I love the loving clarity of your posts. There is no shame in reclaiming our humanity. If I may share — I am 63 and “shedding.” My mother was first-gen American with parents from a tiny village on the plains beneath Mt. Etna in Sicily. They raised me for part of my childhood. I needed to go to Sicily and this summer, I did. Setting foot in a tiny place where everyone knows everyone else, where a stranger invited me into her home for lunch because I was lost in winding streets, where I touched the stone house in which my beloved Nonno was born — all was a pilgrimage I needed to make. In Mineo, Sicily I understood what my forebears traded for life here, particularly in the vacuous chain-link, two-car garage wasteland of the suburbs. I understood it in my bones, like my center of gravity was righted by being there. My chaotic childhood, my sense of lost young adulthood, my resistance to social climbing even as it was beaten into me, all made sense. Paesani from a tiny ancient place thrust into a society that gobbled them - their labor, culture, bodies, souls, language, and customs. I’ve been grieving since I returned. But I also have a little corner where I light a candle and honor them, the songs and poetry and first language I heard as a newborn. My grandfather was deemed enemy alien in WW II and never spoke of it. My grandmother worked in a sweatshop. I want my life to honor them.
Thank you for this offering. What you just shared is not a comment. It is a return. A soul retrieval. A remembrance in the deepest sense of the word.
What you described, the grief, the clarity, the resistance to suburban soullessness, the ache in your bones, is the spiritual cost of whiteness. Your people weren’t born white. They were Sicilian, Paesani, land-rooted, village-centered, earth-bound, and story-filled. But empire offered them a false trade: survival in exchange for silence. Proximity to whiteness in exchange for everything they actually were.
And now you, with candlelight and song, are reversing that transaction.
You are reclaiming what was deemed enemy.
You are honoring what was once punished.
You are bringing poetry back to a bloodline that was taught to forget it.
There is no shame in this grief. This is holy mourning. This is the kind of remembering that heals not just your lineage, but the whole system that tried to erase it.
I honor your pilgrimage.
I honor your Nonno.
And I honor the way your life, your voice, and your altar are now becoming what empire tried to bury:
A living archive of truth.
Thank you for walking this path. You are not alone. We are remembering beside you.
I say that ancestors build the emotional rooms we live in. The grief they never expressed took up space. I thought it was my fault, as so many children do. This is deep stuff. Seeing “Nonno” in your post makes it real for me. Big thanks.
This has hit home. I had a vague idea of what white supremacy, racism, colonialism was about - it is not something I had looked into much which is shameful really given the world as it is. Now I realise how much the systemic issues in society I instinctively push against are based upon it all I know I need to investigate in depth. Thank you for sharing in a way that has brought these issues into my awareness in a way that touched my heart.
Did you know the first Sicilians to arrive in America were “Black”? Did you know that the patron saint of African Americans was born in Sicily? When Sicilians arrived in the decades after the Civil War, they were designated as “black” on the US Census, which included two choices. Black or White. As such, they were subjected to Jim Crow laws and the same indignities as the former slaves. The largest mass hanging occurred in New Orleans, where 11 Sicilians were wrongly accused of murder. Benedict the Moor was born in the 1500s and canonized in 1806; Catholic churches in the South still bear his name.
The “Black or White” binary was a settler-colonial tool of racial classification, used to uphold white supremacy by legally separating who was allowed to fully participate in society and who was not.
My Sicilian grandparents were considered trash and ungodly when they arrived in America via Ellis island 1909. Their family lived in extreme poverty. Children were taken by child services.
Sorry to read that, John, but I believe it. Teddy Roosevelt, governor at the time of the lynchings of Sicilians, echoed “the ride down the escalator” of you know who. Roosevelt hated Southern Europeans. The stigma lasts to this day. Mention the word “Sicilian” and ask for a word association, and see what you get. Roosevelt planted that over a century ago.
Yeah as soon as that Sicilian village where everyone knows eachother was mentioned I knew she wasn’t going to realize the contradictions between her likely politics and the the world she finds meaningful.
This resonated a lot. I’ve had this feeling of rootlessness my whole life, the feeling of not having “a people”, but I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about it.
I am Spanish, but I don’t think citizenship is the same as the identity of your “clan”. Modern nations are the product of what you explain, they are not ancestral identities. The Church was probably even more damaging in erasing ancient cultures.
In my case, reconnecting with an ancestral culture is very difficult. Spain was conquered by the Romans like 2300 years ago, there is nothing left from the native inhabitants: no language, no writing, just some ceramic pieces and broken weapons. The erasure was so early, and so thorough, that we barely know anything of the Iberian peoples.
Besides, Andalucía (where I am from) has a history of A LOT of peoples influencing or conquering this land: the Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, the Romans, several Germanic peoples, Byzantium, Arabs from the Middle East, Sephardic Jews, several waves of northern Africans…until the creation of a united ruling by the Catholic Monarchs in the 15th century.
I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint just one source of my identity, or an original group. I don’t have a tradition to turn to.
However, I’ve been really into prehistoric art and rituals for the past years, and I love it because it’s like that ancestral indentity we all share. The original spirituality—the connection with the earth, the worship of the forests, rivers, mountains, the moon and other animals. Of life itself.
So if you don’t have a clue of what your origins are, prehistory connects us all. Everyone comes from there. Sometimes I look for rock art in my area and when I find it, it feels profound. That’s my tradition 🌱🌲🪨🦌🦬🦉
You just named what so many people feel but are never given language for, the grief of ancestral erasure, masked as modern identity.
Rootlessness is not your fault.
It is the result of conquest sold as civilization.
It’s what happens when empire strips away kinship and replaces it with citizenship.
When the sacred is criminalized, and we’re told that ancestry begins at a border.
You are absolutely right, modern nations are not ancestral identities.
They are post-1492 projects of empire.
Spain, like many colonizing powers, was itself colonized first—by Rome, by Church, by Crown, and what survived was not culture, but what empire allowed to remain.
But what you’re doing, seeking prehistoric art, finding rock markings, listening to the land, that’s not a hobby.
The Iberian peoples weren’t lost. They were silenced.
And yet here you are, singing back their memory with your feet in the soil and your eyes on stone. That is tradition.
That is the inheritance.
You don’t need intact mythology or written archives to belong.
Belonging lives in your awe.
In your remembering.
In your listening to what empire tried to erase.
And yes, when we don’t know where to begin, we return to prehistory.
Because the sacred came before the nation-state.
The land is older than the Church.
And your soul remembers a time before conquest.
Thank you for speaking this truth aloud. You just made space for so many others to remember that we don’t need a passport to belong, we need a place to return our grief, and a practice to grow something honest from it.
