Monthly Archives: April 2021

Struggle stalwart Charlotte Maxeke has this Freedom Month, been remembered as a strong and selfless woman.

On Wednesday, ahead of the annual Freedom Day commemoration, a virtual panel discussion was organised by the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) to mark the life and times of Maxeke as a freedom fighter.

The panellists described Maxeke as a woman who was always determined to work for others.

Dr Musawenkosi Donia Saurombe, from the Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke Institute (CMMI), said Maxeke had made an enormous contribution to the improvement of people's lives, particularly women.

Maxeke was selfless. "Charlotte continued to be a selfless character. She was a pioneer."

Saurombe said it was important for women to follow in Maxeke's footsteps and emulate her determination to challenge the status quo.

The Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke Institute (CMMI) is a family initiative born out of the desire to preserve, promote, elevate and leverage the legacy left behind by Mme Charlotte.

Maxeke was a South African religious leader, social and political activist; she was the first black woman to graduate with a university degree in South Africa with a BSc from Wilberforce University Ohio in 1903, as well as the first black African woman to graduate from an American university.

Born on 7 April 1871, she was the only woman who attended the launch of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in Bloemfontein in 1912.

She witnessed the 1878-1879 last Frontier war, the battle of Isandlwana in 1879, the battle of Adwa in Ethiopia, 1896, the Pan African Congress and the Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906.

She and other selfless women of her generation fought against oppression at a time when such defiance was met with unrelenting force.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the struggle icon and Freedom Month is being celebrated under the theme "The Year of Charlotte Maxeke: the Meaning of Freedom under COVID-19".

Government has called on everyone to use the Freedom Month and Freedom Day celebrations to pull together and continue to fight COVID-19 while striving for greater inclusion and social cohesion.

As the government has declared 2021 the year to remember Maxeke, Dr Saurombe said the CMMI had planned a number of programmes and activities to commemorate the life and times of the struggle icon.

Zubeida Jaffer, an award-winning South African journalist and activist, is the author of 'Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke'.

She wrote the book over a period of three years.

"I believe more could be written about Charlotte. There are many big moments that people can read about her," Jaffer said.

Jaffer told other panellists that Maxeke used to teach herd boys at night while continuing to do her other activities. "Often it is the small things that we make that impact on other people's lives," she said.

Reshoketswe Mosuwe, the President of the 19th Episcopal District Women's Missionary Society A.M.E Church, said she was humbled and proud to be following in Maxeke's footsteps.

"We believe that she still lives in us," Mosuwe said.

Mosuwe was invited to speak about the life and times of Maxeke as a church leader and as a spiritual woman in the A.M.E church.

Maxeke was greatly influenced by AMEC.

She became the organiser of the Women's Mite Missionary Society in Johannesburg and then moved to the Polokwane (then Pietersburg) area. There she joined her family in Dwaars River, under Chief Ramakgopa, who gave her money to start a school.

With regards to gender-based violence, Mosuwe called on everyone to fight the scourge. "She was a fighter and fighting gender-based violence is part of honouring her," she said.

(With Inputs from South African Government Press Release)

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Charlotte Maxeke remembered as strong woman this Freedom Month - Devdiscourse

Motivation for the assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Ankara, remains shrouded in mystery five years after off-duty Turkish police officer Mevlut Mert Altintas committed the crime during the opening of an art exhibition in Ankara on December 19, 2016. Chaos ensued when Altintas (circled in the photo below) calmly pulled out his duty gun and fired at least eight rounds, shouting in Arabic and Turkish, Allahu Akbar! Dont forget Aleppo. Dont forgetSyria. Unless our towns are secure, you wont enjoy security. Only death can take me from here. Everyone who is involved in this suffering will pay the price.

Speculation about why Altintas acted as he did have run the gamut, but three theories have come to the forefront. First, Turkish government officials blame the Gulen movement, which they designated as a terrorist organization right after the suspicious July 15, 2016, coup attempt. Second, Altintas, who was opposed to increasing economic ties between Turkey and Russia and opposed to Russias support for the Assad regime in Syria, operated as a lone actor. Third, suspicion has been cast on the Kurds who are fighting against ISIS. The leaders of both Turkey and Russia were prudent in their statements after the assassination. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said,I describe this attack on Russias embassy as an attack to Turkey, Turkeys state and nation, while President Vladimir Putin said that the crime was a provocation designed to spoil relations between Russia and Turkey and derail the peace process in Syria.

As might have been expected, the Second Heavy Penal Court of Ankara, which announced its verdict in the assassination case on March 9, 2021, said that the Gulen movement was complicit in Karlovs death. Russia and experts of the Western world, however, do not support the Turkish governments theory. This article attempts to shed light on the indictmentsTurkey issued in the Karlov case and delves into questions related to the Gulen theory and the lone-actor theory that need to be reinvestigated. The Kurdish theory is not addressed here because no evidence exists to even suggest that such a scenario is plausible.

Turkeys Accusations in the Indictment

Like it had done with other investigations of notable attacks in Turkey since the anti-corruption scandals came to light in late 2013, the court accused Fethullah Gulen and his movement of plotting the assassination of Karlov and persuading Altintas to commit the crime. Before examining the details of Karlovs indictment, however, it is necessary to explain how the Turkish justice system works and why the investigation and prosecution of notable attacks always have the same scapegoats: former police officers, former military personnel, and Gulenists. The December 2013 anti-corruption investigations, which used solid evidence to implicate Erdogan, his family members, and Erdogans cabinet, is a prime example. Erdogan accused allegedly Gulenist police officers to plot a scheme to overthrow the government and oust Erdogan from power. Furious about such an unconvincing plan, Erdogan responded by launching a retaliatory crackdown against the Gulenists and subjecting all members of the movement to relentless oppression.

Erdogans implacable grudge against Gulen has harmed the credibility of Turkeys justice system because, now, every investigation is directed to conclude that Gulenists were somehow the perpetrators. This hijacking of the Turkish justice system helps to explain why Turkey was ranked near the bottom of the constraints on government powers category in the 2020Rule of Law Index. The World Justice Project compiles the index each year and reflects how the influential nonprofit civil society organization perceives 128 countries adherence to the rule of law. Turkey ranked 124th on the list.

The governments disregard for the rule of law in Turkey has meant the demise of bottom-up investigations that aimed to collect evidence and then identify the suspect and the rise of top-down investigations that name the suspect first and then fabricate evidence against the predetermined suspect. Prosecutors now routinely use copy-and-paste indictments filled with fabricated evidence presented by intelligence officials. Prosecutors who were opposed to the directives promulgated by Erdogan and his government were accused of being members of a terrorist organization and then put in jail. The indictments prepared after the 2013anti-corruption scandals were no different and include many contradictions that Western countries consider to be suspicious.

Suspicious Investigations by Turkeys Judicial System

An examination of how the prosecution and conviction systems work in Turkey suggests a pattern of subterfuge that undermines the credibility of the governments indictment of Altintas for the assassination of Karlov. That pattern involves the use of fabricated and dubious evidence and the statements of secret so-called witnesses provided by intelligence officials and the police for the sole purpose of indicting a perceived enemy of the government. Prosecutors are complicit in the charade, signing the bogus indictments and referring them to the court without question.

