Section 5 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"

Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that explores how the mainstream antiracist movement, which involves denigrating reason and enlightenment values, is toxic to black people

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To reverse the drift away from the antiblack origins of our country (and make sure nothing mind-undulling like the Harlem Renaissance ever happens again); to keep blacks locked in tribal ignorance and stunted by superstition, estranged from (if not violent toward) the tools of flourishing hallowed in the heart of western culture—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?

It could just sit back and watch our world where, instead of the black chess masters (like Darrian Robinson) or theoretical physicists (like Jim Gates) or acers of SATs (like Justin Ricketts) or so on, the children-titillating airwaves are filled with the most brazen attention-grabs of black degeneracy: weaved-out ghetto girls on daytime talk shows airing their sordid lives of drugs and baby daddies for heckling audiences, their fists ready to fly at the slightest provocation (“I live how I wanna fuckin’ live. Come up hur and say sumpin’, bitch”); their foul-mouths out-shouting each other in the heat of the revelation, say, that Damarius, the daughter’s boyfriend, got the daughter’s mother, LaQuintavia, pregnant (the mother, hair-hat ripped away, ultimately telling the audience, while twerking as the daughter is dragged backstage by security, “I ain’t give a fuck, Murray. That sex was good!”); their profanity-laden rants eager to inflict damage—especially after paternity results reveal that the man they insist is the father is not the father (“Get tested for that hot sauce, nigga, cause I be fuckin’ all your friends”).

It could just sit back and watch our world where, as if to drown out the faint voice that tells them they are lying to themselves in subscribing to the Chinese-invested victimology narrative about the US being a flourishing white supremacy, blacks and their antiracist allies (in many cases perhaps their indoctrinators, their trainers and instigators) either hum away with fingers in their ears the many examples of black perseverance in the face of hardship (especially, of course, the hardship of yesterday’s real antiblack racism) or else—teeth bared and spittle flying, as if the self-appointed guardians of blackness—lash out against these haunting spirits, denigrating trailblazers like Edward Bouchet (first black PhD recipient in the US) and James McCune Smith (first black American to practice medicine with a medical degree) and Madam C. J. Walker (first self-made female millionaire) and Zipporah Potter Atkins (first black landowner in Boston) for “having adopted the anti-communitarian mindset of the white man” and thereby—as if climbing social hierarchies and achieving success through hard work were somehow a betrayal of their race—for “having set themselves apart from their own people.”

It could just sit back and watch our world where, as if we have backslid into the suffocating atmosphere of the Dark Ages, so-called “antiracists” regard the civil rights movement as toxic to blacks since “that movement, in its ultimately patriotic claim that blacks should get to enjoy the liberal ideals enshrined in the Constitution, served to legitimize the deeper problem, the deeper foundation on which white power rests: those very liberal ideals themselves,” those white-created insidious ideals of colorblind justice and personal liberties (freedom of opinion, of expression, of congregation) that only interfere with “the urgent need for equity”—interfere by preventing blacks from being judged according to more accommodating standards, and by allowing whites to form views that “invalidate black lived experience,” and by allowing whites to keep saying things that “wound the black soul,” and by allowing whites to gather together in groups despite “the epigenetic trauma” such clusters cannot but activate in black bodies. 

It could just sit back and watch our world where, as if we were in an Orwellian twilight zone, so-called “antiracists” regard even many movements that attack liberal ideals (one thinks of Marxism, for example) as toxic to blacks since “those movements, in using reason to make their attacks, serve to legitimize an even deeper problem than liberal ideals, serve to reinforce the deepest foundation on which white power rests: the very enlightenment ideals themselves,” those white-created ideals of reason and science that only interfere with “the pressing need for equity”—interfere by preventing blacks from being judged according to “the emotional and gut ways of knowing native to their souls,” and by allowing whites to feel superior in their consistent outperformance of blacks in all areas emphasizing math and logic and science, and by allowing whites to keep cherishing “the oppressive notion of objective truth” even when such truth opposes what black people feel in their hearts or what black visionaries and prophets teach, and by allowing whites to reject “aboriginal black ways of knowing” for failing to honor the scientific method).

