Section 8 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"
Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that sheds light on the harm to black people done by race-hustlers who claim to be looking out for black people
To subdue and hobble blacks while mercilessly inflicting humiliation, even if it means tearing at the very fabric of society; to help reify their status as the infants of humankind even at the expense of posing an existential threat to humanity itself; to reinforce the notion that blacks who engage in intellectual pursuits have forsaken their blackness; to keep blacks sick and down, wrenching their spirits and chaining their dreams (even if it means siphoning away the collective hope of whites as well)—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—in a demonic assault on black bodies and minds (demonic in that the purported beneficiaries are the ones most hurt)—defunded in the feel-good-but-hollow name of “antiracism” are not only the police that protect so many black lives (especially from the disproportionate violence of other blacks), but also the math-logic-science outreach programs that provide a glimmer of hope for black success on the intellectual mainstage (instead of just on the stunted stages of deep-sounding-but-shallow spoken word, where ankh wearers of Disneyfied afrocentrism smell like Badu’s frankincense vagina as they spew vapid wordplay to finger-snapping applause too cringey to behold and too sad to think about (especially if genuine chills really do course throughout the audience): “Sis Tings. Feel free to cry, SIS / in the middle of re-SIS-ting cri-SIS. / The world spins its a-XIS, each day I give you access ac-CESS, / to me: Nu-bian queen, / a New Bein’ to Cue You [Een]”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of pushing harder on poor black children to make up for households lacking intellectual stimulation (homes of feeble vocabulary and nonexistent reading time; homes of no pressure to identify shapes or run through times tables or explore nature’s wonders or cultivate self-discipline and self-restraint), schools go easier even on well-to-do blacks with siblings who share the same father under the same roof—all in the feel good name of “social justice” and of “celebrating diversity” and “embracing a holistic approach to assessment.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—hellbent on “liberating the curriculum from colonial whiteness” and “halting the longstanding practice of spirit-murdering our precious black students” (but what is hauntingly reminiscent of bygone days when home economics took precedence over calculus for women)—social-justice-tattletale whites now turned teachers (although still teenlike with their dog whistle of blue hair) focus on the “native strengths” (no pun intended) of their black pupils: strengths like athletic prowess and communal solidarity (perhaps justifying this approach by denying the universality even of mathematical and logical truths).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to maximize the amount of black homicide (which can then be conveniently represented as more evidence of pervasive racism and thereby of the necessity of bombarding blacks with crippling handouts), racial profiling by law enforcement (despite having proven helpful to curbing the surfeit of black-on-black violence) is vociferously denounced as an act of antiblack brutality, rather than recognized as a pragmatically grounded response to the disproportionate involvement of blacks in criminal activities.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“Like a dentist with a drill, I be digging in they mouth / First they swallow all my children / Then I kick them bitches out (kick them bitches out”), blacks fixate solely on the harm inflicted upon them by “this white supremacist nation” so that they push away—like depressed people often do solace-providing friends and family—so many who could help them achieve excellence.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as the message of widespread black victimization by an ever-growing white supremacy gains momentum within high schools, trade programs that offer practical skills and alternative paths to success (welding, plumbing, roofing, auto-mechanics) are deemphasized in favor of courses designed to disseminate that “dire message,” which then makes it easier for urban blacks to take the gangbanging-and-drug-selling route plaguing black communities since at least the eighties—and this way, the self-proclaimed “antiracists” can continue to ride the race-huckster gravy train of pointing out how victimized blacks in the multitentacled grip of white supremacy.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, sewing division among blacks themselves, all humans are brainwashed to discriminate between true blacks and fake blacks so as to inject into today’s blacks an anxiety virtually unknown among yesterday’s blacks who, living in a time before the desiccation of tangible antiblack racism, could not help but be truly black no matter what they did (no matter what sonnets they wrote, no matter what Latin they learned, no matter what Plato they poured over): an anxiety around listening to Beethoven (God forbid while striving, in what we now describe as “their internalized whiteness,” to invent the lightbulb of our time); an anxiety about looking up to, let alone gunning to achieve the heights of, Shakespeare and Michelangelo; an anxiety about any academic interest (aside, of course, from ferreting out invisible signs of a continued antiblack agenda); an anxiety about ascending the social hierarchy (since that is one of the chief symptoms of having “assimilated into Whiteness”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to discourage black education (perhaps in a more clever way than making it outright illegal, as it was during slavery), academic success and sophisticated speech and thirst for learning and appreciation for fine art are equated with being an “Oreo” (where being an Oreo is seen as one of the worst things for a black to be since it boils down to being a white supremacist in black clothing)—and so yet another reason for even nonblack children thinking (or at least having the unplaceable-but-unshakeable sense that) something’s “off” about that black man if ever shown a classroom video of, say, James Baldwin’s white eloquence.