The Ultimate Betrayal

There is a comforting lie circulating in the empire: that “white” people can save themselves through moral posture. That if they read the right books, say the right words, attend the right protests and condemn the right atrocities, they can be absolved of the historical crime(s) that made “white” people “white” in the first place.

Anti-racism, abolitionism, allyship—these have become the sacramental language of liberal redemption. But in reality this is a fantasy.

It is not enough for “white” people to oppose racism. Racism is not an attitude error, it is a material relation. It is not sustained by ignorance alone but by land theft, stolen labor, state power, and a socialized class structure that grants wages—psychic and material—to those classified as “white”. To oppose racism while clinging to whiteness as a social identity is to oppose the symptoms while defending the disease.

Franz Fanon warned Us long ago that the colonizer who wishes to remain “moral” without ceasing to be a colonizer is engaged in a contradiction that can only be resolved through rupture. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote that the colonial world is “a world divided into compartments” and that this division is not simply spatial or kultural but ontological—a division of being itself. One is either on the side of the colonized or the colonizer. There is no neutral ground.

You see whiteness is not merely a phenotype. It is a political identity forged in the crucible of slavery, settler colonialism, and counter-revolution. It is an identity that cannot be reformed, only abolished. Thus, for those who identify as “white” the question is not whether you are anti-racist, but whether you are willing to commit class suicide, destroy whiteness as a lived identity and be reborn into a revolutionary peoplehood. Anything less is charity, charity is not liberation.

Whiteness as a Class Position, Not a Moral Failure

Liberal discourse treats racism as a defect of the heart or mind. New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism (NARN) overstands racism as a structural technology of class rule. Whiteness functions as a cross-class alliance among Europeans and their descendents, binding poor whites to the ruling class through shared access to stolen land, elevated social status, and protection by the colonial state. This is why anti-racism without class suicide is incoherent. Atiba Shanna [James Yaki Sayles] in his book Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth made it clear for Us that the colonial subject is not only oppressed by force, but by a system that recruits inter-mediaries, buffers and collaborators. Whiteness, in the settler colony, is precisely such an intermediary identity. It recruits even the poorest white worker into the project of domination by offering them distance from the colonized and proximity to power.

Thus when a “white” person declares themselves an “ally” while remaining invested in the wages of whiteness—property rights, police protection, national identity, kultural centrality— they are not breaking with colonialism. They are renegotiating their role within it.

Fanon describes this phenomenon when he critiques the “colonized intellectual” who wishes to humanize colonialism rather than destroy it. The same critique applies here. White anti-racists who seek inclusion within the moral economy of the oppressed, without serving their material and political ties to whiteness, are attempting to humanize an inhuman structure.

This is counter-revolutionary.

Why Abolitionism Alone Cannot Save You

In recent years, abolition has become a fashionable word. Police abolition. Prison abolition. Border abolition. Yet too often abolition is framed as a policy demand rather than a total transformation of social relations.

For New Afrikans abolition is inseparable from national liberation. The Police are not an accidental institution, they are the domestic army of a settler state built on the capture of control of Black bodies. Prisons are not broken, they are functioning exactly as designed.

White abolitionists who oppose prisons but do not oppose the settler state that requires them are engaging in abstraction. You wish to dismantle the tool without dismantling the hand that wields them.

Fanon warned that reforms offered by the colonizer are designed to stabilize domination, not end it. Abolition that does not challenge land ownership, sovereignty, and national oppression becomes another reform—a safer, kinder colonialism

This is why abolition is insufficient without disidentification from whiteness. Whiteness is the political identity that authorizes the police, legitimizes the prison, and sanctifies the border. To oppose these institutions while remaining white is to oppose the consequences while affirming the cause

Class Suicide: The Necessary Betrayal

Fanon introduces one of the most dangerous ideas in revolutionary theory: class suicide. He argued that for a revolution to succeed, certain classes must annihilate themselves as classes. This is not metaphorical. It means abandoning the material interests, social privileges, and ideological commitments that bind one to the old order.

As one of the founders of the Class-Suicide theory, Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde explained:

Class suicide by the revolutionary petit-bourgeois leadership amounts to listening to its own revolutionary consciousness and the culture of revolution rather than acting on its immediate material interests as a social class. It must sacrifice its class position, privileges and power through identification with the working masses.¹

In this formation the danger for revolutionaries from relatively privileged classes is not just material co-optation but ideological assimilation into the dominant kulture and economic interests that keep the oppressed in subjection

For Whites of the oppressor nation, class suicide necessarily includes social suicide/white supremacy suicide.

To commit class suicide as a white person means:

• Renouncing the privileges of settler colonial status/whiteness: this involves not only economic and social privileges but also the internalized assumptions that accompany them.

• Centering the voices and political goals of the New Afrikan Nation: advocates from outside the New Afrikan Nation must avoid commanding or defining the struggle on behalf of the New Afrikan Nation.

• Transforming one’s own identity and practice through long-term engagement: Genuine solidarity is not a one-off action but a sustained process of learning, unlearning, accountability, and shared struggle.

• Subordinating oneself to the leadership and discipline of the New Afrikan nation: Fanon was ruthless on this point. He argued that the colonized must lead their own liberation, not because they are morally superior but because only they have an objective interest in destroying the colonial system completely. Those who benefit from the system, even marginally, will always be tempted to compromise.

This is not self-flagellation. It is political rebirth.

Atilba emphasized that Fanon did not call for guilt, but for transformation. Guilt leaves the structure intact. Transformation destroys it. The white revolutionary must cease to exist as white and come into being as something else—a revolutionary subject forged through practice, sacrifice, and accountability.

This is why New Afrikans have always been and should always be wary of white participation that is not grounded in discipline. History is littered with examples of white radicals who retreated the moment the struggle demanded real loss—loss of status, loss of safety, loss of legitimacy.

Social Development Written in Disappearance

For those of us who study social development eventually notice a pattern: when the struggle intensifies, white radicals disappear.

They are present at the beginning—at the rallies, the study groups, the early organizing meetings. They speak the language fluently. They quote Marx, Angela Davis etc… They wear the symbols, chant the slogans, post the statements. But when the struggle moves from discourse to danger, from critique to confrontation, from protest to power, the numbers thin. When repression comes, when stakes rise, when consequences sharpen, many retreat back into the safety of whiteness.

This is not a personal failure. It is a structural tendency. White nationalism in the settler colony has historically functioned as a pressure valve rather than a revolutionary force. It absorbs dissent, gives it an aesthetic and a vocabulary and then disperses when the system threatens to impose real costs. The retreat is often justified in the language of “strategy”, “self-care”, or “long-term sustainability” but the culture is the same: abandonment of the oppressed at a moment when solidarity is most needed.

This pattern is not mysterious, it is the predictable result of a radicalism that refuses to sever itself from whiteness as a class position.

Whiteness as an Escape Hatch

Whiteness is not just privilege. When repression intensifies, white radicals possess options that New Afrikans do not. They can relocate without suspicion. They can blend back into civil society. They can be reabsorbed into institutions—universities, nonprofits, media outlets etc…—that reward dissent so long as it is detached from revolutionary consequences.

New Afrikans do not have this luxury. The State does not allow Us to become neutral. New Afrikans are marked bodies within a racialized colonial order. Even Our silence is read as a threat. Even our reformism is criminalized. There is no retreat into innocence for a people whose very existence is framed as a problem to be managed.

This asymmetry produces a fundamental contradiction in multiracial movements that refuse to confront whiteness directly. When risk escalates, those who can leave often do. Those who can’t are left to face repression alone. Fanon overstood this dynamic clearly. In The Wretched of the Earth, he observed that the colonized have no interest in gradualism because they live under conditions that make patience lethal. The colonizer—and those aligned with the colonizer—can afford delay. Delay is itself a privilege.

White radicals who have not committed class suicide retain access to delay. That access shapes their politics whether they acknowledge it or not.

Liberal Co-optation and the Professionalization of Dissent

One of the most effective counterinsurgency strategies of the settler state has been the professionalization of white dissent.

Universities, foundations, media institutions, and nonprofit organizations absorb white radicals by converting rebellion into expertise. The Revolutionary becomes a consultant. The organizer becomes a program officer. The abolitionist becomes a policy analyst. The language remains radical, but the function changes

Atiba Shanna warned, following Fanon, that the greatest danger to revolutionary struggle is not repression alone, but co-optation that redirects revolutionary energy into harmless channels. White radicals are especially vulnerable to this process because the system is designed to rehabilitate them.

