Whose World is This: Race and White Supremacy in the Anti-Globalization Movement
By Walidah Imarisha
Published in Rain and Thunder, Winter 2001
The anti-globalization movement will always remember the Genoa protests against the G8 as an unmitigated war where the state showed its repressive power. Many activists were shocked and dismayed by the blatant brutality shown by police, crystallized in the murder of Carlo Giuliani, a young Italian anarchist protester. Many, especially white anarchists, were shocked and stunned by the disregard for life shown by Giuliani’s murder.
While we must mourn Giuliani’s death and use it as a catalyst for continued organizing, some are calling Giuliani “the first person killed in the anti-globalization movement.” This statement and the mentality behind it epitomize a thinking centered around whiteness and western reality that pervades the current movement for social justice, a mentality that has left many people of color frustrated and angry.
Carlo Giuliani was shot by the military forces of an international global economy struggling to keep capital at the top and people at the bottom. He was killed, not because he was in the off limits zone the police arbitrarily erected, but because he was using his body as his voice, screaming out against the injustices in the system. The fact that he was not only shot but also run over by a tank shows the disregard this system has for a human life.
But it is a disregard for human life that people of color have always been intimately aware of. Globalization is not a new concept; it has been in practice for centuries. The first full-scale globalization of “products” was the slave trade with African people as the commodities being bought and sold. From the inception of this country and before people of color have been important only for what the dominant culture can leech from our bodies. Black people were considered 3/5 of a human being according to the constitution; Native peoples were classified as “children” legally with the state as their parent; Asian people were imported like goods until they were no longer necessary, as are Latino people today. And now we have the growth of the prison industrial complex, which uses Black and Brown bodies predominantly for the same purposes.
The use of police to further this criminalization of melanin is nothing new to us, so the brutal police tactics used in Genoa are no surprise; any brotha or sista on the block could tell you a hundred stories like it that never made the front page of the newspaper – hell, they didn’t even make it into the newspaper.
Some have talked of Giuliani’s murder as “the first North American/western/European death of the anti-globalization movement,” to address some of these concerns. Aside form being an unwieldy title, it more to the point ghettoizes brown struggle within the movement, and devalues brown life. With the thousands, the millions, of activists and rebels and revolutionaries of color who have been massacred the countless millions of workers and the poor who have died simply because they dared to be born, to feel the need to set Giuliani apart is really to say that this is the first death that matters to the movement.
Around the world, people of color bear the brunt of globalization, and have since its inception. And when people rise up against globalization in Third World nations, as is happening around the world today, it is people of color who are cut down with increasing frequency and disregard for human life. The Left mourns Carlo Giuliani, as it should, but doesn’t even know the names of those who died putting their bodies in the line of global capital’s fire around the world.
Protesters were killed in New Guinea, and it didn’t even get mention in the majority of the “progressive” press. Giuliani is killed, and it’s the front page of every alternative media outlet. One flyer I read in Portland said, “With comrade Giuliani’s death, it begins a new stage in the struggle against Capitalism.” I’m not trying to detract from the horror of Giuliani’s murder when I point out that if he had been a Black man in Nigeria fighting to get Shell out of his country and government thugs hired by the corporation had shot him down, no one would know his name.
This is the fault of the movement, of the activists and organizers who do not go in search of this information, but instead rely on mainstream media sources with their own agenda to spoon feed them knowledge. It is also the fault of alternative media for not prioritizing these incidences of repression and resistance. Independent media sources are useful only in that they not only bring us accurate information that is distorted or omitted from mainstream press, but also to frame those stories in a way that is anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-heterosexist, anti-classist, anti-imperialist. It is on these news outlets to do their own unlearning oppression work, so they do not end up perpetuating the same system that deems people of color’s death less important than those of whites. If they are not fulfilling that role, those alternative media outlets need to be dismantled, and something new put in their place.
The current anti-globalization movement is not addressing people of color, not even wording the dialogue in a way that involves people of color. This is unacceptable when we are the central players in oppression. The racial chauvinism of the anti-globalization movement in America and Europe, run predominantly by white privileged activists, feels it can be the savior to the peoples of the world.
