I spent this past weekend with Erin and a bunch of radical twenty-somethings up in Anderson Valley — one of the NorCal enclaves where the hippies settled in the diaspora following the Summer of Love. Erin’s former housemate Jade grew up in the woods on a forty-acre plot that her dad purchased back in the 1970’s for a price that brings tears to my 2005 eyes. We, a bunch of free speech radio volunteers and employees, and a few other assorted friends spent the weekend hiking out to waterfalls, cooking collards and quinoa, playing, and hanging out. I finally got a chance to cuddle up with Ted Allen and really tuck into The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America.

Allen writes of the Virginia colony in 1623:

Open military dictatorship was over; the colony was now governed by the newly created General Assembly, the Colony Council and General Court. Reliance would still be placed on English mercenary veterans of wars in Ireland and the Netherlands, not only to command in warfare against the native population but also for the maintenance of social control in the interest of the tobacco bourgeoisie. The fulfillment of this social control function was favored by four special conditions prevailing in the colony at this time.

I change Allen’s order for rhetorical purposes, but he recognises these conditions as:

1. The colony’s phenomenally high death rate, which created a certain social anomie, creating opportunities for opportunistic land- and labour-grabbers.
2. Intensified economic pressure on the peasantry in England, creating a large base of unemployed potential labourers.
3. ‘[T]he complete and utter dependence of the colony upon England for supplies, especially of clothing and metal products but also, to a considerable extent, of food and beverages.’
4. The existence of the Powhattan and other American Indian groups right beyond the borders of Jamestown and Newport News, creating an easy out for those colonists who would rather go native than continue labouring under unjust conditions for Big Tobacco.

It’s the last point which interests me most:

[T]his contradiction made ruling-class social control more difficult, since it presented the laboring people of the colony with a means of frustrating the bourgeois pressure on their living standards and social rights, by abandoning the colony and joining one or the other of the nearby Indian communities. This was more than an abstract possibility. Instances of English colonists fleeing to the Indians are found throughout the records of the early colonial period. They went despite the fact that recapture could mean death “by hanginge, shootinge and breakinge uppon the wheele.”

At that time, labour was in such short supply that it was necessary to maintain control of labourers’ physical bodies. As the labour supply grew, however, it became impossible for local Indian communities to take in the escaping English. New immigrants couldn’t join the Indians, but they could move further and further away from their bourgeois oppressors. This, however, served the tobacco capitalists’ purposes even better than their own, as these people formed a protective buffer around the heart of the colony.

It seems to me that, two centuries later, something of the same sort served Manifest Destiny well: People and peoples either seeking the opportunity to take economic ownership of their own lives or unwilling to continue living in a culture that they believed oppressed or corrupted them, moved West to escape and to start anew. Instead, they and their descendants served as a foothold and outpost for further expansion of American-style capitalism and imperialism.

I thought about the house that I was in, and about the Back-to-the-Landers’ continuation of that noble, but unfortunate American non-conformist tradition of running away.

I thought, then, about how high-minded, broad-hearted hippies turned the Haight from a multi-cultural black, Korean, and Jewish community into a yuppie shopping district. How hipsters, escaping mainstream white bourgeois cultural suffocation, are rapidly making the Latin American Mission District a chichi party neighbourhood. How my neighbourhood, the Fillmore — once a vibrant black community and the heart of San Francisco’s jazz scene — is slowly succumbing to white youth drawn by cheap rents: my house is across the street from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the only predominantly black Catholic church in San Francisco — the church where the Black Panthers started their social service programs. This past winter, the archdiocese closed the church down. It will be razed to make room for apartments or condos.

Since the 2004 election, there’s been a new exodus: Leftists who have given up on America, and have gone overseas in disgust. Throughout history, whenever we have left our homes to escape oppression (like the Dissenters who came to America and slowly, slowly pushed the Indian populations up against the wall; like the gay men who crowded immigrants out of the Castro) or to seek freedom (like the Westward expansionists of the 19^th century; like the hipsters of the Misison), we have advanced the causes of the dominant races and classes by, first, sometimes, clearing the way for their expansion, but, second, always, by ceding to them a little piece of the culture. We — hopeful hippies, angry punks, disaffected hipsters, wounded queers — have been the shocktroops of the bourgeoisie, the vanguard of whiteness. And even when they have not followed us, we’ve left them uncontested on our native soil.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 7 July 2005 at 07:53 and is filed under Miscellanea, Race and Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.