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Saturday, March 30, 2024

SMOKERS’ CORNER: IN SEARCH OF THE 'NEW MAN'
DAWN
Published March 31, 2024
Illustration by Abro


Till the 1960s, the idea of engineering an ideal society was an earnest endeavour. It did not draw the kind of cynical ridicule or even dread that it often evokes today. The concept of ‘social engineering’ is now understood as a rather sinister idea — but it just might be making a comeback.

The study of social engineering is often tied to the study of ‘ideologemes’ (a way of expression or representation of a particular ideology), such as the ‘New Man.’ The concept of the ‘New Man’ was a popular unit of various ideologies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The concept first emerged during the 18th century French Revolution, when radicals (the Jacobins) took control of the revolutionary regime and looked to create a whole new society by completely destroying the old. To do this, the regime felt it needed to shape a new kind of citizen through a new set of knowledge and morals. This pursuit led to excesses, in which hundreds of ‘bad citizens’ were brutally executed.

In the 19th century, two books — one in Czarist Russia and the other in Germany — would go a long way in popularising the idea of the New Man. The first was a novel written by the Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He called it The Story About The New Man.

After gaining prominence in the 19th century and its proliferation in the 20th century, the concept of ‘social engineering’ in order to create an ‘ideal society’ seems to be on the rise once more

The protagonist of the novel sees himself as one of the “new breed of men” in Russia entirely dedicated to forming a new society. He is a self-appointed messiah, envisioning a utopia. He even suppresses his sexual urges for this and is inclined to treat women as equals, as long as they are willing to work towards creating a new society.

The second book was by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In it, a ‘prophet’ tells the people about the coming of a new kind of man, the Übermensch (or the ‘overman’).

The Übermensch was to rise by shattering established ideas of morality, destroying the ‘decadence’ of the modern world, and would fill the void created by the figurative “death of God” with a new set of morals. The Übermensch was passionate, intuitive and unabashedly egotistical in his pursuit for power and glory.

These two tomes went on to influence experiments in social engineering in the 20th century, mainly in the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The founder of communist Russia, Vladimir Lenin, was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky’s novel.

Lenin’s Bolshevik party set out to create the ‘New Soviet Man’ and the ‘New Soviet Woman.’ Lenin understood the Russian society to be ignorant and emotional due to the manner in which it was ‘brutalised’ by the old order.

Policies were launched to engineer a society that preferred consciousness over instinct and emotion, and worked towards creating classlessness. The ‘New Soviet Man’ had to be physically and mentally strong, disciplined by Marxist-Leninist ideology. He had to completely forgo his ethnic and racial identity.



The ‘New Soviet Woman’ was to be his equal — a fellow comrade, a securer of the Revolution but also a wife and mother. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, asked the party to become “engineers of the human soul.” He said that society needed to be remoulded, “just as a gardener cultivates a tree.”

To Stalin, this required rapid industrialisation. Plans to do this were put into action. But whereas the Soviet Union achieved industrialisation at an impressive pace, this was at the cost of millions of deaths in the countryside, due to food extortion by the state to feed the cities, and the introduction of forced labour to build factories, roads and dams. The period also witnessed the mass execution and exile of thousands of “socially harmful elements.”

In Nazi Germany (1933-45), initiatives were launched to create the ‘New Aryan Man.’ He was to use instinct and intuition over reason and consciousness. He was to be a man of sheer will — not as an individual, but as an extension of a collective striving to serve a new Aryan society. The New Aryan Woman was to be a mother, the breeder of children of “pure German blood.”

Crude experiments in eugenics were carried out, millions from “undesired races” were exterminated, brutal military invasions were undertaken, and a bloody world war was fought to hasten the creation and supremacy of the ‘New Aryan Man.’

Nietzsche’s Übermensch was an inspiration to the Nazis, especially the Übermensch’s amoral and passionate impulse for power through grand military means and an unabashed lust for glory, even if this meant causing outright destruction.

The Chinese communist ideologue Mao Zedong tried to create a ‘New Chinese Man.’ The New Chinese Man was to be engineered to construct a new Chinese society. For this, Mao launched a campaign of “thought reform” in the cities. “Bourgeois thoughts” had to be expelled from the mind and replaced with thoughts of communist ‘sages’, such as Mao.

Then, reforms were initiated to create ‘New Chinese Men’ in the countryside. For this, peasants were forcibly organised into large collectives. ‘New Chinese Women’ were to be equals of men. In fact, they were treated as men and given similar tasks.

In 1966, Mao launched a ‘Cultural Revolution’ to galvanise Chinese youth to lead the way in persecuting those who had supposedly retained “bourgeois thoughts” and habits. Some 30 million people starved to death due to the collectivisation policies in the countryside, and the death toll during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) is said to have been two million. Many were killed by young men and women who were turned into fanatical believers of “the thoughts of Chairman Mao.”

In South Asia, the Muslim poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal wrote about the need to create a ‘New Muslim Man.’ Iqbal took the romanticised and mythologised dimensions of Islamic history to conceptualise the New Muslim Man, who was to be intuitive. He would passionately seek to shatter orthodoxy as well as ‘decadent’ modernity. A kind of Islamic Übermensch.

Iqbal’s ideas, in this context, went on to inspire Islamist ideologues such as Abul Ala Maududi, Islamic modernists such as Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, Islamist revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ruhollah Khomeini, and populists such as Imran Khan.

The Hindu nationalist V.D. Savarkar sought to create a new kind of Hindu who was militant and proudly chauvinistic, or the opposite of the archetypal ‘peaceful Hindu.’ Decades later, Savarkar’s status suddenly rose to that of a ‘sage’ with the rise of populist Hindu nationalism in India.