It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks become more and more estranged from the most powerful propellent for rocketing away from the gravity well of historical oppression and its cascade of deleterious effects: reason itself, the brightest beacon of hope for liberation and flourishing—perhaps learning to mock it (as “an imperialism-justifying machination of dead white males in periwigs”) and even to regard it, unnervingly in line with the white supremacist stereotype of a century back, as something at odds with the black spirit (a spirit more at home in the gut than the head).

It could just sit back and watch our world where, as if there were some conspiracy to keep blacks disoriented, math and logic (the very foundations of thriving homes and civilization) are in the best cases relegated to an importance secondary to personal emotion (such that “two plus two should equal whatever people feel it should equal, not just what the white powers that be say to the exclusion of alternative truths”) and in the worst cases belittled as “exclusionary tools of white supremacy,” as “problematic knowing styles of oppressive whiteness” (evident simply by the sheer fact that blacks underperform in these areas)—although this latter approach might require great concealment (no biggie when it comes to a people already historically oblivious), concealment of all their nonwhite forefathers: the Swaziland people who used baboon bones over forty-five thousand years ago as instruments to track lunar cycles, and the Babylonians who discovered the Pythagorean theorem at least a thousand years before Pythagoras, all the way to the modern period (from Francis William and Benjamin Banneker to Katherine Johnson and David Blackwell).

It could just sit back and watch our world where, on grounds that (1) the scientific method and particularly the hard sciences as we know them today were developed by Europeans like Galileo and Newton and that (2) blacks are underrepresented in these areas, science is disturbingly viewed as a “white thing,” a “European style of thinking toxic to blacks,” “a method of white supremacy” whose acceptance by blacks (like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Marie Maynard Daly) renders them Oreo whores of the white man—yes, even despite the fact, a fact that concretely highlights the genetic fallacy operative behind this line of reasoning, that blacks were once underrepresented in the white-invented sport of basketball (not to mention the general fact that “all the artifacts and styles of whites” are really artifacts and styles of blacks in the sense that blacks, bracketing off their own ancestors who have white skin under fur, are the original people).

It could just sit back and watch our world where—in what seems, in general, an end to an Enlightenment era that brought the world to the best place it perhaps has ever been for humans and in what seems, in particular, a reawakening of the white supremacist notion that race is indicative of rational ability (specifically, that blacks are intrinsically inferior when it comes to rational ability)—abstract reasoning altogether (especially of the linear sort where one “squarely and weakly and whitely” follows steps instead of “hiply and strongly and blackly feeling it out”) becomes seen as “a dry and bigoted and hegemonic style of knowing callous and damaging to heart-forward non-Eurocentric styles of knowing”: intuiting the correct course of action through consultation of spirits, bones, stars, shamans, personal feeling, tribal vision-seekers, and the voices of visiting angels; showing no tolerance for what feels wrong to the gut; trusting in the healing powers of stones and other magic; preserving the tie between spiritual wisdom and societal governance; promoting the capacity for awe and wonder (instead of always trying to explain everything); keeping a close tie with the land (instead of filling it with skyscrapers and smog); having no shame in (and even celebrating) circular reasoning (“Everything our elder says must be true since our elder himself declares that everything he says is true!”).

It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks, as if bulls under the spell of masterful matadors, will be mislead—perhaps given the many years of their oppressors touting enlightenment values and the scientific method—to attack as “inherently white supremacist” enlightenment values and the scientific method themselves: reason over tantrum; free speech over silencing; tolerance over intolerance; truth over activism; philosophy over superstition; scientific consensus over magical thinking; cold hard objective fact over the my-truth notion that whatever I feel to be the case is the case (as if I were the center of reality and matter most); careful observation over just trusting the gut; skepticism and hypothesis testing over tribal authority; nuanced thinking over black-and-white folk instinct.

