Racial Identity Politics

& the Anglo-American Mission

By Joseph "Lil Joe" Johnson

The ideological partisanship of American racial identity politics manifest in the hand-wringing over the saga of Shoshana Johnson versus Jessica Lynch demonstrates how it is that "Black ethnicity identity support" is, in the United States at any rate, part and parcel of U.S. culture and advances the politics of U.S. imperialism.  In dispersing an appeal to come to the aid of Johnson, an obviously innocent, though politically naïve, writer inadvertently makes the case that Iraqis are wild (and, according to the prevailing wisdom, evil) sand-niggers that must be brought to heel by American troops on the ground. (See article below.)

I respect the writer as a very sincere friend of Nathan and Julia Hare, as he said in a previous exchange, and as a Black revolutionary nationalist in the same tradition as the Hares.  This response is not personal.  Nor, is this a personal attack on Shoshana Johnson who, like so many other poor workers, joined the U.S. military in an effort to "be all that you can be" -- that is to say, she enlisted, ostensibly to learn a trade or/and further her education.  But reality is a very harsh critic.  We must be honest with one another, and respond to public statements objectively.

African Americans are Americans who think in ethnic terms the same as any other ethnic group in this "nation of immigrants" – WASP [white Anglo Saxon Protestant] Americans, Irish Americans, German Americans, Mexican-Americans, and so on. 

Shoshana Johnson must be seen for what she IS -- an American soldier in a mercenary imperialist army.  Her personal motives are irrelevant.  Soldiers are professional killers.  Those individuals who are enlisted in imperialist armies are imperialist troops not some romantic abstraction, such as “strong Black Woman.” 

By doing this racial analysis of who suffers most from the Iraqi Resistance, and is most rewarded by the state for killing Iraqis, or suffering as a consequence of the actions of the Iraqi resistance, we muddle the analysis. Defining the realities in terms of who suffers most at the hands of the Iraqi resistance, one implicitly justifies the American military aggression and joins the invaders in representing the Iraqis as wild savages that need to be suppressed and civilized by American imperialism.

I know that this is not the message that the writer wants to convey in his portrayal of the suffering of, and rewards to, Shoshana Johnson in contrast to Jessica Lynch. Nevertheless, this is the objective result. The comparison of the experiences and rewards of Johnson and Lynch, for killing Iraqis, and the highlighting of disparity in compensation for being wounded and captured, is inadvertently endorsing the bombing campaign, military invasion and occupation. Criticism simply on the grounds of mercenary payments gives legitimacy to Anglo-American aggression.

I am not suggesting outright complicity. Nor am I (at this point at any rate) attacking the writer for what he wrote or/and posted.  He has hitherto represented himself convincingly as a conscious Black activist critiquing racism in the United States.  But this instance points out the pitfalls of American racialism ( the politics of Blackness), that even when it is critical of the sociological/economic discrepancies in American democracy, it operates from the standpoint that capitalist (bourgeois) democracy is legitimate and, therefore, that were racism to be eliminated, capitalism and its political formation (bourgeois democracy) would be okay.  This, for instance, is the epistemological premise of the doctrine advocating "affirmative action."

Historically, contextualized, the abolitionist movement against slavery was ontologically and epistemologically based in the recognition that there can be no "equality" of chattel slaves to the slave owners. Equality of Black (slaves) and White [owners] could become the equality of human beings only in consequence of the abolition of chattel slavery.  The equality of Blacks and Whites was possible even in bourgeois-democratic capitalism but only through the social emancipation of Negroes effectuated by the destruction of slave-based relations of production in the economy. 

Thus the black bourgeois became equal to the white bourgeois and the workers, both black and white, became equal in their condition of enslavement to capital. The post-slavery relations of production are based on the economic equality of commodity production and producers.  The ideology of, and struggle for, "affirmative action" has been nothing but the continuation of the bourgeois democratic emancipation of Slaves, marked by the entry of Negroes into the proletarian labor aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, and into what Baraka critiques as the formal political capitalist "superstructure."

The issue of Johnson and Lynch shows that the objective of socioeconomic bourgeois equality is the assimilation of Negroes into the bourgeois civil society.  The capitalistic mode of exploitation, the state and the military is not attacked and destroyed but becomes “integrated.” This is an arrangement in which Blacks become, along with Whites, capitalists and politicians -- oppressors.

