Race - 3. page

Hannibal Buress, the black comedian who successfully placed Bill Cosby’s record of sexual violence before America, after several failed attempts by others, did so partly in retaliation for a set of senescent remarks by Cosby about comedians like himself, younger, blacker comics, for whom profanity was central to their performance.

“Pull your pants up, black people!” he paraphrased Cosby’s rant, “I had a sitcom in the 80s!”

“Yeah,” he said in his own voice, “but you’re a rapist… and I can’t help but having noticed that rapists don’t tend to curse on stage.”

There is a lot to unpack in those remarks, all germane to the slinter, the trick by which people who believed in affirmative action have been conned into believing in its opposite, without realizing that their views have been turned around.

The first part is this: there have long existed two theories of why black people continue to be the most oppressed caste in America’s racial system. These theories are often held, to varying degrees, within the same person. They are, to paraphrase an apocryphal Native American saying, the two wolves within every black person.

One wolf says, “the reason our people are kept down is structural. We were brought here as slaves and our oppression doesn’t just keep us down. It holds up our country’s whole caste system of racial inequality to grease the wheels of capitalism.” The other wolf, the self-hating wolf, says, “sure, we were brought here as slaves and damaged by slavery. But the real damage slavery caused was ruining our culture. If other black people were not so dishonest and lazy, and we all acted like respectable, disciplined people, we could achieve equality.”

Booker T Washington, the first de facto national spokesperson for Black America, more than a century ago, epitomized that divided self. He advised black people to be respectful, deferential to white people, to focus on learning the trades, not drinking too much and keeping their clothes and homes cleaned and pressed. That way, he publicly claimed, they would achieve equality within a few generations and laws and wealth distribution would change in response to this performance of self-discipline and respectability.

It later turned out that Washington also funded many people, legal challenges and organizations he publicly condemned as too radical and contrary to the project of what scholars call “black respectability.”

My grandfather, Harry Jerome Sr., was very much a man of the first wolf, a trade unionist, a socialist, a member of the CCF, a man who sat in at lunch counters and organized buses to hear Paul Robeson sing. But that did not stop him making sure his and his family’s shirts were bleached whiter, starched harder, pressed flatter than any white family’s, that his shoes were shined; he had taught himself to read while a shoeshine boy in New England and liked to slip Shakespeare quotations into his speech when dining with richer, whiter people.

Still, when push came to shove, he knew that it was an economic structure, a caste system, leavened by capitalism, that kept him down, that that was the vastly more important factor. Bill Cosby once thought that too, before all the millions of dollars, unprosecuted sex crimes and dementia destroyed his once-fine, albeit predatory, mind.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States’ federal government and many of the country’s white citizens repented of their caste system and sought to use the power of the state to bridle its worst excesses of violence and discrimination. This encompassed two main policy initiatives: desegregation and affirmative action. Both were based on a structural understanding of racial oppression.

Hospitals, schools, parks, washrooms, offices and other government facilities had been segregated in much of the country. So were many private businesses, with either the standard  “no blacks, dogs, Jews” sign or with inferior facilities available to non-whites, as in government facilities. The motivation behind integration was not, as people today contend, to produce classrooms, parks and restaurants that were “diverse” the point was not having an aesthetically correct rainbow of colours in elementary school class pictures, or even to give black and white kids a chance to get to know each other. The logic for this was born of the core principle of the twentieth-century Cold War welfare state: universality.

During the Cold War, social democrats and democratic socialists understood that privileged people, wealthy people will only vote to adequately fund government programs if they themselves have to use them. American schools were integrated not to achieve diversity but to achieve and maintain parity in per-student funding between black and white students. That way a school board controlled by white racists could not, as they had for the previous eighty years, underfund black students while funding their own kids adequately.

Affirmative action, similarly, came from the same impulse. As I have stated previously, the point was not to produce a “diverse” workforce for the sake of diversity itself but to equalize incomes and promotion opportunities between whites and non-whites and between male-headed and female-headed households. It was financial security, disposable income and getting in on intergenerational wealth accumulation that affirmative action programs sought to foster.

When the Reagan revolution began in the US and Thatcherism was embraced throughout the English-speaking world in the 1980s, affirmative action and integration were far more popular among their beneficiaries than the parties and politicians that instituted these programs. They were popular for the simple reason that they worked. Beginning in the 1960s, through the 1980s, these measures lifted people out of poverty and set whites and non-whites, men and women on a more equal footing, often within a couple of years of being instituted.