🪶🌒🪨🌲 You are already in your tradition. Keep going.
The only thing I would add to this masterful explanation is the part that’s extremely uncomfortable to me as a Christian pastor. I think Christian evangelism and white supremacist conquest are basically coextensive. Christianity in the form that it usually takes is innately anti-indigenous because it offers a universal abstract story that doesn’t give a shit about the land. I’m still a Christian but I’m trying to find my way back to the druidry of my ancestors. Being rooted in the land where I live is essential to my not being a dissociating anxious asshole. The white man’s contempt for his body and the land where he lives is such a big part of why we treat people terribly.
"God Is Red" by Vine Deloria Jr. was a timely read for me after years of drifting away from "the" church.
It might give undue weight to Velikovsky at one point (e.g. the positing of old testament narratives as plausible side effects of Venus making an incredibly late entry into this solar system), but the perspective of practices that are land-based versus his-story-based is crucially critical.
To say I can relate to your comment is an understatement, especially in the context of this post/ article / what are these even called this month? I made sure to read this article all the way through, slowly so as not to miss anything.
I, too, am white (Anglo, yes, largely Protestant, but with Irish and Scottish mixed in, along with Norman, AKA northern French) am a practicing Christian, pray ceaselessly that it's the true kind (including as I type this, during my wife's and my individual/dual prayer time.) No, not this entire system of false teaching that calls itself Christian. But I studied resistance, dissident, and revolutionary movements (long before I studied the Bible) all the way back to the early Christians and the medieval communal societies. Rootless or well-traveled? How about both? I've been to 43 U.S. States by my count, lived in 8 of them (six months or longer), plus, respectively 5 Canadian provinces, lived in two.
For what it's worth, I am currently on my second marriage to a black woman - widowed from the first. And that, too, has to be a misnomer, because - it does bother me to admit this, but I've got to - as a geography major, I still have a terrible time with more than just the names and approximate locations of African countries, let alone the sordid colonial history of genocide and conquest - and above all, before all that mess. My late wife and current one was/is also Christian- and apart from those two similarities, they couldn't be more different. It should be obvious by now, why. Besides the fact that we're individuals (yeah, take that, Borg, as someone pointed out here, LOL).
Well, I've said enough for now. Time to take a deep breath or two, and pull up a chair and listen some more.
I think the indigenous spiritual movement of Yeshua of Nazareth is a hell of a lot cooler than the abstract colonial mess we inherited from the "Christianized" Roman empire. And also I think it's okay to syncretize our spirituality with what we encounter in our natural context if we can do so without trying to make ourselves the experts in other culture's lineages. So many rich white people get into tantra, ayahuasca, and other trendy forms of spirituality and immediately try to monetize it for themselves. My path, the Way of the Fool, is to gather up wisdom from lots of different places like Saul of Tarsus did (he was so syncretistic) and let other peoples' wisdom humble and refine my Christianity so that hopefully I can find a way of living in grace and truth that doesn't involve trying to conquer others.
Whew. This was so beautifully written! Thank you for sharing your perspective. Can you say more about your path, the Way of the Fool? Where does that concept come from?
In 1 Cor 1:27, Paul writes that God “chose the fools to shame the wise.” To be a fool in the sense in which I use it is to be unconcerned with being perceived as an expert or authority figure. It is to live in beginner’s mind and see everyone around me as my teacher. It is to let my youngest son tell me what to do for the sake of his empowerment. It is trusting that divine grace is sufficient and there’s not anything that I need to “master” or “get right” other than relaxing into complete trust of the universe. It’s the opposite of being a stereotypical white man who needs to feel authoritative.
To some degree, whiteness is the accidental invention of the universal identity created by Paul’s epistles in the New Testament. But it really intensifies in the age of the European Enlightenment in the aftermath of the religious wars when Kant et al said why can’t we just be global men of reason instead of Catholics or Protestants, Prussians or Bohemians. Whiteness is the delusion that there is a global, objective way to experience the universe that transcends ethnicity and geography. It becomes a skin color secondarily to the self-imagined meta-ethnic transcendence of European intellectuals. The whites supremacy of the dumb American racists is a much later byproduct of the original white supremacy/Christian exclusivism of the European intellectuals. Jesus is roped into this generic universal humanity in the European Enlightenment partly because his Judaism was so distasteful to the civilized men of reason.
To borrow from Star Trek, the Borg are white supremacy.
Sad thing, if I read this essay to some of my family, they would just be affronted and mad. If I replaced every instance of white with Borg, they would still miss the message, just wouldn't be mad. So much to learn and then so much to undo post the most horrendous movement of mAgAgAgA.
Yep. Before they turned us white, they needed to turn us away from nature, God, community and self. Obedience requires first the stripping away of belonging. Long road back. But, if we travel together, all of us, the journey will seem shorter or at least more enriching.
Thank you. You pretty much summed up why I feel really angry every time I’m filling out paperwork and the only option is white. I’m not white. I’m Irish and Swedish. I felt so lost as a kid. So, I decided to learn about my ancestors. There are so many parallels in ancient native cultures. And yet they are erased by colonizers. Dismissed as silly and exotic, rather than truths that span across cultures globally. I hate seeing my ancestors painted as savages who were lucky to be "converted" as colonizers try to erase our languages, gods, and cultures. English catholic "conquerors" in Irland burning "idols" that were bones of revered ancestors covered in gold and jewels, just so they could rob graves with "idolitry" as an excuse. I want to remember everything. The words in our languages they erased because they don't follow the victim victor mentality. I want to recognize the dignity and validity of all these other people's cultures too.
Brother! How do you have the energy and time to educate white people on this? How? Lol…. I burned out years ago. Facts and education seem to matter little to the “feelings are facts” crowd.
LOL I definitely understand. I committed my life to this work. What I found is that they are not incapable of learning, we just have to find ways to teach and reach. 💙
We could say the exact same about you , dude. You have prefabricated narratives that ignore facts as well. You don’t have “the truth” you have a perspective not allowed to be debated within institutions you’ve captured.
None at the scale we are in now, which is a legacy from the british (east india trading company).
Take the mongols for example: as much as they tried or wanted to export their culture as the dominant one, they ended up adopting the traditions and cultures of what we now call chinese.
Its not as cut and dry as your comment pretends, because your interpretation of history based on your comment is paltry and uninformed.
First, the idea that “everyone did colonialism” is a distortion. Yes, many societies throughout history engaged in conquest and empire-building. That is a human reality. But not all conquest is created equal.
What European settler colonialism did, beginning in 1492, is fundamentally different in scale, structure, permanence, and ideological violence.
