Section 3 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"
Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that explores how mainstream antiracism, as if the handmaiden of white supremacy, undermines efforts to address deep-rooted issues faced by blacks
To starve any motivation to address the tangible causes of black deficiency on so many measures; to undercut the will to attend to the degraded cultural and economic and educational conditions rippling out from centuries of being fuck-doll chattel (only to be denigrated and stifled on many fronts after “liberation”); to dissuade blacks from ever seeing themselves as playing some part in their failings (a necessary requirement for internally-driven growth)—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I don't give a fuck, nigga I'm with that gun violence / I'm with that gun violence, I'm with that gun violence”), increased incarceration and addiction, and decreased education and wellbeing, in so many black communities is regarded almost universally as a sign of an undefeatable white supremacy rather than of diseased practices and attitudes—practices and attitudes that, although tied more or less to historical oppression, cannot be blamed in any seriousness on some alive-and-well white supremacy: celebration of violence and drugs (especially, to use the words of Plug Two, in “their [let-me-prove-I’m] sicker-than [you] rap” about “cocaine and crack / which brings sickness to blacks . . . clappers and gats / makin' the whole sick world collapse”); mockery of peace-loving nerds (light-bearers like Plug Two) for being “fake black pussy niggas”; dependence on government assistance; glorification especially of cold-blooded disregard for how behavior affects others; anti-gratitude futilitist feelings of there is no point trying in a white-run world set on black destruction; and so on).
It could just sit back and watch our world where the various reasons why the black man shot the black people he did become obscured, thus disallowing the chance for targeted cure, by saying fatalistically and ignorantly “it was because of internalized white supremacy.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, on feel-good grounds of “Let’s not feed into longstanding notions of black inferiority,” it is deemed evil (or at least pointlessly insensitive) to acknowledge the statistics about blacks having lower IQs than whites, poorer academic performance no matter the income level, lesser likelihood to build positive social networks, greater likelihood to be involved in violent crime—the very statistics that, were they spotlighted instead of cloaked, would invigorate a mission to ferret out the real causes, the causes beyond the monolithic and unhelpfully vague and downright unreal one (pervasive antiblack racism) that, in being posited again and again as the end-of-discussion answer (as if sociological insights were so easy to arrive at), makes seem like child’s play a science that should be one of the most difficult (given the array of variables and hard-to-predict agents with which it deals).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, instead of putting in the hard work of addessing root causes (like cultural attitudes and lack of exposure to the variety of areas where blacks again and again underperform), we embolden the strategy that is understandably more attractive to those who value lazy sensationalism over black wellbeing: the much-easier and money-making and social-capital-yielding strategy of ridiculing tests and high-standard teachers and selection committees and traditional expectations and the like as all being “racist tools of an institutional war against black bodies.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, instead of addressing the poisons and traumas and diseases of poverty and diminished educational exposure and overburdened single-mom homes and joblessness and gang activity affecting blacks especially, we focus on how traumatizing it is for blacks ever to hear or read the word “nigger,” even just “nigga,” from a white person—harmful enough, so white liberal rich kids on campus (desperate to prove how “down” they are) might model for their black peers, to warrant crumbling into teary balls of (playacted) delicacy, of (sham) pathological sensitivity, of (fake) woundedness, at any word that merely sounds close to it.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, instead of working to ween blacks from their addiction to the soothing-but-infantilizing treatment procured by playing the victim (an addiction made worse by the notion that it is a black blessing rather than a black blight), we focus on how traumatizing it is for black students to walk past (“day after day, and on a modern-day college campus of all places!”) a statue of Thomas Jefferson, “a no-good barbarian who slept with his slaves”—harmful enough for some blacks, those really buying into and selling their performance, to say in phone conversations with their parents perhaps what they have been instigated and coached to say by their well-to-do white peers, who in neckerchiefs above their “Whiteness Is NOT Okay” t-shirts have been blasting the statue with red paint and demanding its removal: that they fear, if the removal campaign does not go through, “all the white supremacists on campus will be emboldened, and maybe even start lynching us from that very statue.