If one were to dismantle affirmative action and integration, these parts of the fabric of American life could not be attacked head-on any more than one might attack nigh-universal television or automobile ownership. So, the first step in undermining affirmative action and integration so as to reduce their reach and effectiveness was to re-narrate what the purposes and effects of the programs were.

This is where the self-hating wolf comes in.

Integration certainly got black kids into more contact with white kids and raised the test scores, university admission rates and general literacy and numeracy of black kids. But what if we argued that this was caused not by equalizing per-student funding but by black kids being exposed to more disciplined, continent, well-mannered white kids. What if integration was succeeding because black kids could see what a proper student looked like, in the form of their white classmate and were choosing to emulate that superior model? This, rather than structural financial equality, came to be the New Right’s explanation of the apparent success of integration.

Even more perniciously, a similar argument was made about affirmative action: the reason black communities were rising from poverty, the reason women’s wages were rising relative to men’s was not that pay and promotions were made more equal to those enjoyed by white men. No. Successful women and successful people of colour were lifting their communities out of poverty by providing “role models.”

Apparently, women were being underpaid and people of colour underpaid, not because of systemic and unfair discrimination but because of local and justified discrimination because they just did not know how to deport themselves as successful people worthy of promotion.

Even though women and people of colour were less likely to rush to Reagan’s coalition or Thatcherite parties, they, and the crumbling liberal and social democratic parties they supported, began to imbibe this falsehood too. In my own city, I watched black community organizations that had been focused on boycotts, lobbying and political organizing for affirmative action turn into more conservative organizations designed to instill good work habits. Public events no longer featured political speakers but successful “role models.” Speeches were not about how to achieve collective success through reform of government and major corporations but about how to achieve individual success by emulating the featured role model.

It was not just Bill Cosby’s most iconic role, Heathcliff Huxtable, the hyper-respectable sweater-wearing suburban medical doctor and lovable dad that created the Thursday night NBC ratings juggernaut; the non-respectable, profanity-laced routine of Chris Rock’s first HBO cable special in the 90s featured the iconic, “black people vs. niggers” routine articulated the identical thesis: black people’s biggest problem is other non-respectable, lazy black people; the solution is for people to read more, wash more and go back to school.

While the corrosive Identitarianism of contemporary liberal and progressive movements has many sources and points of origin, none is more important than the conservative reconfiguration of the meaning, purpose and mode of operation of affirmative action and integration.

Integration was redefined in the 1980s and 90s. What began as a strategy for equalizing educational resources across race by producing diverse school populations became an end in itself. In contemporary bathroom or shelter bed debates, the diversity of people in a public facility has been adopted as a categorical imperative and reimagined as a human right. One does not need to ask what the benefits of a diverse group in a public facility are because diversity is an end in itself.

Affirmative action, as I have written elsewhere, only need apply to leadership groups and famous people. We do not need measures to equalize wages and promotion opportunities because, we have decided, the pauperization of female-headed and non-white families was never caused by that. Those families will get richer and more successful just by “seeing themselves represented” on corporate boards and Third Way party caucuses and cabinets. Barack Obama will make black people richer relative to whites because of his superb qualities as a continent, benevolent, intelligent, respectable role model.

Except that we know that doesn’t work. That was never the problem. The Obama presidency made black people poorer relative to whites but we continued to support him because the insidious nature of the “role models” argument is that it exists inchoate in every one of us, inculcated into our thinking as part of the structure of racism in our society.

And worse yet, as we see with Bill Cosby, the danger of believing in the theory of the role model is not just that it leads to poverty; it leads to us building up and worshipping the monsters among us because, in our imaginary Reaganomics theory of cause and effect, exposing and tearing down a role model predator might result in us sinking deeper into poverty and marginality.

When I was a child, my parents and I lived in a house in Kerrisdale, a former streetcar suburb in Vancouver centred around a set of three-storey walk-up apartment buildings inhabited by the current and former servants of those living in the adjacent neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. Over time, Kerrisdale became a high-income neighbourhood in its own right and my parents were part of that transition. My mom was black and my dad was white; my grandma bought them their house with the money from her late husband who had been a prominent stockbroker.

