Why I Stopped Being White and You Should Too by Nicky Reid, CounterPunch

August 23, 2019 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

Why I Stopped Being White and You Should Too by Nicky Reid, CounterPunch
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/23/why-i-stopped-being-white-and-you-should-too/
Paul Craig Roberts
What poses as the left, but isn’t, is completely bonkers. When I first read the above, I thought it was a parody, but is it?
For the American left, nothing is real. Everything is a “social construct,” race, gender, sexual
preference, whatever. But the “white race,” apparently is an exception to the “everything is a social construct” and is “a very unique creature, and a dangerous one”:
“The white race is unique in that it is the first defining race of the imperial era and modern day imperialism defines its very existence. The Western Europeans designed the concept of whiteness to justify their expanse and enslavement of the New World and it’s dark skinned cousins across the Global South. As the insatiable nature of capitalism demanded endless expansion, it’s moneyed mandarins required the creation of a new super-class to rationalize the enslavement of the darker nations. This concept became even more necessary with American independence and the fall of monarchism.”
In order to consolidate “white supremacy’s ill-gotten gains,” white supremacists invented new races—“the colored races of black and Latino.”
If you are lost, so am I. Race, unless you are a white demon, is a social construct, and whites socially constructed the other races in order to have something to exploit and dominate. Sounds a bit like magic, but let’s go on.
Nicky was born white, but he didn’t know what this meant until he “came out of the closet.” Then surrounded by fellow homosexuals, he realized “the fickle parameters of blood and soil” and became defined by homosexual “existential opposition to white colonial culture.”
It was Christianity “which set the stage for modern white supremacy.” Before Christianity people did not have to “conform to the perceived norms of gender and sexuality. Nicky defines himself by his “queerness,” not by his whiteness:
“I have made a conscious decision to reject my whiteness and to forge a new queer tribal awareness that defines queer as a race unto itself, an anti-colonial race in the robust mold of the Black Power and Chicano movements. I have borrowed ideas from everyone from Noel Ignatiev and the Black Panther Party to Oswald Spengler and the National Anarchist Movement. It is a highly inflammatory and downright politically incorrect mission, but my aim isn’t simply to create a queer race but to destroy the white one by using my privileged access to the master’s house to burn down the whole fucking plantation, once and for all. And I invite other oppressed ‘white’ people to join me.”
NIcky wants all whites to become anti-whites:
“There was a time before whiteness and there can be a time after it. The Alt-Right will bellyache like snowflakes that my philosophy is one of white genocide, but the white race is an unnatural conglomeration defined by genocide, not just of dark and queer people, but of Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish, Russian, Scottish and Welsh people. All of these once proud tribes, dissolved like corpses in the acid bath of white supremacy.”
Having declared race and sexuality to be mere social constructs, Nicky concludes that some social constructs are more worthy than others:
“I choose, as a queer person, to stand with my black and brown brothers and sisters. I choose to reject the blood spattered gift of whiteness and I invite you to do the same. Only a world of autonomous minorities can destroy a nation of imperial majority.”
Little doubt it will surprise the majority of the core white American population, disposessed as they are of their jobs and careers by offshoring and of their humanity by Identity Politics that they are an “imperial majority.” A family just arrived from the Congo can be given free housing in Mormon Utah, but hundreds of thousands of the “imperial majority” are homeless.
The more I think about it, Nicky has to be writing a parody of the left. CounterPunch must be poking fun at itself.