It’s Always About Race
The thing about building a society around white supremacy is that it gets into everything.
White supremacy isn’t a logical, thoughtful, constructed idea. White supremacy is — like every form of supremacy — a primal scream, a mess of incoherence and rage, a spiraling, consuming madness that warps reality like a funhouse mirror for the soul. It corrupts everything it touches, and the only way to remove it is a relentless vigilance.
So yes, everything in the United States is tainted by white supremacy. It is “about race.” It is impossible for it to be about anything else when a bunch of slaveholders get together and insist they’re building a government around the principle of equality. Then three generations later, that very same government collapsed into civil war over the notion of mere hostility to slavery, let alone any actual efforts at abolition. And after they finished killing more than 300,000 loyal souls and a nearly equal number of traitors, the desperately patched-together Union spent another decade and a half asking whether it could countenance actual equality. (Spoiler alert: they couldn’t.) Instead of managing anything resembling an equitable society, they instituted a regime of racial apartheid for almost a century, and then, when a single brick was removed from the architecture of that brutal, inhumane apartheid, they resisted every last element that might meaningfully change things while congratulating themselves for not owning people anymore.
Something so deeply pathological feeds into every conflict, every mistake, every self-inflicted wound on society. To pretend anything else is to exhibit the deepest form of denial.
Whatever it is that is bothering you, whatever political hobby horses you have, whatever aspirational policy you espouse — race is instrumental to it. We don’t want to even acknowledge this, lest we find ourselves confronting just how fucked this mindset is. It goes beyond cutting off your nose to spite your face, and becomes more like creating a self-starting Saw-themed Rube Goldberg machine in your basement rather than a library and relaxation space.
Racism has undermined every universal program going back to the Square Deal. It is responsible for the poverty and lack of industrialization in the South going back to the very first days of the Industrial Revolution. It is why we have a weak labor movement. It is why eugenics became popular and abortion became unpopular. It is why feminism only made advances as far as white, cisgender women could go and still be behind white men. It is why rents are too high and incomes are too low. It is why we have a massive, bloated military and an impoverished social infrastructure.
Any cultural or political malady you can think of: white supremacy is sitting at the core of it.
But rather than be just depressing, this is actually a comforting consistency. Because we know that if we tackle the poison that the patient will recover. Whatever other issues there are, we know that if we can get to the racism and excise it, we have a real chance to move forward.
To some degree, I get the resistance that white people have to recognizing the truth of it. I know why they always complain that BIPOC make “everything” about race, why they deflect to class or gender as the “real” problem, why we can’t have any meaningful discussion about the elephant in the (NYC-sized studio) room. Because if I were acting this wild over melanin and minor differences in phenotypes, then I wouldn’t want to admit it either.
Especially when it’s true.
