Black, White, and Rainbow Solidarities, Our Choice

Black, White, and Rainbow Solidarities, Our Choice

by Xolela Mangcu

The first time I heard people speaking about solidarity was on 12 September 1977. The occasion was a protest in my local community against the police killing of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko under South Africa’s notoriously cruel detention without trial laws. The police had killed forty-five people in detention since the Terrorism Act was enacted in 1967. Biko was the most prominent of those who had been murdered because, in the absence of Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe, both of whom were languishing on Robben Island, Biko was the leader of the liberation movement. Through my home’s kitchen window, I watched as people milled into the local square from the four corners of the township carrying placards with a picture of Biko break- ing the chains of oppression. Emblazoned above the picture were the words “Black Solidarity.” To my eleven-year-old mind, solidarity meant nothing more than the workaday concept of unity. It had been captured in a liberation song: “m-Zulu, m-Xhosa, m-Sotho hlanganani izophela i-apartheid.” (“Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho unite to end apartheid”)

At seventeen I left home to enroll at the University of the Witwatersrand, a predominantly white liberal university in Johannesburg. In those days, Black students were not allowed to study at white universities without a government permit. I had been denied the permit, but was able to formally register the following year after the passage of a law that allowed these universities to enroll a certain quota of Black students. That experience became the inflection point in my radicalization. I was quickly elected chairman of the Black Consciousness student organization, the Azanian Student Movement (AZASM). It was only then that I began in earnest to read Biko’s political writings. His essays had been collected into a posthumously published book titled I Write What I Like in 1978 by his two white allies, journalist Lewin and Community of the Resurrection monk Aelred Stubbs. What struck me was his political definition of Blackness, which I had taken to be people whose phenotype looked like mine—Africans. Biko defines “Blacks” as “all those who are by law and definition politically, socially and economically discriminated against” AND who “[identify] themselves as a unit for the realization of their aspirations.” As if to drive the point further home, he also wrote “Being black is not a matter of pigmentation—being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.” Hence the importance of the coordinating conjunction AND before the verb “identify.” Without this act of identification, and the “mental attitude” that goes along with it, identity would simply be an inert social marker.

Biko had developed this political definition to include Coloreds and Indians—alongside Africans. The government had imposed the term “Colored” on people of mixed race, “Indian” to those whose ancestors came from India, and used the pejorative term “Bantu” for Africans. As part and parcel of its divide and rule strategy, the government treated Coloreds and Indians slightly better than Africans, but they were, in large part, not exempt from apartheid laws. Biko’s definition sought to overcome these attempts to divide the groups and build a united front. Aelred Stubbs described the solidarity between these communities as follows: “. . . [I]t was a special strength of the Black Consciousness Movement that from the beginning in the 1960s SASO [South African Students Organisation] had been open to Coloureds and Indians. I am not sure that the importance of this achievement, in the given social structures of South Africa, has been emphasized, but the way in which SASO managed to overcome traditional barriers between Africans and Coloureds . . . was not only indicative of a new mood in the Coloured community, but a significant achievement of non-ethnic solidarity.”

To my eleven-year- old mind, solidarity meant nothing more than the workaday concept of unity

To be sure, solidarity is an empty signifier that has been used as much to build nations as to destroy them. In the period after the Civil War, Southern scholars and journalists dedicated themselves to a defense of white supremacy and a reversal of African American political and civil rights. In his 1866 revisionist history of the Civil War, The Lost Cause, journalist Edward Pollard set out to present a beneficent interpretation of the Confederacy, one in which villains such as Robert Lee emerged as heroes to be memorialized in statues. The Southern states would rebuild themselves by propagating white supremacist ideologies and building new institutions to buttress white solidarity. As Pollard put it: “. . . [T]he war properly decided only what was put in issue: the restoration of the Union and the excision of slavery . . . But the war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State rights . . . and these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.”

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, in Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008), explain how this racist, cultural phenomenon could arise. Lake and Reynolds draw on Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community to describe how these white supremacist scholars, journalists, and politicians built a “transnational solidarity.” “The imagined community of white men,” they write, “was transnational in its reach, but national in its outcomes, bolstering regimes of border protection and national sovereignty. A project that took shape in international conversations about interracial encounter increased isolationism.”