A fascination with ideas of social engineering is clearly present in the political populism that has engulfed various regions of the world from 2010 onwards — a dreadful development.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 31st, 2024

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Hinduism Is Fascism

Modern Hinduism is fascism and racism. It is the origin of what we would call modern Fascism. Based on a religious caste system that is Aryan in origin, it divides up the world into three castes, warriors, priests, merchants, and in a slave class; the Dalit's or Untouchables. India Caste System Discriminates

The influence of Hindu Fascism on the Occult is well documented. Especially in the racialist constructs of Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical movement. It is the concept of the Secret Chiefs, of higher beings who contact select humans, usually Caucasian Europeans, while relegating other 'races' of humanity to lesser rungs in the celestial hierarchies. Hence the belief in reincarnation, karma, dharma, etc. gets interepreted as the need for these lesser races to evolve to be accepted into the divine prescence fo the Secret Chiefs.

Later Aryan racialists would look at India as the home of the purist of the Aryan social constructs, that is the caste system, which they equated with the Indo-European peoples and as dating back to the orginal Aryan/Germanic expansion into the region. Savtri Devil, Hitlers Priestess was such a Indo-Aryan revivalist. The underlying construct of Hinduism is of whiteness/light verus black/darkness, which appealed to the Aryan racialists.


Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India
Originally published in India under the title Apartheid in India, V.T. Rajshekar's passionate work on the plight of the Indian Dalits was first introduced to North American readers through the publication of DALIT: The Black Untouchables of India in 1987. This book is the first to provide a Dalit view of the roots and continuing factors of the gross oppression of the world's largest minority (over 150 million people) through a 3,000 year history of conquest, slavery, apartheid and worse. Rajshekar offers a penetrating, often startling overview of the role of Brahminism and the Indian caste system in embedding the notion of "untouchability" in Hindu culture, tracing the origins of the caste system to an elaborate system of political control in the guise of religion, imposed by Aryan invaders from the north on a conquered aboriginal/Dravidian civilization of African descent. He exposes the almost unimaginable social indignities which continue to be imposed upon so-called untouchables to this very day, with the complicity of the political, criminal justice, media and education systems. Under Rajshekar's incisive critique, the much-vaunted image of Indian nonviolence shatters. Even India's world-celebrated apostle of pacificsm emerges in less saintly guise; in seeking to ensure Hindu numerical domination in India's new political democracy, Mahatma Gandhi advocated assimilating those whom Hindu scriptures defined as outcastes (untouchables) into the lowest Hindu caste, rather than accede to their demand for a separate electorate. Rajshekar further questions whether the Brahminist socio-political concepts so developed in turn influenced the formation of the modern Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy, placing the roots of Nazism deep in Indian history.


At the Culture and the State Conference at the U of A three years ago there was a concurrent conference of Dalit's from across North America. It was organized by my comrade John Ames. It was there I picked up their materials denonucing Hinduism as Racism and Fascism. These texts advocated a secular socialist humanist perspective on the Dalit struggle against the feudalist religion and politics of Hinduism.


Many Dalit groups, taking their cue from civil liberties organizations, ignore much of the economic ground for untouchability. Communist leader Brinda Karat notes that “only Communist inspired movements, enabled by the active participation of Dalits, have led to concrete gains against casteism.” In West Bengal, she shows, the Communist government initiated land reform that now forms “the backbone of Dalit self-respect and dignity in the State.”Badges of Color

Dalit Voice - The Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights
Dalit Voice was the first Indian journal to expose this closely guarded secret and shock the outside world and make history. That is how Dalit Voice has become the organ of the entire deprived destitutes of India, the original home of racism. Started in 1981 by V.T. Rajshekar, its Editor and founder, Dalit Voice, the English fortnightly, has become the country's most powerful "Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights". A veteran journalist, formerly of the Indian Express, powerful and fearless writer, V.T. Rajshekar, had to face the wrath of the ruling class, arrested many times, several jail sentences, passport impounded and subjected to total media boycott.


The Dalits are not only literal shit collectors in India they are also the largest group of workers in the service sector including government and the public sector. The political activism of the Dalits has been to unite in unions, broad based populist political parties, movements for womens rights, etc. to confront the Hindu Caste State in India.


Dalit Rising

Ghettoised Indians of the gutter society, eternally condemned. Not anymore, writes Amit Sengupta. The uprising is not a revolution, but it is no less

Buddha Smiles: Mass-conversion of dalits to Buddhism, November 4, 2001 Delhi
The sun of self-respect has burst into flame Let it burn up these castes!
Smash, Break, Destroy These walls of hatred
Crush to smithereens this aeons-old school of blindness Rise, O People!
Marathi song, anti-caste movement, 1970s



In other words, five thousand years and more after, almost 60 years after ‘Independence’, dalits in India are a priori condemned, even before they are born. Even after they die when they are buried in separate village graveyards. Even when they become educated or employed, within or outside the politics of half-fake affirmative action.

Unlike in Punjab, with plus 30 percent dalit population, many of them economically well-off, not dependent on land, where Kanshiram begun his first mobilisation. The dalit-sufi secular traditions (they control dargahs) are as strong here, as is the old Ghadarite-Leftist-radical traditions — be it during the freedom struggle, or in the great sacrifices made against terrorism. The Mansa and Talhan movements are examples of organised dalit reassertion: political and ideological (see story).

In Bant Singh Inquilabi’s amputated limbs, lies the epic story of a nation defiled, like his raped daughter in Mansa. But the truth is that this ‘invisible nation’ is refusing to accept its fatedness anymore. As in Gohana in Haryana, in Bhojpur in Bihar, Ghatkopar in Mumbai, Talhan in Punjab, this rising is rising like a wave on a full moon night. It’s only that we only want to see the dark side of the moon.




The Politics of the Caste System and the Practice of Untouchability

The Hindu religious belief that" ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT BORN EQUAL" is deeply entrenched in the psyche of the upper-caste Hindus, leading them to see themselves as a superior race destined to rule and the out-castes (the Untouchables or Dalits) an inferior race born only to serve. This system, which has resulted in the destitution of millions of people due to racial discrimination, has not changed one iota after 50 years of Indian independence.


"For the ills which the Untouchables are suffering, if they are not as much advertised as those of the Jews, and are not less real. Nor arc the means and the methods of suppression used by the Hindus against the Untouchables less effective because they are less bloody than the ways which the Nazis have adopted against the Jews. The Anti-Semitism of the Nazis against the Jews is no way different in ideology and in effect from the Sanatanism of the Hindus against the Untouchables.The world owes a duty to the Untouchables as it does to all suppressed people to break their shackles and set them free."