My kindergarten class over-represented high-caste Indians, Jews, Catholics and other members of the new Kerrisdale bourgeoisie, the newly white and the nearly white. Some marshland was cleared for the Arbutus Club, a fee-paying club to serve this secondary elite, who could not gain admittance to the Vancouver Club, Terminal City Club, Vancouver Lawn Tennis Club, University Women’s Club or Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Nevertheless, when my mom would wheel me up to the high street, Forty-first Avenue, in my stroller, the elderly white women who had retired from domestic service always assumed that I must be the child of a very rich person, from the Shaughnessy side of the train tracks because I appeared to have a black nanny.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, black domestic servants were the most sought-after in Canada. As the Laurentian elite continued to converge with the Yankee elite of the US, an increasingly popular way of displaying one’s wealth in Canada was to have a domestic who resembled an American domestic. Having a dark-coloured servant with distinctively African features was better than an ounce of saffron in the cupboard. Black bodies, especially in Western Canada, were very rare, comprising less than 1% of the population, and they looked all the more exotic, as a result. At the same time, as showing one’s wealth through one’s exotic possessions, having black bodies in one’s house in Canada also showed one to be conforming to the mores of the most powerful elite in America, the Yankees, the nabobs and patricians of the Northeast. One could concurrently show one’s status through both conformity and exoticism, both expressed through the same body.

Most black people who were brought to the Americas were brought here as plantation labour, deployed in lowland, humid regions that had been depopulated of Indigenous people. They were put to work in sectors where they were expected to live long, hard lives. (Because most of the costs of a slave were paid up-front at the time of purchase, slaves were not, mainly, sent into high-mortality tasks like mining for fear of investment loss.)

But a minority of slaves were sent somewhere else: to serve as butlers, guards, nannies, etc. in places where the manual labour of colonialism didn’t come from slaves but from Indigenous people or from low-status white creoles. In Mexico City, Lima, Boston and New York, the greatness of a house was determined not just by its size but by the blackness of its guards, porters and butlers. That is because blackness was an integrated part of an aesthetic display by the wealthy: where black bodies were rare, and consequently expensive and difficult to obtain, they were deployed as part of an elaborate show of power. In the late twentieth century, Japanese night clubs used the same strategy—the most elite ones had African bouncers: just one of the rare and precious things one could enjoy there, of a piece with the endangered abalone brought all the way from the waters off California.

In addition to being about scarcity and preciousness, showing the bodies that pseudoscience said were the most unruly, base and uncontrollable forced to stand at attention, to bow, to curtsey, while wearing impractical, fancy, constraining clothes has always fitted into the politics of the Western Hemisphere’s elite. The Spanish, British and American Empires have always been animated by that neo-Ottoman spirit: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. By putting the most abject, alien and unruly bodies adjacent to those of the most powerful elites, serving them with precision and fealty, the play of American empire and racial hegemony is enacted every day.

In 1988, I was an enthusiastic new member of the Green Party. I was also sixteen years old. And in September of that year, the party held an omnibus nomination meeting at its Vancouver office on Commercial Drive. I was studying for a physics test and could not attend but I begged my mom to go to the meeting in my stead.

When she entered the room, she found herself to be the only non-white person there. It was quickly decided that the party would not field any municipal candidates unless the slate was joined by a woman or a person of colour. As my mother was the only member of either group with any experience in politics (she had run for Parks Board in 1978) and one of only four women in the room, she suddenly found herself in a hostage situation. The Green Party was going to deny every supporter in the city the chance to vote for them unless my mother agreed, then and there, to run.

A short aside to my readers: my mother and I are estranged. That is neither a good or a bad thing. It just is. I ask that you respect our privacy as I have hers these past seven years: I never tell a story about my mom that she herself has not told to a public audience. If you want a narrative of blame for our estrangement, blame the intergenerational legacy of trauma descended from slavery.

Some people might say that this was a great step forward in the broadening of the Green Party’s appeal to new constituencies of voters. I am not saying it was not. But here is what it also was: extortion and conscription.

A group of white people with more leisure time than my mother decided to withhold their labour from the project of saving the planet unless they could make the first black person over whom they could exercise power do an equal or greater amount of work. They did this by, among other things, using the threat of dashing her son’s hopes to do that. That’s extortion.

A black person was coerced to do work for an organization run by white people with no compensation, monetary or otherwise. That’s conscription. And—a little bit—slavery.

Some people might argue, as they have falsely done in other areas of American life, that this is affirmative action. Let us be crystal clear:

There is no such thing as affirmative action when people are not being paid. The purpose of affirmative action is not to have a workforce that looks diverse, by showing off bodies that have different genders and races inscribed on them. The purpose of affirmative action is to redistribute wealth—to give non-white and female-headed families the ability to save money, to inherit money, to send their kids to college, to participate in activities money had cut them out of.