The British, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese created a system of racialized domination that enslaved millions, redrew the borders of nearly the entire planet, erased hundreds of languages, and embedded whiteness as the global standard for humanity, intelligence, beauty, and power.
They didn’t just conquer. They colonized time, space, identity, memory, and economy.
They didn’t just win wars. They built global hierarchies of race that outlasted the war itself and still determine who lives, who dies, who thrives, and who is discarded.
No Indigenous, Asian, African, or pre-colonial society ever invented chattel slavery based on skin color. None of them created a racial caste system enforced across continents. None built a capitalist empire where bodies, souls, land, and labor were commodified at industrial scale. And none globalized a myth that whiteness equals superiority.
Second, when people bring up the Lakota, Mongols, Chinese, and others, they’re engaging in whataboutism. They’re trying to equate isolated moments of conquest with a system that has lasted over 500 years and still governs every global institution today.
The Mongols, for all their violence, assimilated into the cultures they conquered. They didn’t leave behind a legacy of systemic racial domination.
The Lakota and other Indigenous peoples may have had conflict, but they never sought global hegemony or erased cultures through forced assimilation, land theft, or eugenics.
No non-European empire created anything close to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, boarding schools, scientific racism, apartheid, redlining, caste-by-color capitalism, or the colonial debt traps still enforced today.
And if someone brings up the Great Wall of China, remind them it was built to defend against invasion, not to enforce racial supremacy on a global scale.
Third, the idea that domination is just human nature is the most dangerous lie. It naturalizes what was intentionally engineered.
Whiteness is not human nature. It is a political invention created to justify domination under the guise of civilization.
Colonial violence was not random. It was legalized, sanctified, mapped, monetized, taught, and repeated across centuries. It became law, theology, policy, and culture.
That is not just domination. That is a global system.
If you want to respond to this kind of deflection, here’s something powerful you can say:
This article wasn’t saying white people invented violence. It was naming that white supremacy turned violence into a world order. A global, racialized, legal, and self-replicating structure.
Yes, the Lakota had warfare. So did the Mongols, the Zulu, the Persians. But none of them rewrote the globe with racial hierarchy as law. None of them built intergenerational wealth through genocide and slavery. None of them erased entire cosmologies and called it progress.
You’re not making a historical point. You’re dodging a structural truth.
If you want to talk about violence, let’s talk. But don’t confuse tribal war with 500 years of colonial erasure, racial capitalism, and institutional white supremacy.
Whiteness justified a system of chattel slavery that was in fact one of the most barbaric systems in the history of the world. They committed themselves to that system, with the same zeal they capitalized on the discovery of germs, guns and steal.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
This book unmasks the myth of “American exceptionalism” and lays bare the genocidal logic of settler colonialism. It makes clear that conquest wasn’t natural. It was racial, religious, and strategic.
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Colonial violence was not an accident. It was the language of empire. Fanon shows how colonization destroys the psyche and culture of the colonized while grooming the colonizer to believe in domination as destiny.
The Racial Contract
by Charles W. Mills
White supremacy is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Mills reveals how whiteness was embedded in the foundational contracts of Western modernity and how racism shaped law, philosophy, and power globally.
Silencing the Past
by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
History isn’t just written by the victors. It’s engineered by them. This book shows how colonial powers distorted, erased, and controlled memory to uphold empire. It will dismantle any myths about neutrality in history.
Birth of a White Nation
by Jacqueline Battalora
Whiteness was not born. It was legislated. This book traces the colonial laws that created white identity in North America to divide and conquer labor forces. It proves whiteness is not culture. It is control.
Decolonizing Methodologies
by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Western knowledge systems have always been tools of domination. Smith gives us a powerful analysis of how research, academia, and education systems continue the violence of colonization against Indigenous peoples.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by Walter Rodney
Rodney tears down the myth that Europe “developed” the world. He reveals how Europe extracted wealth, life, and sovereignty from Africa to fuel its own capitalist rise, leaving deep structural underdevelopment behind.
Orientalism
by Edward Said
Said reveals how Western powers invented a fantasy version of the East to justify their domination. This book is key to understanding the cultural machinery behind white supremacy and imperialism.
The Invention of the White Race
by Theodore W. Allen
Allen meticulously shows how whiteness was created as a ruling-class project in the colonies to prevent solidarity between poor Europeans and enslaved Africans. It’s one of the most thorough studies of race as power.
Stamped from the Beginning
by Ibram X. Kendi
A sweeping historical account of anti-Black racism, from 15th-century Europe to the United States. Kendi names the policies, theologians, scientists, and politicians who deliberately built the ideology of racial hierarchy.
Afrotopia
by Felwine Sarr
A visionary work that refuses to frame Africa through a Western lens. Sarr reclaims the future through African imagination, art, and philosophy, offering a blueprint for a world beyond colonial metrics of success.
Thanks for sharing these resources. My old seminary professor J Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account provides a helpful illustration of how the abstraction and rationalism in Protestant Christianity created whiteness as a sort of anti-ethnic identity of geographically rootless “men of reason” with a divine mandate to “civilize the savages.” I think Christianity’s complicity in white supremacy is a horror that those of us who are Christian have to face up to.
This just means European empires were the best at building them, at least in recent memory. When viewed in this light, belief in white supremacy made sense for the time. To be clear, I don’t actually, literally think Europeans are genetically superior, only the best at conquering in a certain historical time frame. Also, Chinese and Russians have been adopting European methods for a long time now.
I’m white and I love this piece, thank you so much. I remember as a kid saying to my Mom, “we don’t have any traditions” and what I was describing was the homogenized WASP white culture I grew up in. I’m exploring my own pre-Christian Northern European roots and reclaiming those traditions that were stolen from my ancestors.
This really resonated with me. I am a daughter of the Irish Diaspora, second generation American. My Irish-born grandmother lived with my family when I was a child so there was a living memory of “the old country.” I performed in Irish dance festivals. I.e., there was a sense of an ancestral culture. My family were Catholics from the North of Ireland so I was raised with stories of occupation, discrimination and oppression. My maternal great grandfather emigrated because of an injury he sustained at the hands of an “Orangeman.” My family weren’t “rabble rousers” or IRA but, again, subtly I understood that we had been colonized, although that term was never used. My grandmother would talk about atrocities that occurred during the “civil war.” She related them in such detail that as a very young child I assumed she was talking about things that had happened at the time of the American Civil War and thus within the living memory of her parents, relatively recent. (Remember, I was very young so things were a little muddled in my head.) Later, I came to realize she had been speaking of events that happened in the English Civil War - I.e., she was relating in vivid detail incidents that had occurred hundreds of years earlier but must have been handed down through the generations. We had a family keepsake - a green ribbon that an ancestor had worn in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, defying laws that forbade doing so. Although devout Catholics, there was an appreciation of and reverence for nature that I have come to think of a vestigial “bass note” of paganism that underscored the conscious religion. In later years, I have done “ancestor work/practices.” Thank you so much for your post - it’s given me much to reflect upon and at the same time has validated my own experience.
