Summary of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"

Soon, before the end of black history month, I hope to release a full draft of my lyrical essay "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed," which you will find summarized below.

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Summary of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed

This lyrical jeremiad, merging poetry and scholarship in a manner bound to rankle genre purists, highlights the manifold threats posed to black Americans by the so-called “antiracist movement,” a crusade nourished ultimately on the bogus notion that white supremacy—although “now invisible most of the time, to most eyes”—flourishes today well beyond merely the American marrow from which it supposedly can never be removed: in restaurant menus and Rachmaninoff piano concertos; in defense of “open discourse” and “free speech” and “artistic expression”; in calculus textbooks and triggering names like “John” and “Karen” and “Rebecca”; in handshakes and hugs across the color line; in expectations of punctuality and etiquette and excellence; in museum exhibits and urban design and fast-food packaging; even in black-on-black violence and black-on-black love alike. The movement, propelled by a lucrative engine that spectacularizes race and weaponizes victimhood and essentializes helplessness (all under the disgusting guise of “progress”), harms black people enough, so goes the thesis—on the verge of deconstructing—at the core of my essay, that it almost proves the very thing my essay rejects: that white supremacy runs largely unchecked in every cell of every organ. To put the supreme irony in different terms, the best evidence for the foundational deceit of so-called “antiracism” (namely, that white supremacy enjoys an especially pervasive grip today) are the various degrading things done in its feel-good name of “dismantling white supremacy.”

Indeed, and for reasons I explore at length, it seems clear that the antiracist movement, as is perhaps expected to some degree from any movement whose livelihood depends on what it fights, serves the self-fulfilling function of midwifing the very antiblack undercurrents it claims to combat. It is a hustle as cunning as it is toxic. Primed to decode even the most innocuous words and body tics as “racist violence” worthy of immediate job termination, primed to push its punking program to the extremes of nitpicking at the racism demonstrated even in whites groveling in apology for their “whiteness”—the movement provokes precisely what it prophesizes: a “backlash of fragility” that, likely to be coded in racial terms (given that it was set up that way, and given how unnuanced and dramatic and intellectually lazy Americans are), will allow it to say “Told you so!” and thereby entrench its tentacles even deeper into hearts and minds and institutions.

It should be clear, then, why I have chosen the Sowellesque title “White Supremacy on Its Deathbed” and also why each non-introductory paragraph repeats the same refrain: “[white supremacy] could just sit back and revel in our world where . . .” None of it is mere whimsy. For what I am saying, in effect, is that white supremacy, although too beaten down to pursue its antiblack mission, could find succor in its dying breaths—if not even perhaps miraculous resurgence!—in watching on its ceiling-corner TV all the things carried out in the name of antiracism: from workplace diversity trainings stereotyping black inferiority to school boards imposing racial guilt, from top-down mandates to decrease arrests and school suspensions of blacks to treating blacks as “super citizens” deserving of special leeway and choice cuts and pampered protections from unsettling ideas or even from certain sounds or certain visual marks. How could white supremacy on its deathbed not feel some sort of warm-fuzzy surge at seeing blacks humiliated and hobbled and spoiled to the point of being unable to hold their own heads up without assistance—and all through efforts rolling back social progress, right as we were on the verge of going colorblind, perhaps even to the point of starting a race war?

By keeping black Americans shackled to inflated notions of persecution while fomenting (in such an obviously middle-school-playground move) the white rage it predicts, antiracism plays enough of an antiblack role that I would have thought—if only my tinfoil hat were a tad thicker—was by white-supremacist design (instead of the banal truth of the matter: that it is as organic, as explainable by the selective effects of competing grabs for power, as Paley’s eye). White supremacy, after all, need not lift a finger when “antiracists,” their cynical manipulations and self-serving hype more befitting P. T. Barnum than Thurgood Marshall, prove so effective at keeping blacks on a plantation of dependency while stoking the very antiblack sentiments that legitimize their movement—profiting, despite the long-term effects, ultimately from divisiveness (like most of us do, to be fair, in our algorithm-powered outrage economy where the hand of selection finds pandemonium fittest).

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