Section 6 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"
Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that suggests that the mega-$$-backed narrative of black victimology pumped into US minds prevents meaningful solutions to the problems faced by blacks
To ensure that blacks devalue themselves, that the black spirit—to the extent that it has been reified if only by a long history of collective oppression—is extirpated, that black dreams for excellence veer never too far beyond guilt trips and entitled demands for handouts and preferential treatment, that blacks equate coming up with pulling others down, that blacks focus mainly on how victimized they are and so stay locked in a Gollum-state of bitterness; to encourage in blacks the self-destructive feeling that there is no point in taking proactive steps to improve their situation; to steer blacks away from the life-enhancing emotion of gratitude and from a sense of excitement in personal growth and pride in personal accountability—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks, incentivized by an antiracist industrial complex desperate to ensure that the activism money never stop pouring in, remain blind to the entitlements they have simply by having been born in the US at a time rich in resources and opportunity and medical technology and life expectancy, a time when black children can be anything they want—this way, focused on how constricted they are “under the boot of the white man,” they will neither take advantage of their leeway nor experience the tranquil confidence that comes from gratitude, but will instead stew in life-expectancy-lowering resentment.
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks—already for centuries primed by a religion in which being a victim grants you superiority over others—see themselves according to the all-too-standard story, the ghoulish gospel so-called “antiracists” are paid to drive down their throats, of having been born the victims of a system so stifling it is pretty much pointless, despite the shining counterexample of Asian Americans or Nigerian immigrants, to struggle to rise above persecution with enterprising effort.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, despite—or is it, precisely because of?—the tangible dearth of antiblack racism in a western world as contemptuous of racism as it is enamored of black celebrity, people are eager to do whatever it takes to convince the world that blacks continue to be brutalized by white supremacy (thereby fueling black victimology): seeing every disparity disfavorable to blacks through a bogus lens of white-supremacist reign; imagining an antiblack hand behind all black underperformance; explaining every black setback as a function of relentless racism baked into the American DNA (and thereby whose cessation would require America no longer being America); interpreting each case where a black cop brutalizes a black person as a matter of that cop’s “internalized whiteness” or, as it is more colorfully put in Boyz N The Hood, as a matter of that cop’s being an Office Coffey (lightened up with cream).
It could just sit back and watch our world where so many are eager to preserve this hobbling, belittling, responsibility-denying narrative—yes, even if it means reopening long-healing wounds and inventing new ones (with China’s help, of course)—for three main (understandable) reasons:
(1) black people, to say nothing of whites hooked on the rewards of feeling like parent-saviors, will be reluctant to give up the helpless-victim outlook into which they have been groomed, groomed not only from oppression over enough centuries to feel like home, but also from recent years of enjoying the countless short-term privileges—big-oil style—that rely on it being accurate (everything from capitalizing on the daily national reminders to support black businesses, to the monthly diversity bonuses that lawyers and doctors get on top of their base pay, to the rush of power seeing private and public and entertainment industries bend over backward to prove they stand with antiracism, to the surge of satisfaction seeing the highest institutions (even universities and churches and hospitals) accommodate (if not celebrate) the norm violations of antiracism (just as many otherwise upright members of Trump's political team did in Trump’s case), to the cheap thrill of watching whites tread lightly around them, to the bullyish eroticism of watching whites too afraid to stand up even to their most whimsical demands, to the relief of having a widely-accepted scapegoat of whiteness on which ultimately to funnel all their frustrations, to the enjoyment of getting to be the pitied centers of attention and yet without having either to look to themselves when addressing their shortfalls or to take on the burden of carving their own fates);
(2) the speeches and writings of black artists and leaders half a century ago (now in our cyberage surreally available all at once) were so powerful in their argument and rhetoric, fueled as they were by a combination of truth and justice, that they convince many college-going blacks today, against their own intuition and empirical sense, that black people still grow up thinking they are white until they learn otherwise, that white beauty standards still are the only standards, that the US has not yet found a place for black bodies aside from as service chattel, that blacks still are to the US what the bad guy is in the crime novel or the Native American is in the black-and-white cowboy film;
(3) so many people, white and blacks, have built their livelihoods and sense of purpose around fighting antiblack racism—now a gravy-train industry in which film studios, universities, publishing houses (especially those sleezy weekly-webinar ones specializing in “Equity and Inclusion literature for companies who care about black folx”), big businesses, small businesses, and individuals are involved—that without it we face, like a fire department in a world where fire is on the verge of extinction, the scary unknown of what to do next, an unknown especially scary for blacks since it comes with being finally burdened (to the same degree, at least, as everyone else) with that agency from which they have long been alienated, that daunting freedom, to make of their lives what they will.
