I hesitated on posting this. I worried mostly about getting me and my loved ones doxxed if this post gained any traction out in these digital streets. The news about Ahmaud Arbery was just trickling in when I originally put this down and of course, COVID-19. So I put it down.
Then Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were murdered by cops.
I will take the hit.
With that being said…
White supremacy is a death cult.
Read it back.
Now read it again.
I want you to read it until you fully grasp the weight of the words that I have typed to compose the title of this piece.
I often joke to myself that I have a PhD in white people. As a Black American, you have to, so I’m sure I’m not the only one with this distinction.
Consider this my thesis.
2016 was a hell of a year. Not only did Orange Meyhem get elected because he completely disregarded the dog whistles that white supremacy has utilized since its inception to indicate that people of other races, classes, sexes, creeds, religions, abilities, sexualities and the like are inferior, subhuman and not worthy of the air they breathe, but there were two particualr murders that shook our consciousness. These murders- of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota- weren’t the first muders of Black people in America that shook our consciousness, I mean we’ve had Sandra Bland, Emmit Till, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, James Byrd Jr., insert name here; but these murders hurt because they occurred in successsion, literally a day apart from one another in July 2016, just a day and two after “Independence” Day. Philando Castile’s murder was particularly disturbing because it was livestreamed on Facebook and there was a child in the car when it happened, but that never stopped white supremacy from murdering us before.
But I want to get to my main point, the pain point of this article. It was from that moment on for me at least, that the more and more I saw and watched, as more Black people were killed, as more children were killed at school, as more people were killed at country music festivals, at war, at the border in horrible conditions in detention centers, it hit me – white supremacy is a death cult.
Let me give my explanation of what white supremacy is and what it entails. Yes, it is the belief that those from the European peninsula are the most superior race of people on this planet. As a system, it consists of more than just racial supremacy. Class, sex/gender, ability, culture, and age, among others, are all metrics that are used in this white supremacist framework to determine who is worthy.
The reason why I mention all those things and not just race alone is because in the white supremacist framework that we are currently subject to, white people are affected by this shit too. Many of them don’t realize it.
Seriously, white people do not like other white people.
In America alone, the heartland of this country is constantly ignored and left to die, and yet, their belief in their whiteness and the superiority it gives them constanly keeps them from seeing how they get screwed over time and time again on the class front most importantly. There is a belief here that many poor folks, but especially poor white folks, believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Throughout history, going back into Europe, they used to fight among themselves all the time. The European Union is a fairly recent development, and the United Kingdom leaving it just shows how fragile that alliance potentially can be. The British have beefed with the French and the Irish, and Europeans have beefed with each other over the years, hello World Wars 1 and 2: Electric Boogaloo, and a lot of those prejudices came over to America, until it became beneficial for the white supremacist framework here in America for those ethnic groups initially denied whiteness- the Irish, Italians, Polish, so on and so forth- to become white to up their numbers and strengthen the cause.
Yeah, whiteness is conditional.
But, what do you mean by it’s a death cult, get to that part.
Many cultures throughout history have utilized human sacrifice to appease their gods. The white supremacist god that this country worships especially requires it. They strucutred their god to be this way (because a society’s gods are a reflection of them, not the other way around). It’s why a Black man can go jogging down a street in the state of Georgia, be chased down, murdered in cold blood and his murderers be arrested TWO MONTHS after the fact, because the video was exposed to the public. It is why many of your children are learning drills in the event that their school is shot up instead of gun laws being enacted to prevent these types of things from happening. It is why the response in this country to COVID-19 is not “let’s hunker down for everyone’s safety and get past this”, but instead “I want to get my hair done and go eat at Denny’s and I don’t care who gets sick, I don’t like being told what to do, don’t tread on me, you can’t make me, FREEDOM!!!! *insert American Flag emoji x50* We have to go back to work and die on the job, there is more to life than living.” The god of white supremacy requires blood, and Black blood is potent. This is why Black people were taught to be forgiving in the face of being sacrificed. This country has been engaged in one big long extended ritual.
The god that watches over this country requires death, and guns are it’s favorite instrument of destruction, but it will take war (overseas and on drugs), drug overdoses and health failures as well. Keep guns in circulation, provide piss poor health care, ignore pandemics and epidemics like COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, keep certain subsections of the population under your heel and without knowledge of themselves and supply them with drugs, bread and circuses and bomb other countries incessantly and the white supremacist god will keep you in power.
I’m an optimist to my own detriment sometimes. Now, because the Maggot in Chief was allowed to make it to primary, let alone the Oval Office, it may indicate that there were cracks in the fragile armor of white supremacy. Barack Obama was the first Black president this country ever seen, and no matter if you want to claim him as Black or want to call him a war criminal or believes that his values align more conservatively than him being a Democrat indicates or wish he did more outwardly for Black people, the point is, he was darker than many of the previous occupants of the Presidency and that caused the cultists to go off the deep end and eventually elect the Narcissist in Chief.
We have not known peace since then.
However, time marches forward. Birth rates are still down for white folks in this country. Suicide is up among a lot of groups, but it’s definitely up among middle aged white men. The opiod crisis still rages. The government still tries to follow through on coups and wars. Health care in this country is trash and this pandemic is putting a strain on already fragile resources. This is why they’ve resorted to trying to ban abortion outright in various states, and why they’ve had to kidnap Latino children being kept in detention centers along the southern border, put them up for “adoption” and have loving white families take them in and brainwash them into being white.
Numbers have come out and it has some people believing that Black and Brown people are, again in the minds of some, the only ones affected by COVID-19 given the rate in which we are dying of the virus, but that’s not the case. A lot of these cultists are setting themselves up to be a sacrifice and they don’t even realize it.
I’m not saying this stuff out of hatred. Frustration, anger, fatigue, anxiety, yeah, those are things that I feel on a constant basis, but not hatred. Honestly, I want better for everyone, but I can’t want it more that the folks I want better for. Those who benefit the most from white supremacy need to recognize that they are expendable to the cause, that the benefits are miniscule. Even if the racism aspect of this was miraculously eliminated, you’re still getting fucked by those in power. The entire structure needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. The impetus has been on Black people to do this work since we got here, but it’s not up to us. We’ve been more than willing to assist in the work, but it’s not us. As long as the cultist are still drinking the Kool-Aid that their white skin is an invincibility buff, they won’t move.
I recently learned a new term. Necropolitics was coined by Achille Mbembe and it is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some will die. This COVID-19 pandemic has brought this term to the forefront, even after people were deriding death panels during the Obama administration. I bring it up because I feel like necropolitics has been at play since the inception of this country. The powers that be have silently been deciding who lives and who dies since these shores were encroached by European settlers. Native Americans in the way of manifest destiny die. Enslaved Africans and their decendants die. Chinese laborers working on the railroads die. Latino immigrants fleeing the instability of their countries that was caused by the United States die. Poor whites die, whether by drugs, war or their own hands.
If this piece gains some traction and gets some eyes on it, before you resort to anger and name calling and all the other bullshit you like to do to people spitting the truth, really sit back, calm down for a second, and think about it. I know the history we were taught in our compulsory education was lackluster and didn’t paint the whole picture, but many of you have been around long enough and have enough experience to have witnessed a lot of this shit first hand. Think of the lynchings, the domestic terrorism, how the government has constantly bailed out the rich. Think of as much of it as possible.
I just want you to think of it from whatever angle is palatable for you and realize, let that cold feeling settle in your chest that this country requires the blood of its citizens to keep going. And just think about and realize what would happen if we all stopped willingly laying ourselves at the altar.
They’d probably just bomb us.
Image credit courtesy of Jeff Kowalsky, Getty Images.