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to alienate blacks from intellectual endeavors and thereby make sure that no Black Renaissance (like the one centered in Harlem a century ago) ever happens again, “acting white”—something worthy of relentless ridicule—is a matter of doing well in school and speaking with big words (like “schadenfreude”) and studying books (aside perhaps from antiracist propaganda on black oppression, mere comic books compared to DuBois).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where “acting white” is so worthy of being teased about (like being a Yankees fan in Boston, but far worse) that—while even many whites (willfully) atrophy in intellect, choosing being cool with their “peeps” over academic triumphs too reminiscent of their now unfashionable (indeed, mock-worthy) whiteness—blacks will be more viciously eager to pull back into the crab bucket any black trying to crawl out (thus keeping, for example, the average SAT scores earned by children of black PhDs lower than the those earned by children of white parents who only have high-school diplomas) and then, because of the resultant perpetuation of black underrepresentation in legitimate academic fields (beyond black studies), antiracist race hustlers can cry out “systemic racism” with heightened righteousness while the real causes go overlooked.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“And when I tell you I don't fuck with these niggas (What you mean?), / I'm speakin' in general (Everybody) /Ain't no favoritism with none of these niggas (None), / bitches, baby mamas, family or nothin' / I'm tunnel vison, I don't see nothin' but hundreds”), to be authentically black is to listen to antisocial music whose lyrics openly oppose the values that have proven to be an asset to the success of a people across time in a diversity of cultures:
prioritizing family;
embracing education and learning from other cultures;
emphasizing knowledge and spirituality over materialism and consumerism;
practicing sexual modesty (or at least not glorifying promiscuity and cheating);
valuing marriage and the sanctity of birth within it;
celebrating women in their entirety rather than reducing them to dehumanized flesh;
respecting and trusting parental figures and other worthy authorities;
exercising temperance when it comes to drugs and alcohol and violence and various other excellence-distracters;
exhibiting self-control and generosity (if only in the form of not “jackin’ niggas for their chains”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are hypnotized to think that black advancement and black power means fixating on historical oppression and—especially with the help of (1) ever-lowering thresholds for what counts as a racial offense and (2) incentives to invent imaginary obstacles and traumas—fixating on how oppression will never go away.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even if though it has resulted in more and more whites wishing with all their hearts (and with good reason) they were black (such that Baldwin’s claim that “white people know one thing: that they would not want to be black here in America” is now obsolete), blacks are trained to lean heavily on their abstract blackness as a totem of pride—but only to cover, only to distract them from, having little else going on for themselves (aside from having the dancing and singing and sporting skills that provide so much sambo entertainment for the white world).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where young black people start seeing alternative ways of healing—aromatherapy, statement-driven apparel, candle-light incantations, affirmation boards, even Maasai-like witch-doctory involving chicken sacrifice and cow-blood drinking—as superior to the western medicine that they will be groomed to believe cannot help but marginalize them, superior even when it comes to treating the sickle cell anemia, the diabetes, the HIV, the cancer that tortures so many blacks.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, unimaginable as it may seem ever to take root, blacks see the shutting out of dissenting opinion and facts that conflict with (that wicked notion) “my truth” as a matter of self-care and start labeling—Talib-style—“colonialist gaslighters” or “Nazis” or “white supremacists” anyone, even other black people, who disagree with them.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, with all their performative gestures of virtue, white progressives—scarved guitar-playing hipster types who search your eyes as you speak, nodding with prayer hands and head tilted in concern, and who open Zoom sessions with “I ask that persons of color be given a chance to speak first,” and who hug in true pity black coworkers with a teary “I’m here for you” after news of black death by cop—are ashamed enough by black crime that, at the cost of disrespecting the victims and their families, they afford it minimal media attention (on grounds—virtuous-sounding but self-defeating—of refusing to reinforce an “unfortunate stereotype”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, even at the cost of white suffering and death (but mainly just poor whites who can only afford unhealthy food), we shame anyone who, daring to violate Lizzo’s truth, says that obesity—already implicated in the suffering and death of a crazy number of blacks—is unhealthy.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in an attempt to further distort black minds already comparatively underfed in intellect and atrophied in sense of agency, magical thinking is fed to children not only as hip (which, yes, will result in harm at least to those whites not well-to-do enough to see things like astrology and healing crystals as just fun and games) but also as a mark of authentic blackness—a part of black identity that goes deeper than Wakanda.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, when a teary white president guarantees on TV that he will “appoint as many blacks to as many offices as possible,” the amens in the black room will be too loud and enduring for the black child, queasied by conduct she has not yet the vocabulary to pin down, to voice her reservation: “Shouldn’t we want the best qualified?”