The police investigation that targeted members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a case in point. During this investigation, the police collected solid evidence about the spying activities of IRGC members in Turkey and how they had targeted the U.S. Consulate in Turkey. The government, however, ignored the evidence and shut down the investigation. In another case, the government shutdown a police investigation that targeted the Tahsiye Group, an al Qaeda-affiliated organization led by Mehmet Dogan. Dogan had become a target of the law enforcement when, during a speech, he praised Osama Bin Laden and told his followers that they have a binding duty (fardh) to join Osama Bin Ladens army in Afghanistan. In a third case, the government relentlessly punished the police investigators who examined several trucks that belonged to Turkeys Intelligence Office. The investigators found that the trucks contained arms and explosives destined for jihadist groups in Syria. Despite solid evidence and video footage showing arms hidden inside the trucks, the government shut down the case. In yet another case, the government shut down the December 17 and 25, 2013 anti-corruption investigations that implicated Erdogan, his family, and members of his cabinet. Reza Zarrab, the money launderer for the corrupt government officials, transported$20 billion to Iran on a route through Turkey at a time when the European Union and the United States had imposed embargoes on Iran for its ambition to possess nuclear weapons. The police had proved that Zarrab was giving bribes worth millions of euros and dollars to Turkeys bureaucrats and ministers, but the government disregarded the evidence and released Zarrab and his accomplices. Zarrab, however, was arrested in the United States on March 19, 2016. At Zarrabs trial, the U.S. prosecutors were able to use all of the evidenceincluding wiretappingsthat the Turkish police had collected within the scope of their corruption investigations from three years ago and which the Turkish government alleged that they had been fabricated by the Turkish police investigators. A fifth case involves the conviction of police officers who allegedly had ignored the killing of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007. The court announced its verdict on March 2021; however, Dinks family and the familys lawyers believed that the investigation had overlooked critical elements and were not satisfied with the courts decision. The common thread that ties these five cases together is the governments adamant contentiondespite clear evidence to the contrarythat all the defendants were Gulenists who deserved lengthy, and even lifelong, prison sentences.

The outcome of the governments investigation of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt differed slightly from its usual strategy. This time, the government accused not only Gulenists but also Americans of plotting the failed coup. Evidence uncovered since then, however, indicates the July 15 coup attempt was one of the most suspicious events of Turkeys history. Some high level politicians in Turkey have said that Erdogan knew about the coup in advance and did not try to stop it because he believed the fallout from a coup would be to his benefit. The coup, therefore, was not a failed coup but rather a fake coup. The authors previous articles about the coup emphasizes the idea that a small group of military personnel who were provoked into staging a badly orchestrated coup and paid a colossal cost for doing so, as Erdogan used the event to undermine Turkeys democracy and turn a democracy into an authoritarian regime.

Details and Questions from the Altintas Indictment

The prosecutor accused 28 suspects in a 600-page indictment and concluded that Gulen was the number one suspect. According to the indictment, the prosecutor made the following accusations:

The following questions still need to be answered:

Now the Second Theory: Was Altintas a Lone Actor Inspired by al Qaeda Ideology?

The second theory contends that, in his effort to punish Russia for of its involvement in the Syrian conflict, Altintas acted on his own volition when he assassinated Karlov. Such lone-actor terrorism has been a threat to the world since the early 2010s. Individuals who engage in lone-actor terrorism operate according to their own timetable, are not directed by any terrorist leader or terrorist organization, and may be inspired by one or more radical ideologies. Most lone actors, however, have been inspired by ideologies of either al Qaeda or ISIS. Given that Altintas was a self-radicalized individual with close ties to SDV and given that the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, al Nusra Front,has claimed responsibility for Karlovs assassination, proponents of the second theory believe that their interpretation of assassins motivation has more credibility than any other proposed theory.

Altintas Radicalization

Details in the prosecutors indictment of Altintas provides clues about how Altintas was self-radicalized. Various models explain how individuals are radicalized, and, according to one of them, radicalization is a four-step process: (1) pre-radicalization, (2) conversion and identification, (3) conviction and indoctrination, and (4) action. At the pre-radicalization step, according to the details of the indictment, Altintas introvert personality made him susceptible to being affected by the teachings of the Turkish radical Islamist Nurettin Yildiz. The indictment also noted that Atintas had complained about his family, telling friends that his family was not practicing Islam. According to Altintas family, he drank alcohol and was not a religious person until he attended the Turkish National Police Academy in 2012. In his second year in the academy, family members said, Altintas began to sympathize with radical religious groups and joined the religious programs offered by Yildiz.

