You're reacting to the title. Read the article. And if you did, what you call ignorant is actually saying "This made me uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to handle that without calling it ignorant."
You have every opportunity to change the name of your post. But, you don't. Despite the fact that some people have found it problematic as well as hurtful. Everyone that doesn't agree with you is ignorant. There is no possibility for dialogue because people that engage like you do are completely sure of your correct assessment of things. You take the moral high ground. You're blinded by self righteousness. You also show a lack of sensitivity others feelings.
Deep listening and presence is a graceful act of moral courage — not because it endorses the other's position, but because it protects both their humanity and our own.
Grace is the bridge that allows truth and dignity to coexist in dialogue.
Anna, if this thread and Christian's writing and communication style upsets you, you can step out of the conversation to find something that better resonates with you. And you may have already...
I am white and the title resonated so immediately with me that I had to read it and share it with white friends to discuss. It may feel uncomfortable and threatening, and painful if you let the truth of it sink in. But how is it hurtful?
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.
When you take IQ into account there is no evidence of any racism
Blacks with the same IQ as whites do BETTER, when it comes to income and incarceration
This shouldn’t surprise us, racism hasn’t prevented any other minorities from achieving economic success. When you’re smart and can offer people something economically valuable they don’t care about your race, even if their bigots. Money is money.
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.
I'm honestly not 100% sure if this post is parody, but I will try to respond in good faith and assume sincerity, and try to be polite and to the point. There are a lot of claims being made in this post that are either wrong or just bizarre.
>Let’s be real, White culture has no culture.
I don't think many people would deny this, if for no other reason than the fact that people don't generally culturally identify as "white," outside of far-right white nationalist freaks.
> And that’s what we’re here to talk about. Not to shame, but to shake the system that made you believe whiteness was an identity instead of a cage.
See above.
>Before the system of Colonial white supremacy demanded assimilation into empire, people we consider to be white today had culture, real culture. Rich, rooted, regional traditions.
??? This is still a thing today. Visit any European country, go into a rural area, and you will find many people whose families have been living there for many generations, who still speak their ancestral dialect, and have regional (not national) cuisines, festivals, patron saints, etc.
> But when Rome gave way to the Crown, and the Crown merged with the Cross, those cultures were either assimilated, exterminated, or rebranded as savage. And so began the great whitening, a centuries-long erasure in which European peoples were stripped of their earthbound, matriarchal, animistic, and cooperative ways of life and taught instead to worship hierarchy, empire, and “civilization” through blood and conquest.
This is a totally ahistorical claim. There's so much that's incorrect about these few sentences that I don't even know where to begin. The idea that pre-Roman / pre-Christian Iron Age Europe was a matriarchy is insane. European agricultural societies were almost uniformly patriarchal since at least the migration of the speakers of proto-Indo-European (pastoralists tend to be extremely patriarchal.) Pre-Christian Rome was actually one of the more gender egalitarian societies of Iron Age Europe and the Mediterranean, and Christianity drew most of its support from the "downtrodden" in the empire - slaves, freedmen, and, crucially, women! There's no evidence that Christianity negatively impacted the status of women in late Antique and early Medieval Europe.
> European empires like the British, French, and Spanish realized they could manipulate poor Europeans, "peasants", farmers, and workers, by convincing them that they were “better” than the people being colonized, enslaved, and dispossessed around the world. Even if they were starving, landless, and exploited themselves, they were told: “At least you’re white.”
I don't think that's correct. Many economically peripheral Europeans benefited from the crimes of colonialism - in fact, the primary purpose of colonization is to provide a safety valve for excess population. Many of the people who founded homesteads in the present-day US were landless back in Europe.
> They made the Irish forget that they once revered goddesses and followed Brehon laws, a legal system based on restorative justice, not punishment.
I don't have the background knowledge to assess this particular claim, but I think the idea that pre-Christian societies didn't practice punishment is very dubious. Broadly speaking, justice in the ancient world was about vindicating the victim, or restoring their honor - i.e. state regulation of cycles of violence before they escalated. "Prisons" as such generally didn't exist, but this was in no small part because many things were considered capital crimes; for instance, adultery.
> Then came enclosure. Communal lands in Europe were fenced off, privatized, and stolen from the people to create wealth for the elite. This was a dry-run for colonialism abroad. Europeans were displaced and forced into urban wage slavery, then told their enemy was not the landlords or monarchs who took everything, but the “savage” in Africa or the “heathen” in the Americas.
This is almost right, but not quite. Many people dispossessed by enclosure could not and did not find jobs in urban areas - hence colonialism! Moreover, enclosure did not create elite wealth primarily through the first-order effects of enclosing the commons, but by increased crop yields due to greater economies of scale.
> But in doing so, it also hollowed out the descendants of Europe. It severed them from their ancestral cosmologies, burned their folk traditions, outlawed their dialects, shamed their earth-based mythologies, and replaced them with the machinery of empire, war, and control.
I'm not really sure how Europe has been "hollowed out" by the absence of paganism. People still have local culture without "ancestral cosmologies" and "earth-based mythologies." I'm not entirely sure how Europeans would be better off today if they still believed in magical beings who controlled the weather or arbitrarily dictated peoples' fates.
> ENVY IS INEVITABLE!
Basically everything that follows this sentence is just pathologizing cultural osmosis, which is a very normal and healthy thing and has been a feature of human society basically forever, and certainly did not start with the Bad White Men doing Capitalism and Other Bad Isms.
***
Insofar as European cultures have changed over the millennia, they seem to have changed for the better. Christianity is rooted in an ethic of agape, or unconditional love, whereas paganism was rooted in a transactional power/fear dynamic rooted in the fear of nature's arbitrary power (pagans made sacrifices to the "gods" because they feared their power!). Violent warfare is far less common in Europe (and the world) today than at any other point in history, despite Ukraine/Gaza/wherever. Average incomes and life expectancy are much higher in Europe today than in pre-industrial (and pre-enclosure!) Europe, and log per capita GDP is correlated as closely with virtually every measure of self-reported happiness as such measures are with each other. Moreover, Europe absolutely still has within-country regional cultures - as does the US!
Frankly, this article is an artifact of an era in which the worst excesses of exceedingly woke people went unchecked. A lot of the claims made here are wrong and, frankly, insane, and the implied conclusion - that Europe needs to "decolonize" by going back to some imagined past before Christianity/Imperialism supposedly ruined it, is just ridiculous.
This kind of response is exactly why the piece was written, not to “debate” history, but to expose the systemic conditioning that frames responses like this as objective, rational, or “just logic.” What you’re reading as “wrong,” “insane,” or “parody” is actually your discomfort speaking, dressed up in academic cosplay.
Let me be clear:
You are not actually arguing from neutral ground. You are arguing from within the worldview that the article critiques. That worldview, the one that sees empire as progress, Christianity as salvation, and “culture” as unchanged regional cuisines and tourist-friendly rituals, is not timeless. It is produced, and enforced, by the very colonial systems the article names.
You say you don’t think many people identify as white. That is precisely the point. Whiteness was never about shared cultural identity. It was about constructing proximity to power across otherwise diverse groups of Europeans. It flattens culture and offers access to dominance in exchange for complicity. If that sounds abstract to you, that’s because your own history has likely been sanitized, standardized, or replaced, not preserved. That is not an opinion. That is how hegemony functions.
You cling to the idea that Europe retained its regional dialects and patron saints, as if that proves cultural continuity, while refusing to acknowledge how much was obliterated by Church and Crown.
You reference proto-Indo-European pastoralist patriarchy as a rebuttal to the matriarchal structures that existed across pre-Christian Europe, especially among the Celts, Basques, Etruscans, and countless others. You dismiss animism as if spirituality rooted in land, nature, and reciprocity was simply fear of weather.
That is colonial bias in full form, pathologizing anything not filtered through Western rationalism. Full stop lol
You claim Christianity uplifted women, yet ignore the witch burnings, erasure of priestesses, and the ecclesiastical criminalization of female sexuality, medicine, and midwifery. You don’t mention Christianity grooming girls for marriage.
You applaud the GDP rise of Europe while erasing the fact that it was built on the back of enslaved labor, land theft, genocide, and extractive empire. You are praising the benefits of a stolen future while ignoring the body count that paid for it.
And this part is key. When you say cultural osmosis is normal, you conveniently forget that theft is not the same as exchange. That extraction is not collaboration. That mimicry under occupation is not admiration. Cultural exchange is only beautiful when it is mutual. Colonialism was not mutual.
You do not get to romanticize Europe’s “progress” while erasing what it cost the rest of the world, or pretending it wasn’t ripped from the roots of those same cultures it erased at home.
If you truly believe in facts and history, then face them. Don’t just cherry-pick citations that support the story you were taught. Examine the one you were denied. You might find the culture you think you are defending is not what was taken from you. It’s what was given to you in place of what was taken.
I don't think I'm engaging in "academic cosplay;" I'm not an academic historian or anthropologist and at no point do I use any jargon-ey terms. I think I am trying to be historically correct.
This conversation doesn't make me "uncomfortable," it makes me frustrated because I'm trying to have an actual discussion about cause/effect and the historicity of some of the claims you make, and you assume bad faith on my part and give me a lecture composed of "woke" word salad instead of actual, precise arguments.
> You are not actually arguing from neutral ground. You are arguing from within the worldview that the article critiques. That worldview, the one that sees empire as progress, Christianity as salvation, and “culture” as unchanged regional cuisines and tourist-friendly rituals, is not timeless. It is produced, and enforced, by the very colonial systems the article names.
This is odd, because I never claimed to be "neutral," I'm clearing taking a stance in this argument based on background knowledge and experience. I also don't think that European imperialism was a net positive development for the world, nor am I a Christian! Although I may not be "objective," since that's strictly impossible, I'm trying to make arguments rooted in generally understood historical fact.
> You say you don’t think many people identify as white. That is precisely the point. Whiteness was never about shared cultural identity. It was about constructing proximity to power across otherwise diverse groups of Europeans. It flattens culture and offers access to dominance in exchange for complicity. If that sounds abstract to you, that’s because your own history has likely been sanitized, standardized, or replaced, not preserved. That is not an opinion. That is how hegemony functions.