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where everyone agrees that it is a mortal sin, an expression of a gaslighting drive for dominion over black bodies, to disagree with “black truths” (even when those truths are out of touch with reality) or to call blacks out for any flimsy ideas.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where one of the worst sins for anyone to commit, since it would undercut the racial blackmail serving as the chief source of power and purpose for everyday blacks and especially for those race-hustlers (those racial-injustice mongers) who have built careers on blacks being seen as victims, would be to call blacks out for exaggerating—perhaps even knowingly (out of a long addiction to reaping the benefits of playing the victim)—how bad they are being kept down by a racist country.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where one of the most heinous things one could do, in effect, would be to go against the stories that have been used to keep blacks locked in their victimology—go against the story, of example, of how bad the cops treat blacks (described as innocent Emmett Tills even when armed, high, on drugs, in gangs, and in active psychosis) such that even the president and his wife say they lose sleep to think of the day when their daughters will be driving alone on freeways patrolled by officers itching to club and grope black bodies.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where people are ruined—fired, doxxed, deplatformed, humiliated, hounded out of public spaces (often without even being asked first to undergo diversity training and other right-think reeducation)—for voicing points of view, or even raising questions or engaging in discussions or citing thinkers, banned by the growing number of taboos erected to keep blacks hobbled and dependent or, in the language of its advertising (which is itself disgusting in its infantilism), to protect a precious people from the further victimization of words.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics (“I shot at your mans / None of that shit wasn't planned / I fucked this bitch and her friend /Both of them bitches done came on my pants”), merely raising the question of the connection between biological inheritance and intellectual ability is foreclosed even in university research labs (on grounds, of course, that—and here is the true antiblack rub—blacks are too fragile to handle such traumatic discussions).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where being a racist is one of the most abhorrent things to be and yet where, in what is a classic example of doublespeak, merely exposing blacks to challenge (one of the most nurturing things for young brains) or airing data that puts blacks in a bad light (a prerequisite to addressing the roots of those blemishes) or disagreeing with blacks (the very key to their betterment) makes one categorically racist.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, through a patronizing method more insidious than the time-tested trick of hooking them on rum and humility gospels, blacks—as if the spoiled princes of some powerful and ruthless tyrant—get their self-reliance and self-respect and self-initiative poisoned by the junk food of excessive pandering and handouts and lowered expectations (that no healthy parent would tolerate for their own children).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where black students, for example, get As for C work (as if too dumb to handle what white students can); get to focus narrowly in school on issues of black oppression and inequity in a white-supremacist country instead of on “his-story” or math or (God forbid) biology, whose endorsement of evolution violates the creation myths of indigenous wisdom; get to demand as a matter of safety and justice that whites not come to campus on certain days (and with such force that professors who oppose such demands are publicly shamed as vile regressives—indeed, heretics to the antiracist cause).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where black scholars, for example, get treated with kid gloves when going up for tenure; get to assert—and quite “convincingly” if done through the “wise spunk” of an urban “blaccent,” the wordplay chicanery of black preachers and spoken-word poets—their unbacked conclusions as a matter of a black person simply “breaking it down” and “telling it like it is” and “kicking the truth”: “In life we gotta face our poison in order to poise-on. Cause you know you was born from your mother and you a poi-son!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the black commuter, for example, gets applause and finger snaps from the full diversity in the train car (and afterword goes viral in a TikTok video whose title says “White Devil Too Slow for Black Mind”) when, after the white lady says “Yes” to his question (“Do you really believe the black man is not inferior?”), the black man responds with South-Bronx profundity “You can only be-lieve what you don’t know. So you doubt your own answer?”—the white lady’s Phil-101 retort (“But believing is necessary for knowing”) drowned out by the cheering that only calms a moment, as the man comments on the face deepening in flush: “Only a devil goes red when exposed for telling on itself.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where black employees, for example, get excused from normal standards “that might reawaken epigenetic memories of ancestor trauma”; get showered with praise just for doing basic things; get to speak first in Zoom meetings; get to insist that, since intent matters nothing compared to impact, hand gestures or mouth sounds or whiteboard marks are racist simply if just one black (potentially) feels they are.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where white students too are to prioritize “empathy studies” (that is, learning about how bad blacks how it in this white-supremacist country) so that they learn to keep effectively treating blacks as pitiful victims who should be held to lower standards than whites.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if to make it realistically sustainable, whites feel self-congratulation, anointment, in helping the horror story of black infantilization and victimology come about.
This piece is unpublished
Photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo