I’d say the biggest misconception [about my ideas], though, is that people think I’m talking about race alone, that everything in America is determined by race alone, and that’s not really what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that race in America has been used as an identifier for capitalism to form and control classes, that race is not just a metaphor for class, but an identifier of class in real terms. Everything is upside-down — things that are racial are really about class. Like Affirmative Action. The real Affirmative Action is the enormous built-in advantages that white middle-class people, particularly from the suburban school systems have, that get them into universities, and getting corporate jobs and networking. Everybody knows this. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a fact, right? So that’s the actual Affirmative Action. These other programs are really to compensate for that, and are just the warped forms that the civil rights victories of the 1960s forced upon the society. I mean, I don’t personally view them as significant. The fight over them is, in a funny way, within settler society, within imperialism itself, over how it’s going to manage itself.
J Sakai