It could just sit back and watch our world where, in the name of “antiracist progress” and of “challenging the hegemony of whiteness,” black boys and girls—mainly via the partitioning of school curricula according to “black ways of knowing” (gut instinct and personal feeling, oral storytelling, communal dance and song, elder authority, call and response, kinesthetic experience) and “white ways of knowing” (logic and linear thinking, science, writing, quantification, secularism, skepticism of authority)—are groomed to grow in twisted directions (the earlier the better so as to entrench as deep as possible their understanding of their powers and of what things matter for them), groomed to regard what is healthy and liberating and aspirational as “inhumane tricks of the white devil.”

It could just sit back and watch our world where, in what amounts to the undoing of the progress that has led to a present where blacks face the burden being able to fly wherever they choose from their depressive nest (albeit one in which they have been imprisoned long enough to love), black boys and girls are trained to think that it is part of “the disease of Whiteness” to value diversity of opinion or to give credit to individuals (rather than communities) or to treat people on a case-by-case basis (rather than foremost as representatives of their group identities).

It could just sit back and watch our world where, in the name of “respect for diversity” and of “curing the poison of white thinking” (but is absolutely frightening in light of the Voltairean wisdom that “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”), black boys and girls are coached to regard it as an assault on “the black spirit” for teachers to do what will become more and more worthy of termination for them to do—worthy of termination on grounds that doing them “precipitates black-body trauma”:

saying, for example, that there are correct answers in math;

or celebrating abstract thinking and problem solving and systematic planning as crucial elements of intelligence;

or privileging some dead white man like Einstein over some vision seeker from an all-black tribe in Kenya;

or neglecting to explain how “European progress has come solely from oppression of vulnerable groups”;

or praising individual students (in flagrant denial of the fact that they are representatives of groups and that they depend on other humans and the Earth itself to be what they are);

or stressing reading and reading comprehension (despite black students being “more at home with the spoken word”);

or praying in class (unless, of course, it is to “the Mesoamerican gods like Quetzalcoatl or African gods like Sango that can bring a classroom of diverse students together”);

or defending the value of viewpoint diversity as a tool for getting closer to truth and for becoming more effective at defending our beliefs;

or suggesting that indigenous creation myths do not have equal standing to the evolution story of “white science”;

or teaching the theories of “dead white males” or the white-bread language of standard American English of which only (sellout) weirdos like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison became masters;

or teaching the scientific method, which is inherently tainted with anti-black racism (as is evident by the repeated poor performance of black students in subjects where that method is essential);

or teaching white-bread subjects like engineering instead of subjects more appropriate to a “rhythmic people” who think more “holistically” than those whose jobs will be to build telescopes and bridges and rockets;

or, in general, promoting (and even just failing to criticize) “the various antiblack customs on which this white Amerikkka runs” (customs like striving to be objective, striving to be on time, striving for perfection).

It could just sit back and watch our world where, in the name of “racial sensitivity,” black boys and girls are coached to regard it as “cruel trivialization of the debilitating horrors of white oppression” (horrors, so children will be taught, blacks can never really escape) for teachers to do what will become more and more worthy of public ridicule for them to do—worthy of public ridicule on grounds that it expects black students, “as if the centuries of white values and styles being shoved down black throats were not enough, to snuff out the remaining ember of their native spirit”:

asking, for example, black students to be on time or to be polite or to compete against each other in debate teams;

or telling black students, who might have used “indigenous wisdom” to arrive at the answers, to show their math work so that others can understand how the answer was reached;

or expecting lagging black students to work harder (as if they had any control over their home lives made virtually impossible by antiblack racism, let alone over the white-supremacist standards by which their work is judged);

or assigning homework (even though doing so “undermines the goal of inclusive success while demoralizing black children” since such children tend to have disproportionate hardship to deal with after hours at home);

or teaching as if black students have the capacity to learn what Sri Lankan and Aboriginal, Chinese and Indian, Brazilian and Canadian students can;

or imposing on black students one of the central features of “white-supremacist ideology”: binary thinking (as when the black-spirit-murdering philosophy professor says, “God does exist or God does not exist; there is no third option if by each repeated word we mean the same thing”).

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This piece is unpublished