Preface to White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
Let's workshop this preface to my book-length lyrical essay (White Supremacy on Its Deathbed), which aims to promote true black excellence by exposing the harmful implications of mainstream antiracism
I promised that I would get this out by the end of February. I failed in that. But I have a full draft ready now, however rough around the edges it remains. I will distribute it all over the next few days. As usual, there will be no paywall.
For whatever it might be worth to say, I have grown quite tired of writing and editing this project. In general, I never enjoy diving into the political muck of the day. But this piece is somewhat personal—tied, remotely at least, to personal experiences around the “cancelation” of my professorship, a cancelation “justified” on grounds that “my creative writing has proven unsettling especially to vulnerable populations.” The idea of vulnerable populations like black Americans having to be treated with such velvety kid gloves that they need to be sheltered—at a university of all places!—even from mere words, that rubbed me the wrong way (to say the least). And when it became clear that such sheltering was being carried out in the opposite-day names of “antiracism” and “black-empowerment”—well, I am too much on the spectrum, so to say, to tolerate such audacious hypocrisy! Treating blacks as precious super-citizens (a treatment justified, as a matter of dire social justice, on the bogus notion that there is an ongoing “total war” against black bodies) largely serves to humiliate and hobble them into perpetual invalids stuck on a plantation of dependency. Given the long-history of preventing blacks from being the masters of their own fate, the long history of grooming them to feel at home not being the masters of their own fate, such treatment is a sick slap in the face.
But it is the easy route. It the easy route for much more reasons than that humans are resistant to change. Who among blacks (aside from a few Shelby Steeles or Glenn Lourys) could resist the temptation to weaponize one’s institutionally-backed victim status, weaponize it (a) to convince themselves they are never to blame for their own shortcomings (because it is white supremacy’s fault) and (b) to guilt trip special favors everywhere they can? And who could resist the temptation to feel good about oneself, to purge the oppressor guilt that society drumbeats into every white skull, by dishing out special dispensations to those made innocent from all their oppression—those beaten dogs among men? And look what results. Those dispensations only hurt blacks more, distracting blacks from fixing their own shit and taking accountability. That then fuels their victimology narrative and the righteousness by which they engage in emotional extortion of the ones who “hurt them,” the ones supposedly behind all their failures. And the cycle continues.
I see antiblackness in antiracism, in short. And this project is my way of purging my emotions around that. (It is also is my way, if I am to be transparent, of purging my emotions around—my disgust for—the tartan-scarf- and slouchy-beanie-wearing liberal whites behind so much of it.)
After the next few weeks we will return to typical operations: poetry and short stories (and a smattering of academic work).
Preface to White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
Here we find poetry, the breathy repetitions of an urgent Ginsberg, and scholarship, the bullet-point articles of a quantitative sociologist, merged in one book-length jeremiad bound to rankle genre purists—and anyone, for that matter, needing a clean line between journalistic fact and dystopian fantasy. Through its dissatisfaction and lament, through its ridicule and satire, through its playful leaps between various literary forms, the overarching aim of this lyrical essay hopefully rings clear: to motivate a movement of black empowerment that really does empower.
Highlighting the manifold threats posed to black Americans by the so-called “antiracist movement”—that is the primary means by which I pursue my aim. The antiracist movement, in its mainstream form at least, is nourished ultimately on the bogus notion that white supremacy—although “now invisible most of the time, to most eyes”—flourishes today well beyond merely the American marrow from which it supposedly can never be removed: in restaurant menus and Rachmaninoff piano concertos; in defense of “open discourse” and “free speech” and “artistic expression”; in calculus textbooks and triggering names like “John” and “Karen” and “Rebecca”; in handshakes and hugs across the color line; in expectations of punctuality and etiquette and excellence; in museum exhibits and urban design and fast-food packaging; even in black-on-black violence and black-on-black love alike. The movement, propelled by a lucrative engine that spectacularizes race and weaponizes victimhood and essentializes helplessness (all under the disgusting guise of “progress”), harms black people enough, so goes my central thesis, that it almost proves the very thing my essay rejects: that white supremacy runs largely unchecked in every cell of every organ. To put the supreme irony in different terms, the best evidence for the foundational deceit of so-called “antiracism” (namely, that white supremacy enjoys an especially pervasive grip today, roused out of its relative dormancy in the heart of America) are the various degrading things done in the name of “dismantling white supremacy.”
What harms do I have in mind? Laying all the sufferings of black people, all the unflattering disparities (especially in health and crime and education), at the feet of a purportedly unconquerable white supremacy, while at the same time classifying the call for blacks to look at the ways they themselves contribute to their own suffering as a blaming-the-victim expression of white supremacy—that is the first main harm (see especially Chapters 3 and 4). Spreading the narrative that blacks have been and continue to be so victimized by a flourishing antiblack agenda, one whose traumas are inherited by each generation, that they need the special dispensations it would be cruel and unfair to withhold (a narrative of victimology that grooms them into leaners as opposed to lifters, which only reinforces their inferiority)—that is the second main harm (see especially Chapters 3 and 4). Pushing the notion that past discrimination and injustice is righted only through retributive discrimination and injustice, and yet insisting (repeating and repeating in an attempt at grand hypnosis) that anything done to right past wrongs can never count as racist because whites hold the reins of power—that is the third main harm (see especially Chapter 5). These harms really add up in a time where black people are primarily represented in the media, especially the music media, as more hypersexual and more hyperviolent than imaginable even by the very racists of yesteryear who concocted these stereotypes in the first place, these stereotypes to dehumanize black people and legitimize their continued use as chattel (see Chapter 2)—a hoe-thug image (one too often held up as aspirational in black communities) that if not itself (as some antiracists will say) “a form of liberation from whitey’s longstanding bio-power over black bodies,” then at least “a means of shining a documentarian light upon the depredations of the currently unchecked antiblackness indelibly baked into the genetic code of the western world” (think: the most gruesome photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki aftermath).
Bringing these points together, what do we get? A witches’ brew. The antiracist movement serves to humiliate and hobble blacks while at the same time exacerbating racial tensions—stoking black outrage (especially with the help of social-media misinformation) and baiting whites (the majority population) to engage in aggressions that will further “prove” the antiracist point as to how dire the antiblack sentiments in this country are. The latter issue receives significant treatment in this essay. As I see it (and as is expected to some degree from any movement whose livelihood depends on what it fights), the antiracist movement carries out the self-fulfilling function of midwifing the very antiblack undercurrents it claims to combat. It is a hustle as cunning as it is toxic. Primed to decode even the most innocuous words and body tics as “racist violence” worthy of immediate job termination and social banishment, primed to push its punking program to the extremes of nitpicking at the racism demonstrated even in whites groveling in apology for their “whiteness”—the movement provokes precisely what it prophesizes: a “backlash of white fragility” that, likely to be coded in racial terms (given that it was set up that way, and given how unnuanced and dramatic and intellectually lazy Americans are), will allow it to say “Told you so!” and thereby entrench its tentacles even deeper into hearts and minds and institutions.
It should be clear, from the above sketch, why I have chosen the Sowellesque title “White Supremacy on Its Deathbed.” It should also be clear, for the same reason, why—after the introduction of each chapter beyond the first, an introduction that wonders what white supremacy might do from its deathbed to carry out some element or other of its antiblack agenda—each subsequent paragraph repeats the same refrain: “it could just sit back and revel in our world where. . . .” What I am saying, in effect, is that white supremacy, although too beaten down to pursue its antiblack mission, could find succor in its dying breaths—if not even perhaps miraculous resurgence—in watching on its ceiling-corner TV all the things carried out in the name of black power: from workplace diversity trainings stereotyping black inferiority, to school boards imposing racial guilt; from top-down mandates to decrease arrests and school suspensions of blacks (as if it were purely a matter of them being targeted), to treating blacks as “super citizens” deserving of special leeway and choice cuts and pampered protections from unsettling ideas or even from certain sounds or certain visual marks; from calling out white supremacy as being the source of all black setbacks, to filling the music charts with black performers (even though the nearly monolithic image they present perpetuates degrading stereotypes). How could white supremacy on its deathbed not feel some sort of warm-fuzzy surge at seeing blacks at once tainted and spoiled and maligned (a veritable chef’s kiss) to the point of being unable to hold their own heads up in the civilized world without assistance and without being looked at as thugs and hoes—and all through efforts rolling back social progress, ironically right as we were on the verge of going colorblind, perhaps even to the point of starting a race war?
By keeping black Americans shackled to inflated notions of persecution while fomenting (in such an obviously middle-school-playground move) the white rage it predicts, antiracism plays enough of an antiblack role that I would have thought—if only my tinfoil hat were a tad thicker—it was designed by white-supremacist machination (instead of the banal truth of the matter: that it is as organic, as explainable by the selective effects of competing grabs for power, as Paley’s eye). White supremacy, after all, need not lift a finger when “antiracists,” their cynical manipulations and self-serving hype more befitting P. T. Barnum than Thurgood Marshall, prove so effective at keeping blacks on a plantation of dependency while stoking the very antiblack sentiments that legitimize their movement—profiting, despite the long-term effects, ultimately from divisiveness (like most of us do, to be fair, in our algorithm-powered outrage economy where the hand of selection finds pandemonium fittest).
