Tag: white supremacy

The Denial of Blackness

Blackness is disruptive, appearing from beyond the sharply codified ‘civilized’ landscape, arising from the relational, the tribal, re-enacting the alchemy of kinship, the recovery of natural authority, the intuitive recapitulation of one’s source, a perpetual invitation to and reminder of the inherent precarity of life.

Race is such a raw topic in America (and elsewhere) that I might well question what I, a white person, imagine I’m doing writing about race. I have no authority to be doing this, neither personal nor academic. But I’m not really intending to write about race. I’m regarding blackness as a construct. I am noticing an arrangement of ideas around what blackness symbolizes, to find meaning in that arrangement that reaches beyond race and intra-acts with mass consciousness. 

Small (b) blackness has been characterized by Bayo Akomolafe as a quality of being, as a metaphor beyond the constraint of racial identity. In the most general sense, blackness emerges as a statement about culture and history in a world—what we call Modernity, or if you prefer, late-stage capitalism—which itself is increasingly untethered to either history or culture. blackness is a quality of presence, consciously and unapologetically bringing history into the moment as a way of making meaning, making visible its intrinsic garments. In that sense, blackness is independent of superficialities like pigmentation. It’s an implication of the unexpected, an embodiment greater than physical dimensions. It is the language of uprising, a voice of the whole heart. It arises from instinctual guidance rather than the inertia of mass culture. It’s an expression of wholeness beyond the atomization and categorizations of modernity. It’s the fugitive self, the unchained, the unbowed, uncolonized by modern convention.

blackness is a mark of independence, whether momentary or perpetual. It is disruptive, appearing from somewhere beyond the codified ‘civilized’ landscape, arising from the relational, the tribal, re-enacting the alchemy of kinship, the recovery of natural authority, the intuitive recapitulation of one’s connection to an unregulated past, a perpetual invitation to and reminder of the inherent precarity of life. blackness is an escape, a temporary reprieve, however brief, from the Modern Plantation; it is also a recovery of something rapidly receding from human memory. 

blackness is not owned solely by Black people. It may be embodied by anyone, and its enactments are not trivial. As an elementary example, it’s Colin Kaepernick kneeling (at the sideline) and it’s Eminem kneeling (at the Super Bowl). It’s disturbing, enlivening, seductive, anarchic, and destabilizing. Its implications reside in hidden capacities, in the molecular algorithms of traits, inherited wisdom, communal practice, shamanic ritual borrowed from the bones of the more-than-human, in whatever remains of traditional cultures everywhere. It threatens to redefine self, family, social responsibility, community, and economy. It’s definitely an affront to the State. Most of all, it’s a crack, breaking through the cultural obscuration of existential alignments.

In the conquest of North America, settlers, refugees, religious extremists, and revolutionaries escaping monarchic Europe brought their treasured ethics with them. The entire project of Christianity since its origins had been the transformation of the primary spiritual relationships sustaining every culture it encountered.  Instead of relying on one’s horizontal and historical bonds with land, gods, tribal practices, and pagan customs, the unconverted were called to discard all of that and replace it with a vertical relationship to a single omniscient authority. And if they refused, they invited extermination.

Christian whiteness is built on a limited foundation of sacred rules and structures supporting, from an animist perspective, a narrow definition of God, to the exclusion of all other possible sources or views. Its relationship to the irrational, the lustful, the profane, the un-christened disorder of a complex, tangled and uncontrollable world is the essence of its original denial of blackness. blackness strikes fear in the heart of the modern Crusader. No wonder Christianity is obsessed with missionary zeal.

The morality of the Christian compendium of rules, aligned with capitalist interest, requires incremental repression and restriction. The denial must always be reinforced in ever more confining ways, at increasing cost, to manage spontaneous stirrings or any unbridled celebration of what institutional Christianity might regard as the ultimate threat—the discovery of divinity in everything, all the time. In this light, Christianity, for centuries and especially as it came to America, was always a radical departure from the typical inclusion of unseen forces, the witness of animal, of stone and sky, of forest and river in the cosmology of tribal cultures. blackness is a force of nature. If we do not know it, we cannot love it.  Resisting its resonant freedom relegates us to a life compacted in purgatory, neither fully arriving at the new nor being able to return to the old.

Europeans and white slavers from North America also brought their bias with them. It wasn’t on social or political grounds that slavery was undertaken. It was mercantilism supported by a religious certainty that any culture or people relying on anything other than the promise of eternal salvation could never be worthy of equality or the abundant promise of the New World. Even now, American religious extremists are still embedded in the belief that America was originally a religious endeavor in search of unimpeded freedom and that even democracy itself was sourced in religious principles, never mind what the Constitution or its framers might say. For them, church and state could never truly be separate, and some peoples are marked by God to remain eternally superior. Conversion can never even truly erase their primal nature. To Rome, conferring Roman citizenship to conquered barbarians of the North could never change their intrinsic identity. It only changed their allegiance.