It could just sit back and watch our world where the victimology narrative is so important (and almost as if, so a conspiracy-oriented person might come to think, the desire to rob blacks is so strong, strong enough to result in white collateral damage) that statues of heroes (even of abolitionists and philosophers whose writings were instrumental in dismantling any justification of white supremacy and who argued that proper education would reveal blacks to be just as capable and moral as whites) are torn down—perhaps due to one small flaw (true or false) or just one passing comment out of spirit with the rest of their work or even just because they are white—and (in an anxious mix of pandering and fear) replaced with a statue of a black man murdered by cops, a statue merely testifying to the existential crisis of living while black—even though it could have served also at least to spread awareness about a real crisis: the opioid crisis (saying, on the bottom next to the man’s name perhaps, something like: “Even this American saint struggled with an opioid addiction”).
It could just sit back and watch our world where antiblack racism is regarded as so essentially American—indeed, the very explanation of America’s success in the global order—that America’s true birth date cannot be said to be the glorious 1776 (where brave people led us into liberty the likes of which the world had never seen), but rather the shameful 1619: the date of the beginning of the country’s protracted original sin; the date the first black slaves arrived from Africa.
It could just sit back and watch our world where China, soon to rise to top-superpower status on the back of human-rights violations of its own, revels in and pushes the narrative of omnirelevant black victimology at the hands of US white supremacy—this way, priming people to embrace it as the new beacon of goodness it hopes in the near future to spread around the world, representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (following Soviet footsteps in fueling grievance and division in the US, but to greater effect given greater ignorance of history and contemporary affairs in the US coupled with greater tendency toward self-condemnation in the US) can declare to intergovernmental organizations while holding up a photo of George Floyd: “Instead of telling us what to do as if you had the moral high ground when, in truth, you continue to torture and kill blacks (yes, even after having committed barbarities against them the likes of which have never been seen in human history), you need to take a good look at the white-supremacist wasteland in the mirror before you even dare cast judgment on other countries.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where the market demand for the narrative of black victimology—a narrative in which black people are those to whom horrendous things are done and in which white people are those that do horrendous things (and that those facts are omnirelevant)—is great enough that those who push it are given an easy pipeline to publication in the major presses, and make more for a one-hour speech than many Americans make in a year, and get honored with tenured posts and genius grants and peace prizes and comparisons to Gandhi and Holocaust heroes, while putting their very livelihoods at risk (from their typically negligible and underground platforms) are those pariahs who aim to expose that narrative as what it is: an aspiration-thwarting blight on blacks pushed by hucksters and the real handkerchief-head race traitors; a black poison that in being called “antiracist” is more ironic than a brand of black beauty products for hair-straightening and skin-bleaching being called “Nubian Pride.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, as if to burn an indelible imprint on all our minds as to how terrorized blacks are in the US, news of “antiblack brutality” is worth so much (and dishes out so many rewards and punishments to those even remotely connected to it) that “antiracists,” almost as if they had some sort of stake in ensuring that blacks remain in the terrorized-victim frame of mind, will paint racial slurs on homes and business and cars and sidewalks in the secret of night and, if caught, will spin their duplicity as a desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures matter of “drawing attention to a gruesome problem in this country,” thereby garnering respect—and, when the perpetrator happens to be white (as is so often the case), garnering the “We-fucks-with-Josh” support of blacks (the support for which any white person in this country who cares for their reputation prays).