Every human group has created culture and just because they are descendants of colonizers don’t really mean they don’t have culture. If that was the case, most of the people that descended from other colonial projects - the Mongals, the Romans, the Mughals, the Abbasid, the ottomans, wouldn’t have culture either. But of course no one would dare say China, Kazakhstan, Italy, India or Egypt don’t have culture.
But more importantly, the claim is *deeply* insidious. The idea that descendants can’t make new, distinct culture would invalidate the culture that black Americans have made, many who don’t know their roots. You can try to limit to only white people but which ones? Italians? Jews? The Irish? Never mind you’d be suggesting that white Americans are some how fundamentally different than other humans which is literally dehumanizing
And the idea that white folks should go “back to their ancestors” culture is essentially the same right wing talking point and has scary implications - the idea that humans must be chained to same vague notion of their historical culture. This is antithetical to the way humans actually live - culture shifts and changes and morphs, and new cultures are created all the time.
And the idea that white supremacy is the end all be all, the founder of capitalism and patriarchy is so ahistorical it’s funny. Empires have existed long before Europe was more than a mere backwater. Is China a white supremacist because it practices debt diplomacy and is the owner of the largest mines in the Congo while committing genocide against Uyghurs and over fishing countries sovereign waters? Is India white supremacist because its leader is a Hindu nationalist hell bent on disenfranchising its Muslim citizens? Was the Ottoman Empire white supremacist? Were the Arab empires that had the largest slave trade in Africa, that lasted over a thousand years and enslaved an estimated 18 million people white supremacist?
Look. I’m a black dude. I could tell you a thing or two about racism. But this article is so reductive, half baked, ahistorical with deeply insidious undertones I’m at a loss. And to watch the mostly white folks in the comments lap it up is wild.
First time I have ever commented on Substack. This is absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever read. I respect your opinion and take. It’s yours and there is nothing wrong with you feeling the way you expressed in your essay. I just don’t agree. I’m a mixed American who finds culture, value, ceremony, in all aspects of my multicultural family. We all laugh. We all joke. We all address differences openly with dialogue. My Hispanic (Native) grandmothers culture is as important to me as my African American grandfathers. They both are as important as the mixed Western European/Midwest grandparents whose culture was created by the hardships of the frontier west. It easy to say conquest is the thief of tradition. However life is slightly more complicated. I may be “unable” to understand the lack of original values I was supposed to be following due to the circumstances of colonization. However there isn’t a culture alive who hasn’t been allocated, appropriated, commandeered, or plagiarized.
I don’t have to sit with anything. I’ve lived a life with American “White” people who carry none of the mindsets you blanketed onto a whole group. It’s frustrating to read generic takes on entire swathes of certain people. Especially if you know the opinion to be misleading and untrue. I don’t think I would have been born into such a loving, diverse family. If certain types “wore dreads” but understood their privileged envy. I mean come on. Does this narrative stand in Asia? Where Chinese culture has large swathes of influence over countless other countries? I guess I’m saying I’ve yet to meet a “white” without culture unless the point I’m missing is that my grandmother, per say, lost her traditional Irish heritage to white supremacy and any sort of local/regional/religious/family tradition doesn’t count as culture because of that. once again. It is your take. I read through it because I like to understand the opinions of others. I just whole heartedly disagree with such a generic opinion based on my personal experiences. Cherry still intact my good sir!
“Whiteness”, as this author describes it, is basically meaningless, save a sort of nebulous shell of a cookie-cutter stereotype.
These things are easy to whack away when they’re made of straw. If he had named a specific culture that was Caucasian or Caucasoid - Slavs, for example - then the onus would be on him to explain why that specific culture is “problematic”. That goes for basically anyone else.
Not only that, but people like this fail to understand the multifarious depths of culture. Some are regional. Some are ethnic. Some are hybrid. Tap dancing is a hybrid between the dances Africans brought over and the ones the Irish brought over. So is it black? White?
Plus, he begs the question all over the place when he says a priori that white people are raised by “a system”. Really? With no variation or nuance? And what, exactly, is “the system”? Television? The Internet? Those media are often at odds with each other. Same with government and religion, or better: government and corporations. If government and corporations are so antithetical to each other, what sense does it make to assume that they’re part of some sort of hegemonic cabal?
These arguments are just foolishness. It’s a vehicle for those of inferior bent to try to level everyone down by trying to exhort them to prostrate due to all being born with original sin. I know Freud is long since outmoded, but one could say less accurate things than to call this projection.
I love the loving clarity of your posts. There is no shame in reclaiming our humanity. If I may share — I am 63 and “shedding.” My mother was first-gen American with parents from a tiny village on the plains beneath Mt. Etna in Sicily. They raised me for part of my childhood. I needed to go to Sicily and this summer, I did. Setting foot in a tiny place where everyone knows everyone else, where a stranger invited me into her home for lunch because I was lost in winding streets, where I touched the stone house in which my beloved Nonno was born — all was a pilgrimage I needed to make. In Mineo, Sicily I understood what my forebears traded for life here, particularly in the vacuous chain-link, two-car garage wasteland of the suburbs. I understood it in my bones, like my center of gravity was righted by being there. My chaotic childhood, my sense of lost young adulthood, my resistance to social climbing even as it was beaten into me, all made sense. Paesani from a tiny ancient place thrust into a society that gobbled them - their labor, culture, bodies, souls, language, and customs. I’ve been grieving since I returned. But I also have a little corner where I light a candle and honor them, the songs and poetry and first language I heard as a newborn. My grandfather was deemed enemy alien in WW II and never spoke of it. My grandmother worked in a sweatshop. I want my life to honor them.
Thank you for this offering. What you just shared is not a comment. It is a return. A soul retrieval. A remembrance in the deepest sense of the word.
What you described, the grief, the clarity, the resistance to suburban soullessness, the ache in your bones, is the spiritual cost of whiteness. Your people weren’t born white. They were Sicilian, Paesani, land-rooted, village-centered, earth-bound, and story-filled. But empire offered them a false trade: survival in exchange for silence. Proximity to whiteness in exchange for everything they actually were.
And now you, with candlelight and song, are reversing that transaction.
You are reclaiming what was deemed enemy.
You are honoring what was once punished.
You are bringing poetry back to a bloodline that was taught to forget it.
There is no shame in this grief. This is holy mourning. This is the kind of remembering that heals not just your lineage, but the whole system that tried to erase it.