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in a preface to his book,

"Gandhi and the Emancipation of Untouchables" - 1st September 1943

Man who redefined Dalit politics- The Times of India

October, 10, 2006

NEW DELHI: Kanshi Ram, the Dalit icon who changed the political landscape of north India, was cremated as per Buddhist rituals at a funeral conducted by his political legatee, Mayawati, after Delhi High Court turned down the plea of his family for staying the last rites.

For a man who single-handedly turned the politics of North India on its head by thrusting Dalits as a factor in the regional power-play, Kanshi Ram's end was rather sedate, passing away on Monday, at 72, after being confined to bed for almost four years.

As in life, Kanshi Ram, in death, did not miss to shock his main haters — the urban middle classes — as he pulled the subaltern in droves on to the Capital's roads, throwing them off gear in sweltering heat.

Post-independence, Kanshi Ram redefined Dalit politics in the idiom of defiance. Hailing from a Ramdasiya Sikh family of Ropar and employed as a research assistant in a defence ministry lab, he resigned over the right of Dalit staff to get leave to celebrate Ambedkar and Valmiki jayantis.

What unfolded was a long-drawn mobilisation of Dalits, which changed political faultlines of the Hindi belt, marked by rebellious rhetoric and neat networking.

Kanshi Ram first targeted the better-off among Dalits, who had benefited from job quota. The result was the birth in 1978 of the Backwards and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), the first countrywide network of government employees from these categories.

APPRAISAL

KANSHI RAM

The Dalit Chanakya

If Ambedkar was theory, Kanshi Ram was practice. Roaring practice.

RAMNARAYAN RAWAT

Magazine | Oct 23, 2006

The dalit in India - caste and social class

THE dalit or "Untouchable" is a government servant, the teacher in a state school, a politician. He is generally never a member of the higher judiciary, an eminent lawyer, industrialist or journalist. His freedom operates in designated enclaves: in politics and in the administrative posts he acquires because of state policy. But in areas of contemporary social exchange and culture, his "Untouchability" becomes his only definition. The right to pray to a Hindu god has always been a high caste privilege. Intricacy of religious ritual is directly proportionate to social status. The dalit has been formally excluded from religion, from education, and is a pariah in the entire sanctified universe of the "dvija." (1)

Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word "pariah" itself comes from a dalit caste of southern India, the paRaiyar, "those of the drum" (paRai) or the "leather people" (Dumont, 1980: 54).




Barbaric Assault on Bant Singh (AIALA Leader)
Petition to Prime Minister of India


We the undersigned condemn the savage and barbaric assault by powerful Congress-backed Jat landlords which has left Bant Singh, Dalit leader of the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha (All-India Agrarian Labour Association) in Mansa, Punjab, with both hands and one leg amputated. Further we note that this criminal attack was planned in retaliation for Bant Singh’s sustained campaign against caste and gender based power and violence, and in particular, his struggle to bring his minor daughter’s rapists to justice. We stand by Bant Singh and his family in the face of this unspeakable tragedy and we believe passionately that such atrocities cannot be acceptable in 21st century India.




Dalit Religious Conversion

A Struggle for Humanist Liberation Theology

The development of Buddhist and Christian conversions as a political force for change is key to the Dalit philosophy. Rather than being absorbed into their new religion, the Dalit's use religious conversion to counter the hegemonic cultural domination of Hinduism. In that they adapt their new religious affiliations to meet their needs, ironically which are based on a humanistic and secular view of the world that oppresses them.

Low-caste Hindus mourning
Despite advances, India's lowest Hindu castes remain downtrodden
Tens of thousands of people are due to attend a mass conversion ceremony in India at which large numbers of low-caste Hindus will become Buddhists.

The ceremony in the central city of Nagpur is part of a protest against the injustices of India's caste system.

By becoming Buddhists low-caste Hindus, or Dalits, can escape the prejudice and discrimination they normally face.

The ceremony marks the 50th anniversary of the adoption of Buddhism by the scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

He was the first prominent Dalit - or Untouchable as they were formerly called - to urge low-caste Indians to embrace Buddhism.

Similar mass conversions are taking place this month in many other parts of India.

Several states governed by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, have introduced laws to make such conversions more difficult.

Dalit Theology-

Dalit-liberative hermeneutics is scientific and praxis-oriented.

The Travancore Pulaya mass conversion movement to Anglicanism in the latter half of 19th century was an expression of social protest. For thousands these conversions were protests heralding exit from the inhumanity of the caste system. These oppressed also saw the doors opening for them as a way out of the misery with the success of the anti-slave campaign championed by the missionaries.

Guru Ghasidas

Guru Ghasidas according to delivers of the Satnami panth was born on 18th December 1756 and died at the age of eighty in 1836. He was born in village Girodhpuri in Raipur district in a dalit family. Ghasidas was born in a socio-political milieu of misrule, loot and plunder. The Marath the local had started behaving as Kings. Ghasidas underwent the exploitative experiences specific to dalit communities, which helped him the hierarchical and exploitative nature of social dynamics in a caste-ridden society. From an early age, he started rejecting social inequity and to understand the problems faced by his community and to find solutions, he traveled extensively in Chhattisgarh.

Ghasids was unlettered like his fellow dalits. He deeply resented the harsh treatment to his brotherhood', and continued searching for solutions but was unable to find the right answer. In search of the right path he decided to go to Jaganath Puri and on his way at Sarangarh attained true knowledge. It is said that he announced satnam and returned to Giordh.On his return, he stopped working as a farm worker and became engrossed in Tapasya. After spending six months in Sonakhan forests doing tapasya Ghasidas returned and formulated path-breading principles of a new egalitarian social order. The Satnam Panth is said to be based on these principles formulated by Ghasidas.


