Instead of longing to return to a past version of the world that gave us white supremacy, we should push to kill it at its roots
Source: Prism
“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin.” – Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz)
The white world has a significant problem on its hands. The U.S. empire has disrupted the terms of longstanding agreements. European conquest and colonialism have long had an internal competition between powers, but things have transformed over time. Though these regions, empires, and states were not always friends, the advent of whiteness helped foreground some understanding among the so-called West. A self-selected racial superiority would help enrich their global takeover. The invention of the white race doesn’t have a history we should oversimplify, but what’s happening now during the apparent dissolution of the U.S. empire disturbs it. As naked fascism overruns the entrails of the U.S. administrative state, it seeks to consume and extract wherever it can. In practice, this looks like President Donald Trump, yet again, threatening Europe, Canada, and other longstanding U.S. allies in the name of a supposed isolationism that might unravel the global order we’re used to.
To understand where whiteness has brought us requires a deeper study of Europe, the place that carved the world up in its collective image. However, before its modern relations came to fruition, Europe had much strife and turmoil. From antiquity to our current times, those propagandizing with the pseudoscience of race have worked backward to manufacture narratives to glorify specific histories. We may learn of the greatness of the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, and many other old societies—their whiteness implied, though the concept had not yet been invented. Still, all else can be rendered primitive to sanitize Europe’s own interior genocidal, war-torn, and downtrodden past. Things like religious struggles and the development of capitalism out of feudal orders obliterate the myth that intra-communal violence is a nonwhite phenomenon. The late scholar Cedric Robinson reminds us that these societies and civilizations contained racial characteristics in their domestic conflicts. Consider the prolonged oppression of groups like the Romani, the Irish, and Jews over several periods dating back generations.