At the conversion and identification step, the indictment indicates that in 2013, Altintas began to question his job and Turkeys approach to Islam. For example, Altintas began to complain about his position as a police officer, telling his friends that it is not appropriate to work in a state until it is ruled by Islamic law, that he was planning to resign from his position as a police officer, and that he was against the democratic elections.

At the conviction and indoctrination step, Altintas seemed to have become an ardent believer in jihadist ideology. For example, Altintas shared extremist messages on a WhatsApp group about Syria and ISIS. He also used hate rhetoric against the United States and said that the United States was inflicting cruelty on the people in Islamic countries. Altintas also was followed the news in Syria and criticized Russian atrocities in Syria.

At the action step, Altintas sought to engage in deeds that would serve his ideology. For example, he wanted to travel to Syria, join a jihadist group, and become a martyr. He also became involved in donation programs that send money to Syria. When investigators examined Altitas computer, they discovered that he had downloaded a video in February 2016 titled Al Qaeda: You Only Are Responsible Yourself, which began with a speech by Osama bin Laden. Altintas computer also contained a draft email to mrtltns@gmail.com, dated July 27, 2015, that Altintas was preparing to be a martyr.

SDV and Salafism in Turkey

Turkey has been one of the top 10 countries with the most jihadists joining al Qaeda or ISIS groups in Syria. In 2015, more than 2,000 Turkish jihadists joined one of these terrorist organizations. Turkeys government has been criticized for ignoring the activities of jihadist groups in Syria and for allowing the militants to use its borders freely not only to transfer militants but also money and logistics. In 2015, Russian authorities published satellite images purportedly showing Turkish trucks transporting oil from ISIS-controlled areas in Syria.

Nurettin Yildiz, a retired imam and director of SDV, played an essential role in the radicalization of many individuals, including Altintas. Yildiz is known for his anti-Semitic and jihadist speeches. In one of those speeches, he said, Jews are the symbols of brutality and enjoy killing of women and children.Yildiz also is an advocate of Salafism in Turkey and regularly holds meetings and gives sermons on topics such as Salafi-interpreted jihadism and support for jihadists in Syria. He also is a fervent supporter of Erdogan and the AKP. As an example, a page on the SDV website and a google search on Yildiz bring photos of Yildiz with previously-investigated suspects for their roles in transferring arms and explosives to Syria.

After the assassination of Karlov, the al Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria known as Fatah al-Sham Front (formerly al-Nusra Front) claimed responsibility for the assassination of Karlov in a letter the group published online. The letter talks about the Revenge of Aleppo and claims that Altintas was not only a riot police officer but also a member of the al-Nusra Front. Erdogan, however, said in a 2016 speech that al-Nusra Front is not a terrorist organization, only to reverse his stance two years later and designated the group as a terrorist organization.

To conclude, Turkeys Second Heavy Penal Court of Ankara announced its verdict in the Karlov assassination casein March 2021, concluding that the Gulen movement was responsible for the crime. The court ignored an investigation report that said Altintas committed the crime as a radicalized lone actor with link to al Qaeda-affiliated individuals. The courts decision appears to have been based on a government-directed investigation that declared an alleged perpetrator and then tried to find or fabricate evidence to fit its contrived scenario. In Russia and the Western world, the verdict has been deemed unsatisfactory. It is not realistic, of course, to expect reliable investigations and prosecutions under the current authoritarian regime in Turkey. Further investigation of the Karlov assassination is needed to determine who directed Altintas to kill the Russian ambassador, who was behind the government-directed investigations, who ignored potential evidence that could have led to the identification of the real culprits, who chose not to provide adequate protection for Karlov inside the exhibition, and who directed officers to kill Altintas at the crime scene even though it would have been possible to capture him alive.

