Crasses et Voluptés

this

RACISM, COLONIALISM,IMPERIALISM

James McMaster

Let’s begin by doing away with a harmful misconception. Racism is not simply a matter of individual misinformation or malice. Far too many “anti-racists” misunderstand racism as the name for a wide diversity of problematic individual attitudes and bigoted opinions that must be undone. This view is wrong-headed. One of the major problems with this perspective on racism is that it tends to cast figures like “the white US southerner” or “the drunk uncle around the dinner table” as the racists par excellence. The impulse to cast another as the true figure of racism is born of the desire to absolve ourselves of our own complicities with structural oppression. Something to accept: we are all complicit in the perpetuation of racism. When accused of racism, the appropriate response is not any version of, “No, not me!” Rather, the work begins when we come to terms with the fact that racism is the air we breathe; it is the water in which we are submerged, and in which many of us are drowning.

 ...

A truly anti-racist practice and performance of art and life must be similarly unapologetic and uncompromising in its coalitional opposition to racial capitalism and antiblackness, to settler colonialism, orientalism, and empire. There can be no justice under capitalism. Inclusion within a machinery that is designed to destroy so many of us is not and never will be justice; indeed, the will to inclusion in such a machinery may very well be one of the most significant strategic problems facing those interested in livable minoritarian life. Theatre practitioners and other cultural workers would do well to operate from a set of assumptions that sees settler colonial nation-states as fundamentally violent and that recognizes that the most powerful enemy of people of color, black people especially, is the state. At least in the United States, these facts require us to do away with patriotism and (ethno-)nationalism, as well as with fantasies that imagine the United States as a source of justice rather than one of destruction. Only after we’ve done this will we be able to imagine and enact a politics that is formidable, radical, and revolutionary enough to reckon with a country dependent on the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples, the ongoing enslavement of black peoples, the ongoing abjection of other people of color, and the ongoing imperial wars for resources and power being waged across the world.

Another world is possible, but it is our task to build it.