Are the white working class politically black?

"I hate the white working class."

The sentiment runs through the rhetoric of anti-democracy campaigners and seems straight enough - such campaigners hold prejudices on the grounds of skin colour and of class. But things start to break down once one tries to work out: who, exactly, are the "white working class"?

I got a clue as to the configuration of this singular group when talking to two black men at a political meeting. They said that when they changed their views from far-left to centre-right they were treated as if their skin-colour had changed overnight. Although students, they were made to feel as if they were two instantiations of the amorphous "masses" that had turned up in the wrong place: the "ordinary people" left-wingers fetishize as an abstraction but hate with every fibre of their being when they turn up in places judged to be above their station.

(The men told me being treated as white in any way was bad enough when coming from other black people, but obscene coming from white people.)

The underlying assumption is a "four-legs good, two legs bad" view of race whereby black people are fundamentally edenic and white people fundamentally fallen It is the sort of supposition that tends to take root among overpriveleged, predominantly white adolescents who are ignorant of life beyond their gilded walls.

But the joker in the pack is race itself. This benighted concept was coined originally to justify slavery in the West. Slavery has existed in most societies and in most of recorded history, but Western slavery from the middle ages onwards was unusual in that it was people designated the Other by way of their skin colour that were targeted. After the abolition of slavery, as social Darwinism took root to give a spurious scientific basis to prejudice, race was recycled to justify eugenics. Chinese people working in the UK were castigated as the "Yellow Peril" for bringing in opium - because the British had invaded China and forced opium upon the people in the Opium Wars, in the name of balance of trade. After hatred justified in the name of race ended in the Holocaust there was a hope that its essential vacuity had been laid bare, but the hope was negligently optimistic, as race and the prejudices associated with it have dragged the Labour Party and the unions into a morass from which they may never emerge.

The association of skin colour with simplistic notions of "good" and "bad" was fuelled by philosopher Clarence Sholé Wilson, who riffed on the theme, popular in the 1980s Left, of being "politically black". I believe his intentions were good, as indicated by the title of his
essay, (Re)Conceptualising Blackness and Making Race Obsolescent. He appears to have been poking gentle fun at students who take race so seriously as to give it existence:

...one can alter the normative use of whiteness and blackness by dismantling the sociopolitical framework within which it is embedded. One way of effecting this dismantling is to alter the conventional use of the terms of the discourse. It is such alteration of terms, and by extension the dismantling of the state of affairs to which they refer, that I am advocating by positing the concept of blackness as counterhegemonic. Far from discounting blackness and whiteness as descriptors of pigmentation, however, my view recognises such uses of the terms. But it goes beyond them in suggesting a political use as well. The political use is one in which blackness is subversive of the status quo, viz. whiteness. Given this use, there is no incongruity in the idea of a person being pigmentationally white and politically black, or of a person being pigmentationally black and politically white. All is means to say that a person is politically black is that the person is anti-status quo: that she or he is ideologically committed to de-centering whiteness; that she or he is ooppositional or counterhegemonic.

It's a passage filled with meanings and nuances that would take a long time to unpack, but it was Wilson's misfortune to have his essay published in 2005, when many students on the Left had lost the ability to appreciate nuance and plurality of signification. (Psychiatry calls this "concrete thinking" and posits it as a diagnostic feature of psychosis, which is something to think about on the group level.) They treat such passages as Gospel and set themselves up as the one true church entrusted with interpreting them. But their rigidity breaks down when you look a little closer. Let's look at an example.

One person who embodies the sentiment "I hate the white working class" is Anna Soubry, the former Conservative MP who now represents her majority-Leave constituency as part of The Independent Group, and has described those who wish to leave the European Union as "white working class [people] who have never seen a migrant".

But there's the rub: reread the quote from Wilson. In his terms, those who represent the status quo are pigmentationally and politically white. Membership of the EU is the status quo. Those who want to leave the status quo, even though they are in the majority, are therefore counterhegemonic and, regardless of how their skin looks, are politically black.

Now we're really turning things upside down. The hegemonic status quo view that we should remain in the EU is actually that of priveleged minority who have a stranglehold on much of the media. On the other hand, the counterhegemonic view is that of the majority, whom said minority depict as white working class regardless of skin colour, social status or wage. We, the democrats, despite being the majority, are counterhegemonic in that we are taking the struggle for emancipation from a political behemoth to the empowered classes.

The ancien régime can call us white working class as much as they want. We are both the majority and politically black, and that can only be good.