I think that poor white people do actually experience something close to double-consciousness. The difference is that there is no escape from actual double-consciousness except liberation; the alternative (self-negation) can be attempted but only actually achieved in death.
For white people the crushing pressure isn't as uniform or absolute. Racial capitalism views black people as expendable and subhuman because of their race; it can't get rid of them because they have utility, but it constantly tries to push them as far away as possible.
This idea of "pushing" is also a really good way of understanding how overt racists justify their worldview to themselves: apart from the most extreme fringe (which I'll get to in a moment) they insist that genocide is not the goal, that they just want to be "left alone."
For poor whites, the contempt we experience is bewildering; racial supremacist narratives that tell us we're the heirs of a glorious past at once denies but also *scorns* our very real weakness and insecurity. We are baffled by our defeat; in not understanding, we shrink from it.
Put simply, our abject state is *despite* our race, and requires an extraordinary explanation to account for the elevated status which, clearly, we were born into and deserve.
Capitalism constructs whiteness (in place of national, ethnic, and sometimes, eventually, even religious identity) in order to establish a bulwark against a racial underclass. It does not care about our humanity, but this one aspect of our humanity, our white skin, is USEFUL.
This is still a place of privilege compared to having your humanity completely denied! But the gap that capitalism opens for us is in fact a mold; it creates a hole shaped like the weapon it needs and says "get in here if you want to feel human."
Capitalism creates fascism, but this isn't quite what it intends to do. It creates it in negative space; it doesn't build fascism brick by brick, it simply occupies every space that isn't either fascism or revolution and refuses to share any of it.
I've used the metaphor of a mold, but a better one might be a cyst. Threatened by some foreign element, it encapsulates the intruder in an empty space, and forms a hard wall. The wall is the point; the empty space around the irritant fills with pus simply because it is empty.
The combination of empty space and the wall is whiteness. It is empty in the sense that you are no longer Irish or German; you might be Protestant, Catholic, even atheist, but this is muted, secondary. In this contrived absence of real culture, a diseased, mythical one fills it.
Fascism is traditionally nationalist; "American" and "white" are nearly interchangeable to the racist. This is a carefully selected compromise, because American culture *does* exist and is not dead to us in the same way most of our European immigrant cultures are.
But I actually wonder how long this will last. Colonialism was organized by nations, but in the past 100-200 years or so it successfully evolved into a true international system. Fascism is currently in reaction against internationalism -- hence Brexit, Trump, etc.
But in the same way that we're probably only a few decades (at most) from a mutated fascism that embraces environmental catastrophe as a call to action instead of denying it, I wonder if a collapse of international capitalism will result in a rise of an international fascism.
I think this is possible because of the mechanism I described; capitalism squeezes white people towards whiteness to the exclusion of all other values and humanities. Fascism is probably too unstable to replace capitalism, but if it could, it might finally put race before nation.
On a more personal level, fascism demands symbolic if not literal suicide because the model of humanity it offers us cannot contain a complete human being. It offers to lobotomize us, amputate our moral and social limbs, to cure the pain that it caused in the first place.
Brave, sincere fascists exist, but only briefly. The "futurism" of pre-war Italian fascists embodies this even better than Nazism; less concerned with the "organic" or with Volkisch survival, it worshiped self-destruction, idolized machines because they are animate, but dead.
The reverse side of capitalism decaying into fascism is that, after the most vital, sincere, and driven fascists burn themselves out in a Pyrrhic frenzy, cowards and con men survive. These characters will eventually rediscover capitalism and so make the whole process symbiotic.
The extent to which suicidal frenzy and cynicism co-exist determines the success of any fascist regime. This is also why it's so hard to portray fascists accurately in art; self-preserving cowardice and fearless suicidality require different, even opposite strategies to counter.
When they are disorganized and at odds, they can be fought separately, and more successfully. It's when they form a chimera -- two heads on one body -- that things get difficult. You need flexibility, nuance; this is made even more difficult by the tensions of capitalism/racism.
