such as those found between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland 34 00:01:12,167 --> 00:01:14,521 or Sunnis and Shia in several Middle Eastern countries. 35 00:01:14,521 --> 00:01:18,001 But while race can, and does assume a variety of different forms 36 00:01:18,001 --> 00:01:20,594 based on local demographic and political factors, 37 00:01:20,594 --> 00:01:22,960 it has always been, and remains to this day, 38 00:01:22,960 --> 00:01:24,650 a cross-class alliance 39 00:01:24,650 --> 00:01:26,490 – a way of binding the ruling class 40 00:01:26,490 --> 00:01:28,461 and a segment of the exploited classes 41 00:01:28,461 --> 00:01:30,281 through a compact of shared identity, 42 00:01:30,281 --> 00:01:33,448 in order to project force against those who fall outside of it. 43 00:01:33,448 --> 00:01:34,749 Or to put it simply, 44 00:01:34,749 --> 00:01:37,017 it's a way that states manipulate large groups of people 45 00:01:37,017 --> 00:01:39,615 into believing that they have more in common with their rulers 46 00:01:39,615 --> 00:01:41,920 than with the fellow ranks of the oppressed. 47 00:01:41,920 --> 00:01:44,346 An early precursor of modern concepts of race 48 00:01:44,346 --> 00:01:46,348 lies in the idea of the barbarian, 49 00:01:46,348 --> 00:01:48,253 which was developed independently by the rulers 50 00:01:48,253 --> 00:01:50,253 of a diverse number of early states, 51 00:01:50,253 --> 00:01:52,791 ranging from the Shang Dynasty in ancient China, 52 00:01:52,791 --> 00:01:54,759 to the Greek and Roman Empires of Eurasia, 53 00:01:54,759 --> 00:01:56,319 and Aztec and Inca Empires 54 00:01:56,319 --> 00:01:58,305 of modern-day Central and South America. 55 00:01:58,305 --> 00:02:00,125 By dehumanizing different ethnic groups 56 00:02:00,125 --> 00:02:01,922 outside their borders as barbarians, 57 00:02:01,922 --> 00:02:03,983 rulers were able to mobilize armies 58 00:02:03,983 --> 00:02:06,790 and rationalize the enslavement of captured populations. 59 00:02:06,790 --> 00:02:07,685 Centuries later, 60 00:02:07,685 --> 00:02:10,227 the rise and spread of powerful monotheistic religions 61 00:02:10,227 --> 00:02:12,834 added a new dimension to the construction of race, 62 00:02:12,834 --> 00:02:15,134 as the ideological conception of the barbarian 63 00:02:15,134 --> 00:02:16,039 was given new weight 64 00:02:16,039 --> 00:02:18,983 by the introduction of the notions of “pagan” or “infidel”. 65 00:02:18,983 --> 00:02:21,754 Religious dictates calling for the forced conversion of non-believers 66 00:02:21,754 --> 00:02:23,694 sanctified new wars of conquest, 67 00:02:23,694 --> 00:02:26,576 waged by the armies of Christianity and Islam. 68 00:02:26,576 --> 00:02:28,523 Fearing the expansionary rise of Islam 69 00:02:28,523 --> 00:02:30,348 which by the 11th Century had spread 70 00:02:30,348 --> 00:02:32,578 deep into the heart of European Christendom, 71 00:02:32,578 --> 00:02:33,798 the Catholic Church teamed up 72 00:02:33,798 --> 00:02:36,193 with feudal elites to launch the Crusades, 73 00:02:36,193 --> 00:02:38,929 a series of holy wars spanning nearly four hundred years 74 00:02:38,929 --> 00:02:42,598 and planting the seeds of ethnic, national and sectarian rivalries 75 00:02:42,598 --> 00:02:44,024 that continue to this day. 76 00:02:44,024 --> 00:02:46,131 In the final years of the Reconquest of Spain, 77 00:02:46,131 --> 00:02:48,392 the Catholic Church ramped up popular sentiments 78 00:02:48,392 --> 00:02:50,795 of anti semitism and Christian hysteria 79 00:02:50,795 --> 00:02:53,251 by launching the Spanish Inquisition 80 00:02:53,251 --> 00:02:56,250 – a bloody purge and forced conversion of Muslims and Jews 81 00:02:56,250 --> 00:02:59,345 that provided a horrific new laboratory for the development of race 82 00:02:59,345 --> 00:03:02,545 as an internal system of division and social control. 83 00:03:02,545 --> 00:03:05,265 The Spanish Reconquest was completed in 1492, 84 00:03:05,265 --> 00:03:06,972 and was followed in quick succession by 85 00:03:06,972 --> 00:03:10,296 Christopher Columbus' accidental invasion of the Americas. 86 00:03:10,296 --> 00:03:12,377 Believing the so-called “discovery” of the New World 87 00:03:12,377 --> 00:03:16,002 to be sign of divine providence after their holy victory against Islam, 88 00:03:16,002 --> 00:03:18,346 Spain launched the colonization of the Americas 89 00:03:18,346 --> 00:03:20,077 with a brutal religious fervour, 90 00:03:20,077 --> 00:03:22,508 waging a genocidal campaign of extermination 91 00:03:22,508 --> 00:03:24,537 against the continents' original inhabitants, 92 00:03:24,537 --> 00:03:26,328 alongside mass forced conversions 93 00:03:26,328 --> 00:03:28,795 carried out by Jesuit and Franciscan priests. 94 00:03:28,795 --> 00:03:29,959 In the decades that followed, 95 00:03:29,959 --> 00:03:32,210 Spain was joined in its pillage of the Americas 96 00:03:32,210 --> 00:03:35,179 by Portuguese, Dutch, and French colonialists. 