One of the leading white supremacist intellectuals of the time, Lothrop Stoddard, envisioned a different kind of solidarity to defend what he described as the “white man’s countries” against the threat of the so-called Yellow Peril—the view that Asians were an existential threat to white people. In The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White WorldSupremacy (1920), Stoddard called for Asians—mainly Chinese immigrants—to be barred from entering the United States and those already in the country to be deported. This kind of thinking resulted in the JohnsonReed Act of 1924 (aka the Immigration Act of 1924). Stoddard was effusive in his description of white solidarity. “Nothing was more striking,” he remarked, “than instinctive and instantaneous solidarity which binds together Australians and Afrikanders [sic], Californians and Canadians, into a sacred Union at the mere whisper of Asian immigration.”

Students of solidarity have traced its origins to ancient Rome when it referred to collective/mutual legal responsibility for a person’s debt. According to the principle of “obligatio in solidium” each person, say in a family, was responsible for the debts of the entire family. However, the concept’s most elaborate modern definition was provided by British sociologist T.H. Marshall in his 1950 landmark book Citizenship and Social Class. Marshall argued that the path to solidarity went through three historical phases. First, there was the extension of citizenship through the extension of civil liberties (liberalism) such as freedom of speech and freedom of worship in the eighteenth century. Second, in the nineteenth century, citizenship rights were expanded to includethe right to vote or be voted into political office (democracy). Third, in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, governments created a floor of social and economic rights through labor protections, public education, health care, welfare payments etc. (the welfare state).

Marshall’s imagination failed him when it came to multiracial and multicultural citizenship. He was blind to the decolonial movements of midcentury and the new social movements of the end of the century. These movements demanded recognition of the cultural rights for people who had been denied full citizenship because of their race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality. These would include the provision of resources for identity-based groups to protect their cultural heritage and undertake cultural activities. As Steven Lukes argues in his article, “Solidarity and Citizenship,” these rights should be afforded to culturally marginalized groups because “access to one’s culture is legitimately to be regarded as at least as important to freedom as access to material, medical and educational resources.” In this vision, “A solidary, multicultural community of citizens would be one in which the link between poverty, undereducation and devalued ethnicity has been broken, and this can only be done by enabling individuals to escape the limits that these conditions, and above all their combination, set upon liberty.” For Lukes, these rights should be extended to immigrants as well:

Those excluded from the bonds and networks of social solidarity are not only the individually marginalized but also those who, because they are alien, are treated as subjects, not citizens. Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, Asians and West Indians in Britain are denied cultural membership because of their collective identities—and very often, and increasingly, they do not seek inclusion but rather cultivate difference.

He might as well have included Latin Americans in the United States—the twenty-first century equivalents of early twentieth century Chinese immigrants. Karl Marx wrote that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In the 1920s Chinese immigrants were denigrated as “rice eating” and “beef-eating.” Today, or least during his most recent campaign for presidency, Trump entertained his followers with false claims that Haitians were “eating the dogs and the cats.” Prominent figures such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt called on Anglo-Saxon women to stop “breeding” with German, Irish, Afrikaners have nonetheless presented themselves as victims of the Black government, notwithstanding the fact that white South Africans have done better under the Black government than they did under apartheid, and certainly better than their fellow Black citizens. Italian, Jewish, Polish immigrants. Official government policy was to discourage immigration from southern European countries and extend it to northern Europeans. One hundred years later, during his first term as president, Trump would seek to end immigration of people from what he called “shithole countries in Africa.” In a reprise of late nineteenth-century policy, when the United States coveted Norwegian workers, the American president said that, instead, “. . . we should have more people from Norway.” In his second term, he has extended the invitation to white Afrikaners. Having ruled South Africa under apartheid, some Afrikaners have nonetheless presented themselves as victims of the Black government, notwithstanding the fact that white South Africans have done better under the Black government than they did under apartheid, and certainly better than their fellow Black citizens. Trump has offered these victims of oppression refuge. Here, too, the past is being rewritten just as it was rewritten during the period after the Civil War; all traces of references to the histories of Black and other previously oppressed communities are being removed from the walls of government offices, from libraries and museums. Books such as Toni Morrison’s muchacclaimed novel, Beloved, are banned from public schools. Universities are being told not to teach diversity and inclusion, or risk being deprived of government funding. Historian George Mosse describes racism as a “scavenger ideology,” meaning that it lives off previously discarded, discredited, and dead ideas. It reproduces itself in different temporal and spatial contexts by revivifying age-old prejudices and using them to justify discriminatory practices. It distances itself from past prejudices, while embracing new forms. However, those ideas are passed from generation to generation through all manner of symbolic speech and action. These symbolic speech acts come alive when social pressures arise and then rise to a level when the only safe recourse is to look around for old racist crutches. In his essay “Racism and Culture” in Towards the African Revolution (1967), Fanon noted:

Racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance. It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that informed it . . . The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of existing. At the extreme, such terms as ‘message’ and ‘cultural style’ are resorted to. ‘Occidental values’ oddly blend with the already famous appeal to the fight of the cross against the crescent.

If anything fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Europe it was the idea that certain groups of people existed outside history.

All the post-War policy certitudes about economic, racial and gender equality are under attack. To paraphrase Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” Francis Fukuyama had argued that we had come to “the end of history,” but current events suggest that history does not move in a straight line. It is more prologue than teleology, to be studied more for what it teaches than its supposedly glorious achievements. Those who want to Make America Great Again would be well advised to examine the detritus of such slogans in the past. We have been here before, with tragic consequences for humanity. To understand the origins and appeal of racial nationalism and its spread as “transnational white solidarity” we must go back to the emergence of nation-states in the wake of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. The treaty consolidated former regions of the Roman empire into separate national communities. From then onward, Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, “nationality became a salient feature of the identities of modern men and women.” Over time, economic viability, or what Eric Hobsbawm called the “threshold principle,” became the criterion for the viability of the nation state: “Below this threshold, [the nation state] had no historical justification.” If anything fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Europe it was the idea that certain groups of people existed outside history. Thus, Hobsbawm further observed, those nation-states that found themselves outside of history turned to other means of justifying themselves. It turned out all that was needed was resentment:

All that was required for the entry of nationalism into modern politics was that groups of men and women who saw themselves, in whatever manner, as Ruritarians, or were so seen by others, should become ready to listen to the argument that their discontents were in some way caused by the inferior treatment of Ruritarians by a nonRuritarian state or ruling class. (Hobsbawm)

Giving fuel to the fire of ethnic nationalism were the economic disparities that came after the Great Depression of 1873–1879, leading the newly forming nationstates to adopt protectionist measures, which came mainly in the form of tariffs and worker protection and social welfare programs.

Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1957), describes how these emerging nations adopted economic protectionism as a defense against the vicissitudes of globalization:

[They] shielded themselves from unemployment and instability with the help of central banks and customs tariffs, supplemented by migration laws . . . the import tariffs of one country hampered the exports of another and forced it to seek for markets in politically unprotected markets. Export pressure was reinforced by a scramble for raw material supplies caused by the manufacturing fever. Governments lent support to their nationals engaged in business in backward countries.

To understand this trend toward economic protectionism is to also understand the emergence of “transnational white solidarity”; it is to also understand the antecedents to the “scramble for Africa,” which was birthed by the Berlin conference of 1884, when European countries divided Africa among themselves.

To understand this trend toward economic protectionism is to also understand the emergence of “transnational white solidarity”; it is to also understand the antecedents to the “scramble for Africa,” which was birthed by the Berlin conference of 1884, when European countries divided Africa among themselves. The disruption of global supply chains continued with the Great War, leading to spiraling inflation throughout Europe. Fascism emerged in Italy and spread throughout Europe because it promised to free the local people from the power of the global elites, Nationalism became not just an ideology of collective belonging, but also of mobilizing against the alien threat. To protect the nation, rulers would have to suspend democratic institutions and individual freedoms—and the people would

have to suspend their own disbelief. In Germany, Adolf Hitler scapegoated the Jews as the face of global capitalism and the cause of German woes. By the end of the war, the Nazis had murdered over six million Jews. What may be of relevance for the times we are living through is that these changes were initiated through the electoral system before they turned that system on its head.

To understand this trend toward economic protectionism is to also understand the emergence of “transnational white solidarity”

American responses to globalization were not that much different from Europe. In the 1920’s the U.S. abandoned President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism, which had included the establishment of the League of Nations. Under the administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the United States withdrew from the very League of Nations it had helped established, and imposed tariffs to aid American farmers by increasing prices on their products in the face of slowing demand from Europe. Targeted sanctions continued until they were replaced by the SmootHawley Act, which Herbert Hoover signed into law in 1930. As with the Trump administration’s policies, these tariffs were imposed on almost every product entering the United States. American products could not be sold in Europe, and Europe’s slowing economies could not pay back wartime debts to the United States. The SmootHawley Act is widely acknowledged as the single most important factor behind the Great Depression.

American internationalism was restored when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the war—against the protestations of American isolationists in Congress. Leading the charge against any form of international entanglement was the America First Committee—an early inspiration for Trump and his America Firsters. Even after the tide had turned in Roosevelt’s favor and America entered the war, and even after his successor Harry Truman had played a leading role in establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the isolationists continued to exert influence in the Congress.