This is what makes liberalism so frustrating. We need liberals as human beings; bluntly, we need the numbers. But liberalism as an ideology is like feeding the dragon's head while you try to fight the lion. Even when liberals aren't our enemy, they negate their own contributions.
By the same principle, poor white people make the perfect recruits of fascism because this is how they experience the hypocrisy of liberalism: force-feeding them with one hand, cutting at them with a knife in the other.
The conservative distrust of "big government" and their hatred of social programs is not irrational, and not exclusively racist, although racism quickly reinforces it. Liberals mistake the sadism of poor whites for an original cause, when in reality it is a psychological defense.
It's one thing to humble yourself and accept actual charity. It is another thing altogether to humble yourself, accept an offer of charity, and get a cruel joke. And social programs in America are almost always cruel jokes; "pay for private insurance or get penalized?" Fuck you.
Combine this justified pessimism about anyone ever helping you with a barrage of blame-shifting propaganda, and you produce racism. Social programs are safest in America when they benefit whites most; everyone is pessimistic, but racist solidarity is permitted, and so gets ahead.
Toni Morrison once said that the most important aspect of her artistic career was her effort "To take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up." This is a titanic task for a black woman, but it is, in one sense at least, an external one.
Her point was that, for her at least, it was necessary to step away from "refuting racism" as a preoccupation for black authors; the preoccupation is understandable in context, but severely limited the horizon of what she could express.
I don't know whether this is true or not; I have literary training and no shortage of opinions on writing, but it is literally impossible for me to know what possibilities exist where a white man isn't looking, for obvious reasons. But -- I do know what black authors mean to me.
My progress as a poet stalled out for a very long time, roughly when I finished internalizing the lessons of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. It wasn't until I discovered Safiya Sinclair, many years later, that I found someone not only acting in, but advancing the forms I cared about.
As a babby socialist, Marx confirmed a lot of what I already expected; the Manifesto confirmed my convictions, helped me organize my thoughts, and built on my familiarity with e.g. Bertrand Russell (In Defense of Idleness) and Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism).
But reading W. E. B. DuBois, or Cedric Robinson, or most recently Frantz Fanon, gave me a brilliant, birds-eye view survey of ideas I had only brushed against in the dark. Without black radicals, I would be a prisoner of my own perspective.
Morrison says she had to escape the white male gaze to reach her full potential. With humor, and more than a hint of irony, I have to admit: "Yeah, me too." Of course, my position is completely different; I can no more escape my perspective than a black man could inhabit it.
What I can do, however, is refuse the invitation that "whiteness" represents. This does not make me something else, and never will; it's not something that can be accomplished personally. It would take the destruction of capitalism and the birth of a new generation just to begin.
But in the uncomfortable act of straining against a space too small to contain me, I can act in solidarity with people who are not permitted to exist, to live, in any space at all. Every crack that opens in the wall lets me empty myself of poison, replace it with something else.
That "something else" isn't blackness, obviously, or womanhood, or anything like that, even if it is born from contact with black or female or non-American minds. It's the product of a white perspective. My hope is simply to "do whiteness" in a completely novel, improper way.
I am, fortunately, used to this sort of thing. As an autistic person, I am quite familiar with occupying an uncomfortable, "defective" space in society, making it mine with morbid but sincere humor. As a just-barely-bisexual man, the outer border of privilege is already my home.
Ridding myself of poison, I know others will sometimes be exposed to it. I cannot demand that you do this for me; all I can do is promise to apologize sincerely, that I will be transformed by my own hand one way or the other, that your help is appreciated; that it will be repaid.
If a black man's struggle in America is to see himself through his own eyes for once, a white man's is to see himself reflected in someone else's & not flinch away. He has the privilege of being victim of his own power, which is inescapably personal; he cannot be saved from it.
Even admitting that the black man is not my doctor, not my priest, not my therapist, I still hope to convince him that we can be neighbors, despite everything. It would be unfair to ask him to change my mind; that's my job. But I hope I can ask him to tell me what he sees.
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