Snippet from "White Supremacy on its Deathbed"

Let's workshop one paragraph from a novella-length lyric essay I am working on--a paragraph shining a light on the extent to which whites go to atone for "the (multiracial) disease of whiteness"

Snippet from "White Supremacy on its Deathbed"

[Behold] our world where blacks, and in a sense all of us really (especially members of the Chinese Communist Party), cannot get enough

of the white public intellectual, with his “Undoing Racism Begins With Me” button, who—face contorting and voice trembling with revulsion—cries out in the podcast discussion “Quite frankly I’m ashamed to have this puke body: there is no end in sight for the atonement whites have to make”;

or of the white celebrity on TikTok who—face teary to the point of boogers—announces (in her “I support black victims” shirt) the “good news” that “the recent census has shown the number of whites to have gone down”;

or of the white music teacher who, despite having a classroom full of African art and always wearing her rainbow-colored "Ally" pin, steps down from her twenty-five-year position in foggy-spectacle shame for having shown her freshmen class a documentary that included vintage footage of a white man describing the singing behind him as what everyone called such singing at the time (“a negro spiritual”);

or of the white employee whose whistleblowing on a fellow developer for having retweeted something “the black community could regard as problematic” immediately resulted not only in the firing of that developer, but also in the name-change of a central character in the world’s most popular first-person shooter game (a change from Mark to Malik) since that character was named after the problematic developer in question;

or of the white HR-rep who, after taking the time to give a meaningful stare at each black person in the room, commences the meeting on the importance of diversity quotas by “seeking forgiveness for any neurological trauma” her “whiteness might have caused in the past or”—her voice extra soothing to project empathy—“might be causing in the present and even might cause in the future”;

or of the white car salesman who, wearing the yellow wristband of BLM, refuses to push luxury vehicles onto black customers (in hopes “never to participate in the exploitation of the financially vulnerable”) and whose business card states under his name “White, privileged, and sorry (but desperate to learn)”;

or of the white politician on the debate stage denouncing her own whiteness as “a disease in need of eradication,” while her black opponent stands beside her in discomfort clear behind a stoic facade;

or of the white butcher who, still in his bloody apron, goes off on a TikTok rant about how exhausted he is dealing with “the constant flood of ignorant whites” who continue to ask “‘What meats are native to the area?’, a problematic question since it involves racist decisions of who does and who does not belong”;

or of the white news correspondent who, on grounds that “it has only been two days since the mother of three was last seen,” mocks—as a case of “missing white woman hysteria”—the volunteer fire department’s decision to participate in the search effort (instead of staying another day at the BLM protest);

or of the white museum curator who, “in light of the BLM protests around the world,” feels “compelled to denounce” the once-revered painting, which depicts a Kalenjin marriage ceremony, as “the worrisome and illegitimate acquisition of a white gaze,” claiming the artist’s own diary entry about the painting (“a deep tribute to the beautiful people of an East African community”) was “at best, cope for having engaged in poaching and, at worst, a willful lie”;

or of the white mother (known in the community for spearheading the program “Reparations by Gift Card”) who at a PTA meeting takes a stand in her “Decolonize Museums” t-shirt and—after announcing her pronouns, and that she is “a white millennial transmasculine femme survivor of acute and complex trauma who happens to be nonbinary, mostly able-bodied, neurodivergent, obsessive compulsive, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, unitarian universalist, nonmonogamous, demiromantic, and above all archenemy of white supremacy”—encourages fellow whites to return “immediately” any gifts received by black people “given the likelihood that our colonial spirit, even if only working subconsciously, manipulated those gifts out of them”;

or of the white “antiracist conductor” who—smelling of expensive diffuser oils and eager to “sacrifice as many chairs as possible for the greater good"—insists (from beneath a George-Floyd scarf that could double as a blanket) that, “aside from scrapping blind auditions altogether, there is no way to rectify the imbalance, the legacy of white hegemony, that has orchestras looking so pasty”;