The tension between internationalists and isolationists was on display during the Great Debate of 1951—which concerned how the United States should respond to the Soviet and Chinese-backed North Korean invasion of South Korea. Under the leadership of President Harry Truman, internationalists argued that the United States should not only defend South Korea but that it should pursue a policy of deterrence by strengthening its NATO allies. The isolationist wing of the Republican Party, led by former president Howard Taft, called on Europeans to pay for their own defense.

Leading the charge against any form of international entanglement was the America First Committee—an early inspiration for Trump and his America Firsters.

Taft invoked Herbert Hoover’s speech on 20 December 1950 in which the former president railed against American involvement in the Korean War. After outlining the obstacles to military success, Hoover concluded: “[T]he foundation of our national policies must be to preserve for the world this Western Hemisphere Gibraltar of Western civilization.” As if anticipating current U.S. Vice President

J.D. Vance’s skepticism, if not outright disdain for Europe, Hoover told his listeners that: it is clear that Continental Europe has not in the three years of our aid developed that unity of purpose and that will power [sic] necessary for its own defense.” In 1951, Assistant Secretary of State Edward W. Barrett characterized the Great Debate in words that have striking resonance for contemporary foreign policy debates:

At the moment the United States, without having consciously decided upon such a course, finds itself being pushed toward the position of hemispheric isolation that Mr. Hoover proposed for it. To put the United States in this position has been a major political and psychological objective of the Soviet Union . . . But they cannot be said to be totally responsible for it. On the contrary, the evidence would seem to be that the United States has by its own actions contributed materially to the creation of the situation in which it now Stands [sic].

In the same memorandum, Barrett further noted that American unilateralism was alienating US allies in Europe. “[American actions] affect the attitudes and the relationships existing among the United States, the United Kingdom and France as they move toward negotiations with the USSR. They affect the resolution and the confidence of the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as they undertake to build a common defense of freedom in Europe.”

The rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe has tracked the global economic slowdown of the past five decades.

In the end, internationalists won the day. In the post-war period, the United States led the creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations to reduce world poverty and inequality and regulate global conflict. These institutions underpinned the global economic order for six decades, until they were replaced by the rise of neoliberal market capitalism on a global scale in the 1990s. The effects of this were felt in the Global Recession of 2008, which led to the inflammation of racial nationalism on the American right. The COVID pandemic further frayed whatever bonds of solidarity that may have existed in the United States. In 2023, the Center for Disease Control declared loneliness a public health epidemic. In such contexts, it is easy for racial demagoguery to take hold as it is now happening in the United States. The United States has imposed tariffs on every country in the world, threatening to take the world economy into a tailspin. And as if that weren’t enough, Trump has expressed territorial designs on Canada and Greenland like the imperialists of yore. Polanyi used the metaphor of the “double movement” to describe the yin and yang of free trade and protectionism. As he put it, “The pattern of international trade which was now spreading at an accelerated rate was crossed by the introduction of protectionist institutions designed to check the all-round action of the market.” The rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe has tracked the global economic slowdown of the past five decades. In a recent New York Times article titled, “There’s a Reason the World is A Mess, and It’s Not Trump,” economic historian Aaron Benanav points to the political implications of the anemic growth rates of the past few decades: “In the past, G20 economies grew 2 to 3 percent per year, doubling incomes every 25–35 years. Today, many growth rates are 0.5 to 1 percent, meaning now incomes take 70 to 100 years to double— too slow for people to feel progress in their lifetimes. when people can no longer assume that their or their children’s living standards will improve, trust in institutions erodes and discontent rises.” In the past, as in the present, that discontent has been expressed through racial nationalism of the worst kind. Speaking at the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg in 2018, Barack Obama noted how breakthroughs in science and technology had led to improved standards of living, but also how those gains were being reversed by growing inequality, with only a dozen of billionaires controlling as much wealth as half of the world’s population. These billionaires were making decisions—whether to relocate their manufacturing plants or locate their headquarters in safe havens “without reference to notions of human solidarity—or a groundlevel understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made.” The economic dislocations were producing similar racist rightwing movements as in the past. Probably having the likes of Donald Trump in the United States and Victor Orban in Hungary in mind, Obama continued: “Strongman politics are ascendant suddenly. whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained— the form of it—but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning. In the West you’ve got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism.”

