settlers the mythology of the white proletariat

Overall, this book kept me repeatedly shocked because on nearly every page there was a new detail that I never heard in a classroom discussion of the very same time periods and events in history. I am skeptical that the people who are most damned by this piece can fall out of love with whiteness long enough to actually see any of Sakai's points all points that must be addressed if you are proposing 'radicalism' or 'revolutionary' idea that is afraid of alienating white-identified people. It's not because Sakai isn't accurate most of the time, but instead because the style of writing takes the exact tone that evokes hostility from leftists who at core believe white supremacy is only for broke white Republicans and from lukewarm liberals who prefer multiculturalist reform strategies that involve assimilation as am answer for racial minorities. Let me start by saying that the main thing on my mind while reading Settlers was the following questions: Why have I never seen this book or most of the information included in it referenced by any self-described leftist academics? Why have I instead heard mostly the same flawed, incomplete, and misleading interpretations of American history that Sakai discredits? From the first pages of Settlers I got a hint of why. Please note that none of the illustrations from the paperback edition are included in the digital version. This new edition includes “Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese-American Reparations” and an interview with author J.

As recounted in painful detail by Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence. Settlers exposes the fact that America’s white citizenry have never supported themselves but have always resorted to exploitation and theft, culminating in acts of genocide to maintain their culture and way of life. First published in the 1980s by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book soon established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the predominantly colonialist Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements at that time.Īlways controversial within the establishment Left Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity.

Settlers is a uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements.

Settlers the mythology of the white proletariat