The settler state has no interest in rehabilitating New Afrikans as revolutionaries. It seeks to neutralize Us through imprisonment, surveillance, or death. White radicals by contrast, are offered platforms, grants, fellowship and visibility—provided they translate liberation into reform and revolution into rhetoric.

This is how White radicalism becomes a career rather than a commitment. You see this is not simply hypocrisy. It is a function of class position. Whiteness allows dissent to be monetized rather than punished. That fact alone disqualifies unruptured white radicalism from revolutionary leadership.

The Myth of Equal Partnership

i touched on why white radicals must submit to the leadership of New Afrikans/the oppressed earlier, however i feel the need to elucidate upon it more in depth here.

Calls for “equal partnership”, “shared leadership” and “coalition politics” often obscure the reality that New Afrikans are an oppressed nation, not a demographic interest group.

Coalitions that refuse to acknowledge national oppression reproduce colonial dynamics under a progressive banner. They ask the colonized to negotiate their liberation with members of the colonizing group who have not relinquished their structural power.

As i pointed out earlier, Fanon was ruthless on this point. He argued that the colonized must lead their own liberation, not because they are morally superior, but because only they have an objective interest in destroying the colonial system completely. Those who benefit from the system even marginally, will always be tempted to compromise.

NARN therefore rejects the idea that leadership should be shared simply because oppression is interconnected. Interconnection does not erase hierarchy. Solidarity does not erase contradiction.

White radicals who resist New Afrikan leadership often do so unconsciously, framing their resistance as concern about “authoritarianism”, “exclusivity”, or “identity politics”. But beneath these concerns lies an unwillingness to relinquish control.

Class suicide requires precisely that relinquishment.

Betrayal as a Political Category

From the perspective of the oppressed, betrayal is not an emotional accusation—it is a political category.

When White radicals retreat, moderate, or defect under pressure, the consequences are borne disproportionately by New Afrikans. Informants are produced. Movements are exposed. Security kultures are weakened. Strategies are diluted. The cost of white retreat is paid in New Afrikans’ imprisonment and death.

The historical memory informs New Afrikan skepticism. Distrust is not cynicism, it is survival.

Atiba emphasized that Fanon did not romanticize unity. He insisted that unity must be forged through struggle and tested through crisis. Those who remain when the cost is high demonstrate their commitment. Those who leave reveal the limits of theirs.

Why this History Demands Class Suicide

The repeated failures of white radicalism are not inevitable. They are the result of an unresolved contradiction: attempting to wage revolution while remaining socially white.

Class suicide is the only mechanism capable of resolving this contradiction. It eliminates the escape hatch. It forecloses the option of retreat. It binds the individual’s fate to that of the New Afrikan Nation.

As i aforesaid, when a white person commits class suicide:

• Your material interests no longer align with the settler order.

• Your safety is no longer guaranteed by racial identity.

• Your future becomes inseparable from the success of the liberation struggle.

Only under these conditions does solidarity become structurally reliable.

This is why the Republic of New Afrika does not—and cannot—base inclusion on sentiment or ideology alone. Revolutionary movements that fail to draw these lines invite sabotage, dilution and collapse

The Door is Narrow

Anti-racism is not enough. Abolition is not enough. Even Solidarity is not enough if it is not accompanied by rupture.

The door into revolutionary identity is narrow because liberation is not a performance—it is a transformation. For white people, that transformation demands betrayal: betrayal of Whiteness, of the settler state, of inherited privilege.

Only on the other side of that betrayal does the possibility of revolutionary belonging emerge.

New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism does not deny the possibility of white revolutionaries. It denies the possibility of revolutionary whiteness. Those are not the same.

Only those who have broken decisively with whiteness, who have accepted New Afrikan leadership, who have demonstrated loyalty through sustained practice, may be recognized as komrades and under specific conditions granted forms of political belonging within the Republic of New Afrika.

But this belonging is not symbolic. It is governed by discipline, accountability, and Umajaa—not as abstraction, but as lived unity forged in struggle.

We are our own Liberators

REBUILD TO WIN

Komrade Shine White

1. Tom Meisenhelder, “Amilcar Cabral’s theory of class suicide and revolutionary socialism,” https://libcom.org/article/amilcar-cabrals-theory-class-suicide-and-revolutionary-socialism-tom-meisenhelder.