"Isn’t it interesting how progressive whites seem to have a direct line of communication with black leaders, while everyone else in the street fails to suffer from the same delusion..."
-We Outside Collective
It's always some white guy talking about how identity politics "divides the class." These divisions are not being created subjectively. These divisions exist and have existed in this settler-colonial state. This is how capitalism developed here: it was through colonization, genocide, sexual violence, and racialized slavery.
Neoliberals appropriate strategies and tactics used by the oppressed to liberate itself. The 1960's and '70s saw a revolutionary situation where colonized and oppressed people were organizing autonomously while building coalitions and alliances with others. This was a strength and build real unity, not a liberal notion that you build unity for the sake of unity (all while white people position themselves to lead and take over the Organizational leadership over and over again - leading us down a reformist path). White supremacy is the corner stone here, so much that even the white left benefit from this. Giving up on that power for them is a leap so many of them still aren't willing to take. They rather have a better form of capitalism that still benefits them at the end (i.e. democratic socialism and reforms).
Fast forward to neoliberalism AND neocolonialism today. They prop up fake leaders who might look like oppressed and colonized people, but their intentions are to steer rebellion and revolt towards a white supremacist reformism. They've used these tactics in the so called third world for decades as well. They buy-off the movement leadership, prop off puppet leaders who look and act like colonized people, and kill off the ones they can't jail or buy-off.
Malcolm X once said you have to follow the money/funding of a movement and so-called leader to see who's really pulling the strings. If most of these BIPOC's support is from white liberals, then that should definitely raise questions and suspicions of the intentions and validity of a movement. We should analyze critically their goals and how they want to get there.
Democrats in particular pride themselves in putting forward politicians who might look like us and might even use grass roots language and rhetoric from time to time. We all have seen them, especially, lead generation after generation of young people back into bourgeois democracy and electoral politics. All while the empire continues to grow, the planet continues to be destroyed, and our communities continue to be occupied by police, and gentrified. We continue to be pushed into prisons and into tent cities and shanties.
The point I want to make is that there is a difference between Neo-liberal identity politics or neo-colonialism (where reformists and the white left in general tell us who to follow), and building autonomy and solidarity. We want to have self-determination as oppressed and colonized people to build our own infrastructure, process, strategy and tactics, that comes from within. We can choose with which sections of other colonized communities we agree with (each community has their own internal struggle against their own sell-outs), so we can finally free ourselves, humanity, the planet, and return the land to its rightful care-takers everywhere once and for all.