Dissident Sects & Anti-Caste Movements:

Both Vedic ritualism and gnosis [supremacy of Brahmans] were bound to be called in question by the common people. The popular discontent found expression in dissident sects like Jainism (540-468 B.C.) and Buddhism (563-483 B.C.). There is no doubt that Jainism and Buddhism were the first attacks or revolts in general against the caste system.

Lord Buddha initiated a radical critique of contemporary religion and society. He was forthright in repudiating the caste system and the notion of ritual purity associated with it. One of his famous sayings runs like this:

No Brahmin is such by birth,

No outcaste is such by birth.

An outcaste is such by his deeds,

A Brahmin is such by his deeds.”

From out of the struggle between Vedic religion and heterodox movements like Jainism and Buddhism was born what is today called Hinduism, which reached its golden age in the Gupta period (300-700 A.D.). Many factors were responsible for this new development. Brahminism succeeded in integrating within itself popular religions. Popular deities were absorbed into the Vedic pantheon through a process of identification or subordination. Even Buddha was given the status of a vishnuite incarnation.

Dalit poems and sayings on evil brahminic system

Tell a Slave is a Slave!

Surely and invariably he will rebel!

For most of times Slaves know not they are Slaves!

Always they only keep enjoying and relishing their Slavery!

They say that had been their lives generations after generations!

That too over the many many millenniums!

Slogging in the fields and mines for the landlords!

Taking just a pittance in return and still be proud and happy!

Listen to this! This is what the landlords, who had raped butchered killed otherwise murdered in cold-blood, and burnt SC&ST Dalits say –

We had all along for generations employed them paid them given them grains, fed them and looked after them! Now they had forgotten all that, to believe in the Govt, go for Education, seek Govt Employment, trust the Parties, run behind the Party Workers, follow the useless Leaders, pin their Hopes on the meaningless Govt Programmes, lean on the fake NGOs, and repose faith in all those stupid Activists! And, they have turned against us, we who have been feeding them for Generations! We can’t understand this! Hence we had to teach them a Lesson! Discipline them! Put them in their Places! They are like our Children! They are our Responsibility! And in fact it is our Duty to Discipline them, and bring them back to the right path – their old ways!

That is it. The Landlords want now to reclaim the SCs&STs, bring them back under their total and tight control, and keep them in their fold, as in the good old days! The old bondage and slavery!

Yes, it is true! Many SC&ST Dalits still toil as Slaves to crude cheap landlords and goons! They don’t realise their status and slavery. They don’t know that the World had changed!

One need not be surprised or feel shocked by this ignorance, and lack of knowledge or realisation of the World. After all they are poor rural labourers of backward feudal areas! But even the educated and employed SC&ST Dalits are not aware of all their Dues and Rights! In fact the depth of their ignorance is shocking! If the Dalits’ Knowledge of Dalit Issues are so shallow, what can we say of others understandings of Dalit Problems! It is for this reason that any writings on Dalit Issues, and Dalit Views have to be in so much of, perhaps what appears to be too detailed! That includes Dalit Poetry on Dalit Issues and Problems! Hence, the Prose like Poetry, or Prose rendering of Poetry! That may not matter, but that also so inevitable!

Dalit Womens Struggles

The oppression of women is a double burden in slave societies, and amongst the Dalit's women have played an important role in linking their struggles with that of being Dalits and women. It has created a syncratic feminism that is reflected in the movement regardless of their religious affiliations. Again emphasising the humanist nature of Dalit relgious conversion.

Ruth Manorama, voice of Dalits
Ruth Manorama is a women's rights activist well known for her contribution in mainstreaming Dalit issues. Herself from the Dalit community, she has helped throw the spotlight on the precarious situation of Dalit women in India. She calls them "Dalits among the Dalits." A peacewomen profile from the Women's Feature Service and Sangat.

DALIT WOMEN: The Triple Oppression of Dalit Women in Nepal

Terai Dalit Women - Violation of Political Rights

Attacks on Dalit Women: A Pattern of Impunity - Broken People ...

FEMINIST DALIT ORGANIZATION

Dalit Women Literature Review

Dalit Feminism By M. Swathy Margaret

EMPOWER DALIT WOMEN OF NEPAL is a small human rights organization for Dalit women, the “untouchable” women on the lower rungs of Nepal’s caste hierarchy.


Five pledges for dalit shakti

By Freny Manecksha

Print this articleE-mail to a friendTell us what you feel



Martin Macwan’s Dalit Shakti Kendra in Gujarat provides vocational training to dalit youth. More importantly, it gives them a sense of identity




It began as a small agitation in Ranpur, Dhanduka taluka, Gujarat. Women of a particular dalit sub-caste, who still performed the menial task of manual scavenging despite legislation against it, had asked the panchayat for new brooms but were refused on grounds that there was no budget for it.

This was a seminal moment for Martin Macwan, a dalit activist who had set up the Navsarjan Trust in 1989 against scavenging. “What totally devastated me was that they were not agitating against the practice. They were merely begging the panchayat to give them more brooms to prevent their hands from being soiled with shit. They didn’t dream of eliminating scavenging.” (Mari Marcel Thekaekara in Endless Filth, Saga of the Bhangees)




Globalization and the Dalit

The Green Revolution in India as well as the later developments around GMO's etc. have had a disproportionate negative impact on the Dalit's agricultural communities. Modernization and industrialization have not benefited these peasant economies, as much as chaining the Dalits to their landlords.

Free Trade – A war against Dalits & Adivasis

Dalits and Adivasis have never been the part of the conventional trade systems. Today they are faced with the horrible hostility of trade and market policies. In recent times trade entered the scene on mass scale through the principles of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. Mega industrial production still plays the key role in all trade deal not only at the national level but also at the international level.

Industrialisation, which made a colourful and dreamy entry, is turning out to be the worst form of human development. The steady economic growth of industries with active support from the state machinery is directly proportional to the unchecked exploitation of masses. Most of them belong to marginalized communities such as Dalits, Adivasis, women, working class, etc. Though during the independence struggle “land to the tillers” and “factory to the workers” prominently came on to the national agenda, nowhere in India had we witnessed the later one being implemented in the post independence era. Resultant displacement, migration, repercussion of workers, loss of land and livelihood, pilfering state revenue, forest resources, etc. has outgrown to monstrous level.

This has amplified particularly with WTO taking the centre stage of all sorts of trade related agreements and transactions at the international level. Trade is no longer buying and selling of goods and services but it encompasses issues like Intellectual Property Rights. With this the global market has wide open for exploration and exploitation of resources under the aegis of free trade. Industrialised nations found their tools to maintain supremacy on world trade. Prophets of trade and commerce argue that free trade maximises world economic output. This is what is considered to be progress. But what we have been witnessing with the Dalits and Adivasis in India is diametrically opposite to these claims.


Dalit woman shows the way to better yields



Dalit Academic Perspectives

A Dalit Bibliography

558, February 2006, Dalit Perspectives

Seminars and Workshops of Deshkal Society | Seminars on Dalit


Dalit Resources

Nepal Dalit Info

CounterCurrents.org Dalit Issues Home Page

Dalit Freedom Network: Abolish Caste, Now and Forever

Dalit foundation - Accelerating change for equality

Dalit Welfare Organisation (DWO)

Dalit Human Rights

Punjab Dalit Solidarity-A blog

National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR)

The Bhopal Dalit Declaration

International Dalit Solidarity Network

Formed in March 2000, the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) is a network of national solidarity networks, groups from affected countries and international organisations concerned about caste discrimination and similar forms of discrimination based on work and descent.

IDSN campaigns against caste-based discrimination, as experienced by the dalits of South Asia to the Buraku people of Japan, the sab (low caste) groups of Somalia, the occupational caste people in West Africa and others.

The work of IDSN involves encouraging the United Nations, the European Union and other bodies to recognise that over 260 million people continue to be treated as outcasts and less than human and that caste-based discrimination must be regarded as a central human rights concern. IDSN insists on international recognition that "Dalit Rights are Human Rights" inasmuch as all human beings are born with the same inalienable rights.

IDSN brings together organisations, institutions and individuals concerned with caste-based discrimination and aims to link grassroots priorities with international mechanisms and institutions to make an effective contribution to the liberation of those affected by caste discrimination.


More than 260 million people worldwide continue to suffer under what is often a hidden apartheid of segregation, exclusion, modern day slavery and other extreme forms of discrimination, exploitation and violence.


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India




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Wednesday, March 22, 2023

 Opinion

From Christchurch to Emanuel AME, we must recognize the patterns of white supremacy

Recent reports suggest the attacks on houses of worship are not rare and the perpetrators are seldom acting alone.   

In this June 20, 2015, file photo, Allen Sanders, right, kneels next to his wife, Georgette, both of McClellanville, South Carolina, as they pray at a sidewalk memorial in memory of the shooting victims in front of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

(RNS) — Four years ago, on March 15, 2019, a white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving 51 dead and 40 others injured. While this was shocking in terms of the number of deaths and injuries, such attacks have become alarmingly common.

In the past 10 years alone, North America has seen white supremacists carry out mass shootings at multiple religious sites, including: the Overland Park Jewish Community Center and Village Shalom Retirement Center in Kansas (April 2014); the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina (June 2015); the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, Canada (January 2017); the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (October 2018); and the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California (April 2019). 

Reporters and government officials often refer to these shooters as “lone wolves” and their crimes as “one offs.” They study the background of these individuals to attempt to determine what led them to carry out such horrific and supposedly unusual crimes. However, a recent report published by the International Commission to Combat Religious Racism (ICCRR) suggests these attacks are not rare, and the perpetrators are seldom acting alone.   

The ICCRR report examines racially motivated attacks on places of worship and religious community centers in the United States and Canada. In total, the report includes attacks on 58 places, which, in addition to the previously mentioned shootings, include acts of vandalism, arson, stabbings and bombings as well as plots or attempts to carry out these same kinds of attacks. Nearly all the perpetrators of these attacks were white males, and many of them openly declared their intent to protect the white race or to “defend” their country against non-white, non-Christian “invaders.” Many were also self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis and/or they used Nazi symbolism (i.e. swastikas, images of Adolf Hitler and coded phrases meaning “Heil Hitler”) in their attacks.  

Perhaps the most concerning finding in this study is the data on how many perpetrators were part of a larger conspiracy. The ICCRR reports that nearly 1 in 5 cases involved multiple perpetrators.

In nearly half of cases, the “perpetrators were part of, encouraged by, or trying to gain admission to a larger group of extremists who believe in racial supremacy. In many cases, these were well-known groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Brotherhood. In a few instances, the perpetrators organized their own groups for the purpose of training, obtaining weapons, and carrying out attacks.”

Additionally, in more than half of the cases, the perpetrators attacked or planned to attack more than one site. In total, nearly two-thirds of the cases involved a series of attacks, multiple perpetrators and/or affiliation with an extremist group. 

Students from the Yeshiva School in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh pay their respects as the funeral procession for Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz passes their school en route to Homewood Cemetery following a funeral service at the Jewish Community Center, Tuesday Oct. 30, 2018. Rabinowitz was one of people killed while worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Students from the Yeshiva School in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh pay their respects as the funeral procession for Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz passes their school en route to Homewood Cemetery following a funeral service at the Jewish Community Center, Tuesday Oct. 30, 2018. Rabinowitz was one of 11 people killed while worshipping at the Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

The findings of a survey conducted jointly by the PRRI and the Brookings Institution, released on Feb. 8, 2023, adds another dimension to our understanding of the ICCRR report. The survey explores support for “Christian nationalism” in the United States. PRRI President and founder Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., defines “Christian nationalism” as belief in “the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians.” 

According to this definition, it found that 10% of Americans could be classified as adherents of Christian nationalism and that nearly 20% are sympathizers. Of white evangelical Protestants, it found that almost two-thirds are either adherents (29%) or sympathizers (35%). These Christian nationalists overwhelmingly agreed with arguments that are fueling racially motivated attacks on places of worship. For instance, more than 70% believe immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” and more than two-thirds believe people from some majority-Muslim countries should be prevented from entering the United States.

The survey found that the majority of adherents of Christian nationalism disagree that white supremacy is a major problem in the United States. Perhaps most concerningly, approximately 17% of all respondents agreed with the statement, “the United States is a white Christian nation, and I am willing to fight to keep it that way.”  

Read together, the ICCRR report and the PRRI and Brookings Institution survey suggest there is a very serious but overlooked threat terrorizing religious communities in North America. Self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are carrying out violent attacks against religious communities.

Both these attacks and their perpetrators are more organized than official responses would lead us to believe. Nevertheless, not only do large segments of the population refuse to believe white supremacy is an issue in the United States today, many of them appear to share the beliefs of the perpetrators of these attacks.

Danielle N. Boaz. Courtesy photo

Danielle N. Boaz. Courtesy photo

These reports should leave us all wondering, and worrying, about the future of our racially and religiously diverse nation. 

(Danielle N. Boaz is associate professor of Africana studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches courses on human rights, social justice and the law. She is also a PRRI Public Fellow. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Thursday, June 11, 2020

As protests grow, Belgium faces its racist colonial past

By RAF CASERT


1 of 17
 https://apnews.com/b405027b7232c42b8d9dab407ff87aa1/gallery/5c89763e6f054791a5e3d7f62e636559
In this June 10, 2020, photo, a statue of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with paint and graffiti in the center of Brussels. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

WHITE SUPREMACY ARYAN SUPREMACY IS THE CULTURE OF IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM
BLACK LIVES MATTER IS A GLOBAL RESPONSE 
TO THE GLOBALIZED RACISM OF IMPERIALISM

TERVUREN, Belgium (AP) — When it comes to ruthless colonialism and racism, few historical figures are more notorious than Leopold II, the Belgian king who held Congo as his personal property and may have been responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese more than a century ago.

Yet across Belgium, the monarch’s name is still found on streets and tunnels. Cities are dotted with his statues and busts, even as evidence of his misdeeds has piled up over the decades.

Now a reckoning seems to be at hand.

The protests sweeping the world after George Floyd’s death in the U.S. have added fuel to a movement to confront Europe’s role in the slave trade and its colonial past. Leopold is increasingly seen as a stain on the nation over which he reigned from 1865 to 1909. Demonstrators want him removed from public view.

In just the last week, a long-running trickle of dissent that resulted in little more than occasional vandalism has turned into a torrent, with statues of Leopold defaced in a half-dozen cities. In the port town of Antwerp, where much of the Congolese rubber, minerals and other natural riches entered the nation, one statue was burned and had to be removed for repairs. It is unclear whether it will ever come back.

“When you erect a statue, it lauds the actions of who is represented. The Germans would not get it into their head to erect statues of Hitler and cheer them,” said Mireille-Tsheusi Robert, president of the Congolese action group Bamko-Cran, which wants all Leopold statues removed from Belgian cities. “For us, Leopold has committed a genocide.”

On Wednesday, an internet petition to rid the capital, Brussels, of any Leopold statue swept past 70,000 signatures. Also this week, regional education authorities promised history course reforms to better explain the true character of colonialism. And at the University of Mons in southern Belgium, academic authorities removed a bust of the king, saying they wanted to make sure “nobody could be offended by its presence.”

Similar efforts are unfolding in Britain, where at least two statues of prominent figures connected to the slave trade have been taken down by protesters or city officials. London’s mayor has promised a review of all monuments. In the U.S., protesters tore down a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis along Richmond, Virginia’s famed Monument Avenue on Wednesday night. The death of Floyd has prompted similar Confederate monument removals around the nation.

In Kinshasa, a replica of the main Leopold statue in Brussels had already been relegated to a museum park ages ago. The equestrian bronze was first erected in 1928, but seven years after independence from Belgium in 1960 it was ordered taken down by then dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In 2005, authorities put it back up, intending it to serve as a reminder of the horrors of colonial rule — with an updated plaque. Only a day later, though, it was removed following a public outcry. For the last decade, it has sat in a park of colonial monuments.
In this June 9, 2020, photo, the bust of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with paint and graffiti on the grounds of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Leopold ruled Congo as a fiefdom, forcing many of its people into slavery to extract resources for his personal profit. His early rule, starting in 1885, was famous for its brutality, which some experts say left as many as 10 million dead.

After his ownership of Congo ended in 1908, he handed the central African country over to the Belgian state, which continued to hold sway over an area 75 times its size until the nation became independent in 1960.

Leopold has come to symbolize the racism and inequality citizens of Congolese descent have had to endure. Next to the royal palace stands an equestrian statue with Leopold gazing solemnly toward the horizon. On Wednesday, his hands and eyes were covered with red paint, and expletives were spray-painted on the side of the monument.

Maximilian Christiaens, an architect with a Congolese mother and Belgian father, who came to see the statue after the defacing, realizes the issue is part of his identity. Since Congo achieved independence, Belgium’s Congolese population has swelled to about 230,000 in a nation of 11 million.

“You know, we feel at home here, but seeing symbols like this in the city and all over the country gives us the opposite signal,” Christiaens said. He would like to see them torn down.

A similar struggle is playing out in the majestic woods east of Brussels in Tervuren, where the palatial Royal Museum for Central Africa stands. It was built over a century ago to glorify Leopold’s colonial exploits and to convince Belgium citizens that their country was delivering civilization to the heart of wild Africa.