I honor your pilgrimage.
I honor your Nonno.
And I honor the way your life, your voice, and your altar are now becoming what empire tried to bury:
A living archive of truth.
Thank you for walking this path. You are not alone. We are remembering beside you.
I say that ancestors build the emotional rooms we live in. The grief they never expressed took up space. I thought it was my fault, as so many children do. This is deep stuff. Seeing “Nonno” in your post makes it real for me. Big thanks.
💙💙💙💙✊🏽
You’re not just wrong, you’re part of the problem.
This has hit home. I had a vague idea of what white supremacy, racism, colonialism was about - it is not something I had looked into much which is shameful really given the world as it is. Now I realise how much the systemic issues in society I instinctively push against are based upon it all I know I need to investigate in depth. Thank you for sharing in a way that has brought these issues into my awareness in a way that touched my heart.
Did you know the first Sicilians to arrive in America were “Black”? Did you know that the patron saint of African Americans was born in Sicily? When Sicilians arrived in the decades after the Civil War, they were designated as “black” on the US Census, which included two choices. Black or White. As such, they were subjected to Jim Crow laws and the same indignities as the former slaves. The largest mass hanging occurred in New Orleans, where 11 Sicilians were wrongly accused of murder. Benedict the Moor was born in the 1500s and canonized in 1806; Catholic churches in the South still bear his name.
The “Black or White” binary was a settler-colonial tool of racial classification, used to uphold white supremacy by legally separating who was allowed to fully participate in society and who was not.
And today, it is stronger than ever if not directly then through subtler off-shoots. Thank you for opening the topic.
My Sicilian grandparents were considered trash and ungodly when they arrived in America via Ellis island 1909. Their family lived in extreme poverty. Children were taken by child services.
Sorry to read that, John, but I believe it. Teddy Roosevelt, governor at the time of the lynchings of Sicilians, echoed “the ride down the escalator” of you know who. Roosevelt hated Southern Europeans. The stigma lasts to this day. Mention the word “Sicilian” and ask for a word association, and see what you get. Roosevelt planted that over a century ago.
There have been many racist presidents for sure. The current one has set the country back decades.
Sarcasm comes from the Greek root, "to tear flesh." It’s not intended to advance understanding, so why even post?
Yeah as soon as that Sicilian village where everyone knows eachother was mentioned I knew she wasn’t going to realize the contradictions between her likely politics and the the world she finds meaningful.
This resonated a lot. I’ve had this feeling of rootlessness my whole life, the feeling of not having “a people”, but I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about it.
I am Spanish, but I don’t think citizenship is the same as the identity of your “clan”. Modern nations are the product of what you explain, they are not ancestral identities. The Church was probably even more damaging in erasing ancient cultures.
In my case, reconnecting with an ancestral culture is very difficult. Spain was conquered by the Romans like 2300 years ago, there is nothing left from the native inhabitants: no language, no writing, just some ceramic pieces and broken weapons. The erasure was so early, and so thorough, that we barely know anything of the Iberian peoples.
Besides, Andalucía (where I am from) has a history of A LOT of peoples influencing or conquering this land: the Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, the Romans, several Germanic peoples, Byzantium, Arabs from the Middle East, Sephardic Jews, several waves of northern Africans…until the creation of a united ruling by the Catholic Monarchs in the 15th century.
I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint just one source of my identity, or an original group. I don’t have a tradition to turn to.
However, I’ve been really into prehistoric art and rituals for the past years, and I love it because it’s like that ancestral indentity we all share. The original spirituality—the connection with the earth, the worship of the forests, rivers, mountains, the moon and other animals. Of life itself.
So if you don’t have a clue of what your origins are, prehistory connects us all. Everyone comes from there. Sometimes I look for rock art in my area and when I find it, it feels profound. That’s my tradition 🌱🌲🪨🦌🦬🦉
This. Every word of this.
You just named what so many people feel but are never given language for, the grief of ancestral erasure, masked as modern identity.
Rootlessness is not your fault.
It is the result of conquest sold as civilization.
It’s what happens when empire strips away kinship and replaces it with citizenship.
When the sacred is criminalized, and we’re told that ancestry begins at a border.
You are absolutely right, modern nations are not ancestral identities.
They are post-1492 projects of empire.
Spain, like many colonizing powers, was itself colonized first—by Rome, by Church, by Crown, and what survived was not culture, but what empire allowed to remain.
But what you’re doing, seeking prehistoric art, finding rock markings, listening to the land, that’s not a hobby.
That’s resistance. That’s reconnection. That’s decolonial memory work.
The Iberian peoples weren’t lost. They were silenced.
And yet here you are, singing back their memory with your feet in the soil and your eyes on stone. That is tradition.
That is the inheritance.
You don’t need intact mythology or written archives to belong.
Belonging lives in your awe.
In your remembering.
In your listening to what empire tried to erase.
And yes, when we don’t know where to begin, we return to prehistory.
Because the sacred came before the nation-state.
The land is older than the Church.
And your soul remembers a time before conquest.
Thank you for speaking this truth aloud. You just made space for so many others to remember that we don’t need a passport to belong, we need a place to return our grief, and a practice to grow something honest from it.
🪶🌒🪨🌲 You are already in your tradition. Keep going.
The only thing I would add to this masterful explanation is the part that’s extremely uncomfortable to me as a Christian pastor. I think Christian evangelism and white supremacist conquest are basically coextensive. Christianity in the form that it usually takes is innately anti-indigenous because it offers a universal abstract story that doesn’t give a shit about the land. I’m still a Christian but I’m trying to find my way back to the druidry of my ancestors. Being rooted in the land where I live is essential to my not being a dissociating anxious asshole. The white man’s contempt for his body and the land where he lives is such a big part of why we treat people terribly.
"God Is Red" by Vine Deloria Jr. was a timely read for me after years of drifting away from "the" church.
It might give undue weight to Velikovsky at one point (e.g. the positing of old testament narratives as plausible side effects of Venus making an incredibly late entry into this solar system), but the perspective of practices that are land-based versus his-story-based is crucially critical.
Yeah that's a great book. I also like Kaitlin Curtice's book Native which draws from God Is Red and Braiding Sweetgrass.
Thanks, those are now on the list (which is wayyy longer than when i finally found out about VD jr, DeeBrown, & Ward Churchill 25-30 yrs ago)
To say I can relate to your comment is an understatement, especially in the context of this post/ article / what are these even called this month? I made sure to read this article all the way through, slowly so as not to miss anything.
