Several anti-racisms coexist, even contradict and oppose each other. For universalists, [1] all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; they denounce and fight individuals, organizations, States that discriminate against humans on the basis of criteria of race, color, sex, language, religion, opinion, origin, wealth, birth…. For decolonial antiracists, it is the entire system of Whites that must be fought. Whites (noted here with a capital B) committed the colonization and enslavement of non-White peoples. Even after decolonization and the abolition of slavery, this racism and exploitation persist. Whites in Europe and North America built their well-being on the exploitation of non-Whites, and are therefore all guilty, from CEOs to homeless people. Non-Whites are the victims, of the racialized.[2]
In detail, it gets complicated. Some Arab-Muslims were colonized, which makes them racialized. But they are often white, and have developed large empires in the name of Jihad, imposing the racist laws of dhimmitude on non-Muslims.[3] They should therefore be classified among the oppressors, that is to say the Whites. Furthermore, many white-skinned peoples have been exploited and massacred (sometimes by Muslim countries) and are therefore racialized peoples….
These uncertainties are conducive to a proliferation of narratives. The situation is further complicated by the incentives to rewrite the history already written by the West.[4] Enrique Dussel, a Mexican philosopher, is one of the influential thinkers of the decolonial movement. For him, everything happened in 1492. That year, the Christian barbarians, as he calls them,[5] liquidated the Kingdom of Granada, driving the Muslims out of Spain. In the same year, they launched an assault on the world, leading to the extermination or enslavement of millions of Amerindians and Africans. Dussel denounces Eurocentrism,[6] this overwhelming feeling of superiority, “the height of a racist ideology”.[7] He replaces the Eurocentric, falsely universal philosophy with his discourse 'pluriversal', authentic 'dialogue of cultures'[8].
Dussel could have integrated the other great dramas of humanity into his pluriversal vision. This is not what happened. In a 1996 text, Dussel made a strange analysis of Nazism and the shoah. Nazism would be a simple corollary of Eurocentrism. holocaust, it would be the result of a conflict between capitalists: the systematic murder of six million Jews was carried out “with the complicity of the nationalist capitalism of bourgeois Germany... which saw the disappearance of a competitor: transnational Jewish capital."[9] Dussel uses an incredible anti-Jewish argument here, to the point that it must be recalled that the murdered Jewish masses were for the most part miserable, living in extreme poverty.[10]
There are other disappointing aspects to Dussel's text. He passes over in silence the genocides of the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Congolese, Namibians... He never mentions pre-Islamic cultures and civilizations, as if Islam had settled in a vacuum in Europe, Asia and Africa. And he doesn't have a word about dhimmitude and the Jihad ! Why such selective indignation from someone who claims to be rebuilding universalism? Worse, driven by his radical anti-Europeanism, Dussel accuses Europe of having made the “great Muslim civilization” disappear.[11],[12],[13] Andalusia, “the most civilized region of the Mediterranean.” He criticizes Western contempt for Islam and the Caliphate of Cordoba, which is said to have been the origin of the Enlightenment. And Dussel expands on this “great civilization,” with many contradictions and anachronisms.[14].
The reality was different: like all Muslim states, Andalus was based on war, Jihad and the slave trade. In addition, " The great philosophers of Islam were amateurs and did philosophy in their leisure hours: Farabi was a musician, Avicenna a doctor and vizier, Averroes a judge. Avicenna did philosophy at night, surrounded by his disciples. [15] Worse, they have sometimes been accused of heresy. On the other hand, in the European universities which were created since the 12th centurye century, " Philosophy has become an academic subject, from which one can make a living. It is also the work of a mass of non-graduates, of philosophy teachers."
Dussel goes so far as to take up Islamist narratives amalgamating “the racism of Apartheid in South Africa, the discrimination of blacks in the United States, of Turks in Germany, of Palestinians in Israel, of Indians in Latin America in general."[16] ? He even participated in events with the Natives of the Republic, which mix political demands and anti-Judaism.[17] Grosfoguel, Dussel's younger brother, claims that Islamophobia was the driving force behind the Spanish Reconquista and then the development of white capitalism.[18] Unsurprisingly, Grosfoguel is also alongside the Indigènes and Tariq Ramadan,[19] which he describes as ““progressive Muslim reformer”.
In 2022, Illana Weizman published her book Whites like the others? Jews, the blind spot of anti-racism. She courageously pleads for a convergence of all anti-racisms. But wouldn't the right question be to know if Jews are racialized like the others? And with them, all peoples, white or non-white, oppressed and persecuted by the Jihad in the name of the laws of dhimmitude? For obscure reasons, Dussel has wiped the slate clean of the systems of domination and oppression linked to the Jihad. He who aspired to a new universalism, he did not take off beyond a regionalism. Alas, he strongly influences a generation of well-intentioned, but poorly informed people.
