It’s easy to associate such a broad and grand concept of White Supremacy with the KKK, lynchings, Nazis, Hitler, Ayrians, and Proud Boys. In contemporary usage, it is described as groups espousing ultranationalist, racist, or fascist doctrines. It is said that white supremacist groups rely on violence to achieve their goals.
I have infrequently met these sorts of white supremacists. Instead, what I have is a myriad of microaggressions amongst the most conflict-avoidant nice white liberals that hide behind the “it’s complicated” clause, where the mere act of bringing up the topic of Palestinians will have so-called white feminists finding excuses ranging from “it’s my Luteal phase” to sudden busy work schedules. Progressive Except Palestine.
Someone I follow wrote, I’m unfollowing all people who are silent regarding Palestine. People warned this person not to be so extreme. Does online “relationships” matter? What are these symbols of the following? Are we not touching enough grass? But in a society where money isn’t real, and the global south is being held hostage by the invention of debt by the IMF to maintain the façade of white supremacy, I came to realize that I have been complicit in the game of supporting the empire.
The words of Fanon haunt me, ricochet in my mind like an ever-present drone, “Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways…We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries, they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.”
I have been exhausted by my own guilt, attempting to draw blood from stone. But what does any of this compare to the man digging for weeks in the rubble in search of his daughter in Gaza? I beg, pathetically, for humanity within the myth of western democracy, from friends of pleasure. It is more painful to admit and confess my own internalized white supremacy as the crucial ingredient that allows for disappointment than to accept the reality—I have been conjuring a fantasy of hope from a system of apathetic whites who are benefactors of said white supremacist imperialism.
Fanon's voice returns, “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We can do everything today, so long as we do not imitate Europe and are not obsessed with the desire to catch up with Europe. Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed.”
So this is where we are now. A white man corrected me once: relationships don’t end; we just dim the lights here and there. I want to believe that he is right. Yet I constantly wonder what the last words ever uttered between people are. It’s rarely obvious, but usually a mundane false hopelessness for a future that will not exist.
It is suggested in all relationships that one only goes as far as the other. Don’t be too eager, don’t be too enthusiastic. Here, once again, I have slowly adopted the white supremacist’s stance of conservatism, a stance of bad faith. And so, shall we return to the same stance prior to the Great War? A world in fear and distrust? The key ingredient that allows fascist regimes to ignite wars while hiding their blunders.
“White people are the most segregated people in America,” wrote Heather McGhee in The Sum of US. “In today’s increasingly multiracial society, where white people value diversity but rarely live it, there are costs - financial, developmental, even physical - to continue to segregate as we do. 75% of white people have all-white social networks and friend groups.”
So, over the years, I think back to the wonderful but short-term performative whites who swear that they are different from their grandparents as they dictate their terms of engagement. The white rage that denies their fragility in the face of overwhelming evidence. The empire demands daily sacrifice of bodies to which they must project their guilt. I ask myself, what can I do to serve the empire today?
No, suggests Fanon, for “if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent, and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe. Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”
So long, white supremacy