I, too, am white (Anglo, yes, largely Protestant, but with Irish and Scottish mixed in, along with Norman, AKA northern French) am a practicing Christian, pray ceaselessly that it's the true kind (including as I type this, during my wife's and my individual/dual prayer time.) No, not this entire system of false teaching that calls itself Christian. But I studied resistance, dissident, and revolutionary movements (long before I studied the Bible) all the way back to the early Christians and the medieval communal societies. Rootless or well-traveled? How about both? I've been to 43 U.S. States by my count, lived in 8 of them (six months or longer), plus, respectively 5 Canadian provinces, lived in two.
For what it's worth, I am currently on my second marriage to a black woman - widowed from the first. And that, too, has to be a misnomer, because - it does bother me to admit this, but I've got to - as a geography major, I still have a terrible time with more than just the names and approximate locations of African countries, let alone the sordid colonial history of genocide and conquest - and above all, before all that mess. My late wife and current one was/is also Christian- and apart from those two similarities, they couldn't be more different. It should be obvious by now, why. Besides the fact that we're individuals (yeah, take that, Borg, as someone pointed out here, LOL).
Well, I've said enough for now. Time to take a deep breath or two, and pull up a chair and listen some more.
I think the indigenous spiritual movement of Yeshua of Nazareth is a hell of a lot cooler than the abstract colonial mess we inherited from the "Christianized" Roman empire. And also I think it's okay to syncretize our spirituality with what we encounter in our natural context if we can do so without trying to make ourselves the experts in other culture's lineages. So many rich white people get into tantra, ayahuasca, and other trendy forms of spirituality and immediately try to monetize it for themselves. My path, the Way of the Fool, is to gather up wisdom from lots of different places like Saul of Tarsus did (he was so syncretistic) and let other peoples' wisdom humble and refine my Christianity so that hopefully I can find a way of living in grace and truth that doesn't involve trying to conquer others.
Whew. This was so beautifully written! Thank you for sharing your perspective. Can you say more about your path, the Way of the Fool? Where does that concept come from?
In 1 Cor 1:27, Paul writes that God “chose the fools to shame the wise.” To be a fool in the sense in which I use it is to be unconcerned with being perceived as an expert or authority figure. It is to live in beginner’s mind and see everyone around me as my teacher. It is to let my youngest son tell me what to do for the sake of his empowerment. It is trusting that divine grace is sufficient and there’s not anything that I need to “master” or “get right” other than relaxing into complete trust of the universe. It’s the opposite of being a stereotypical white man who needs to feel authoritative.
And when did Jesus become white?
To some degree, whiteness is the accidental invention of the universal identity created by Paul’s epistles in the New Testament. But it really intensifies in the age of the European Enlightenment in the aftermath of the religious wars when Kant et al said why can’t we just be global men of reason instead of Catholics or Protestants, Prussians or Bohemians. Whiteness is the delusion that there is a global, objective way to experience the universe that transcends ethnicity and geography. It becomes a skin color secondarily to the self-imagined meta-ethnic transcendence of European intellectuals. The whites supremacy of the dumb American racists is a much later byproduct of the original white supremacy/Christian exclusivism of the European intellectuals. Jesus is roped into this generic universal humanity in the European Enlightenment partly because his Judaism was so distasteful to the civilized men of reason.
I should tip my hat to my professor J Kameron Carter who wrote Race: A Theological Account. I’m just summarizing his ideas.
Excellent. Thank you.
This reads like ChatGPT...
I format my articles for my neurodivergent audience.
To borrow from Star Trek, the Borg are white supremacy.
Sad thing, if I read this essay to some of my family, they would just be affronted and mad. If I replaced every instance of white with Borg, they would still miss the message, just wouldn't be mad. So much to learn and then so much to undo post the most horrendous movement of mAgAgAgA.
Yep. Before they turned us white, they needed to turn us away from nature, God, community and self. Obedience requires first the stripping away of belonging. Long road back. But, if we travel together, all of us, the journey will seem shorter or at least more enriching.
Toward the inhumanity of conquest? It required a construct and whiteness, was it?
Thank you. You pretty much summed up why I feel really angry every time I’m filling out paperwork and the only option is white. I’m not white. I’m Irish and Swedish. I felt so lost as a kid. So, I decided to learn about my ancestors. There are so many parallels in ancient native cultures. And yet they are erased by colonizers. Dismissed as silly and exotic, rather than truths that span across cultures globally. I hate seeing my ancestors painted as savages who were lucky to be "converted" as colonizers try to erase our languages, gods, and cultures. English catholic "conquerors" in Irland burning "idols" that were bones of revered ancestors covered in gold and jewels, just so they could rob graves with "idolitry" as an excuse. I want to remember everything. The words in our languages they erased because they don't follow the victim victor mentality. I want to recognize the dignity and validity of all these other people's cultures too.
I love that you mentioned learning the old erased words. Language is one of the ways through this, in my opinion.
I’m learning a little Scots Gaelic (very difficult)
That’s dedication for sure. :)
Very much a long-term project.
Brother! How do you have the energy and time to educate white people on this? How? Lol…. I burned out years ago. Facts and education seem to matter little to the “feelings are facts” crowd.
LOL I definitely understand. I committed my life to this work. What I found is that they are not incapable of learning, we just have to find ways to teach and reach. 💙
We could say the exact same about you , dude. You have prefabricated narratives that ignore facts as well. You don’t have “the truth” you have a perspective not allowed to be debated within institutions you’ve captured.
You’re having an insecure moment. I know you’re hurting. Love you
not only white people are colonial.
Study the Plains tribes of North America; the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans;
the Mongols; Persians; Arabians; Han Chinese; Turks; Huns; Scythians; Sumerians; Macedonians; Babylonians; etc etc
I dont know anything about Africa yet but im damn sure they have their own empires
-edit-: Hannibal and the Carthaginians were African.
Some tribes just -like- to expand.
They want to establish hegemony; control other rival tribes; control resources; or just bolster their egos with domination.
Not a "white" thing at all.
You’re missing the point.
All those groups did invade, wage war, etc.
None at the scale we are in now, which is a legacy from the british (east india trading company).
Take the mongols for example: as much as they tried or wanted to export their culture as the dominant one, they ended up adopting the traditions and cultures of what we now call chinese.
Its not as cut and dry as your comment pretends, because your interpretation of history based on your comment is paltry and uninformed.
Yes?
Do you know where Lakota originated before 1790 or so?
...Around Duluth.
So how'd they become masters of the plains: one of the most powerful tribes on the Continent, by 1850?...
By pushing other tribes out; killing, plundering, pillaging, rape, and ethnic cleansing.
Just. like. every. other. dominant. group.
Do you know who built the Wall of China?
And why?...
Those werent white boys surging across China...