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Under False Pretenses: Who Directed the Assassin to Kill the Russian Ambassador in Turkey in 2016? - Modern Diplomacy

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Posted by Nupur Hukmani

Dalit political history is testimony to Namdeo Dhassals immense contribution. He was one of the founders of the Dalit Panther Movement (DPM). Born as a Mahar (whose designated caste occupation was remover of carcasses), he grew up in dire poverty on the streets of Mumbai. He never finished school and was self-taught. His activism, politics, and his art for the fight against the injustice of the caste system made him a beacon of hope for scores of oppressed Dalits.Dhassal is well-known for his audacious poetry for which he won a Padma Shri.

The DPM which eventually became a political party was full of hot-tempered young men that idolized Dhassal for his inflammatory words and actions. Dhassal wrote vivid poems, left nothing to the imagination, and captured the nature of the oppression that he as a Dalit had faced in a chaffed style. For the oppressors, Dhassal was the anti-thesis of the ramifications that upholding the caste system was meant to have- being confident, opinionated, acutely aware of the oppression, and revolutionalizing the masses against that oppression. His use of shock poetry describing the life, subjugation, and helplessness of being Dalit was what drew the masses toward him. Consider these lines from his poem, Equality for All or Death for India:

They are fired up with their own egotismThey are possessed by neurosesKilling, violence, bloodshedThey are polluted by this rotten stenchThey make everyone into an OedipusThey want partitionThey want riotsThey want to turn humans into demonsThey want to see humanity destroyed one more time

Here, Dhassal talks about caste violence and uses the term they for caste Hindus, and the we is used to denote Dalits. His poems have a historical quality and yet seem very relevant to this day. The imagery and choice of words are unconventional and courageous to say the least.

The DPMwas built on the lines of the Black Panthers Movement against racism in the USA of the late 60s. The evolution of the Dalit Panthers journeyed interesting paths. By the late 50s, Ambedkar had decided to renounce Hinduism, the religion which he believed had no conscience. He studied various religions and finally chose to convert to Buddhism as a means of emancipation. He led the mass conversion of millions of Dalits to Buddhism. Ambedkars political interpretation of Buddhas teachings came to be called Navayana or Neo-Buddhism and was the core ideology of the Dalit Panthers when they started.

The Panthers movement was initiated by a bunch of college-going Mahar youth whose own families had converted to Buddhism during Ambedkars time. The 60s also saw a wave of new writers on the literary block who were livid with the hegemony of Brahmin writers for not only occupying the literary space but for also appropriating Dalit experiences. The DPM was first born as a literary movement and then went on to become a political movement. Dhassal was a poet before he became an activist and his poetry reflected the raw and shuddering experiences of Dalit oppression in the vocabulary of Dalits.

Also read: Dalit Panthers: A Radical Resistance

The word Dalit means downtrodden. The Panthers decided to use the term because it is casteless and their ideological stand was to fight for all the oppressed be it members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the Neo Buddhists, the workers, the landless, poor farmers, women, or then those who were fraught in the name of religion. They called themselves the Panthers after the Black Panthers, which symbolized courage. They believed that violence in response to violence and other forms of oppression was justified. The Dalit Panthers Party was initially an interesting amalgamation of different ideologies which was no doubt refreshing but which was also the very reason for their split into different styles of leadership many years down the line.

To build this movement from its inception as a literary one to the point where it became a full-fledged social movement and eventually even a political party, the Panthers used a lot of symbolism such as protest marches, demonstrations, pamphleteering, and many times ingenious sloganeering. Public gestures like the burning of the Manusmriti and Gita were carried out to denounce the religious sanctity of the caste system. They commemorated the valorous act of Dalits at Bhima Koregaon War and also held a large rally on Ambedkars death anniversary at Chaitanya Bhoomi. All these symbolic acts stimulated the Dalit youth and helped snowball the movement to spread all over the country.

Dhassal was a natural leader full of charisma. People flocked around him, paid rapt attention to his words, were mesmerized by his blasphemous poetry, and saw in him a future of hope and change. Under his leadership, Dalit politics saw a new horizon and was instrumental in unifying the masses. That is why it is soul-crushing to read his wife, Mallika Amar Shaikhs memoir about her tumultuous relationship with him, and the subjugation he put her through.