It is not affirmative action when people are placed in roles that deplete their leisure time, that deplete their funds, that deplete the resources available to their families. That’s counterfeit affirmative action.

Our understanding of this is occluded by the way the civil society and its labour systems were reordered by Third Way austerity in the 1990s. Today, most charitable and activist enterprises function like businesses. Volunteers are unpaid interns. Boards of directors are essentially self-appointing. The funds come from donors who gain no membership rights with their donation or from family trusts or the state.

Because we see active volunteer membership not as part of a democratic culture of a self-governing organization with regular, democratic internal elections, it is easier to falsely apply ideas of affirmative action to what we euphemistically call “the non-profit sector.” Because the people doing the daily work of these organization are conceptualized as a mix of paid organizers and their unpaid interns.

Today, in BC, there is an effort being led by Indigenous people, in particular, the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en people. The traditionalist faction of the Wet’suwet’en people are making big sacrifices of their labour, their money, their freedom to stop a gigantic carbon bomb being built in Kitimat by cutting off the route the government has chosen for its pipeline.

The Wet’suwet’en traditionalists are doing everyone in the world a gigantic favour by protecting us from the machinations of the BC government, Canadian government, Royal Dutch Shell and Mitsubishi.

And what is our response? Mostly, it has been good. But I have also noticed something else.

In communities all over BC, white settlers like me are saying “well, I’ll come to a rally but it needs to be led by Indigenous youth.” Note how they don’t care what First Nation the youth come from. It’s just that people younger and less white than them, with fewer resources, at greater risk of police brutality are being asked to stand in the vanguard. If they do not, these white settlers might just withhold their labour from the single most important climate battle being waged in our time and place.

Like so much of colonialism and racism, I believe that these efforts and conscription and extortion are unconscious. That’s what makes our settler colonial order so powerful here: it lives inside the unconscious of everyone.

Those parts of the activist world that have not been colonized into the “non-profit sector” that delivers contracted-out government services, lets kids do office work so they can check a box and be allowed to graduate high school, with its set of executive director commissars, are an especially dangerous place. The people standing on logging roads, standing in front of bulldozers, camping on rail lines, these are not people managed carefully by incorporated NGOs with offices and executive directors pulling in six figures; they are mainly young, racialized and poor. Taking on a leadership role in organizations like that doesn’t burnish your resume; it makes you unable to pass a criminal record check, difficult to hire, difficult to house.

How dare we tell the most marginalized people in our society that we will withhold our labour from the struggle unless they bear a disproportionate amount of the risk of violence, unemployment, homelessness, etc.?

All that stated, I believe strongly that when marginalized people seek leadership roles, we must yield those roles to them. And we should support them in those roles by providing them with money, with childcare, with job references and referrals and, most importantly, with our labour. But this should happen only when we have made sure their labour has not been extracted under duress, that they are not our conscripts but, instead, that we are at their service for once.

I cannot help but notice that when white settlers are critical of a group for not “being representative,” they only mount that criticism after looking at a photo of a crowd or a photo array of individual portraits. No one asks if any of those depicted has an invisible disability, a mental illness, an addiction, an autoimmune disease. No one asks if any of those is housed, if they are a member of the underclass, the proletariat, if they are undocumented or do not have literacy skills. And certainly nobody asks if they are descended from people whose skin is not as white as theirs; those of us with Indigenous and African blood and epigenomes ravaged by colonialism are of no use in such a project because our bodies fail to meet the aesthetic demands of the colonizer. (White-looking Indigenous bodies can still be useful if costumed correctly in an exotic way that points towards an imagined past of noble savages with long braids.)

That is because, for far too many people on what we might call “the left,” the politics of representation is not a justice-based project at all. It is an aesthetic project. A key aspect of the display of elite white power is the ability to fashion a mosaic, made out of the most exotic human bodies you can find, that signals to other white people in the same way black domestics servants once did. Such a project is not about transcending colonial racism; it is a re-enactment of that racism.

The Enlightenment, the process that began the Age of Reason, was a global event. Throughout what we might term the “civilized world,” the Baroque episteme, early modernity, the Age of Beauty collapsed under its own weight and gave rise to the episteme, the social order at whose end we are located. Not just in Europe but throughout the world, early modern societies confronted true modernity in the work of the likes of Adam Smith, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This produced a series of crises of social and political order around the world.