First, the idea that “everyone did colonialism” is a distortion. Yes, many societies throughout history engaged in conquest and empire-building. That is a human reality. But not all conquest is created equal.
What European settler colonialism did, beginning in 1492, is fundamentally different in scale, structure, permanence, and ideological violence.
The British, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese created a system of racialized domination that enslaved millions, redrew the borders of nearly the entire planet, erased hundreds of languages, and embedded whiteness as the global standard for humanity, intelligence, beauty, and power.
They didn’t just conquer. They colonized time, space, identity, memory, and economy.
They didn’t just win wars. They built global hierarchies of race that outlasted the war itself and still determine who lives, who dies, who thrives, and who is discarded.
No Indigenous, Asian, African, or pre-colonial society ever invented chattel slavery based on skin color. None of them created a racial caste system enforced across continents. None built a capitalist empire where bodies, souls, land, and labor were commodified at industrial scale. And none globalized a myth that whiteness equals superiority.
Second, when people bring up the Lakota, Mongols, Chinese, and others, they’re engaging in whataboutism. They’re trying to equate isolated moments of conquest with a system that has lasted over 500 years and still governs every global institution today.
The Mongols, for all their violence, assimilated into the cultures they conquered. They didn’t leave behind a legacy of systemic racial domination.
The Lakota and other Indigenous peoples may have had conflict, but they never sought global hegemony or erased cultures through forced assimilation, land theft, or eugenics.
No non-European empire created anything close to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, boarding schools, scientific racism, apartheid, redlining, caste-by-color capitalism, or the colonial debt traps still enforced today.
And if someone brings up the Great Wall of China, remind them it was built to defend against invasion, not to enforce racial supremacy on a global scale.
Third, the idea that domination is just human nature is the most dangerous lie. It naturalizes what was intentionally engineered.
Whiteness is not human nature. It is a political invention created to justify domination under the guise of civilization.
Colonial violence was not random. It was legalized, sanctified, mapped, monetized, taught, and repeated across centuries. It became law, theology, policy, and culture.
That is not just domination. That is a global system.
If you want to respond to this kind of deflection, here’s something powerful you can say:
This article wasn’t saying white people invented violence. It was naming that white supremacy turned violence into a world order. A global, racialized, legal, and self-replicating structure.
Yes, the Lakota had warfare. So did the Mongols, the Zulu, the Persians. But none of them rewrote the globe with racial hierarchy as law. None of them built intergenerational wealth through genocide and slavery. None of them erased entire cosmologies and called it progress.
You’re not making a historical point. You’re dodging a structural truth.
If you want to talk about violence, let’s talk. But don’t confuse tribal war with 500 years of colonial erasure, racial capitalism, and institutional white supremacy.
Whiteness justified a system of chattel slavery that was in fact one of the most barbaric systems in the history of the world. They committed themselves to that system, with the same zeal they capitalized on the discovery of germs, guns and steal.
Hmm yes you make good points.
I think it is, however, just luck of the draw that Europeans developed "guns germs and steel" faster and more effectively than anyone else.
What difference does it make that European powers ruled from 300 BC to present?
The West is collapsing. China and the other BRICS powers are ascendant.
Now, will the NWO be racist?
That remains to be seen.
My main point is that -every- civilization aspires to dominance.
And... every group has racism.
If you go to China and speak Chinese youll hear some spicy things said about Tibet and the Uyghurs.
In India its Muslims.
In the Middle East its Kurds and Yazidis.
My secondary point is that racism is inescapable.
People just love to form privileged in groups and shat on outgroups. And i doubt that will ever change.
I definitely suggest you read these:
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
This book unmasks the myth of “American exceptionalism” and lays bare the genocidal logic of settler colonialism. It makes clear that conquest wasn’t natural. It was racial, religious, and strategic.
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Colonial violence was not an accident. It was the language of empire. Fanon shows how colonization destroys the psyche and culture of the colonized while grooming the colonizer to believe in domination as destiny.
The Racial Contract
by Charles W. Mills
White supremacy is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Mills reveals how whiteness was embedded in the foundational contracts of Western modernity and how racism shaped law, philosophy, and power globally.
Silencing the Past
by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
History isn’t just written by the victors. It’s engineered by them. This book shows how colonial powers distorted, erased, and controlled memory to uphold empire. It will dismantle any myths about neutrality in history.
Birth of a White Nation
by Jacqueline Battalora
Whiteness was not born. It was legislated. This book traces the colonial laws that created white identity in North America to divide and conquer labor forces. It proves whiteness is not culture. It is control.
Decolonizing Methodologies
by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Western knowledge systems have always been tools of domination. Smith gives us a powerful analysis of how research, academia, and education systems continue the violence of colonization against Indigenous peoples.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by Walter Rodney
Rodney tears down the myth that Europe “developed” the world. He reveals how Europe extracted wealth, life, and sovereignty from Africa to fuel its own capitalist rise, leaving deep structural underdevelopment behind.
Orientalism
by Edward Said
Said reveals how Western powers invented a fantasy version of the East to justify their domination. This book is key to understanding the cultural machinery behind white supremacy and imperialism.
The Invention of the White Race
by Theodore W. Allen
Allen meticulously shows how whiteness was created as a ruling-class project in the colonies to prevent solidarity between poor Europeans and enslaved Africans. It’s one of the most thorough studies of race as power.
Stamped from the Beginning
by Ibram X. Kendi
A sweeping historical account of anti-Black racism, from 15th-century Europe to the United States. Kendi names the policies, theologians, scientists, and politicians who deliberately built the ideology of racial hierarchy.
Afrotopia
by Felwine Sarr
A visionary work that refuses to frame Africa through a Western lens. Sarr reclaims the future through African imagination, art, and philosophy, offering a blueprint for a world beyond colonial metrics of success.
Thank you i'll read thoze. I spend all day every day in the worlds best libraries, so why not?!
I'm also a fan of Zinn's Peoples History.
Thanks for sharing these resources. My old seminary professor J Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account provides a helpful illustration of how the abstraction and rationalism in Protestant Christianity created whiteness as a sort of anti-ethnic identity of geographically rootless “men of reason” with a divine mandate to “civilize the savages.” I think Christianity’s complicity in white supremacy is a horror that those of us who are Christian have to face up to.
Can't find Sarr's 'Afrotopia' in our city library — only one by that title is W.J. Moses's from 1998
Legendary note, sums it up
“None at the scale we are in now.”
This just means European empires were the best at building them, at least in recent memory. When viewed in this light, belief in white supremacy made sense for the time. To be clear, I don’t actually, literally think Europeans are genetically superior, only the best at conquering in a certain historical time frame. Also, Chinese and Russians have been adopting European methods for a long time now.