Without an anti-racist foundation, you run the dangerous risk of sounding exactly like the far Right’s anti-big business rant. Neo-nazi groups have called the Battle for Seattle “the greatest showing of young white power in recent years,” and racist skinheads attended some of the protest. This is because anti-capitalism, without the understanding that the foundation of capitalism is rooted in white supremacy, is easily swayed to reactionary racism. This only serves to further alienate communities of color from this movement. If racists are your allies, people of color are not.
The reason globalization often isn’t framed to challenge white supremacy is because if it was, white activists would have to accept their own white privilege. As long as the focus is on corporations like Chiquita and their exploitation of labor, no mention of race, white activists do not have to look at their role, both within and outside the movement, in the continuation of global racism. I have seen far too many activists talk about the racist exploitation of Third World peoples, then take full advantage of their white skin privilege whenever the chance arises. What for some is an exercise in ideology is for people of color a mission of survival.
This is part of the reason folks of color have been hesitant to join the anti-globalization movement, especially in this country; we have seen our white allies fade into the woodwork when real repression comes down, with us left holding the bag. White activists, especially those who are middle class and college educated, always have the option to rejoin society and receive all the class and race advantages they were born into.
In the struggle, on the front lines, white privilege protects white people. White activists get arrested; we get beaten. White activists get beaten; we get killed. Their organizations get raided and their people imprisoned, while the system drops bombs on our homes, as the City of Philadelphia did in 1985 to the MOVE organization. All levels of state repression are disturbing, but it is radicals of color who are sentenced to the longest prison terms, who are murdered in their beds by police forces, who are forced into exile for centuries.
So the police response in Genoa was only surprising to white activists who had previously been shielded from such blatant displays of police power by their privilege. I have heard many people say that the mass globalization convergence protests of recent years are useful because they “make people see the violence inherent in the system.” The oppressed peoples of the world don’t need a protest to see cops cracking skulls – they can just look out their window.
When the media covered a recent case of a young Black man who was brutally beaten by police, a young white man told me with confidence he could relate, because he had been arrested during the Republican National Convention protests. Statements like these deny the white privilege these protesters live under every day. The simple fact that they had to go to a protest to get their asses beat, while this young brotha only had to step out of his front door in the neighborhood he has lived in his entire life. This activist was in a lock box and had made a conscious choice to take the consequences of an action he knew would most likely end in arrest. This brotha was walking down the street, headed home after a long day at work. The activist had a couple bruises and was sore for a week. This brotha was hospitalized in intensive care.
Another example occurred when I went to a May Day march, ironically enough, against gentrification in Portland Oregon a couple years ago. This march paraded through North and Northeast Portland, which is the historic Black community. The march was conceived of, orchestrated and led by white people who had done almost no outreach to the community through which they were marching like an occupying army. When the police moved in to attack the protest, it was only the support and active presence of Black leaders, who joined the march even though they had not been told of it ahead of time, that stopped the assault. I can only imagine what that protest could have looked like, what it could have accomplished, if real coalitions had been built, if real dialogue had taken place, if white people actually listened to Black people about what support they needed to combat gentrification.
I’ve heard white activists say ad nauseum they don’t know how to get communities of color involved in their organizing work. If you are asking that question, it’s never going to happen. You are already operating from a privilege mindset where folks of color should fall in line with your actions, should be tokenized in your organizations, and be happy to be the token spot of color to alleviate your white guilt. This is about white people setting the agenda for issues that disproportionately impact people of color. This patronizing mentality is not new; you can read Frederick Douglass saying the same thing to William Lloyd Garrison during the movement to abolish slavery. The Student Nonviolent (later National) Coordinating Committee went so far as to expel white people from its organization in 1967, because those people were unconsciously and consciously reproducing the dominant culture’s hierarchy of race.
The white-dominated Left has to recognize people of color belong in leadership positions in any movement for justice. We have to be at the forefront of the movement because we are at the forefront of the oppression. Our skin has been our voice, and our lives are the rocks we throw at the system’s tanks. They very act of people of color demanding to be treated as humans is seen as an act of treason.
We are the ones on the front lines every day; we can speak for ourselves. White activists need to find ways to work in coalition and support these efforts that are so essential to undermining the foundation for institutionalized imperialism and racism. White people have to do work on their own internalized white supremacy, because people of color cannot continue to fight a battle on two fronts; one against global capitalism, and the other against white privilege in the movement.
