Asad Haider > Quotes

“But it is possible to reject racism while still falling victim to the ideology of race. Taking the category of a race as a given, as a foundation for political analysis, still reproduces this ideology. This is not innocent, because in fact the ideology of race is produced by racism, not the other way around.”
― Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology

“When Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, my sixth-grade teacher had us sit down and write a paragraph explaining why such an act was necessary. But I knew that on the other side of the television screen there was a mass of human beings who saw things differently.”
― Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology

“So the Black Panther Party had to navigate between two concerns. They recognized that black people had been oppressed on a specifically racial basis, and so they had to organize autonomously. But at the same time, if you talked about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren’t talking about getting power in the hands of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop would be replaced by a black cop.”
― Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology

“Intellectuals and activists allowed politics to be reduced to the policing of our language, to the questionable satisfaction of provoking white guilt, while the institutional structures of racial and economic oppression persisted”
― Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology