A couple days ago I pointed out that Chas Freeman’s much-circulated Tufts speech, when parsed carefully, still endorsed an embrace of empire. An embrace of empire when the global North overlaps with “white” people and its victim, the global South, are “brown” people means that the latter group will die and suffer. I concluded perhaps too vehe­mently that a policy that inex­orably leads to the murder of brown people is “racist.” But Gabriel Ash of Jews Sans Fron­tieres very helpfully pointed out that the terms need clar­i­fi­ca­tion. Chas Freeman is not a bigot. He does not run around spitting at Arabs, sup­port­ing anti-miscegenation laws, or garbed in a white-hooded cloak. He is of American Indian ancestry. He probably is very lightly, if at all, prej­u­diced in his personal life. I’m sure he considers African-Americans worthy of full cit­i­zen­ship in America, doesn’t like the Minute Men carrying out vigilante border-keeping on the US-Mexico frontier, and supports affir­ma­tive action. He is not, as Gabriel pointed out, afflicted with “racism, the theory and conscious belief of racial supe­ri­or­ity, exclu­siv­ity and primacy, and the practices that follow inten­tion­ally from applying these beliefs.” Instead, he almost certainly accepts “racism, a system of assump­tions, habits of mind, knowledge, etc., that supports unequal relations of power between racially con­structed groups and that helps to both nat­u­ral­ize and invis­i­bi­lize the dom­i­na­tion of one group over another.”

That emerges quite clearly in his call for a toned-down liberal impe­ri­al­ism, one that should refrain from spec­tac­u­lar violence both on the grounds of the damage that it does to us as well as the damage it does to the victims, occluding a third option: that we have no right to interfere in other people’s societies. When “we” are white and “they” are brown, and “we” white people are sys­tem­at­i­cally reserving for ourselves the right to interfere in and restruc­ture their societies, this is racism, type two–because however the precise ideology plays out, inevitably, someone will assert that they need our “help,” under the rubric of the mision civi­la­trice, the White Man’s Burden, Democracy Promotion, Human­i­tar­ian Inter­ven­tion, or the modal­i­ties of non-military inter­ven­tion: struc­tural adjust­ment policies, dol­lar­iza­tion, the con­struc­tion of plan­ta­tion economies and captive markets and the rest. Clearly, racism type one and racism type two are connected, too: when Freeman uncon­sciously, thought­lessly, auto­mat­i­cally, erases the genocide the American Indians and a myriad of colonial slaugh­ters and replaces them with that sac­cha­rine abstrac­tion, “our American tra­di­tions,” this erasure is somewhere on the spectrum between racism, type one, and racism, type two: to erase colonial massacre is to erase the humanity of the victims. When that occurs over racial lines, that is racist, and it’s not an unmerited attack to point that out. Fur­ther­more, invoking an airy past of “American tra­di­tions” both excep­tion­al­izes our society and nor­mal­izes past versions of empire that went along with those “tra­di­tions.” Again, empire is inevitably a North-South, “white”/“brown” affair, and for this reason, I used the word “racist.” Rightfully.

More generally, a mixing of types can occur within a society rather than an indi­vid­ual. America is saturated in a mix of racism type one and type two: rabid Islam­o­pho­bia and anti-Hispanic sentiment exists in many sectors. In other liberal sectors, we simply retain the right to interfere in their societies, not out of a conscious, artic­u­lated, coherent belief in the justice of racial dom­i­na­tion but through a series of ide­o­log­i­cal maneuvers that work out to the same thing. Israel is past saturated in racism, the overflow running wild. Still, some on the liberal-left may even think Arabs in Israel deserve full civil and political rights and that the occu­pa­tion should end—but they will refuse to acknowl­edge the original sin of 1948, that is, the fun­da­men­tal ille­git­i­macy of a settler-colonial enter­prise (Odd, since almost no one argues that Jews would leave cis-Jordan in a final set­tle­ment). Gabriel added that in societies as sodden with racism as the United States or Israel—settler-colonial states—racism type two (or type one a la Thomas Friedman) will be manifest in nearly anyone with general access to the public sphere, fair enough, although that still rep­re­sents a choice, that of boring away from the interior rather than working from the outside to desta­bi­lize the system.

Freeman’s recog­ni­tion that when we kill Pales­tini­ans, Iraqis, and Afghanis it is wrong because they are human, too, is laudable. But it’s laudable within limits. Those limits are set by him, not us. And he sets them when he (1) asserts the continued right to interfere in the societies of the global South; (2) for the most part, insists that violent inter­ven­tion be restrained on the basis of its potential to blow-back upon us; (3) repeats this bit about “American tra­di­tions” of non-interference and all the rest, and thereby indoc­tri­nates his audience with dangerous, damaging, insulting pro­pa­ganda about the blood-soaked American past. This utterance rep­re­sents a violence to the memory of those who suffered genocides or from the slave trade, and it’s wrong, and that needs to be said, not out of a juvenile, holier-than-thou rad­i­cal­ism but because calling people out on rhetor­i­cally erasing impe­ri­al­ism is always the correct thing to do because it is only by rec­og­niz­ing the imperial enemy that we can ade­quately challenge it. Freeman is absolutely, as Gabriel pointed out, an ally to break the siege of Gaza. He’s an ally too in the fight for justice in Palestine (although if truly violent resis­tance again erupts, perhaps not). That matters. That matters a lot. But there are limits as to how far he will go, and those limits are reflected in a rhetoric that calls for a rede­ploy­ment of a subdued liberal impe­ri­al­ism. It matters to acknowl­edge that his rhetoric is the symptom of a diseased culture, and the only way to heal a sick culture is by being brutally frank about the nature of the illness.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Chas Freeman, Israel, Palestine, racism, Zionism