Obama’s warning was that the world “now stand at a crossroads—a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world. Two different stories, two different narratives about who we are and who we should be. How should we respond?” The shoots of an alternative vision of solidarity are already showing in the United States as people mobilize throughout the United States to fight back against the extremes of Trumpism. By so doing they may be prefiguring the emergence, albeit tentatively, of this new vision, which Lukes describes as follows: “A solidary, multi-cultural community of citizens would be one in which the link between poverty, under-education and devalued ethnicity has been broken, and this can only be done by enabling individuals to escape the limits that these conditions, and above all their combination, set upon liberty.” When it comes to fulfilling such a vision, American political and civic leaders would do well to look to examples from around the world.

Twenty years after I left my hometown, Nelson Mandela was elected as the first president of a democratic South Africa. Through words and actions Mandela had shown his commitment to a non-racial and democratic South Africa. His speech from the dock, “I Am Prepared to Die” is the South African equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He concluded the speech with the now immortalized words: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” After three decades in prison, Mandela emerged with his commitment to a non-racial community still intact—when he could easily have been stewing in grievance the way that Trump has been doing. One of his first tasks as president was to select another celebrated icon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to be the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Tutu had not been the ruling party’s choice because of his independence, but here is how, in his chapter “The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as Acknowledgment And Justice As Recognition,” political scientist André du Toit described the choice: “[Tutu] had not played a prominent role in preparations for the TRC or in fashioning the PNUR [Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation] Act of 1995, but his discourse of a ‘nation’ was widely associated with the objectives of the commission itself” (2000). There was no way that the commission would heal the long festering wounds of one of the most vicious political systems of the twentieth century. There is validity to the criticism made by scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani about how the commission’s focus on the perpetrators and victims of gross human rights violations occluded the experiences of millions of Black South Africans. However, there is also much to be said about the commission’s symbolic contribution to the creation of a multi-racial imagined community. After his presidency Mandela created the Elders, a group of former leaders—Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, Graça Machel—who came together to promote world peace. The power of their example could perhaps help buck the trend of a fearful “transnational white solidarity” towards the hopeful global multi-racial solidarity they embodied.

South Africa provides several examples of how it is built from the bottom-up.

That said, solidarity is not something that can be proclaimed into existence from the rooftops. Again, South Africa provides several examples of how it is built from the bottom-up. I will close by sharing one such example from my personal experience. In the mid-eighties, I was part of a series of conversations about the role students would play in post-apartheid society. By then, the writing was on the wall for the apartheid government, even as it was intensifying its repressive measures. Cracks were emerging between the conservative and reformist factions within the ruling party. Like activists in the U.S.—as described by Bayard Rustin in his famous account of the civil rights movement in Commentary magazine, “From Protest to Politics”—we entered government institutions, thereby breaking a long-held principle of non-collaboration with the apartheid government. After graduating with a master’s degree in development planning, I joined the government-created Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). The bank had been created to provide funding support for municipalities as part of the government’s winning hearts and minds campaign—what we mocked as the WHAM campaign after the musical group of the same name. The municipalities were tasked with upgrading township infrastructure and building middle class housing.

The problem for the government was that the communities for whom these improvements were intended were not buying it. Instead, local civic associations called on communities to boycott payments of service charges and housing payments. In short order, the municipalities were going bankrupt and could not provide services to their own constituencies. White solidarity began to crumble under its own weight. It was in that context, that I was asked to mediate between the municipalities and the civic associations. The upshot is that there was an agreement to abolish the segregated local government system and to form a new multi-racial institution simply called the Forum. As white municipalities fell like dominos throughout the country, “forum”-like institutions emerged to prefigure democratic local government after the end of apartheid.

The changes that took place in South Africa have often been attributed to the African cultural concept of Ubuntu—which roughly translates to “a person is a person because of other people.” Desmond Tutu wrote extensively about how this cultural principle informed his approach to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As a student of political culture, I would put it differently. I would argue that what we had in South Africa was the combination of the cultural values of Ubuntu and the political cosmopolitanism I experienced as a twelve-year old in my township, as a student activist at a predominantly white university in Johannesburg, and as a participant in the building of a new multi-racial democracy in the 1990s. That political cosmopolitanism is going to be sorely needed as part of a new “double movement” to protect humanity from yet another catastrophic encounter with the perils of racial and ethnic nationalism. We are going to have to develop new kinds of leadership and solidary networks: vertically between local, national, and global institutions and horizontally across national, racial, ethnic, class, gender-based identities.