The Age of Beauty, which preceded the Age of Reason, like John Keats, conflated beauty, truth and power. Political legitimacy stemmed from a sumptuous and elaborate aesthetic performance in cuisine, music, art and philosophy. Copernicus had not supplanted Ptolemy because a heliocentric universe was more reasonable than a geocentric one but because it was more beautiful to have a universe with a sun at its centre.

A philosophy based on luxurious, sumptuous aesthetics made additional contributions beyond a heliocentric universe. The Great Chain of Being was featured in the British imaginary and elsewhere, an elaborate effort to situate every known thing in the universe in a single hierarchy with God at the top, encompassing all things that existed, both natural and supernatural. The great empire of the early modern world, the Spanish, French, British, Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, British, Portuguese and Dutch saw themselves as agents of a divine order in which there was a place of everything and everything was in its place.

Enlightenment thinkers challenged this hierarchical divine order by suggesting that human beings were equal, that there was no reason one set of laws should govern a peasant and another govern lord, no reason that different laws should apply to you depending on whether you were Indigenous, African or European, no reason women should not enjoy the political and financial rights enjoyed by men, no reason to afford one set of rights to Christians and inferior rights to Jews, Deists or Muslims.

In the Baroque episteme, one did not need to show that this hierarchy of kinds of people was entirely consistent with lived experience, physical evidence or logic. For the Great Chain of Being to be true, it simply had to be shown to be the most beautiful way of depicting the human family. In this way, the Baroque order proved itself right by the logic of… the Baroque order.

But Enlightenment thinkers practiced a different epistemology than Baroque thinkers; to be true, a theory or model had to be both internally consistent and consistent with all evidence gleaned by observing the world. Fundamentally, it had to be descriptive. And there were simply too many free, proud, rich people with African blood in their veins; there were too many politically powerful, independent women, too many theologically sophisticated Indigenous people, too many honest, proud, forthright Jews, too many rich men of low birth and poor men of aristocratic blood, etc.

While the existence of thousands upon thousands of exceptions to the map of the human family did not challenge the Baroque order on its own terms, it did challenge it by the increasingly popular Enlightenment epistemology, that more and more people and, especially wealthy, powerful urban people turned to to understand the world. And so many Enlightenment thinkers called for the old hierarchical order to be torn down.

But not all.

What many people forget is the form that the forces of reaction took during the eighteenth century. In 1714, the Hapsburg monarchy was overthrown in Western Europe during the War of Spanish Succession. The outcome was that the Spanish Empire now came under the control of the Bourbon monarchy of France. Following the brutal war, the Bourbons in both France and Spain began to adopt Enlightenment ideas as a means not of dismantling but of shoring-up the old order. The central problem that they faced was the incongruence between the way they described the world, to give their laws legitimacy, and the way the world appeared to observers. In essence, their problem was a fundamental incongruence, metaphorically, between map and territory.

The question that faced not just Spain but many of the world’s empires was how to make map and territory converge. When it came to race, the economic lifeblood of the Spanish Empire was at stake. The existence of the casta (caste) negro (black) made racial slavery both justified and permissible because it described African people as naturally servile and in need of guidance; and this provided almost all of the labour for the empire’s sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations. The existence of the indio (Indian) casta allowed the Spanish to tie indigenous people to the land like medieval peasants, refuse to educate them in the Spanish language and extract annual tributes of maize from them to fuel their imperial machine.

The problem, Bourbon reformers realized, was that the caste system was insufficiently descriptive. It had to be made accurate, map had to converge with territory. So, they began with a crackdown on the illegal sale of limpieza de sangre certificates that attested to the whiteness of a person who was not entirely white. By eliminating corruption and revoking whiteness in the colonies, territory and map began, once again, to converge. Now, at least people who did not look white were not recognized as white.

Build trust in your partner For more intimacy and intensity in cialis tadalafil online your sexual life, understand and correspond with your partner. Sperm with low quality or motility, quaintly shaped sperms or sperms that are not able to attach themselves to the egg or penetrate through them cause major problems and deter pregnancy. buy cialis If you think you might have a role to play in causing erectile generic tadalafil cipla dysfunction and penile numbness. The product is expensive at about $50 viagra online for a month’s supply. The next measure taken to make map and territory converge was the multiplication of the number of castes and racial categories to reflect the true diversity of the Empire. After centuries of intermarriage, sexual violence and illicit relations, there were all kinds of people who didn’t fit into the original castes because they were some combination of races originally envisaged. The reason that a person of Spanish and Indigenous descent was leading such a disciplined, sophisticated urban life was because they were not a mestizo (half Spanish and half Indigenous) but because they were actually a castizo (three quarters Spanish and one quarter Indigenous).

