Racism, guilt and self hatred. posted by Richard Seymour

Curious thing: every time I write a post about imperialism or racism or colonialism, there is someone there to say that I am self-hating or that I am trying to foist 'guilt' on white people or (even more bizarrely) the white working class. Now, this would be comprehensible as a literal reply to something I've written, if I had in fact written that white people or the white working class or Londoners or something should feel especially guilty about the state of the world today, or about colonialism, or about racism. It so happens that I haven't. I can't help but feel that this reaction is a form of projection, in which the troll - often either a pro-war leftie or (as with a certain unpleasant character that deposited some filth here last night) an outright fascist - berates me for encouraging him (always a him) to feel bad about these things, to feel complicit in them. The only conclusion is that the feeling was already there, precisely because the person is complicit in them. There is no reason for anyone who is not a racist or an apologist for imperialism to feel implicated, to feel infested by these various discussions.

Similarly, there's a certain kind of indolent sniggering about my provenance. I am from Northern Ireland, the whitest of whitebread countries (which probably isn't true anyway), where racism is commonplace (which certainly is true), and therefore I must feel enormous revulsion and self-hatred. The obvious reference, it has to be said, is to the mythical 'self-hating Jew' whom Elie Weisel describes as a 'renegade Jew' for not supporting Israel. So when a pro-war 'muscular liberal' makes a charge of self-hatred, he is actually calling me a race traitor - and what an interesting charge to make. As it happens, anyone who knew me could tell you that I have no more self-hatred than anyone else, and probably a great deal more self-love than most people (but I spread the love around). Still, isn't it odd that some people take my anti-racist and anti-imperialist stance - which is hardly heterodox for a Marxist and even has a certain quality of common sense about it these days - and contrast it with my whiteness, as if such a stance is perverse, self-hating and so on?

There's an additional sneering sort of commentary that simply fabricates, falsely imputes statements such as "I understand the brown mind" or "I like Ska" or similar words and sentiments. Not only have I never played Ska (I don't do winter sports), I couldn't begin to formulate such a phrase as "I understand the brown mind" because a) "brown" as a reference to a group of human beings is relevant only as an artefact of the racist imagination (a brutally direct reference to those whom it is easy to bomb from 20,000 feet, or shoot in the middle of the night, or execute in front of their children), and b) since I have strenuously argued that there is no such thing as the brown mind or the black mind or the white mind or the Jewish mind or the Muslim mind or the Arab mind, it's hard to see what there is to understand. Again, one suspects that the idle troll is unwittingly displaying his own mental categories and prejudices. At the last analysis, the invention of such statements involves an implicit charge - comes down to saying that I am a "n*****r-lover". And that, too, is a very interesting charge to make.

PS: And pay attention, because this is important. Don't bother trying to explain yourselves, trolls. My 'delete' button works very well and requires a very minimal expenditure of effort. Just give it a fucking rest, eh?