In this May 6, 1961, file photo, the bust of former Belgian King Leopold II (1835-1909) lies on the ground on the Avenue General De Gaulle in Stanleyville, Congo. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/File)
In this June 9, 2020, photo, the bust of Belgium's King Leopold II is smeared with red paint and graffiti on the grounds of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. With the protests sweeping the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, King Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Museum Director Guido Gryseels fully understands the challenges and the sensitivities, especially after a Leopold statue was defaced in the gardens outside the museum last week. He has sought to shift the museum’s views on colonialism into a contemporary reassessment of a flawed past. This week, the Black Lives Matter logo was displayed on digital screens at the museum entrance.
In this June 9, 2020, photo, a sculpture of an elephant and its riders stands outside the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The present museum was completely renovated in 2018. One of the biggest challenges they faced was presenting a contemporary vision of Africa in a building which had been originally designed as a colonial museum. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

In this photo taken on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, a man stands at the ticket kiosk as a message is displayed on a screen above his head at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The present museum was completely renovated in 2018. One of the biggest challenges they faced was presenting a contemporary vision of Africa in a building which had been originally designed as a colonial museum. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)


As part of a major renovation he oversaw, Gryseels consigned the racist statues of Congolese and the glorifying busts of the Belgian military to the “depot” of outdated sculptures in the museum’s cellars.

“We wanted to keep them somewhere so that the visitors could still see, so that we could explain: ‘This is how we looked at Africa before,’” Gryseels said.

Upstairs, in the grand rooms, the only bust of Leopold on display is made of ivory and aims to explain how the plunder of the country extended to the wholesale slaughter of elephants.

As a listed architectural treasure, Leopold’s royal double L monogram is still plastered all over the building. But Congolese artists have been asked to make a counterpoint, and in the main hall now stands a sculpture of a skull of a Congolese chief who was beheaded by a Belgian. In front of statues that could not be moved because they were protected, there are now transparent drapes with images criticizing Belgian actions in Congo.

In this June 9, 2020, file image from ATV video, a statue of Belgium's King Leopold II is removed from its pedestal, in Antwerp, Belgium. Authorities in Antwerp removed the statue of the country's former monarch Leopold II for repairs on Tuesday after it was damaged during anti-racism protests. (ATV via AP, File)

“It would have been impossible 30 years ago, but there is a step forward,” Robert said. Still, she said the changes do not go far enough and the museum needs to better embrace Congolese in its management structure.

Just about everybody acknowledges that Belgian society needs to take a hard look at its past. The Catholic church, the dominant force in education during much of Belgium’s existence, was at worst an active participant in colonialism, at best a passive bystander. And since many Belgians had family members who went to Congo to seek their fortunes, there is a sense of unease in confronting the history of racism and exploitation.

“The amnesia is linked to the money the Belgians made in Congo,” Robert said.

For many years, Belgian colonial authorities peddled the idea that the king went to Congo to stop the slave trade, Gryseels said, when it was really “a pretext to make big economic gains.”



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Jean-Yves Kamale in Kinshasa contributed.
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Read all AP stories about protests against racism and police brutality at http://apnews.com/GeorgeFloyd

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

ARYAN CHAUVINISM
White men as victims: America's most dangerous fantasy

Chauncey Devega, Salon
February 22, 2022

By Gage Skidmore -


One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls.

By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America's networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources.

Of course many individual men who happen to be white experience life hardships and other disadvantages. Moreover, the group advantages enjoyed by men overall do not trickle down equally to all men on either side of the color line. Likewise, there are individual Black and brown people, and individual women, who have tremendous power, resources and wealth. But in the aggregate, on a societal scale, white men are not being disadvantaged because of their race or gender.

But the absurdity of this claim should not be surprising. Race itself is perhaps the greatest absurdity in modern history; it is a social construct, not a genetic or biological fact. It was invented to legitimize global white supremacy and imperialism.

As Peter Prontzos at Scientific American summarizes:

In 2014, more than 130 leading population geneticists condemned the idea that genetic differences account for the economic, political, social and behavioral diversity around the world. In fact, said a 2018 article in Scientific American, there is a "broad scientific consensus that when it comes to genes there is just as much diversity within racial and ethnic groups as there is across them." And the Human Genome Project has confirmed that the genomes found around the globe are 99.9 percent identical in every person. Hence, the very idea of different "races" is nonsense.
A second problem, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff has shown, is that simply using the word "race," even when criticizing racism, actually reinforces the false belief that human beings belong to fundamentally different groups. That's because the more a word is used, the more that certain brain circuits are activated and the stronger that metaphor becomes.

Nonetheless the "true lie" of race remains one of the most powerful forces in American and global society.

A binary understanding of gender — which itself is also a social construct — is only slightly less absurd than the race concept. When race and gender are combined with questions of whiteness, masculinity and power, matters only become more complicated, more confusing and therefore more politically and socially combustible.

Ultimately, white male victimology has historically proven itself to pose an extreme threat to pluralistic democracy. When the group with the most power believes in delusions and fantasies about its oppression, violence is the likely result. This is justified through claims of self-defense against an imaginary threat.

In a recent featured essay at the Washington Post, Cleve Wootson Jr. waded into the tumultuous debate about white male victimology and "oppression" in the Age of Trump and beyond. He begins with:

Holding court at a political rally in Texas last week, former president Donald Trump implied that he — a wealthy White man who was elected to an office almost exclusively held by White men — was a victim of racism.
His claim referenced what he said were three "radical vicious, racist prosecutors" — one in Georgia, one in New York, one in Washington, and all of them Black — who are investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and examining his business organization's finances. But his comments made him the latest in a line of conservatives claiming, loudly and frequently, that White men are victims of racism.
After years of being branded a racist for his inflammatory comments and actions, Trump and some of his allies are attempting to turn that label back on their critics. In the process, they have wielded their own definition of racism, one that disregards the country's history of racial exclusion that gives White people a monopoly on power and wealth. To make America more equitable, they argue, everyone must be treated equally and, therefore, White men must not in any way be disadvantaged.

Wootson locates this narrative of victimology within the larger context of Joe Biden's promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court:

The decision to consider only Black women was deemed racist by many conservatives. For some, anything but a race-blind selection would reek of bias, and Biden's parameters have been characterized as a political ploy to mollify a key constituency. Others have noted that narrowing the choices to Black women also excludes other historically disadvantaged groups, such as Hispanic women or women of Asian descent.

Wootson also triangulates these white male victimology narratives relative to the extreme partisan polarization of our era, in which a large majority of Republicans believe that "little or nothing needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans," according to a Pew Research study conducted last year, while a similarly large majority of Democrats believe "a lot more needs to be done to achieve racial equity."