Everything you’ve been conditioned to believe about history, society and people are the byproduct of settler colonialism.
I’m white and I love this piece, thank you so much. I remember as a kid saying to my Mom, “we don’t have any traditions” and what I was describing was the homogenized WASP white culture I grew up in. I’m exploring my own pre-Christian Northern European roots and reclaiming those traditions that were stolen from my ancestors.
This really resonated with me. I am a daughter of the Irish Diaspora, second generation American. My Irish-born grandmother lived with my family when I was a child so there was a living memory of “the old country.” I performed in Irish dance festivals. I.e., there was a sense of an ancestral culture. My family were Catholics from the North of Ireland so I was raised with stories of occupation, discrimination and oppression. My maternal great grandfather emigrated because of an injury he sustained at the hands of an “Orangeman.” My family weren’t “rabble rousers” or IRA but, again, subtly I understood that we had been colonized, although that term was never used. My grandmother would talk about atrocities that occurred during the “civil war.” She related them in such detail that as a very young child I assumed she was talking about things that had happened at the time of the American Civil War and thus within the living memory of her parents, relatively recent. (Remember, I was very young so things were a little muddled in my head.) Later, I came to realize she had been speaking of events that happened in the English Civil War - I.e., she was relating in vivid detail incidents that had occurred hundreds of years earlier but must have been handed down through the generations. We had a family keepsake - a green ribbon that an ancestor had worn in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, defying laws that forbade doing so. Although devout Catholics, there was an appreciation of and reverence for nature that I have come to think of a vestigial “bass note” of paganism that underscored the conscious religion. In later years, I have done “ancestor work/practices.” Thank you so much for your post - it’s given me much to reflect upon and at the same time has validated my own experience.
What an absolute gift to me. To read this makes my work all the more worth every second. Glad to have you here.
We so need this type of discourse.
Every human group has created culture and just because they are descendants of colonizers don’t really mean they don’t have culture. If that was the case, most of the people that descended from other colonial projects - the Mongals, the Romans, the Mughals, the Abbasid, the ottomans, wouldn’t have culture either. But of course no one would dare say China, Kazakhstan, Italy, India or Egypt don’t have culture.
But more importantly, the claim is *deeply* insidious. The idea that descendants can’t make new, distinct culture would invalidate the culture that black Americans have made, many who don’t know their roots. You can try to limit to only white people but which ones? Italians? Jews? The Irish? Never mind you’d be suggesting that white Americans are some how fundamentally different than other humans which is literally dehumanizing
And the idea that white folks should go “back to their ancestors” culture is essentially the same right wing talking point and has scary implications - the idea that humans must be chained to same vague notion of their historical culture. This is antithetical to the way humans actually live - culture shifts and changes and morphs, and new cultures are created all the time.
And the idea that white supremacy is the end all be all, the founder of capitalism and patriarchy is so ahistorical it’s funny. Empires have existed long before Europe was more than a mere backwater. Is China a white supremacist because it practices debt diplomacy and is the owner of the largest mines in the Congo while committing genocide against Uyghurs and over fishing countries sovereign waters? Is India white supremacist because its leader is a Hindu nationalist hell bent on disenfranchising its Muslim citizens? Was the Ottoman Empire white supremacist? Were the Arab empires that had the largest slave trade in Africa, that lasted over a thousand years and enslaved an estimated 18 million people white supremacist?
Look. I’m a black dude. I could tell you a thing or two about racism. But this article is so reductive, half baked, ahistorical with deeply insidious undertones I’m at a loss. And to watch the mostly white folks in the comments lap it up is wild.
This is wildly ahistorical.
It’s not
You should consider citations and a bibliography
You can find sources.
That’s your job, you’re making the claims
First time I have ever commented on Substack. This is absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever read. I respect your opinion and take. It’s yours and there is nothing wrong with you feeling the way you expressed in your essay. I just don’t agree. I’m a mixed American who finds culture, value, ceremony, in all aspects of my multicultural family. We all laugh. We all joke. We all address differences openly with dialogue. My Hispanic (Native) grandmothers culture is as important to me as my African American grandfathers. They both are as important as the mixed Western European/Midwest grandparents whose culture was created by the hardships of the frontier west. It easy to say conquest is the thief of tradition. However life is slightly more complicated. I may be “unable” to understand the lack of original values I was supposed to be following due to the circumstances of colonization. However there isn’t a culture alive who hasn’t been allocated, appropriated, commandeered, or plagiarized.
Glad to be the one to pop your cherry. If you actually sit with the what I wrote, and think critically, you’d see it’s not hard to understand.
I don’t have to sit with anything. I’ve lived a life with American “White” people who carry none of the mindsets you blanketed onto a whole group. It’s frustrating to read generic takes on entire swathes of certain people. Especially if you know the opinion to be misleading and untrue. I don’t think I would have been born into such a loving, diverse family. If certain types “wore dreads” but understood their privileged envy. I mean come on. Does this narrative stand in Asia? Where Chinese culture has large swathes of influence over countless other countries? I guess I’m saying I’ve yet to meet a “white” without culture unless the point I’m missing is that my grandmother, per say, lost her traditional Irish heritage to white supremacy and any sort of local/regional/religious/family tradition doesn’t count as culture because of that. once again. It is your take. I read through it because I like to understand the opinions of others. I just whole heartedly disagree with such a generic opinion based on my personal experiences. Cherry still intact my good sir!
That’s because whiteness *is* no culture.
“Whiteness”, as this author describes it, is basically meaningless, save a sort of nebulous shell of a cookie-cutter stereotype.
These things are easy to whack away when they’re made of straw. If he had named a specific culture that was Caucasian or Caucasoid - Slavs, for example - then the onus would be on him to explain why that specific culture is “problematic”. That goes for basically anyone else.
Not only that, but people like this fail to understand the multifarious depths of culture. Some are regional. Some are ethnic. Some are hybrid. Tap dancing is a hybrid between the dances Africans brought over and the ones the Irish brought over. So is it black? White?
Plus, he begs the question all over the place when he says a priori that white people are raised by “a system”. Really? With no variation or nuance? And what, exactly, is “the system”? Television? The Internet? Those media are often at odds with each other. Same with government and religion, or better: government and corporations. If government and corporations are so antithetical to each other, what sense does it make to assume that they’re part of some sort of hegemonic cabal?
These arguments are just foolishness. It’s a vehicle for those of inferior bent to try to level everyone down by trying to exhort them to prostrate due to all being born with original sin. I know Freud is long since outmoded, but one could say less accurate things than to call this projection.
This is fascinatingly reactionary. You have more in common with the far right than you realize.