Mallika recounts meeting Dhassal through her brother-in-law at 14 in her memoir I Want to Destroy Myself. The book is a painful description of her relationship not only with Dhassal, the person but also with Dhassal, the politician. She describes a different side to Dhassal: He was sometimes loveable, many times abusive, and on most occasions insensitive to her needs as a person, a partner, and a woman.

Also read: Book Review: I Want To Destroy Myself By Malika Amar Shaikh

He physically abuses her, passes on a venereal disease which he acquires in one of his visits to the sex worker in Kamathipura, rapes her before they get married, and eventually separates their son from her in a fit of anger for many months. She recalls Namdeo being a completely absent partner and eventually an absent father too. Both of them go through an endless, vicious cycle of drinking, fighting, abusing, and beating in front of the child.

She narrates their agonizing disagreements on parenting decisions which expose Namdeos ideological hypocrisy at home. Having grown up in a communist environment, she is certain on how she wants to raise her child- without religion, caste, and rejecting rituals like the naming ceremony. On the other hand, even though he claims to be Dhassal comes across as someone who is tokenistic in his parenting and is not sure of his philosophy. He wants to give the child a revolutionary name like George Jackson and refuses to celebrate his birthday. Ironically, he falls prey to his friends suggestion of idol worship of the Buddha statue that they decide to install on the eve of his childs birthday.

Mallika exposes Dhassals hypocrisy in his politics as well. As a politician, he was brash, thoughtless, and larger than life. She believes that the internal conflicts took place because the Panthers lacked discipline.

Mallika exposes Dhassals hypocrisy in his politics as well. As a politician, he was brash, thoughtless, and larger than life. She believes that the internal conflicts took place because the Panthers lacked discipline. Dhassal does not contribute to household expenses claiming rising party costs but continues to live a lavish lifestyle himself; spends obscene amounts of money on party workers including their trips to Kamathipura. He also forces her to sell her jewellery when he cant meet these expenses. There is a very poignant description of how she eventually sells theSoviet Landmagazines in their house just so that she can feed the family.

According to her, the Panthers were just a bunch of young, directionless men who were trying to be scooped up by all political parties from the left to the center to the extreme right because of their non-commitment towards a particular ideology. All this takes place against the background of the Emergency in Indiawhich Dhassal openly supportedwhich many believe was so that the government in power would drop the cases against him and his party for all the militancy and violence they allegedly indulged in. She is also vocal with him about his various political decisions. At one point, he decides to support the Shiv Sena which she opposes. What do you understand of it? he dismisses her.

Throughout the book, she talks of the irony of the way her husband was revered by countless people as the saviour of the oppressed while he continued to oppress the women in his life and outside.His hypocrisy is loud and brash like him in every incident that she recounts, except that he is deaf and blind to it. She feels trapped as most women in bad marriages feel. Eventually, she tries multiple attempts at dying by suicide.

Reading about Dhassals early life of abject poverty and social persecution was truly inspiring. Reading his poetry and about his politics makes one marvel at the mans expressiveness, courage, intellect, and elocution. However, reading his wifes memoir put me in an existential quagmire and made me confront many uncomfortable questions such as: Should Dhassal be kept on a pedestal as the ideal of hope and change for the oppressed when he was an oppressor in various aspects of his personal life? His benevolent narcissism makes it extremely difficult to objectively assess his oppression as opposed to his activism and social altruism.

Also read: The Contribution Of Dalit Women Shahir In Maharashtras Anti-Caste Movement

This cognitive dissonance that he and many powerful men like him exhibit between their public and personal lives also leads to another dilemma: What are the implications of the fracture between his public and private values on the issues of gender in the anti-caste movement?