The Bourbon Reforms, the package of laws that were designed to bring the Spanish Empire into the Enlightenment did not do away with race; instead they made it more descriptive. People who had felt that their prior caste designation did not really describe them were given a more precise, narrower, more specific racial designation. And because genetic testing was not on the table, it was relatively easy to look at people’s appearance and station in life and “correct” their race so that it became more descriptive. By multiplying and intensifying the number of racial categories, the Bourbon Reforms did not just produce new laws; they produced new ways for people to narrate their desires, their inclinations and their identity.

In the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the vast political entity encompassing the Philippines, Guam, Mexico, Central America and what is the southwestern US today, this had an aesthetic expression, the Casta Paintings, a whole artistic movement that used increasingly photo-realistic “objective” artistic styles to depict a typical member of each of the now-double-digit number of castes of which one might be a member. These paintings were not simply a state-commissioned propaganda project; they were a popular enterprise that people used to comprehend and navigate their experience. Distinctions were made between criollos (whites born under the less favourable celestial and humoral influences of the Americas) and peninsulares (European-born Spanish whites) too. Differences of dress, culture, custom, language, appearance and class could now be explained by a more precise and refined set of castes; map and territory could again converge.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see what this all was in aid of: Indigenous servitude, African slavery and the disruption of solidarity through the multiplication and elaboration of difference. And, with that same benefit, we can see where all that ended up: in scientific racism, eugenics and the other pseudo-sciences premised on the fallacy of race.

Today, we face an increasingly stratified, oppressive, hierarchical order in our society. Social mobility is freezing. Human trafficking is increasing. More of us are imprisoned. More of us are in the underclass. These things were happening in the eighteenth century too. An unequal and unjust social order was reaching a crescendo of oppression.

It should not surprise us, then, that those defending the dying social order of neoliberal capitalism are offering us illusory forms of liberty and identity. Instead of recognizing gender as an inherently and materially oppressive category, we are told that the problem with gender is that it is not descriptive enough, that with more categories of gender, more categories of sexuality, more sexual orientations, each carefully labeled and described, that the brutality of the wage gap, gender-based violence, workplace harassment and violence, sexual exploitation of the precariously housed, human trafficking, denial of childcare to all but the richest among us, will somehow become justifiable. Once again, there will be a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.

Today, progressives use the term “radical feminist” as an epithet meaning “bigot.” This should tell us something very important: that the people who have borne the brunt of providing transition housing to victims of violence, who have marched against men’s violence against women, who have called-out gender as an oppressive category that keeps people down are now being portrayed as barbarians and villains.

The same accusations were hurled back in the early nineteenth century, at the cross-racial alliances of former slaves, current slaves, Indigenous peoples and the racialized underclass who marched together and took up arms to demand an end to caste system, an end not just to the laws but to the culture that sowed division and justified hierarchy. Vincente Guerrero, a leader of African, Spanish and Indigenous descent led a multi-racial army that called not for the recognition of their castes as equal to whites but for the abolition of race as a category, a frontal attack on the very idea of racial difference. And his army succeeded in tearing down laws mandating servitude, slavery and caste in New Spain.

It is telling that both the left and right head of the neoliberal hydra are attacking the modern Guerreros, radical feminists who are demanding a cultural revolution that will throw off the yoke of gender. The right head calls these radical feminists a threat to order, to the family and to God himself. The left head, the progressive head, calls them intolerant bigots, ignoramuses, science deniers. No doubt, there are some transphobic people in radical feminist organizations, just as there are anti-Semites in the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, just as there were Soviet communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild during McCarthyism. The existence of this minority is not a reason to reject radical feminism.

Let us not allow the existence of an intolerant minority in a movement cause us to lose track of its transformative message: the problem with your gender, your sexuality is not that they are not descriptive enough, not precise enough, not uniquely reflective of who you are. The problem is that they are tools of exploitation and oppression; the problem is that they exist at all, that there are gender norms, gender expectations, gendered outfits, gender performances. These are means of creating division and inequality. They are not natural or inevitable responses to differences in biological sex. You are being conned into believing that they are because, for the order oppressing you to succeed in its oppression, map and territory must converge in the modern equivalent of the Casta Painting.