Not to do dreaded “identity politics” but it does tend to be cis straight white men who think they’ve found a place above society to consider its conflicts and treat all positions equally, racist and non-racist alike. I don’t think I’m imagining this. I’d just ask why it’s always the straight cis white guys who have this incredible capacity to be emotionless in the face of social conflict, while considering all sides equally? Is it their genetics? Or perhaps, maybe they have an insensitivity to what their own power is doing in the world, that blinds them to the fact that racist and non-racist opinion can’t be considered as equally worthy of consideration?

I just know that the same cis white guy is totally calm and scientific-minded until you find a way to implicate them as white in a white supremacist society. Then they become as hysterical as the caricature of the person they try to talk down to, who supposedly cedes too quickly to emotion. As long as you never bring up whiteness, they can comport themselves with an impressive amount of calmness and civility. They can remain wise gurus through all kinds of confrontation. Five seconds into bringing up whiteness, suddenly they have lost the science behind levelheadedness.

What I will assert is that so, too, can everyone else become wise gurus in the face of struggle, when the environment itself is not stressing the relations of domination in a concealed way. The straight cis white guy’s levelheadedness comes as his whiteness is naturalized as a dominant standpoint, and that fact is made invisible. The problem is that this calmness becomes a weapon of whiteness against those it seeks to subjugate. What would bring us all to the less hysterical position would be to acknowledge the conditions of our environment that frame our interactions. We cannot just start from the premise that we have been made equal already. We have to center all attempts to equalize in the reality that the environment itself is classed and racialized.

Of course, many people in the past have realized these issues, theorized about them, and have been refused by white Marxists as “liberals.” In their mind “liberal” means “sensitive woman.” That is generally how social conservatives approach these issues as well. Oddly enough, conservatism is itself a kind of liberalism, as is social democracy. The people who are trying to work through difficulties in organizing are often people who want to overthrow society. Throwing around the word liberal in this case is not very helpful, but I digress. All of what I’m saying can and should be incorporated into Marxist and communist struggle, but time will tell how many times we need to go over the same problems. They keep returning because we have not figured out how to move past them. The problem for white Marxists is that what they refuse as “idpol” are the exact blueprints that will lead us to overcoming this discourse about identity altogether. Yet for some reason they have a lot of pride in their bold, stoic determination being what forces class for itself relations to come into existence. Wonder what that’s about.