The shadow of racism was never solely an issue of color; it’s an institutionalized denial of the pagan Other, the utter refusal to regard any vestige of social and spiritual structures of indigeneity worthy of equal regard.  And even after 400 years, Black people in America can never totally outgrow their roots even if they aren’t exactly familiar with them. They cannot live their way to authentic equality because blackness is unforgivable. Even behind the appearance of total assimilation, they are viewed, along with other ethnicities, Jews, Asians, and Native Americans, by many white people as beyond assimilation—beyond homogenization. 

Racism is much more than a denial of the dark recess of one’s own being. The purpose of structures and elaborations, both the subtle and obviously brutal controls, the hierarchies of the State, the elimination of Black history is to preserve racist preferences, to protect whiteness from any direct experience or confrontation with the Other. Unapologetic, full throated, fully empowered blackness today is the undoing of white hegemony. The more so it becomes, the greater the threat it poses to the privilege of white supremacy and the greater the violence employed to tame it.  

Globalization has been the project of the West for much longer than the appearance of neoliberal economics. Wherever it goes, cultures are undermined and slowly dislodged from their indigenous foundations, the ancestral, historical, cultural, and spiritual anchors that sustained them, to be discarded in favor of the religion of the market. Yes, globalization is a religion. blackness carries an intrinsic challenge to its narrowly defined cosmology. It implicates a receding past and a present increasingly beholden to the techno-driven bureaucracies and efficiencies of modernity. blackness can be an electric charge that shakes whiteness out of its delirium, its narrow view, its privilege, and complacency. blackness is a call to connect with the subliminal, the repressed, denied, and buried pre-colonial common human heritage. Its power lies in drought-resistant derangement, in its disregard for the ceremonies of exclusion, the protocols of inequality.

blackness is messy, uncontrollable, uncouth and…in opposition to the dominant ethic of the time, irrational. blackness is the paradoxical, unruly, weedy, muddy, and unpredictable ongoing-ness of person-making. It is the intergenerational transmission of rules from the inside out, from the ground up. It’s the inversion of Artificial Intelligence. It’s the continuous shedding of the memory of chains, defying the relentless marketing of the new ‘freedom,’ the pseudo-individualistic human whose authenticity is quietly digested by the modern anaconda, The Machine. And at the same time, blackness, wherever it manifests, recalls and breaks through the protocols of state-defined ‘freedom.’

blackness will always demand to be known, even if it is not speaking. It cannot be categorized. It resides in irrepressible social choreographies. It can be denied. It can be sequestered, controlled, or brutalized, but it will not die. Blockades of rules and regulation can be constructed to thwart it, silence it or to put it ‘in its place.’ But blackness will eventually make itself known because it is somewhere deep in all of us. It is the crouching jaguar biding its time, a savage lesson to the big-game white hunter, to supremacy in any form, to whomever may seek its submission.

blackness is in everyone’s ancestry. The catechism of the mainstream co-opting and monetizing the unconventional is a denial of ancestry, a denial of polyamorous culture for the sake of the sterile and the puritanical. The monomaniacal adherence to monogamy, monotheism, monoculture, monopoly, to a monolithic, monochromatic, and mono-typical digital world is the ultimate objective, a utopian flatland, the Great Reset, the ideal of the Metaverse, the erasure of culture, not simply the ultimate dominance of Western modernity, but the complete structural capture and eradication of blackness.

 

Zombie America

America is under racist assault. It has been this way for centuries—as though a cult of the undead, the empty dispossessed can only see the world in one way—Us vs Them. Purposeful demolition is the foremost objective of the undead—led by the First Family of Destruction. The zombie ideologues now get their news from the Family, its enablers, sycophants and its media amplifiers. There’s no more capacity for the undead to change than there is for a jellyfish to float against the currents. Yes, the undead are the jellyfish of the logo-sphere and they carrying a nasty sting. 

There’s no aspiration, no value, no commitment or connection to the collective, only to a their narrow view of entitlement.  There’s been no event, no sacred passage, no period of trial or transition, no foundation for their actions other than domination, jealousy, greed, anger and vengeance. There’s been no transition, no developmental progress, no entrée into a wiser way of seeing based in reality instead of wish-fulfillment.

Traditional initiation crosses a threshold to join the continuous stream of birthing and dying, with all the triumph and adversity, love and suffering in between. Emerging successfully from an initiation would mean walking with our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds (not the reverse), holding a natural connection with our selves, others and with the land. 

Traditional cultures whose initiations were integral to the continuity of their communities prescribed these rites on the cusp of adulthood. They require a separation, a death, an awakening to essence (or soul), a time of rebirth and a return. An initiation is a second birth, having grown up dependent on family and community, the initiate is prepared to establish a separate life, to be guided by a core vision and to live out a full investment in the community according to that vision. 

Initiation is also a rooting experience, a gesture of coming home in the body-mind of the initiate. The body of the initiate is infused with the land and the spirits of the land. They become One.  This is the indigenous experience of initiation. Imagining a shred of anything similar in the American racist zombie cult is a laughable fantasy. We are diminished by all of it—for 400 years. We, as a nation, have been the undead, lost. Sadly, on the issue of race, we are as homeless as the ones sleeping in doorways.

I am of a people who, historically, had no land. The cultural lore is of temporary residence and history has tragically proven the validity of that outlook. We were not nomads, unless you count wandering in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt. That was the original initiation of the Jewish people. As the story goes, we received not only land after the struggle, but a rebirth in that land blessed by the God of that land. True or not, the history of the Jewish people has been one of being landless—until the establishment of the State of Israel. Overlooking the injustice of that creation for the moment (and all the suffering it has unleashed), that land remains the State of Israel in the hearts of many Jews whether they live there or not. 

Even so, tracing my own roots in the Jewish diaspora over the last 150 years, I can say I’m a citizen of America. I could even say I own land or I might trace my life in America for four generations, but I do not have a place in the same sense in which I describe it above. Rural Americans do; urban/suburban Americans don’t. As Stephen Jenkinson has said, we have learned to make do with portable gods. I personally have by conventional definition been a nomad. The deeper yearning to be of a place remains. 

My advantage, my privilege, is that I was not ripped from my ancestral home and transported against my will to this land. And beyond the mass kidnapping and enslavement, the American tradition of making others landless in the course of claiming this land continues to this day. This ideology is, under Trump particularly, delivered every day by the occupying force of police and ICE whose job it has become to enforce the message: you do not belong here. You have no claim to this place. It is ours and will never be yours. 

My personal bond connecting my history and cultural memory to Israel has been severed by the racist apartheid policies of that government. But in my adopted home, zombie white supremacy, an increasingly visible, dangerous and aggressive segment of this nation of white European immigrants, staking a claim to this land above anyone else, is now with rising brutality resuscitating and delivering a murderous message of ownership with a knee to the neck, further severing my bond to this land in the process.

Looking at the American republic, dangling as it is now between the life and death, the racist undead, led by the foremost zombie of our time, Donald Trump, remind us of an incomplete national initiation. There is nothing about Trump to suggest any history of formative, let alone transformative development, no true home, allegiance to anything or any distraction from singleminded and empty devotion to personal gain. And likewise, his most ardent followers feel entitled to demand and accept nothing less than unobstructed freedom of their personal choices without much suggestion of a commitment to anything other than that freedom–such as the common interest. 

America’s initiation on the issue of race is entering the encounter-with-death phase. Trump’s zombie cult, the uninitiated, reflect to the rest of us how severed we are from our ancestor’s bones. America is still way behind the curve of truly becoming Emma Lazarus’s home to the many. It’s primarily a home to the few whose dominance depends on successfully claiming—and selling—the idea of America as their exclusive home. The message delivered to communities of color are that they are temporary residents with shallow roots at best, at constant risk of being attacked, marginalized, incarcerated, exploited, oppressed, exported, discarded and finally, if necessary, killed. America is now being dragged into the mud of history by the undead. The world looks on in horror.

The racist undead have never been alive in the sense of recognizing interdependence as a primal reality of existence. Nor do they recognize or consider themselves beholden to any resident spirits. Even their god is homeless. Grounding to a place and to all people is not embedded in modern American culture; thus, no common vision exists of what it means to live in the full flower of diversity we represent. Our roots are too shallow; our gods are foreign. We are driven by the ideology of self-interest. And if Trump’s ascendance is any indication, the zombies are winning.

What is so disturbing and ironic in these times is that those who claim to be Most American, the ones claiming ownership and to being the ‘true’ keepers of the only legitimate version of America, the ones lugging automatic weapons into statehouses, to polling places and into the street proclaiming their ‘freedom,’ the ones acting least like they believe in the promise of this nation, have the least invested in making sure all people share and contribute to the struggle of thriving together, most likely because it is they themselves who have been hollowed out and discarded by the America they claim to love. They are our zombie chickens coming home to roost, leaning into the nihilism of the chief zombie, Donald Trump.