On the social construction of race
JVL Introduction
This challenging and illuminating essay cites W. E. B. Du Bois, a giant of Black intellectualism, admitting that he didn’t truly understand race until he visited the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1949.
Shanice McBean writes:
There has always been an intimate connection between antisemitism and anti-Black racism. In Hitler’s 1928 second book he praises Jim Crow for its integration of racial hierarchy and segregation within the legal system of a supposed democracy. The Nazis modelled aspects of the antisemitic 1935 Nuremburg laws after Jim Crow.
Studying materialist feminism introduced her to the idea “that race, too, might have its origins in systems of control and wealth accumulation, not biology”.
The fact that most Jews have less melanin in their skin than people from Africa or the Caribbean does not mean that the racism they experience is the result of an entirely distinct ideology. The Holocaust, slavery, the colonisation of Ireland, the Caribbean or India, all derive from relations of domination within which “any set of bodily features can be used to construct, and re-imagine, a subservient racial group.”
McBean is co-author with Aviah Sarah Day of Abolition Revolution, published by Pluto Press.
NWI
This article was originally published by On Revolution on Sun 23 Mar 2025. Read the original here.
'The Despised Blood of the Negro Flows Freely in the Veins of Jews'
Exploring antisemitism and colonial racisms; their connections, and ruptures.
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I’m so delighted to read of the return of materialist feminism!
I was always very much a supporter of Wittig, Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard’s thinking and writing; their materialist feminism seemed to be sidelined for several decades but how great that younger anti-racists are looking a those ideas again.
I love Shanice’s concluding appeal:
‘There was a time when movements against racism were much more integrated with each other. There was a time when solidarity reigned, and we showed up much more readily for each other. Is it not time, once again, to find our way out of the dark?’
Thank you so much for republishing this.
Some broad observations. The present right-wing establishment Labour Party is focussed on a contrived false version of ‘antisemitism’ and is actually opposed to the real victims of racism, who are usually dark-skinned and/or stand out just because they look different. Fagin is a fictional stereotyped cunning crook, but, in the story, he is comparatively benign. Fagin provides orphaned street boys with gainful employment, comradeship amongst themselves and a safe home. Fagin is a kindly person in his manner and in his character. And I wish that people would move away from the lazily repeated bowdlerisation ‘Nuremberg’ and use the actual name of Nurnberg.
Shanice McBean sats this:
“Given the right circumstances, any set of bodily features can be used to construct, and re-imagine, a subservient racial group.”
And she quotes W E B DuBois as follows:
“[Racism] was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery. It was not merely a matter of religion……the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people…”
I think the the DuBois position is better when you are looking at antisemitism and in fact all other forms of racism.