The issue of getting busted for "Driving while Black," for instance, is nothing but the Black professionals and/or capitalists protest against being treated like the lower class Black  proletariat (employed or unemployed).  When unemployed homeless Black proletarians are stopped, beaten, and arrested it is not on the 6 0'clock news, or, taken up as cause celebre by the NAACP or even the BRC, and certainly not by the Congressional Black Caucus!

The contrast in the treatment of Shoshana Johnson and Jessica Lynch, and the hoopla raised regarding this by the Black media is a Black bourgeois issue. The issue, as always, is money!  They do not raise the question of what Shoshana Johnson and Jessica Lynch were being paid to do when they were captured, nor indeed why they were being held.  They don't give a damn about the Iraqi people that both Shoshana Johnson and Jessica Lynch were hired to kill, and the country they participated in destroying.

This is not the case of the writer, of course.  But, whether inadvertently, or, consciously, when he writes uncritically that:

What can we make of it?

The objective factual premise is that Johnson, qua mercenary, killing Iraqis and destroying their country is okay. The protest is not opposition to the killing and destruction but the demand for equal pay for doing this killing and destruction.  Again, while I am not clairvoyant, from what I have read from the writer’s previous writings (including his polemics with me) I will go on the limb and say that this ideological pro-imperialist message is not what is intended.  But this is objectively what he is arguing by arguing for parity of Black and White killer-soldiers.

What I argue on the contrary is for cosmopolitan proletarian class unity transcending ethnic, gender, religious, and national barriers.  The workers and farmers in the American armed forces, rather than selfishly seeking economic advantage in striving to "be all you can be" by killing Iraqis, should follow the example of the Israeli worker-soldiers that refuse to kill Palestinians and destroy theirs homes and farms.  Become refuseniks!

http://www.spectacle.org/0302/refuse.html  See articles following original message post.

 
From: HCHAPS2@aol.com [mailto:HCHAPS2@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 3:10 PM
To: HCHAPS2@aol.com
Subject: [Africa-Politics] JOHNSON ~vs~ LYNCH

Greetings:

Pass It On to your Congressman, Reverend, State Assemblyman. etc.....

Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson, the African-American woman who was held prisoner of war in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was looking forward to a quiet discharge from the Army in a few days. Battle scarred and weary, she has said not a word as her fellow POW comrade in arms Jessica Lynch
cashes in with book and movie deals and a celebrity status in the media.
   
But it is the Army that is forcing Johnson to break her peace.  A few days ago, military brass informed her that she would receive a 30 percent disability benefit for her injuries. Lynch, who is White, was
discharged in August and will receive an 80 percent disability benefit.
   
The difference amounts to $600 or $700 a month in payments, and that is causing Johnson and her family to speak out. They are so troubled by what they see as a "double standard," that they have
enlisted Rev. Jesse Jackson to help make their case to the news media.
   
Jackson, who plans to plead Johnson's cause with the White House, the Pentagon and members of Congress, says the payment smacks a double standard and racism.

"Here's a case of two women, same [unit], same war; everything about their service commitment and their risk is equal. . . . Yet there's an enormous contrast between how the military has handled these two cases," Jackson told The Washington Post.
   
Johnson's father, Claude Johnson, himself an Army veteran, says that while neither he nor his family begrudge Lynch her celebrity or disability payments, he believes that his daughter should get her due,
and it is more than a 30 percent disability benefit.
   
For its part, the Army, in denying charges of double standard, said Friday, that claims are awarded to soldiers according to their injuries.
   
Johnson, 30, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter, was held captive for 22 days, when her unit stumbled into an ambush in southern Iraq last March. Eleven soldiers were killed, and six, including Lynch and Johnson, were taken prisoners.  Johnson was shot in both legs and is still traumatized by her war experience. In addition to walking with a limp, she suffers from bouts of depression.
   
So I ask that you forward this email on to all and inform others of this latest racial attack. Forget about the destroying of stamps, forget about Kobe, forget about Michael Jordan getting fired and
fight for the rights of this strong Black Woman!!!