It could just sit back and watch our world where (1) there is so much social capital in being a victim in general (which is why debates even inside of academia, perhaps even soon about STEM topics, amount to all sides racing to occupy the position of most victimized on the intersectionality matrix), and where (2) there is so much social capital in being a black victim in particular (a sort of ghoulish badge of honor), that it would not be too strange to discover that a black actor—perhaps uneasy about living a luxurious life at odds with the narrative of how bad blacks have it, or perhaps worried that his privilege disconnects him with authentic (that is, down-and-out) blacks, or perhaps just to negotiate a higher salary on the virtually all-black show that happens to be one of the top in the US—hired people to rough him up a bit, becoming (until caught in the lie) a hero celebrated for having survived, as the black US Vice President described it, “an attempt at modern-day lynching of just another three-fifths of a person.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where such a narcotic of fatalistic-skepticism is shoved down black throats not only by public speakers—the more dreadlocks, the blacker (for eerie reasons laid out by Ellison in Invisible Man), the better—but also by their peers (who, by corroborating it, get to feel part of a spiritual-singing underdog team ranging over centuries of oppression while also getting to place all their hardships onto white devils).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, termination and even public ridicule being the price for noncompliance, the McCarthy-level enforcement of right speech and right think regarding how terrible blacks have it (yes, under the continued reign of white supremacy) is present not just in the universities from which the practice began and in the entertainment industry and in pretty much all government agencies from federal to local (the big guns being the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security), but also extending throughout the private sector: from the big health insurance companies and law firms, to Nike and Pepsi and Walmart, all the way down to Sunoco and Cold Stone Creamery—only failing to appear in a few mom-and-pop stores and unincorporated pawn shops.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, perhaps as cover for their own morally questionable histories and futures, the major places (the Nikes and the FBIs and the Disneys) even go so far as to host mandatory nonmandatory “reeducation retreats” where, after days of diversity workshops on “how to be less white” and “how to be more effective at preventing whiteness from causing harm in both the private and public spheres,” the white-male employees are expected—another compulsory noncompulsory thing—in the final gathering
to showcase shame for their whiteness (a bit reminiscent of those self-berating ribbons-of-shame practices in Japanese zaibatsus), teary and yet for the time being at least not typically involving literal genuflection;
and to swear out loud that they do not believe they are superior to any other group;
and to promise to read “nonproblematic” black authors (that is, the “antiracist” authors);
and to affirm that they understand that the only remedy for past wrongs are counter—and thereby non-wrong—wrongs (but that, in truth, the struggles of antiracism are never done once and for all, which is why antiracism must become, in turn, systemic and here to stay);
and to declare that they will never engage in the gaslighting-process of questioning a black person’s lived experience (especially when it comes to how this country is ruled by a white supremacy indelible beneath the mere surface progress of banning slavery and virtually all forms of discrimination);
and to pledge that they will spread their “illegitimate privilege and wealth” to oppressed communities (whether by defending indefinite moratoria on hiring of whites, or by giving money to antiracist organizations, or by lobbying politicians to remove statues of people in any way traceable to white supremacy, or by patronizing all-black businesses, or by refusing to go to hairdressers that do not do black hair, or so on).
It could just sit back and watch our world where the fully-onboard whites—at least those smart enough to connect the dots when it comes to the China-championed message, the message championed as well by the-miscegenation-fearing-racial-supremacist-North Korea, that “Whiteness is a virus requiring bodies like any other virus”—will write (sincerely, and not just because they are “asked to” by their employers during workshops addressing white fragility or white rage or the like) letters of apology to black friends and coworkers and prisoners and even strangers not only for the horrors of centuries back (even though, yes, this involves the strange situation of people only possibly related to people who mistreated others in the distant past apologizing to people only possibly descended from people who were mistreated in the distant past), but also for having to face the more-insidious traumas each day in a country like this, pledging in those letters “to undo the logic that encourages people to want to be white.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, under the trance of the victim mentality, countless blacks allow themselves in good conscience—with no care for any suffering they cause along the way—to duck the burdens of trying hard and of playing fair, let alone of empathizing with other creatures concerning the nuanced injustices we all face in a reality in which we were thrown to die often after protracted suffering.
It could just sit back and watch our world where any event that is unfavorable to blacks, or any measure against which blacks do not do as well as whites, testifies by that very fact alone to an insufferably antiblack agenda.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, almost as if to keep blacks from seizing upon all the opportunities open to them (more or less as many as any other human in this hospice hour of white supremacy), blacks are swindled into thinking that the white system has blocked all but a lucky few—the “sellouts,” the “Oreos,” the “walking lies” among them—from meaningful opportunities (aside from sports and entertainment).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, if only to prove how true the victim narrative is (and thereby to accept, or perhaps even learn to regard as a compliment, being underestimated and judged by lower standards), blacks are enticed to engage in obsessive rumination over past injustice (despite the moving-on-enabling fact that all our ancestors did terrible things)—this way, blacks can go about their days with their hands out, equipped with well-rehearsed huckster spiels about the horrors committed upon their ancestors.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, if only to prove that being a victim is to being black what being renate is to being chordate, blacks are enticed to engage in obsessive rumination over how helpless they remain under the “juggernaut of white supremacy”—this way, while even like-looking Nigerians down and out in the same underfunded public schools (and with the same “antiblack teachers”) go about taking advantage of imperfect opportunities to build healthy homes and successful business and achievement throughout the ivy league (indeed, having a median household income higher than whites, which happens to be half of what Indian Americans make in this “white supremacist” country), blacks can feel righteous in crying “Woe is me” and in making various displays of petulance that neither require mastery and disciplined effort nor result in solutions to concrete problems (especially the crime and family problems) plaguing black people (yes, even though the difference in income between American blacks and whites goes away when we adjust for age, region, location, and educational level).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, if only to prove that being a victim is to being black what, in fact, being trilateral is to being triangular, blacks are enticed (partly by the insidious carrot of “Here is the authentically black style of honoring the angst of your enslaved ancestors”) to engage in self-destructive behaviors (resisting arrest, uttering anti-social F-yous to the white world and its “Ameriklan Dream,” even substance abuse), behaviors only adding to any cradle difficulties they do face—this way, they can point to more concrete examples of racist abuse instead of having to revert to saying, as they have had to do more and more with the waning of white supremacy, that “The abuse, although worse than ever, is too elusive in its nuance to communicate to nonblacks. I mean, will a white person really be able to understand how traumatic it is for a black person to hear Bach?”
