<nettime> Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider

[Alice Yang <alice.lan.yang@gmail.com>]

A couple people recommended this book to me, so I read it last night. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Haider’s statement that white supremacy is a better recruiter than socialism is spot on.

2. I enjoyed his connection that race is class and any definition of race goes back to class formation.

3. Haider seems to talk a lot about black people, passing judgment on black leaders and movements, without being black.

4. He seems to have a distaste of trigger-warning happy safe spaces since they do not value for collective bargaining in the workplace (However valuable they may be for sexual abuse survivors).

5. Haider takes offense of the term antiblackness but cites no history of the term people of color, which originated with black female movements without the intention of replacing blackness, but to be used in specific moments when organizing with non-black women. He describes the two terms as antagonistic while really they were formulated to work together from the beginning.

6. His reluctance to claim the performative role of the victim comes from a perspective that cannot understand its power, a power that has been the exclusive domain of white women.

7. Haider wants us in the left to stop policing ourselves internally and to incite a materialist revolution or collectively bargain. I’m curious about what the revolution he seems to envision looks like, since it is hard for me to imagine any revolution where femmes are not cleaning up, taking care of, and healing the affects of a mass movement. I’m imagining what collective bargaining done by those with wombs around reproductive labor can even look like, since it’s not really work that you clock in or out of, or accounted for at all.

Just my thoughts.

Sent from my iPhone
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