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“May I kick a lil' somethin' for the G's / And take your nigga only for the weekend / Late night creepin' ain't no cuffin' / I'on keep 'em, send your nigga back home”), every white-male portrait in the top western museums from the centuries of western slavery—if not covered (well, covered at least in the groin region since that area “can’t but draw some vulnerable populations to thoughts of black-body rape”)—must at least include a placard with information about the sitter’s link to slavery, no matter how many degrees of separation “so that we never forget that the war against black folx today isn’t coming from nowhere and that it is, in fact, coming from places long thought to be above the brutalities of white supremacy: the very world of art!”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I smoked all his weed and I told him to leave / Use him for his money, that's all that I need”), a museum mural by “just another dead white scumbag” (an artist who only five years prior, like for the dozens of decades before that, was celebrated as “a genius”) is painted over, yes, for having a relatively minuscule section in the corner where black slaves are depicted—painted over, no, not by rogue protesters, but (on the orders of the very curators tasked, ironically, with preserving art) by a janitor (black for the cameras and so for the sake of recompensive spectacle) on grounds, ironically once again, that “black bodies being ordered around like mere tools is harmful for black children to see, especially so close to the food court. We hope other museums will follow our lead in championing more inclusive pictures of reality."
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Play with my pussy, but don't play with my emotions / If you spend some money, then maybe I just might fuck ya / When I shake that ass, I'ma do that shit in slow motion / You got a whole lotta cash, and nigga, you know I want it”), art caretakers (tasked with safekeeping art)—well, more accurately, art commissars (tasked with making sure art signals an attitude shamefully called “progressive” by internet bullies)—refuse to defend the portrait of the Welsh slaveowner on artistic grounds or on historical-accuracy grounds or on grounds that people do not have to visit the wing in which it is located or on grounds that depiction does not entail endorsement or so on, but instead agree that the piece is an example of “nonconsensual art" to be removed from display and “to be put in storage, if it is lucky.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I gotta face all of my opps, don't wanna die (I won't die) / These niggas berry, berry sweet just like some pie (nigga pussy) / Ayy, I put that ball on your eye just like a stye (boom, boom) / Ayy, I got a beam on the end, you can't hide (lil' bitch) / Ayy, he ain't a soldier, he a ho up in disguise (that nigga ho) / Ayy, play with that gang-gang, and that's your demise (nigga died) / Ayy, execution so your mind just gon' get fried (leave him fried)” ), the university administration, under the guidance of the office of equity and inclusion, finally decides to break apart the whole side of the rec center on grounds that “our vulnerable black students are not stupid: they are well aware that beneath the recent coat of paint (a half-measure as cowardly as Sam Houston’s merely voting against the westward expansion of slavery) still remains the ghostly faces of Sam and his wife (white supremacists who don’t deserve a spotlight, however much they ‘treated their slaves like family’).”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Hit your block with them guys, hop out, kill people / Got a Glock four-five, and it's real lethal / Bitch, you know we fry, we really kill people”), plantation paraphernalia—at least when institutions are too “insensitive to destroy them”—must be covered with drop cloths, “for the safety of vulnerable groups,” as if they were cursed items needing to be stored in the weekly-blessed occult room of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“You know who you fucking with? A nigga who got shit to lose / I got niggas that rob you and rape your bitch if they in the mood”), we focus on how traumatizing it is for black students to see “the Nazi act of janitors, sometimes sadly even black janitors,” scrubbing BLM graffiti off churches and federal buildings and statues of revered “dead white males” and even war memorials for soldiers who sacrificed their lives to stop the slave trade and literal Nazis.
It could just sit back and watch our world where—to drive home how much “this country has returned to a bygone era of antiblack racism,” a thesis that all the mainstream publishers (and, of course, the Chinese Communist Party) pay top dollar to see spread (in works that, rather than engage in the “hurtful violence” of questioning whether it really is true, examine its impacts and the subtle mechanisms by which it is maintained)—whites and blacks alike will start detecting white-supremacist paraphernalia and white-supremacist people all over the place, just as the witch-fearing citizens of Salem detected spectral images of suspicious neighbors (to a point where it actually became a purpose-giving industry).