It could just sit back and watch our world where self-destructive behavior (violence, procrastination, drug use, escapism) become an understandable coping mechanism for living in a country that is—so they are hypnotized by the antiracist industrial complex—more deadly and hateful toward black bodies than ever before.
It might just sit back watch our world where—and one cannot help but think of the devil in the Brothers Karamazov who tells Ivan that he has been too victimized and oppressed and demonized over the centuries to feel any gratitude—blacks are enticed to think, against their very own health and longevity, that whenever they feel gratitude (say for being inheritors of great works of art and technology; for being in a land of chock-full supermarkets and warmth in winter and cold in summer; for being citizens of a prosperous country of blind justice and institutional commitment against virtually all discrimination at a time when black people enjoy the rights and opportunities for which so many around the world would die; for being dwellers on a land of beautiful landscapes and grand cities where peace is not the exception but the norm), that whenever they stop feeling bitter about their station (as they cast their eyes upon the mountains of gifts on which they stand), they are sadly lying to themselves to cope with how badly they have been and continue to be wronged.
It could just sit back and watch our world where having an identity built around “having it hard,” an identity that excuses them from playing in the big leagues that their Harlem-Renaissance forebearers were eager to be the best in, is so important to black people (and, today, to universities and employers and mates and so on)—more important, arguably, than any doctoral degree—that they will, if only subconsciously, grope for ways to prove it: whether ignoring context and intent in order to feel slighted yet again (boycotting the museum, for example, because on a placard it uses the term of the day “Negro” to describe black spirituals) or even going so far as shooting themselves in the foot (baiting their employers, for example, to fire them by coming in high because “Life’s a bitch for a black man”).
It could just sit back and watch our world where—despite coming at the expense of poisoning white people enough that even their accomplishments become delegitimized in their own eyes—children are brainwashed to think the agency-atrophying and effort-excusing thought that whites succeed not because of hard work put into mastering things, but because the system is hopelessly rigged in their favor.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, when faced with the African immigrants who achieve so much in this country, blacks will feel in their heart “Well, these immigrants already had to be the cream of the crop when it comes to smarts and motivation (because that’s what it takes to be able to immigrate), in which case the comparison is unfair”—blacks will feel this in their heart and yet not draw the lesson implied by its being true: that cultivating initiative is a better path out of the muck than dwelling on the initiative-draining notion that racism is too baked into the system to warrant hope.
It could just sit back and watch our world, one hard to imagine any more belittling, where as many blacks as possible root their aspirations and personas and movements and communities around nothing grander, nothing broader, than a sense that “someone is going to have to pay” for their having been born with the skin of the oppressed.
It could just sit back and watch our world where blacks are depicted as such helpless victims of omnipresent white supremacy, a racist order the proof for which now requires no more than my-truth reports of “lived experience,” that their dignity—warped through and through—can be realized only in performances of petulance, in cries for special rights and dispensations: handouts and lowered standards and kid-glove treatment; shelter from anything unsettling, such as from the trauma of hearing the n-word from a white mouth; freedom from criticism for their shortcomings (especially from “white mouths that cannot but rape with their words”); even the freedom to have their turn to participate in inhumanity—special rights and dispensations, more junk food for blacks, that giants of black excellence like DuBois and Hughes and Hurston would have never stomached.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, seduced into preserving the vision of themselves as perpetual invalids, blacks feel excused from the burden—terrible and intimidating for all (but especially for blacks, coming out of four centuries of home-making acclimation to oppression)—of honoring their individual agency, their freedom to carve out their own fate in the face of real problems, their calling to take up the grinding and unsexy work necessary to make up for the various meaningful areas where they remain far behind.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, almost as if to keep blacks divided from one another, any black who buys into the “neoliberal-white-supremacist ideal” of shaping ones own fate through individual agency, who tries to learn techniques to increase resilience to the injustice of the world (even if that injustice is merely seeing the word “nigger” while reading an American-History textbook for a college class they chose to be in), is “self-deluded.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who fails to repeat and repeat the ghoulish gospel as to how much blacks have been victimized (and thus to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy benefits that get them out of facing the responsibilities required for human flourishing) is to be excommunicated from blackness, stripped of their “Black Card.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who refuses to follow the chief shibboleth of the black community (namely, that being a victim makes up the core of black identity), and who makes the best of the cards they were dealt instead of devoting all their energy to whining about cross-generational unfairness, is an “Uncle Tom” (or as it is now put, to refer to one of the greats of black excellence who refused to play victim, an “Uncle Clarence”).