97 00:03:35,179 --> 00:03:37,322 They were soon faced with a labour shortage, however, 98 00:03:37,322 --> 00:03:39,957 after working many Indigenous slaves to death 99 00:03:39,957 --> 00:03:43,557 and killing millions of others through diseases like smallpox. 100 00:03:43,557 --> 00:03:46,008 So, beginning in the early 16th century, 101 00:03:46,008 --> 00:03:49,187 Portuguese merchants established the transatlantic slave trade, 102 00:03:49,187 --> 00:03:51,970 a grotesque process of racial dehumanization 103 00:03:51,970 --> 00:03:54,802 whereby millions of people were kidnapped from West Africa 104 00:03:54,802 --> 00:03:58,085 and shipped across the ocean to slave-trading posts in the Caribbean 105 00:03:58,085 --> 00:04:00,430 and Portuguese plantations in Brazil. 106 00:04:00,430 --> 00:04:02,277 Britain joined the fray in 1607 107 00:04:02,277 --> 00:04:05,560 and quickly set to work expanding the transatlantic slave trade, 108 00:04:05,560 --> 00:04:07,935 establishing the vast southern Plantation system 109 00:04:07,935 --> 00:04:10,065 and kick-starting a process of unprecedented 110 00:04:10,065 --> 00:04:11,643 mass European migration. 111 00:04:11,643 --> 00:04:14,028 Within Britain's thirteen American colonies, 112 00:04:14,028 --> 00:04:16,145 a new pact of racial supremacy was forged 113 00:04:16,145 --> 00:04:18,680 between settlers of mixed European descent, 114 00:04:18,680 --> 00:04:21,106 based on their shared experiences of killing Natives 115 00:04:21,106 --> 00:04:23,266 and subjugating Africans. 116 00:04:23,266 --> 00:04:25,832 This new system, white supremacy, 117 00:04:25,832 --> 00:04:28,421 provided all white men with a share of the spoils 118 00:04:28,421 --> 00:04:31,129 stolen through genocidal territorial conquest 119 00:04:31,129 --> 00:04:33,525 and an economy built on slave labour. 120 00:04:33,525 --> 00:04:35,431 It also happened to make a small number 121 00:04:35,431 --> 00:04:38,024 of those white men unimaginably rich, 122 00:04:38,024 --> 00:04:40,790 setting the stage for the rise of capitalism. 123 00:04:40,790 --> 00:04:44,123 Despite ongoing controversy regarding her own racial identity, 124 00:04:44,123 --> 00:04:46,051 one of the most comprehensive descriptions 125 00:04:46,051 --> 00:04:48,501 of how white supremacy functions in the United States 126 00:04:48,501 --> 00:04:50,083 was written by Andrea Smith, 127 00:04:50,083 --> 00:04:52,593 who identified its three supporting pillars as: 128 00:04:52,593 --> 00:04:54,307 Slavery/Capitalism, 129 00:04:54,307 --> 00:04:56,043 Genocide/Colonialism 130 00:04:56,043 --> 00:04:57,707 and Orientalism/War. 131 00:04:57,707 --> 00:05:01,485 The first pillar, Slavery, rests on the commodification of Black bodies, 132 00:05:01,485 --> 00:05:04,860 and to their need to be controlled through force and imprisonment. 133 00:05:04,860 --> 00:05:08,500 The second pillar, Genocide, rests on the need for Indigenous nations 134 00:05:08,500 --> 00:05:11,699 to disappear or assimilate into settler society, 135 00:05:11,699 --> 00:05:14,394 in order to justify white people's claims to the lands 136 00:05:14,394 --> 00:05:15,763 that they currently occupy. 137 00:05:15,763 --> 00:05:17,836 The final pillar, Orientalism, 138 00:05:17,836 --> 00:05:20,316 based on earlier conceptions of the barbarian, 139 00:05:20,316 --> 00:05:22,435 conjures up the image of outside forces 140 00:05:22,435 --> 00:05:24,757 seeking to infiltrate and destroy society, 141 00:05:24,757 --> 00:05:26,979 whether they take the form of Islamic terrorists, 142 00:05:26,979 --> 00:05:28,488 hostile foreign states, 143 00:05:28,488 --> 00:05:31,131 or simply the spectre of “illegal immigrants” in general. 144 00:05:31,131 --> 00:05:33,752 Over the centuries, these three racial archetypes 145 00:05:33,752 --> 00:05:36,148 have been deeply ingrained in the white psyche. 146 00:05:36,148 --> 00:05:38,528 And so when Black people cry out that their lives matter, 147 00:05:38,528 --> 00:05:41,997 Indigenous people assert claims to their traditional lands and culture, 148 00:05:41,997 --> 00:05:43,727 or refugees fleeing wars and poverty 149 00:05:43,727 --> 00:05:45,839 demand their rights to political asylum, 150 00:05:45,839 --> 00:05:49,102 it is unsettling to the power structure that these pillars prop up. 151 00:05:49,102 --> 00:05:50,779 The response of states and rulings elites 152 00:05:50,779 --> 00:05:53,409 will always be to attempt to reinforce these pillars 153 00:05:53,409 --> 00:05:56,556 by fanning the flames of white paramilitary reaction. 154 00:05:56,556 --> 00:05:58,098 For anarchists who seek a new world 155 00:05:58,098 --> 00:06:00,572 built on the destruction of the state and capitalism, 156 00:06:00,572 --> 00:06:04,630 our task is to help to knock out the pillars that these systems rest upon. 157 00:06:04,630 --> 00:06:07,503 For some, this will mean severing the false bonds of whiteness 158 00:06:07,503 --> 00:06:08,803 and joining the resistance 159 00:06:08,803 --> 00:06:10,971 of those who have long struggled under its yoke. 160 00:06:10,971 --> 00:06:13,909 Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.