Whiteness Is A Condition, That’s Nutrition For Sedition…White Superiority Ideology Has America On The Brink
Whiteness Is A Condition, That’s Nutrition For Sedition…White Superiority Ideology Has America On The Brink
6 min read
NOTE: REPOST: I wrote this nearly 4 years ago on January 19th, 2021. Reposting because it's all the same issues, problems, roadblocks, and stupidity in the air!
ICYMI, the latest social media challenge taking ‘murica by storm is called #SocietalCollapse, where a ragtag collection of ideas, idiots, and the internet, threaten to napalm the American experiment and splatter the guts of the federal republic all over your vintage finery. Fuckery is surely afoot and though there’s a myriad of factors that helped birth this insurrection, the test results are in, and Whiteness, you are indeed the father.
The proof is in Black and White, both metaphorically and literally since the same fraudulent ideology of Black inferiority and White superiority that started America, is seriously threatening to end it. The country was found on the twin bill of land theft and genocide of Native Americans and the chattel enslavement of Africans; both so insanely insidious, that it was only possible with White Superiority Ideology (WSI) as a guiding principle.
America has remained painfully recalcitrant in its acknowledgment of the true devastation of slavery and continues to deny the existence of systemic racism and its historical, generational effects on African-Americans. If I throw a bone to brevity and bounce past the part where I talk about the legacy of slavery, then I propagate White American’s seemingly genetic predisposition to avoid or insignficate (new word alert) any slave legacy talk at all.
“The first rule of slave legacy is you never talk about slave legacy”…tagged up in bathroom stalls at Hobby Lobby and Prius dealerships?
The abolition of slavery in America wasn’t a repudiation of White Superiority Ideology. It’s not like anti-slavery White folks were pro-Black. Abolition was a scintilla of humanity after centuries of godless actions by supposedly godly people and driven primarily by political and business considerations. Post emancipation and White people still firmly held that Black people were inferior based on the concept of race, which America created to justify the chattel enslavement of ONLY Black people.
Pro-slavery, anti-slavery; it didn’t matter, White folks, in general, were abhorred at the thought of living, working, schooling, or praying amongst Blacks and set up post-slavery America so that Black and White lives had minimal intersection and that the inferior Black man always had a second class existence. Slavery was a crime against humanity which America, the perpetrator, has not atoned for with true sorrow, remorse, repentance, and reparation. In fact, the country has purposely kicked that atonement can down the road.
It’s been kicked so far down the road, White folks now try to utilize the “long time ago” defense and untether their current selves to the slavery legacy, while simultaneously benefiting from the white privilege and financial benefit which that legacy still provides.
But slavery can’t be distant history because America is still young and young countries have no distant history. In fact, the young history of America can be illustrated through our recent New Year’s Eve celebration. So when 2020 was on its way out and people celebrated with some cold Stella Artois and shots of Bushmills, they not only got smashed on NYE but did it with two adult beverage brands that are actually older than America.
Hey, emancipation was only one hundred and fifty-six years age, which is also known as Betty White’s childhood…though I personally feel that for far too many White people, the very existence of African-Americans is just an annoying reminder about slavery!
So here we are in the year 2021, fifty-seven years since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and the White Superiority Ideology is stronger than ever in America and fueling the current GOP and far-right led insurrection movement. To keep it a buck, White Superiority Ideology affects White folks on all sides of the political spectrum.
It’s an implicit bias born, bred, and breathed into white folks from the womb to the tomb, so the Super Whitey who’s impervious to the wretched WSI and “doesn’t see color” is a mayonnaise-based myth. The White Superiority Ideology has dominated American life so thoroughly, that tons of Black people are infected by it as well!
It’s created a curious case of White people mad at other White people for riding too hard on the equality thing when those same White people actually aren’t riding hard enough at all. Politically, America has spent the entirety of the post-Civil Rights era, singing a song to Black people and the lyrics are contradictory, confusing, disrespectful, and exploitive.
The Democrats songwriters song lyrics are like:
“you can do it I know you can
If you vote for me we can defeat the man
I know life’s hard
So I put welfare on a card
I flip systems like a spatula
See it’s a Black Batchelor
If you give me your support
I’ll give reparations more thought”
Straight pandering, making no real change just looking for the Black vote to stay in office and throwing a few morsels so they can feel good about themselves.
While the GOP songwriters’ lyrics are like:
“stop ya blood claat crying
Hard work equals success
So you’re clearly not trying
White privilege is crap
Says so right on Wikipedia
Slavery gets a bad wrap
by the left-wing media”
So now, American politics has turned into an actual blood sport, with the two-party system synthesized down to an absurdist reboot of Hatfield & McCoy, traced back to and guided by the legacy of White Superiority Ideology. So ridiculous that It actually politicized wearing a mask during a viral pandemic.
GOP and the right in general, think that the country has gone too far and want to tear it all down to claw back the changes and revert to the mythical time when America represented greatness. Angry at what America has become, the right-wing mind is p-noid about the government’s overreaching and immigrants overrunning. They’re also scared witless that the country is losing its identity while the liberal mainstream media lies and hides the real truth.
Groups like Qanon, Confederates, Proud Boys, Boogaloo, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Anti-Maskers, NSC-131, No White Guilt, Unite The Right, Rise Above Nation, Neo-Nazis, and more have their own irrational hate aimed at either the democrats, immigration policies, liberal media or big government.
Hell, a Proud Boy might think that Qanon folks are kinda cuckoo, a Three Percenter might think the Confederates should get over a war from two hundred years ago and Anti-maskers might not agree with the Neo-Nazis. Yet most of the folks that stormed Congress can find common ground: they don’t like Black people!
In fact, most of those groups’ battles against the government, democrats, and the media are really just proxy wars fought against their original enemies which are Blacks in America. Their original hate stemming from America’s original sin is now combined with a profound fear of losing the majority power in America, based on the changing demographics of the country.
But this isn’t just the thinking of a small faction of Americans either. Based on my back of the envelope math, it’s roughly One Hundred and Nineteen Million people of voting age that fux with Trump, and a majority of them are white folks seemingly angry at life in general, so all that discontent and dissent won’t simply blow over. It’s only going to simmer and spill out during Biden’s administration, with a steady stream of domestic terrorist acts by far-right groups.
White people have brought this insurrection and potential fall of American society on themselves. They’ve never atoned for slavery; the biggest issue in the history of the country. The process of atoning would have forced White people to deal with the reality of slavery and the subsequent systems of discrimination, embrace the evil they committed, and paid out reparations for those crimes against humanity.
But America didn’t do the work to dispel the White Superiority Ideology and invalidate its legitimacy. That would have been healthy for the country. But instead, the poison of White Superiority Ideology has flourished unchecked and is now feeding the insurrection, acting as nutrition for sedition, bringing the country back to a civil war mentality.
It’s pitting White folks against White folks, even though they’re two sides of the same coin, with neither group actually doing right by Black people. We can’t lose sight that the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing! And America’s main thing is to atone for slavery, heal internally and grow as a nation…but that WSI and the national embrace of Whiteness just keeps getting in the way!
All that AND Breonna Taylor’s killers have STILL not been arrested.
Originally published at https://dickburroughs.medium.com on January 19, 2021.
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