Kristian Williams

Less than six months before my book on Oscar Wilde and anarchism is available!

I’ve been working on this book for more than a decade and am genuinely pleased with how it has turned out.  The book situates Wilde in the tradition of left-wing anarchism, with chapters on revolutionary violence, capitalism and class, prison, exile and death, and (of course) sexual politics — plus an introduction by Alan Moore!

You can order Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde from AK Press.

 

I will be giving two talks in northern California this month.

The first is part of the “Growing Freedom” Speakers Series at the College of the Redwoods:  Friday Dec. 13th, at 3:30 pm to 5:00pm at the CR Del Norte Campus in Rooms D34 & D36.  I’ll be speaking with Kevin Van Meter about building strong movements in the face of political repression, with illustrations drawn from the environmental movement.

The second is the following day, Saturday,  December 14th, 11am, at  The Manila Community Center (1611 Peninsula Drive, Arcata CA 95521), as part of the Humboldt Anarchist Bookfair.  I will be speaking about George Orwell, the present state of the anarchist movement, and the left’s persistent problems.

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I have two recent reviews at the Toward Freedom website, both relating to queer history.

The first takes a hard look at Naomi Wolf’s Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.  In it, she provocatively relates the Victorian persecution of homosexuality to the censorship of literature and traces both back to the reactionary backlash against the nineteenth-century women’s movement.  Unfortunately, and now somewhat notoriously, she gets her facts wrong.  Her claim that “several dozen” men were executed for sodomy at the end of the nineteenth century was debunked in the course of a BBC interview, leading to the book’s (temporary) recall.  As I note, she is equally mistaken about the legal difference between sodomy and “gross indecency,” leading her to misunderstand the statutory changes resulting in the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, and a great number of other less famous people.

In contrast, Gregory Mackie’s Beautiful Untrue Things is a fascinating and delightful study of the forgeries of Oscar Wilde’s work which poured into the literary market during the 1920’s.  My review considers the ways that the contest between the forgers and the guardians of Wilde’s canon was also a struggle over queer identity.

This interview originally appeared in the July 2019 issue of Bridge Operations and Admin News (the in-house newsletter at my day job).

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A Very Abbreviated History of the Concept of ‘Privilege’:
An Interview with Noel Ignatiev

by Kristian Williams

Noel Ignatiev worked in steel mills and factories for more than twenty years before teaching at Harvard, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the American University in Beirut. He is the author of How the Irish Became White, and a founding editor of the journal Race Traitor.

Ignatiev was one of the earliest theorists of “privilege” as a social science concept. In keeping with the County’s emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I presented him with a couple of questions about the idea.

KW: How did the concept of white privilege emerge, and what was your role in that?

Ignatiev: The concept of white privilege grew out of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, which spoke of the “public and psychological wage” granted southern white laborers, in return for which they supported a system that oppressed black people and held them down as well.

But the term “white skin privilege” was first used in 1965 in a call to commemorate the antislavery hero John Brown drafted by historian/activist Theodore Allen. In 1967 Ted Allen and I wrote a pamphlet, “The White Blindspot,” which identified the struggle against white supremacy as the key to strategy for the entire working class. It listed the privileges of the white skin, including a monopoly of the skilled jobs, a cushion against the most severe shocks of the economic cycle, health and education facilities superior to those of the non-white population, the freedom to spend their money and leisure time without social restrictions, the opportunity on occasion to promote one of their number out of the ranks of the laboring class, and in general the material and psychological privileges befitting the white skin. That pamphlet significantly influenced the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other sectors of the New Left. On June 15, 1969, the New York Times reported that the National Office of SDS was calling “for an all-out fight against ‘white skin privileges.’”

It wasn’t until the ’90s that the notion gained prominence in the universities, thanks to David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, Alex Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Ted Allen’s two-volume Invention of the White Race, George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and my own How the Irish Became White.

KW: Have you seen the concept change as it has become more mainstream?

Ignatiev: As with any concept that reaches a wide audience, white privilege meant different things to different people. Ted Allen and I always held that the privileges were not ultimately in the interests of white working-class people but served to subordinate them to the employing class; our aim was to challenge white supremacy in order to establish working-class solidarity. Others held that the privileges of whiteness made the white workers exploiters of the downtrodden people of the world.

As the concept of “privilege” entered the mainstream, “privilege politics” became a way of avoiding direct confrontations with the institutions that reproduce race. The focus shifted to an emphasis on scrutinizing every inter-personal encounter to unearth underlying racist attitudes and to guide people in “unlearning” them.  This has developed into a tendency to strictly enforce the boundaries between the races—not only (as in the past) by white supremacists but by proponents of what might be considered black advancement.

In contrast, I have known people with the privileges of whiteness who feel that “white” does not adequately describe who they are. Often they do not have the words to express who they are. They feel themselves victims of this society and identify instinctively with other victims. I regard it as my task to seek out these people, let them know they are not alone and that they are potentially part of a community made of up of former whites and people who never were and never could be white, and that together they could bring to birth a new and better world.