The Black Alliance for Peace AFRICOM Watch Bulletin #41 analyzes how white supremacy operates through the actions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in an interview with Gacheke Gachihi,coordinator of the Mathare Social Justice Center in Kenya and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group. The AFRICOM Watch Bulletin also has the latest news from the African continent.
White supremacy is the combined ideological and structural expression of “white power.” In its ideological expression, it posits that the descendants of people of the territory/idea referred to as Europe represent the highest examples of human development. That their culture, social institutions, religions, and way of life are inherently and naturally superior. This position is combined with what BAP calls the global structures and institutions of white supremacy, the material means to maintain and advance global white power: The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), the global banking system, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. dollar hegemony.
For BAP, white supremacy cannot be reduced to individualized attitudes and values just among people identified as white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is ideologically embedded into every aspect of U.S. and European society to the extent that it has become normalized and obscured as general common sense. White supremacy is fundamental to the Pan-European Colonial/Capitalist Patriarchy that began with the invasion of the “Americas” in 1492.
The IMF and World Bank are making moves in Africa against states like Kenya and Zambia, both of which are even more vulnerable as a result of the global economic crisis stemming from the capitalist reaction to the pandemic and the ongoing war in Europe. We must confront this important aspect of the new context of neo-colonial domination in Africa. The upcoming International Month of Action Against AFRICOM BAP has organized will deal with this. Africa and the rest of the world cannot be free until all peoples are able to realize the right of sovereignty and the right to live free of domination.
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin speaks with Gacheke Gachihi, who is the coordinator of the Mathare Social Justice Center in Kenya and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Can you discuss the role of the IMF and World Bank in white supremacy?
Gacheke Gachihi: The World Bank and IMF have for too long perpetuated a racist stratification between developed and developing countries that is the result of centuries of colonialism and has served as a gatekeeper of a global economic system that continues to privilege the developed world of European countries and colonial settler-states such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
If the World Bank is earnest about putting an end to the scourge of white supremacy, it must work towards upending centuries of ruthless domination and exploitation—including systematic racial subjugation, colonization, wars, genocides and enslavement—which have produced a global economy that continues to benefit developed countries to the social, economic and environmental detriment of developing countries, Black countries in particular. The white supremacy of the World Bank and the IMF is holding African and Caribbean countries in debt bondage.
Colonialism is a structure, not an event. We see this in the global trade system. Economies that were colonized are at greater risk of getting locked into the production of raw materials and low-tech goods—a new form of colonialism. And we see this in global power relations. Africa has been a double victim. First, as a target of the colonial project. Second, African countries are underrepresented in the international institutions that were created after the Second World War, before most of them had won independence. The nations that came out on top more than seven decades ago have refused to contemplate the reforms needed to change power relations in international institutions.
AWB: How does this colonial, white supremacist structure play out in practice?
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