“She had three crying children, she was carrying her stuff, maybe she was a single mother, maybe not. And here I am going to law school and telling her that she is privileged and if she didn’t support Black Liberation, something was wrong. This was the line. We couldn’t talk to this woman from where she was coming from, that she worked all week and was dealing with the kids and had to do her shopping, was probably living in a three-story walk-up. It wasn’t getting anywhere.”

      While the concept of “white privilege” had yet to be popularized, the Committee continued an open-ended analysis that had already gone through several iterations throughout the decades. W.E.B. Du Bois never used the term but theorized in 1935 that white workers received positive psychological wages based on their skin color. These invisible wages created a diabolical bargain in which white workers gained the illusion of superiority and lost just about everything else in terms of wages, power, and the possibility of their own emancipation. In a sense, his description of the politics of whiteness was the opposite of subsequent understandings of privilege. Depending on their politics, theorists have emphasized the individualistic aspects of the idea or the structural causes. The basis of the theory is simple. People of color in the United States are excluded from economic, social, and political access that whites provide for one another. The interlocking system that upholds this inequity is led by elites with the near full participation of less privileged white people, who also get limited access to power. The process of chronic exclusion involves a violence against equality, fairness, justice, and freedom. This violence lies at the core of white supremacy and its legacy from the era of settler-colonialism through to the current period.

      In the 1960s and 1970s, Theodore Allen developed these ideas to assert that there was no scientific basis for the category of the white race, and that it was invented as a method of class control. He formed this thesis after meticulously searching through pre-colonial records in Virginia and finding no mention of “white” until after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The rebellion united Black and white laborers against a colonial regime that was seen as coddling indigenous raids on settler colonies. Fearful of what might come after, Allen documented the use of whiteness to confer material and social advantages—privileges—on whites in order to sabotage potential Black-white alliances. Allen described privilege as a “poison bait” that would never allow for working-class power.⁵⁴ Cedric Robinson forever changed this debate in the early 1980s with his seminal work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. He argued that the roots of racism reach far back into Europe’s history, where the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”⁵⁵ This meant that not only was racism a tool of capitalist elites, but capitalism and racism were inextricably interwoven.

      Post–World War II policy changes sharpened the ways that material advantages were distributed toward white workers. The white sections of the low-wage working class shrank, while poverty among Black and Brown workers expanded. Policy after policy, from the subsidization of suburbs to the disinvestment of cities, reinforced this dynamic. New Deal labor policy purposely excluded labor protections for farm and domestic workers. Mainstream labor organizations raised few objections to the parts of the New Deal that jettisoned workers of color. In this context, two of the most influential, yet divergent formulations of white skin privilege emerged.

      In the mid to late 1980s, feminist writer Peggy McIntosh emphasized the day-to-day advantages of privilege through her famous writings on “the invisible package of unearned assets” that white people can count on “cashing in each day.” “White privilege,” wrote McIntosh, “is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”⁵⁶ Author J. Sakai put forward that, as a whole, working-class white people could never truly be revolutionary due to unbreakable attachments to empire and settler-colonialism. He further argued that the white members of the working-class were not part of the proletariat at all, thanks to their status as settlers, and that the citizenship and labor struggles of groups who later would become white was “nothing more nor less than a push to join the oppressor nation, to enlist in the ranks of the Empire.”⁵⁷ Sakai’s distinction reverberated through the Committee, for they saw white privilege as the means that the state uses to organize its support base.

      The events in New York prisons made it clear that Jim Crow wore a different face outside of Southern states. New York was simply “Up South,” as Malcolm X had described. The normalization of increased Klan activity was rampant. In a blow to the people incarcerated at Napanoch, the New York High Court ruled in April 1977 that prison guards were allowed to join the Ku Klux Klan. Months later, members of the NAACP and Latinos Unidos took over a wing of Napanoch, taking eleven hostages. A grand jury returned indictments against ten of the men involved. The men were then quickly transferred to other facilities, hampering further organizing.⁵⁸

      With legal channels shutting down, it seemed to many anti-racist organizers that the “massive offensive” Siwatu-Hodari urged against the Klan was the only option left on the table. The newly minted John Brown Anti-Klan Committee was more than happy to oblige.

      BEGINNING FROM AN AFTERMATH

      In the late 1970s, radical optimism was on the ropes. Only a decade before, it seemed that “The Movement” might somehow redeem the violent history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism in the United States. The right’s reaction against the gains of the Black Freedom movement was defined with a wave of conservative politicians winning office. A rancid bouquet of white supremacist ballot-box organizations bloomed, ready to follow the right’s electoral gains with violence in the streets. Many activists remained in the fray. International solidarity work turned toward opposing intervention in Central America and apartheid in South Africa. Domestic organizers stared down bulldozers leveling low-income communities. The Committee’s founders confronted the stark reality of old friends behind bars and the ongoing wars between law enforcement and Black organizers, radicals, and revolutionaries.