Great White Hope
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It was Robert Barltrop, a member of the Party, who wrote a biography of Jack London which highlighted his racism.
This article returns to the topic
The “Great White Hope” was Jim Jeffries in a match against Johnson in July 1910. This was filmed and was widely circulated. Johnson won and (of course) the film was banned in the Southern States and in South Africa.
Here’s what the Socialist Standard of the time (August 1910) commented in marked contrast to London’s racist scribblings:
The risks of capitalists have been finely illustrated at the expense of the cinematograph people who shelled out some £30,000 to the principals in and promotor of the recent glove contest in America. One Jeffries essayed to “take up the white man’s burden,” which in this instance was to prove the superiority of the white over any other human complexion. It was thought a pretty safe calculation that the universal interest in the spectacle of “Mistah Jeff ” taking up the white man’s burden, would warrant the outlay, but alas ! for the “schemes of mice and men,” it was forgotten that the same pictures might show the black man helping him to lay it down again. Of course the overlooking of this contingency made all the difference.
Was it to be supposed that civilisation could stand it ? We all know that civilisation is based firstly upon the superiority of the white to the coloured races, and secondly upon the superiority of the capitalist to the ordinary or worker white. But what sort of an effect would these moving pictures have upon the social aspect in Africa, and what tale would they whisper into the ear of young India, and how would they be received on the banks of the Nile, where the burden of the white man’s civilisation sits none too lightly on brown backs ? The best black man has beaten the best white. The best black is better than the best white. The black is better than the white.
As Japan snatched the halo of sanctity from the Western brow when she drove the Russian legions before her, so these pictures of the best white man trying and failing to chew all he had bitten off might be taken by the dusky ones the world over as evidence that the miraculous no more belongs to the white skin than to the Western position, and that even the most godlike of white men has a crick in his neck if the axe is put on in the right place—and then goodbye to British misrule in India and Egypt, and farewell to white supremacy in East and West. And then when the worker white made the startling discovery that there was nothing inferior to him he might begin to seriously ask if there is anything superior, and such an inward searching really would place the foundations of our capitalist civilisation in jeopardy.
Scroll down to the final paragraph of this 1915 piece from the Socialist Standard for another reference to racism and boxing in connection with Jack Johnson:
Link: Shrapnel Splinters (1915)
The new white hope is Donald Trump, and he is going to be knocked out by the colour peoples too. One of the problems of the white man is that they do not want to recognize that the first great civilizations of mankind history was developed by colour peoples
Our task is to get away from identity politics
We share Eugene Debs in highlighting commonalities and not differences
“We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.”
Alan Johnston
I have known what you are saying for many years, it is not new to me, but the reality is that white man never wants to recognize the contributions made by colour peoples to the human society. A portion of the article of the SS of August 1910 shows that this civilization is based on the superiority of the white man, if that isn’t true the writer of the article is mistaken,or you haven’t read it
Even more, when I joined the WSM I was discriminated because I was not European and despite that, I stayed in the WSM, so the problem has not been resolved in the minds of peoples that call themselves socialists
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