We must keep in mind that Dhassals activism and politics did not exist in a social and political void but were part of a larger system of patriarchy. The most difficult question for me to answer was: Why am I critiquing Dhassal now? To give a voice to the voiceless- his wife, his mother, women around him at the receiving end of his oppression and the women who are part of this system where men like Dhassal are revered for their fight against injustice while inflicting another kind of oppression in their own homes. And finally, one is forced to confront the eternal question: Must one separate the art from the artist?

Like Chinua Achebe said, An artist is committed to art which is committed to people, Dhassal was no doubt committed to his art, politics, activism and to the masses; only that he did not extend that commitment to all people around him.

Nupur holds a Masters in Psychology and has been an educator for eight years. She is passionate about writing and lovesincorporating writing as a medium in teaching. She is currently pursuing a Masters in International Human Rights from the Indian Institute of Human Rights, Delhi.When she is not teaching or writing, she loves reading, cooking and long distance running. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

Featured Image Source: Namdeo Dhasal | Facebook

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Namdeo Dhassal: The Poet, The Politician, And The Person - Feminism in India

LONDON Yemens teachers union denounced what it described as Tehrans use of education to pursue a policy of cultural colonialism,in statements published by theDaily Telegraph.

According to the teachers union, Yemeni children are being indoctrinated with violent and anti-Semitic propaganda in areas controlled bythe Iran-aligned Houthis.

Yahya Al-Yinai, a spokesman for the Yemeni Teachers Syndicate, told theDaily Telegraphthat the militias had overhauled the teaching curriculum and installed their supporters as principals in just about 90 percent of the schools under their control.

Yinai also accused Iran of orchestrating the changes in a policy of cultural colonialism by trying to introduce the ideology of the Khomeinist revolution in Yemen through public education.

With military and economic assistance from Iran, the Houthis currently control roughly two-thirds of the Yemeni population, including the capital Sanaa.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se) recently released a report which said the Houthis textbooks sought to indoctrinate children to sacrifice their lives.

Marcus Sheff, the chief executive of Impact-se, told theDaily Telegraphthat the Houthis appeared to have no red lines in their education drive.

The closest we have seen to being this extreme is the Islamic State (ISIS) materials, he said.

Houthi textbooks include graphic images of dead children and glorified violence as the only solution for resolving conflicts, the Impact-se report said.

The graphic nature of the material really took us aback, Sheff said.

The United States is described as the Greater Satan and as the enemy of all Arabs and Muslims, the Impact-se report revealed.

The American flag is used in images as a symbol of oppression, colonialism or simply the enemy, researchers found.

Children are being taught a Houthi slogan including the words Death to America, Death to Israel as part of an exercise on learning Arabic, the report also revealed.

Meanwhile, the 1979 Iranian revolution was awarded much praise.

Around three million young Yemenis currently receive their education in Houthi-controlled parts of the country.

Impact-se argues that the militias have made education a core pillar of their campaign to increase their influence and that their teachings illustrate why they are resistant to peaceful conflict resolution, theDaily Telegraphreported.

In the material reviewed, peace is explicitly dismissed as a form of capitulation, and people who advocate for it are framed as fools, cowards and even traitors, said Arik Agassi, the organisations chief operating officer.

This helps explain why the Iran-aligned militias continue to fight, despite the best efforts of a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

Yemen has been convulsed by civil war since 2014 when the Houthis took control of the capital of Sanaa and much of the northern part of the country, forcing the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi-led coalition, backed at the time by the US, entered the war months later to try to restore Hadi to power.

Despite a relentless air campaign and ground fighting, the war has deteriorated into a stalemate, killing about 130,000 people and spawning the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

The administration of US President Joe Biden last month officially withdrew its backing for the coalition but said the US would continue to offer support to Saudi Arabia as it defends itself against Houthi attacks.

The Saudis have recently offered a ceasefire deal, but Houthis turned them down.

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Yemen's teachers' union accuses Houthis of indoctrinating children || AW - The Arab Weekly

In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each items purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 others, including awareness (#18) and childrens games as adults (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasnt long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, whod been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet theres little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. As a white person, youre just desperate to find something else to grab on to, Lander said in 2009. Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished theyd grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.

Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the sites age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and black music that black people dont listen to any more (#116).

What has changed, however changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they werent exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.

In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Landers blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.

Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.

This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a major change in American attitudes about race another 45% said it was a minor change and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.

At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was too much discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didnt exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.

What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society white is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as were not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as were put to the test.

A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: The discovery of personal whiteness among the worlds peoples is a very modern thing a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.

Though radical in its time, Du Boiss characterisation of what he called the new religion of whiteness a religion founded on the dogma that of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.

That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attempted to delineate the real distinctions which nature has made between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnsteins Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that the most plausible explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was some form of mixed gene and environmental source in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.

By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Boiss assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.

If its easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon in some quarters, the idea that race is a social construct has become a cliche the same cannot be said for Du Boiss suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

Of course, its important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, white identity didnt just spring to life full-blown and unchanging. It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.

Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in the discovery of personal whiteness took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. Whats more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Boiss suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally the conditions on Barbados, Englands wealthiest colony, were notorious but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.

Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the perpetual enemies of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts or worse of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacons Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginias colonial government.

To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their Christian servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved Negroes. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina began to describe the privileged class as whites and not as Christians.

One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer perpetual enemies of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others. When that didnt work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.

But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called a screen of racial contempt. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.

As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (I cant think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so, Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour white and African it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.

The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.

The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means. Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography, published in 1802, that humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites, or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves. Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan and that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.

As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noahs son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.

For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what caucasian was supposed to mean; the honorary Aryan status that Hitler extended to the Japanese was no match for the robust complexities of human society.

Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.

The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction. From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilsons claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation, and to Donald Trumps warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were bringing drugs. And theyre bringing crime. And theyre rapists.

Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy.)

Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that Keep England White was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an evil speech, and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.

This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powells speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.

Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange dtente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.

Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.

Even the phrase white supremacy, which predates the word racism in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professors warning that one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today was the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races. In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy, and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihans The Negro Family.

By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, white supremacy was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.

Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of reverse racism, which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other race-conscious policies to claim that they, and not the policies proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: We want a colour-blind society, Reagan declared. A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as structural racism, symbolic racism or racism without racists. In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberl Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bells words, ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law.

Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.

In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: Abolish the white race by any means necessary. This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that the white race is a historically constructed social formation, a sort of club whose membership consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society.

For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. So long as the white race exists, they wrote, all movements against racism are doomed to fail. What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called white people like them to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.

But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed, Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white peoples thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy. Even Ignatiev would later say he wanted nothing to do with it.

By the mid-2000s, the colour-blind ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)

Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.

The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard including from my own mouth the argument that the real problem was that white people werent talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obamas election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.

In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea partys opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, Carter said. (Carters speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.)

The white backlash to Obamas presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdochs media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.

At the same time, Obamas victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. (There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win, said one Republican after Obamas victory.)

Whats more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware.

Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to Take Back Control and to Make America Great Again.

It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially not just the fact of Trumps presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. Trump truly is something new the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president, Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.

In 1860, a man who called himself Ethiop published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyns first public school for Black children. Wilsons essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the Aborigines; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing that made the men and women who enabled it into restless, grasping marauders. In view of the existing state of things around us, Wilson proposed at the end, let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?

Much has changed since Wilsons time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions. In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is real, but moot, and he advocates for something he calls symmetrical multiculturalism, in which identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black. What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas.

From another perspective my own, most days whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was the imperial width of the thing the heaven-defying audacity.) Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek legitimate expressions, whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

Yet even this does not fully answer Wilsons question. For if its easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside Prussian and Etruscan it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as a moral choice, as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.

As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world will not become unracialised by assertion. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness is an idea, not a fact. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.

This article was amended on 20 April 2021 to correct a reference to Eric Williams being the first president of Trinidad and Tobago. He was in fact the first prime minister.

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea - The Guardian