The Delusion of White Supremacy
I know I’m not alone in feeling exhausted today. Watching members of Trump’s cult and white supremacist followers flood the Capitol building while police stood by and in some cases abetted really took a lot out of me. But what’s really taking the wind out of my sails today is all the white folks pointing at that as though “they” aren’t “we”. What we watched yesterday was the infinite snake of Manifest Destiny settler colonial white supremacy eating its own tail; a fast motion, live broadcast version of what’s been happening to our democracy for decades.
The thing is, that wasn’t an aberration, it was the system working as designed. The snake we saw eat itself yesterday uncoiled itself from the Tea Party’s Gadsden flag, a natural next action for those who take the lessons of entitlement we get in white America to the extreme. But those lessons are in all of us who were raised with white skin in this country. And we have to own the wounds inflicted as our wounds in order to heal them.
My mother texted me yesterday, “white privilege is like coronavirus, if I haven’t been impacted by it I don’t believe it’s real”. But I think it’s more like gravity — whether your recognize it or not, it’s impacting you. If you’re white, you might think you stick to the earth through hard work and perseverance, but that’s a delusion. White supremacy is a delusion. Race itself is a delusion. But those delusions are literally the foundations of this nation. We would not exist without a disregard of indigenous and native life, and a delusion that this land and its resources were (are) available for the taking. We would not exist without a devaluation of Black life, and the mental jiujitsu that led to “the peculiar institution” of heritable chattel slavery as well as the 3/5 compromise. We racialized all other people who came to this land, and folded them into our white supremacist delusions, and continue to do so today.
So white folks, we need to stop comparing ourselves to MAGA-hat wearers, Confederate flag wavers, members of white supremacist militia groups as the bad folks to make ourselves feel good. We benefit from the same systems they are expending so much effort to uphold, and it is on us to dismantle those systems. Get educated, get involved, and get out there.
If you don’t know how to get started, some organizations to connect to:
