š§µ On white punk "race traitors"
White anarchist punks practiced a form of race traitor politics that exemplified both the merits and shortcomings of this political approach. Punks attempted to force the major institutions of white society to treat them as antagonists. 1/
Race traitor acts were meant to materially break away from the āwhite clubā and force people and institutions to treat the race traitor differently than they would a ānormalā white person. Race traitor theorist Noel Ignatiev believed that if enough white people engaged 2/
in these traitorous acts, even if only a minority, it would destabilize the dominant position of whiteness. Police and other institutions that uphold the racial hierarchy would not know how to treat someone with white skin and thus the privileged āwhite clubā would fall apart. 3/
The punk writer and academic Maxwell Tremblay explains that āthe more one identified as āpunkā, the more one was expected, as part of a larger political project, to reject oneās inherited whiteness ā¦ through treasonā. 4/
Anarchist punk Amanda Luker argues that punks choose to ādress in a way that tells the White businessman they pass downtown that they are not cut from the same cloth, and would never choose to beā, which prevents the āinherent privilege of bondingā¦as a ānormalā White person.ā 5/
Acting in this way was thought to mean actively working against the privilege of oneās white skin. As Luker says, āmany of us understand deeply what it means to give up privileges by choosing to look the way we do, and weāre doing it for that exact reason.ā 6/
Yet this begs the question: do white punks really give up their privilege by dressing and acting in an oppositional manner? Even if punks are sometimes treated differently than ānormalā white people, they can always return to the fold of the white club ā 7/