It could just sit back and watch our world where the early sightings of white-supremacy’s growing reign take place, of course, on the very college grounds whose classrooms birth the hysteria, which is why these sightings will be taken seriously enough to trigger “campus lockdown” or “immediate evacuation for the safety of vulnerable groups”: a noose on the ground (or at least a symbol of one “meant to provoke fear in black students already shouldering too much in a predominately-white world on a predominately-white campus learning a predominantly-white curriculum”), which the police—white police, mind you—will insist, thereby “invalidating” student truth, is “just a looped zip-tie”; or a KKK member complete with a Kunta whip, which even after surveillance footage reveals to have been a Dominican friar in traditional garb holding mere rosary beads will still invite suspicion among antiracist students since “In these hard times a priest of all people should have known the trauma his resemblance would trigger.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where city blocks are shut down after purple-haired white progressives in scarves mistake construction-worker spray paint in the street as attempts at swastikas, and where even after the truth is discovered the construction team is still ordered to use different symbols and to undergo sensitivity training—all a convenient and welcomed distraction, like the compulsive stewing over past injustice, from the tough work of addressing the real problems that plague black communities (problems that include both the compulsive stewing over past injustice and the out-of-touch idea of our country being too steeped in white supremacy for blacks even to try).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, as a form of “antiracist protest,” graffitiing campus statues of “dead white Nazi fucks” (yes, even philosophers like Mill who exposed racism as philosophically untenable and stressed the urgency even of violence to secure equal treatment for blacks), or reporting even knowingly fake sightings of nooses and Klansmen, or firing teachers who say a word that merely comes close to a word (faked to be) traumatic for blacks (and especially their allies), or lowering standards for blacks, or adding the Black National Anthem (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) before each NFL game (since antiblack racism is regarded as so essentially American that “The Star-Spangled Banner” can be like “a slap in the face for many blacks”), or even shutting down city blocks in case the spray paint in the street marking our water and gas lines really are swastikas, or so on are all righteous-seeming activities of the grand-purpose-giving and life-simplifying and superciliousness-stoking and violence-excusing religion of antiracism, activities that fill the void—a void gaping perhaps more than ever given the rapid withdrawal of religion in the contemporary period—without requiring our lazy selves actually to combat the cultural attitudes and practices that keep blacks down.
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks are treated—not only by people scared about losing their employability, but even by institutions eager to enforce “antiracist policies”—as if infantile cripples who, although handling what pumps through their earbuds (“Told her we gon' be together, that stupid bitch ate the bait / She went for that, I broke the bitch / Told that bitch to sock it to my pocket, then revoked the bitch”), are in desperate need of shelter from certain words in the textbook or in historical documents or in litigation reports, as if enfeebled pets who require “safeternative” (and, of course, easier) classroom lessons lest they break under all “the weight they have to bear in this hellscape.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks are baited by the benefits of r-word-fearing whites jumping over backwards for them, letting them cut corners and get first dibs—baited to perform for whites (something whites have long expected of them anyway, and just eat up) as if fragile enough to be traumatized merely by having to read white authors, or by learning about Euclid and his “white geometry,” or by being in “claustrophobic spaces with too many tomato faces,” or so on.
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks think they are being slick against “the man,” think they are gaining power through such maneuvers, when in truth (1) such power of pity-points and lowered expectations spoils their sense of dignity and their ability to handle the tough problems that arise on every path to excellence (which, of course, further spoils their sense of dignity); (2) such power is largely negative-reactive anyway (dependent on whites, at least those “antiracists” willing to act truly racist enough to believe blacks really are that fragile); (3) such a pathway could eventually become entrenched enough that, the line between fake and real blurring over generations, blacks wind up that fragile in truth!
This piece is unpublished. See sections 1 and 2 here.