An initial note to say we chose to write this article specifically on White Supremacy because it felt most pressing - but know that the Riots cannot be fully understood either without an analysis of Patriarchy, of Class, of Queerphobia, etc. and we hope to share/produce more analysis directly highlighting these over the coming weeks. Also, because as a mostly white racialised team we know its essential work to have white racialised voices also centring the call to dismantle White Supremacy.
We write this on the 8th of August 2024, just over a week since the horrific mass stabbings in Southport that killed 3 young girls - Elsie, Alice and Bebe - and left 10 other children and adults wounded. Our hearts go out to the families and their community who have suffered from this needless violence.
In the wake of such an attack this should be a time of mourning and coming together to say no to violence, But instead we have seen from that very evening an eruption of violence across the entire county. In the mass of competing stories out there about the past week - we’ve written this to make sure people know exactly what we think:
That these are not protests.
They are not simply ‘Far Right Thugs’.
These are White Supremacist Race Riots!
We say this because if we’re not crystal clear what we’re up against, if we hide from the truth of the forces looking to divide and conquer us, then we will fail to counter their hate and fail to repair our broken world. And that central to this is a collective reckoning with White Supremacy as the fundamental driver of not just these Riots but so much of the violence in our society that is ever increasingly destroying life on Earth.
White Supremacy - “the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favours the maintenance and defence of any power and privilege held by white people.”
All you have to do is to download Telegram and scan through the channels of people like Mark Collett - who is one of the leaders of Patriotic Alternative, one of the key ethno-nationalist groups behind the current riots - to see a concerted efforts to frame ‘White Britons’ as a ‘second class citizens’ who are being attacked by an ‘anti-white establishment’ who are enabling an ‘army of migrants’ to do things as absurd as the ‘ethnic cleansing of millions of Britons’.
Big Trigger Warnings on the screenshots below for violent racist views!
Posts on Mark Collett’s Telegram channel.
This so-called ‘Patriotic’ narrative is wholly intended to stoke a group ‘victim mentality’ among white racialised Brits and scapegoat their non-white siblings as the cause of all their struggles. Notably the same, if less subtle, messaging as the Tories’ Stop the Boats and Rwanda policies; UKIP’s anti-migrant Brexit campaigning and years of headlines and articles tying Broken Britain with a so-called ‘migrant crisis’. It is with this victim mentality - that says ‘we’re under attack by savage people who hate us, and they hate us because we’re better than them’ - that the naked truth of the White Supremacy is obvious, shown clearly here by comments on Mark’s posts:
White Supremacist comments on Mark Collett’s telegram channel.
And we want to be clear that what we’re seeing here is not new, this is simply the re-emergence from the shadows of the same White Supremacy that was invented in the 17th century and pushed by British and European elites to justify atrocity after atrocity. The transatlantic trafficking of millions of enslaved Afrikans, the looting and pillage of India and South East Asia, the Colonisation of most of the world and hundreds more horrific acts of violence were all central to creation of the myth of a ‘white race’ whose God given mandate was to dominate the lesser races. Yes ‘God given’ because this myth built on and incorporated the centuries of European religious wars and hierarchy, especially against Islam, which again we’re seeing clearly in the violence against Mosques up and down the country.
As such, ‘Whiteness’ was created to set ordinary people here above the rest of their Global Family, to ask people here to take the side of the European Elite class rather than their peers, the everyday normal working folks of the world, to choose the side of the oppressor. As Aimé Césaire says with such a choice, the choice to disconnect from the immense violence, pain and suffering that underpinned the British/European Imperialism, and continues today through Neo-Colonialism, “a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe” - the poison of White Supremacy.
This poison of White Supremacy, of Racial Hierarchy, showed itself most clearly inside Europe of course through the Nazi’s genocidal plan to create a ‘Master Race’ that led to the Holocaust of millions of Jews and other minority communities, and of course a needless war that cost millions more lives. This was not something ‘out of the blue’. This was the clear ‘boomerang effect’ of cultures that presented the violent domination of some so-called races over others as a natural state of affairs.