or of the white greenskeeper who—if only as a “symbolic gesture against the white supremacist impetus to suppress (chop down and even poison) black bodies in its goal for monocrop homogeneity”—vows, in his “Journalism is Activism” t-shirt, to let the weeds (beautiful, strong, natural, diverse) grow on the campus lawns;

or of the white US Representative who, although admitting that one part of her would have liked to have seen the NFL replace “the National Anthem (representing racism)” with “the Black National Anthem (representing antiracism),” finds it best “all things considered” for the National Anthem to remain included since “otherwise we run the risk of forgetting, football being the quintessential American game, (1) that America can never not be white supremacist as long as it is America and (2) which racial group has the least institutional power (and thereby deserves to run things)”;

or of the white “abolitionist judge” who comments “white people are guilty until proven innocent" in response to his own tweet that “‘blind justice’ and ‘equality under the law’ are white-power notions that interfere with the equity goals of an antiracist (and so reparation-based) system of law,” one demanding “emergency measures (such as a moratorium on the 14^th Amendment, and other guarantees of equal protection) so that we can reduce the number of black incarceration”;

or of the white bishop who—after reminding parishioners to “say something if you witness any violation of our safe space (since, after all, praying white supremacists are nevertheless white supremacists)”—vows, banging the church podium with his fist, to switch to black depictions of Christ (describing the move as “one small thing to help decolonize white normativity in the church, which is just so G-damn white!”);

or of the white ethicist who—infamous for pushing her so-called “Hippocratic Oath for White People (first, do no harm to black bodies)—writes, in a major philosophy journal, “moral equals ought to be treated equally, but white citizens (as complicit beneficiaries of systemic racism at least tacit perpetrators of the white-world’s total war on black bodies) are not morally equal to black citizens, who deserve a freer pass under the law to do whatever it takes to push back the white supremacy that unfortunately can never go into remission while America remains America”;

or of the white celebrities (the majority wearing baggy beanies) who, in a by-no-means-cringey PSA about “the malignancy of white supremacy,” swear back to back in a viral collage “never to bring more white babies, more wicked heirs of ill-gotten privileges, into the world”;

or of the white university president sending out an email reminding students as well as staff and faculty that, especially since “unacknowledged antiblack assumptions infect every US institution and every white heart,” it is crucial “never to question or debate the lived experiences of black peers and colleagues”;

or of the white pediatrician who, “especially given the centuries of medical exploitation and experimentation on black bodies,” writes an open letter declaring that, as her “small contribution to curbing the spread of the unfortunately undefeatable cancer of systemic racism,” she will give preferential treatment to nonwhite (especially black) babies (“and not merely when it comes to vaccination scheduling”);

or of the white professor of American literature who, as a condition of continued employment after having said in class that she admired Twain (an author implicated in the sin of slavery merely by having characters that use the word “nigger”), is according to the university’s Committee for Equity “hereby barred

• (1) from wearing the color red (garments, makeup, and so forth) since students report feeling unsafe seeing it set against the pasty pallor of oppression;

• (2) from making any comments that could be construed as related to black culture;

• (3) from assigning any white author too unseparated from colonialism and slavery, whether by having benefited from such horrors, or having bad actor ancestors or descendants, or having stories set in Western locations without due focus on how those locations are problematic, or so on (consult the British Library’s antiracist blacklist for starters).”

This piece is part of a novella-length work, dedicated to my son, detailing how the biggest threat to goodwill between whites and blacks is the various things done in the name of an “anti-nazi commitment to inclusion and equity,” how the biggest threat to black people is the various things done in the name of an “antiracist movement to redress black oppression”—indeed, how the best evidence for the lie of this country being hijacked by white supremacy is the various things done in the name of combating white supremacy.

Photo: equaliteach.co.uk/the-next-chapter-for-white-privilege/