Today’s show deals the word “white”—meant here not as a color but as a way of describing people. I wrote the following paragraph to my friend Jan Steckel after the mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, July, 2019. And now we have the El Paso massacre and the Dayton, Ohio massacre: The old racist slogan, “If you’re white, you’re right,” seems to have become “If you’re white, you’re a blight”—a precise description of our Racist in Chief. I’m Irish and Italian. The Irish and the Italians were only marginally white for many years. I think we ought to resign any membership in the group. The concept of “white” as a word for people didn’t exist—it’s not in Shakespeare though one of his plays features a “Moor”—until the advent of the slave ships. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the word “white” meaning “A white man; a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion,” was in 1671—some years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The second was in 1726. The speaker is a ship’s captain: There may be about 20000 Whites (or I should say Portuguese, for they are none of the whitest,) and about treble that number of Slaves.   Note in what he says, especially, that the opposite of “white” is not “black”; the opposite of “white” is “Slave.” “White” does not refer to the dubious concept of “race”: it refers, deeply, to power. To be “white” is to be a master, not a slave. Has slavery, in any sense, ever ended in this country? One person answered that question with, “Not only has it not ended. There are more people in bondage now than there ever were.”   At the conclusion of the great Brecht-Weill theater piece, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), the Street Singer narrator, seemingly alone on the stage, sings,   Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln Und die andern sind im Licht. Und man siehet die im Lichte Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.   For some are in darkness / And others are in the light / And you see the ones in the light / You don’t see those in darkness (in Marc Blitzstein’s rhymed translation: There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in light / And you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight). Suddenly, behind the singer, the stage lights up and we see—beggars (what we would call “street people”). They are precisely what the theater audience went to the theater to avoid. It is a moment of violent contradiction and illumination. For a moment, the theater, in all its falseness, is alive with reality. That impulse to illuminate what Langston Hughes called “the darker brother” (“I, Too”) has been at the heart of one of the great struggles of the twentieth/twenty-first century, and it has taken place both in the realm of politics and the realm of the psyche. What is “the Unconscious” if not “the darker brother” understood as a fact of mind? Und man siehet die in Lichte / Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht. I recently wrote this poem about “white privilege”:   The term “white privilege” Has one word too many White means privilege It is the opinion of some That they have lost their privilege That their whiteness is in question It is the opinion of some That they have been Deprived of their birthright And that “the darker brother” Has taken their world away. They are angry Confused And unaware of the closeness Of their DNA To that of the darker brother To that of all darker brothers They wish to regain Their privilege A privilege Which In fact They have never Possessed. Whiteness Is the flag they wave They are A huge blank In a world of color. Is not the philosopher John Searle Defender of landlords Attacker of Derrida Purveyor of academic plums In exchange for plummy sex With young women A white male? Did he not enjoy the privileges Of the white male? Has he not been stripped of his titles And shamed in his profession? Has he not become Another victim Not only of his own greed And desire for power But of Whiteness? …   To speak of “multiculturalism” is to speak of a way of seeing the world without whiteness. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – August 21, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.