And so here we find the heart of the matter, with our streets again filled with men like Mark Collett openly suggesting that only Nazism can save British children, with Neo-Nazi’s marching in Germany, with the National Rally making huge gains in France, the Brothers of Italy, in Trumpism and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. We now more than ever cannot fail to see this resurgence for what it truly is - again not something ‘out of the blue’ - but the poison of White Supremacy that has found a new lease of life in the broad church conservative push to scapegoat immigration as the core cause of the West’s declining economies.
Racist comments on a post on Mark Collett’s Telegram channel clearly suggesting that only Nazi’s can stop ‘more children being killed’ - and Nigel Farage standing next to one of the key racist images of the Brexit campaign.
So let's get out there and fight the fash, let us come together and show them that their hate and violence will never be tolerated. Let us stand with our Global Majority family. Let us stand against Islamophobia, against Anti-Semitism, against Afriphobia, against Anti-Traveller Xenophobia. Let us stand together with all the Migrants who have chosen to, or been forced to, make these islands their home.
But let's not believe a few street counter mobilisations are going to stop this once and for all. Or that on its own the essential anti-racist workshops and programs happening in our communities and organisations can truly tackle racism. For the poisoned chalice of White Supremacy is a global beast and it is always offered with the same question: ‘whose side are we on?’
For everytime we choose the side of the oppressor, the side of multinational businesses that plunder and exploit our siblings and mother earth; the side of the arms companies arming the genocidal Israeli state; the side of the cosmetic companies making millions selling skin-lightening products, etc. In short, everytime we take the side of Global Imperial Britain and its Western Allies that still haunt the world, we choose to maintain the power and privilege of a White Supremacist world system that was birthed by European Colonialism and is still very much alive in today’s Globalised Capitalism.
And yes our fellow Stroudies we are talking about us too. These valleys that clothed the British Empire in Scarlet are still very much entangled in this dance of death. The Black Boy clock still stands, our Schools send our young people around the world on field trips to play saviour, the police disproportionately harass young black men and boys, we host companies that build components for fighter jets and oil rigs; we import huge amounts of our food through exploitative supply chains from the Global South - in short, we have much to do and must see the poison here at home even when there aren’t active mobilisations.
Instagram posts from the PRALER News account highlighting Communities of Resistance taking back their power in Burkina Faso and Colombia.
As the RYSE we believe that only alongside our Global Majority family can we stamp out White Supremacy globally and thus the facism it breeds on our streets here at home. Only when we choose the side of the communities of resistance from the Sahel to Mexico, from Peru to India, and of course Palestine, who are fighting for sovereignty, when together we build a world beyond Western intervention and manipulation, only then will we truly drain the poison from our veins. For this is the path of Repair, of Reparations, for our Global Family, for Ourselves and for Mother Earth - this is the path of Planet Repairs.
So we will see you in the streets this week. Those of us ‘racialised as white’ will put ourselves forward to hold the line. But we will not hold onto our ‘whiteness’ in the years to come. We will remember who we are, who we were before they even invented Whiteness, that we’re the children of Sylvia Pankhurst, of Basil Davidson, of Elizabeth Heyrick and Robert Wedderburn. We are the children of those who broke the fences of Enclosure and fought against the domination of the factory, of the Rebecca Rioters and Kett’s Rebels.
So let us be the generation who refuse the poisoned chalice of White Supremacy and thus break the pact of Empire. Let us be the generation who will Abolish Whiteness and rejoin a Global Family of Resistance and Love. Who will overthrow our oppressive elites at home and champion the dismantling of their machines of death across the world. Let us be the generation that will end Global Britain and turn our islands from a place of domination and despair to a land of solidarity and repair.
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To finish we want to shout out PRALER - the Planet Repairs Action Learning Educational Revolution - here as the powerful internationalist process that we at the RYSE are part of and where much of this learning comes from - everyone can and should register interest if you want to learn more about Planet Repairs!
And as always, buzz us any reflections on this through our email (theryse@riseup.net) or on the Insta - love and power family, onwards!
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