2009
Camped at a tiny conference table in grad school, I first encountered the work of Theodore W. Allen, a labor activist and scholar, whose ideas transformed my thinking on race, identity, and ideology. Allen’s 1975 treatise, Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, argues that white supremacy is the result of concerted efforts by ruling-class interests to rally workers of European ethnicities under the banner of skin privilege over and against all workers’ shared struggle as proletarians. Twentysomething me found the thesis compelling, but a few of my peers adjusted their seating positions several times over the course of the night’s conversation. At one point, a white male student knee-jerk blurted, “I don’t have white privilege. I’m broke!” Unfazed, the professor conceded that should “privilege” evoke Robin Leach and luxury yachts, it might be useful instead to call it something like “white less-worse-off.” Of course, by then I’d already come to understand race to be a social construct. But I’d never seriously considered for whom, or with whose labor, societies perform the construction of race. And it would take time, precious time, for me to grasp the rapacious demand for state violence against people of color that sustains a racialized society.
2010
The following year, I skipped graduation, knocked back pitchers at a campus dive bar instead, and Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Of Alexander’s many, many cogent points in the book, one has proved pivotal to my political education: the question of how “a reasonable person” should be compelled to act when confronted by a police officer. She argues that the idea of what’s reasonable very much depends on one’s past experiences and present situation, on one’s positionality. And so what’s perfectly reasonable to one person may seem defiantly irrational to another. It’s not an overstatement to say that this discrepancy in perspective often constitutes the difference between liberty and incarceration, between life and death. This is disproportionately true for Black people in America.
2020
It was hardly the only such instance across the subsequent decade, but 10 years later, the murder of George Floyd kicked off a summer of heated protest, and Mariame Kaba penned an editorial for the New York Times titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” An avowed abolitionist, Kaba argues more narrowly—and convincingly—that the only way to reduce violent policing is to decrease contact between police officers and the public by cutting in half both actual staff and budget numbers. To a reader like me, that seems entirely reasonable. But I am, admittedly, an easy adherent to Kaba’s position, primed by previous exposure to Allen, Alexander, and, by then, a whole host of others, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore among them.
And then there are my own personal interactions with law enforcement, which I’d describe as mildly inconvenient, at worst. I know that’s not everyone’s story. I have current and former members of the police and armed forces in my family: an uncle long retired from a municipal department whose kids I no longer hear from; a tío murdered one night on duty in Paraguay. So questions about policing are personal for me, too.
But it’s also a privilege, that—the mild inconvenience. One I enjoy as a white male, albeit Latino también.
2022
This is all to say, by the time I picked up Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, by Kelly Lytle Hernández, who has made race, immigration controls, and mass incarceration centerpieces of her research, I had already started identifying publicly as someone who believes that police departments and prisons are not only ineffective and unnecessary but spaces that enforce white supremacy’s rigid grip on the capitalist status quo. But I was surprised to learn from the book how ahead of that curve firebrand propagandist Ricardo Flores Magón proved to be in 1907, outpacing even the other leaders of El Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), who sought to guarantee workers’ rights, tax religious institutions, and return land to dispossessed Indigenous peoples in Mexico. Hernández even provides a quote from Flores Magón that predates Allen’s thinking. Flores Magón states that capitalism itself “foments racial hatred so that the peoples never come to understand each other, and so it [empire] reigns over them.” Indeed, Flores Magón’s anarchist vision for a world free of all hierarchies required “the total abolition of private property as well as church and state.” Even today’s most ardent communists would recognize these demands as radically progressive. But, going back to Alexander’s point about the subjectivity of what’s reasonable, are those demands for society reasonable? Can a reasonable person desire anarchy as the outcome of political revolution?
For all their inflammatory rhetoric, Flores Magón and the PLM couldn’t reconcile the party’s internal contradictions vis-à-vis its alignment as socialist or anarchist. Moreover, Flores Magón had hoped that seeding insurrectionary cells, known as focos, with spirited propaganda via his popular newspaper, Regeneración, would motivate magonistas to prepare for an inevitable uprising. But when the call came, the oppressed masses didn’t rise up into spontaneous revolt. As Hernández notes, Flores Magón was an “agitator, not a revolutionary,” and his “refusal to shift from word to deed—as well as his unpreparedness and incompetence as a military strategist—played major roles in the PLM’s quick decline.” Political change, whether revolutionary or merely reformative, is not just about what people believe. It’s about what they actually do.
2023
How would a revolutionary left in the Americas model itself after the magonistas, anyway? After all, militant cartels have seized many means of production and spread across Central, South, and Latin America like deadly pathogens. Neither am I convinced that the United States needs more cloistered extremists fed a steady diet of increasingly fervent media, even if the extremists are on the opposing side politically. We’ve seen that one play out recently in the spectacular horror of January 6, 2021. Surely, one wouldn’t advise leftists to assemble underground cells and rise up in spontaneous revolt. We’ve learned that much from the magonistas, at least.
So, in the words of another Marxist, well-known for better and for worse: Just what is to be done? I’m not totally certain. Could it be that I still don’t know what to believe about race and capitalism and state power? Until reading Bad Mexicans, I thought I did. Now, learning about the magonistas’ inconsistent views of the state and Flores Magon’s inability to translate words into action, I’m not so sure.
That, too, must be a privilege: this comfortable waffling and philosophizing. But privilege is not only just something beneficial to those who experience it; it’s also a thing to be suffered under. The time it takes to arrive at a position, to consolidate one’s political leanings and marshal the resources to take action, is time white supremacy savors. Inaction can also function as its own form of violence—and the state is well versed in doing nothing when it serves the status quo. It’s not enough for those of us who experience racial privilege to ask the question: How much longer must this go on? We must answer it.
Tick tock.•
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with a special guest and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