For some White voters, experts say, efforts to give certain groups added help can be seen as unnecessarily onerous and even discriminatory. Such views are often deeply held and affect how people — and voting blocs — feel about any number of issues, such as whether children study racial equity in school, who should receive food stamps, or whether an implicit bias seminar at work is a waste of time.

To gain more context and insight into how the Republican Party and the larger white right are deploying the fantastical narrative of white men as an oppressed and persecuted group, I asked several experts on race, power and society for their thoughts on white male backlash, its origins and implications.

Jessie Daniels is a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She is the author of several books including "White Lies" and "Cyber Racism." Her new book is "Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It."

There's a long history of white men seeing themselves as the chief victims of racial oppression. This includes the end of slavery. White men who were also enslavers saw themselves as the true victims of the abolition of their way of making a living, so they went to their government and asked, even demanded, compensation for their "loss" in freeing the people who worked for them for no money. In Britain, this was enacted through the Slave Compensation Act 1837 and continued compensating slave-owning white families through 2015. In the U.S., each slave-owning white man received $300 for each person they owned who was freed because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when at the same time formerly enslaved people were promised 40 acres and a mule, a promise that was mostly unfulfilled.

Fast forward to the era of "affirmative action" in the early 1970s, and even with this very limited federal government program, white men felt attacked.

My research into the far right led me to the printed publications of groups on the right — from the KKK to David Duke's NAAWP — from around 1970 through the early 1990s. Throughout the publications that I examined, I found white men deeply invested in the sort of twin imagery of themselves as "warriors" and also as "victims" of racial oppression.

In the current era, examples proliferate of white men who see themselves as victims, chief among them former President Trump, who in his opening campaign speech referenced the "rapists" and "drug dealers" coming from Mexico, an old racist trope from the white supremacist playbook. It's also deadly. White men as "victims" easily slides into a white guy with a gun. And there's often a white woman standing by her man on the front porch of their midwestern palazzo, even with the guns.

The "victim" rhetoric from white men coincides with the white-led backlash against any kind of Black progress. A year after the supposed "reckoning" of the summer of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd (and "Central Park Karen"), it's not surprising to me that we are experiencing a season of whitelash with white men at the front, proclaiming their innocence for the destruction they've caused even as they profess their victimhood.

Wajahat Ali is the author of the new book "Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American." He is a contributing writer for the Daily Beast. His essays and other writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the Atlantic.

White male grievance is the lifeblood of white supremacy, an endless supply of faux victimhood to justify all sorts of irrational brutality and inequity to maintain power for them and only them. Trump has just tapped into this white rage to fuel the right wing movement; this is nothing new. Just go back and see the movie "Birth of a Nation" from 1915 — it's all there. Black emancipation, even barely at that, was an affront to white power, rule and dominion. As a result? They were victims who then donned the hoods of the KKK to reclaim their honor. Victims or heroes, never the villains.

Jean Guerrero is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of the recent book "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda." Her essays and other writing have been featured at Vanity Fair, Politico, the Nation, Wired, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

White victimology politics were once the purview of neo-Nazis and the KKK, but they've become the engine of the Republican Party. Back in the '70s, David Duke was largely reviled and rejected by Americans for his white victimology politics. He claimed the "white man" was the real "second-class citizen" in America today.

But this delusion that white men are the real victims is now mainstream gospel among Republicans. That's thanks to decades of conservative politicians and talk show hosts cashing in on white racial anxieties about demographic change by injecting white supremacy or "white supremacy lite" into the GOP bloodstream.

Many of those key players (i.e., Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller) have roots in California, where non-Hispanic white people became a demographic minority in the '90s.

As I wrote in "Hatemonger," that's when we saw the rise of a racially furious, radicalized brand of conservatism that eventually morphed into Trumpism. It's no surprise that Trump is now repeatedly framing white men as victims of racial discrimination, given that his trusted ally Miller has for months been busy thwarting efforts to help marginalized communities by casting those efforts as racist against white people. White victimology politics are rooted in the fallacy of civilization as a zero-sum game. Their logical conclusion is race war.

Ashley Jardina in an assistant professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of "White Identity Politics."

Central to Trump's political strategy was an effort to stoke racial grievances among white Americans.

Feelings of racial victimization among white Republicans grew over Trump's presidency. According to data from the American National Election Study, in 2016, 30% of white men identifying with the Republican Party reported that whites experience a moderate to a great amount of discrimination in the U.S. By 2020, that number had increased to 40%. But white Republican women also share this sense of racial victimhood. In 2020, nearly 43% of white Republican women surveyed said that white Americans experience notable amounts of racial discrimination.

Joe R. Feagin is a sociologist and the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. He is the author of many books including "The White Racial Frame," "White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics," "Racist America" and "Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage."

Prominent white men, including major white scholars, created and circulated the terms "reverse racism" and "affirmative discrimination" starting back in the late 1960s and 1970s solely to counter the new civil rights laws and presidential affirmative action orders (from Lyndon Johnson) pressuring whites in major organizations to redress centuries of extreme racial oppression and of white unjust enrichments from that oppression, enrichments passed along many generations of white families to the present day.

In the late 1960s and 1970s this federal pressure sought to redress the severe oppressive legacies of Jim Crow segregation. For decades this reverse racism/white victimology notion has been a standard white deflection tactic to change the necessary antiracist discussions and actions away from those about seriously remedying those past and present unjust white enrichments from 400-plus years of white racist oppression, exploitation and dominance. It is basically an attack on Black America and Black efforts for change.

Especially relevant to this current white victimology is the reality that this broad white racial framing has always centered a very positive orientation to whites as highly virtuous and a negative orientation to racial "others" viewed as unvirtuous.

These narratives aggressively accentuate notions of white superiority, white civilization and institutions, white virtue and white moral goodness. That is what all these white politicians are doing with their phony and empirically undocumented claims that they are victims of racial discrimination. Their white virtuousness is being legitimately challenged, and their unvirtuousness in creating and maintaining racist institutions is being foregrounded.