It could just sit back and watch our world where a black is labelled “deaf, dumb, and blind” for resisting the temptation of the victimhood mentality—a temptation for all people given that it provides one with a sense of importance while excusing, not only hard work and responsibility for past behavior and future fate carving but also, the abuse and manipulation of one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that (1) centuries of victimization have habituated them to it and (2) it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level significance as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” “the powers that be.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any self-loving black who advocates for individual agency and resilience, and who pushes blacks to recognize that an addiction to bellyaching interferes with seizing upon the many opportunities that exist, and who tries to wake his bothers and sisters up to the black-growth-impeding industrial complex surrounding black victimology, and who thereby utters that riddle striking at the heart of the whole belittling enterprise “the best evidence of white supremacy being alive and well is the lie that it is,” is labelled “self-hating.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who refuses to repeat the story of how bad it is for blacks in this country, of how virtually impossible it is for blacks—too often enough literally—to breathe in this hellhole, is an “Aunt Jemima.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who goes down the path of forgiveness (which leads to gratitude, and to focus on the parts of the garden we can tend to, and to regeneration, and to excellence, and ultimately to heaven on Earth) instead of down the path of bitterness (which leads to vengeance, and to harm to others, and harm to self, and ultimately to hell on earth) is “a house nigger.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who expresses gratitude, that chief emotion for preventing the human march toward oblivion from crumbling into a bleak bazaar of bitterness and blaming, is a “sellout bitch”—for, on top of lying to himself (since again, as with Dostoyevsky’s devil, the victimized station of blacks could never warrant such a feeling of non-misery), he depletes the well of resentment against “the whiteness behind all black failings” and thereby undercuts the vengeful drive to remind the world how deserving of boosts and recompense blacks remain.
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who dares to voice the career-ruinous thought on Twitter that the police officer’s shooting of the black man “might not have been an act of racism (especially when we consider that he had a weapon and was living a thug’s life)” is a “handkerchief-headed negro” guilty of a black-on-black crime more poisonous (more poisonous because metaphysical) than any gang bangers in Little Rock could ever be.
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black saintly enough to speak up against the lie on which her very diversity bonuses are based is a “white man’s whore.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where any black who sins against the Holy Ghost (that is, who ever speaks the “invalidating” words “The push for us to identify as victims in the broadly agreeable name of ‘antiracism’ makes us see racism where it doesn’t exist and distracts us from black excellence”) is a “race traitor” more deserving of rebuke than even night-raiding Klansmen—more deserving of rebuke, yes, since he draws a different conclusion from apparently the same information base of experience and so, just as someone who believes in a different God or holy book threatens the believer more severely than any atheist could, is someone who threatens the religion of antiracism more severely than any white ever could.
It could just sit back and watch our world where even the sweetest blacks—yes, even those who find repugnant the idea of dehumanizing another black person as the mere puppeteered whores of the white man—are still likely to wonder in their hearts (which shows how deep the cult of victimology penetrates the black soul) what, other than self-hatred and a Stockholm need for white acceptance, could motivate a black person going around showing all these “violent statistics” showing that things are not as bad as they seem for blacks—the irony being, of course, that those blacks going around in this way are pushing a higher black love.
It could just sit back and watch our world where even the sweetest blacks are still likely to wonder in their hearts what, other than self-hatred and a Stockholm need for white acceptance, could motivate a black person going around making all these “traumatizing arguments” showing that antiblack racism is not behind every black failing—the irony being, of course, that those blacks going around in this way are pushing a brave and wise love concerned with seeing the best for black folks (think: the difference between a mother who loves her child but shelters it from all challenge and a mother who loves her child and exposes it to challenges of ever greater uplifting degrees).
It could just sit back and watch our world where whites, punished for opposition and rewarded for allyship, will lack the backbone or even the awareness to call out these pity-seeking exaggerations as what they are.
This piece is unpublished
Photo: thenation.com/article/society/clarence-thomas-supreme-court/