??? I don't think I've ever denied that "race" as a concept (and therefore "white" as a category) was created as a tool of European imperialism. It's very frustrating that you are inferring things I didn't say and don't believe in order to falsely assume ignorance on my part. This is a very common thing that overly woke people do.
> You claim Christianity uplifted women, yet ignore the witch burnings, erasure of priestesses, and the ecclesiastical criminalization of female sexuality, medicine, and midwifery. You don’t mention Christianity grooming girls for marriage.
I actually didn't claim this; I actually claimed that it's a stretch to believe that Christianity diminished the status of women in late antique and Medieval Europe. What I did claim was that early Christianity was disproportionately adopted by women and other marginalized people; moreover that the status of women was higher in Rome (before and after Christianization) than in other Iron Age societies. Both of these are widely agreed upon historical facts. Certainly, Christianity has historically endorsed many patriarchal practices, but these are hardly unique to Christianity. You have made a specific historical claim that Christianity diminished the overall status of women in Europe, and this claim is ahistorical.
> You reference proto-Indo-European pastoralist patriarchy as a rebuttal to the matriarchal structures that existed across pre-Christian Europe, especially among the Celts, Basques, Etruscans, and countless others.
You're assuming "matriarchal structures" among a lot of very poorly attested to societies. I'll take the Etruscans as an example - the best evidence we have for Etruscan gender politics is artwork depicting men and women socializing together. We can reasonably infer from this that the Etruscans may not have had seclusion norms that were common in many Iron Age societies, such as classical Athens. But Rome *also* didn't have seclusion norms, but it was still patriarchal (albeit less than most Iron Age societies.) We have absolutely no surviving textual evidence that suggests that the Etruscans were a female-dominated society; they were probably just less patriarchal than the norm.
Regarding the Basques, I think the only evidence that they were not patriarchal in the Iron Ages was Tacitus or some other ancient Roman historian referring to the "Vascones" as being gender-egalitarian. This may be true; again, they are a poorly attested to society.
Regarding the Celts, I really don't think pre-Roman or pre-Christian Celts were matriarchal! The best attested to pre-Roman (and therefore pre-Christian) Celts were the Gauls, whom many sources clearly show were ruled by males. Pre-Roman Gaul was an extremely materially unequal society wherein a few powerful males (the Romans called them "principes," roughly translating as "chiefs" or "princes" or "leading men") and everyone else was bound up in a patron-client system. The coat of arms of Ireland is a harp - an instrument that in Celtic society denoted aristocratic status due to the leisure time it took to learn the instrument - this is a telltale sign of material inequality, which usually co-occurs with patriarchy. Women in deeply patriarchal society often have prominent social roles - as priestesses, for instance, but that does not make these clearly male-dominated societies matriarchal!
> You dismiss animism as if spirituality rooted in land, nature, and reciprocity was simply fear of weather.
That is colonial bias in full form, pathologizing anything not filtered through Western rationalism. Full stop lol
This isn't pathologizing, this is just historical fact! Ancient polytheistic societies *made ritualistic sacrifices to their deities because they believed that bad things would happen to them if they didn't do this*! This is just how polytheism worked! If you hopped into a time machine and asked any pre-Christian polytheistic community, that's what they'd tell you! Here's an example: in the famous Melian dialogue, in which Athens, a strong city, demanded that Melos, a weak city, pay them tribute, the Athenians *compared their actions to the Greek gods, who are strong and therefore demand tribute from weaker mortals*! This is the entire foundation of polytheistic practice!
> You cling to the idea that Europe retained its regional dialects and patron saints, as if that proves cultural continuity, while refusing to acknowledge how much was obliterated by Church and Crown.
Of course Christianity and enclosure changed European culture! But cultural change does not imply the *literal absence of culture* which is the precise claim that your title is arguing for!
> You applaud the GDP rise of Europe while erasing the fact that it was built on the back of enslaved labor, land theft, genocide, and extractive empire. You are praising the benefits of a stolen future while ignoring the body count that paid for it.
??? I don't erase imperialism at all? I clearly refer to colonialism as a "crime" and clearly laid out how it supported enclosure, which in part enabled European prosperity. Modern European wealth is probably based in part on the spoils of empire, and in part on the development of certain institutions, such as free markets and the rule of law. Importantly, European imperialism certainly diminished the wealth of the periphery - see for instance the deindustrialization of India.
> And this part is key. When you say cultural osmosis is normal, you conveniently forget that theft is not the same as exchange. That extraction is not collaboration. That mimicry under occupation is not admiration. Cultural exchange is only beautiful when it is mutual. Colonialism was not mutual.
I think accusing people of "theft" for eating Korean BBQ is a bit of a stretch. This sort of cultural exchange certainly is mutual to an extent - see all the people who walk around the streets of east Asian cities wearing Yankees caps.
> You do not get to romanticize Europe’s “progress” while erasing what it cost the rest of the world, or pretending it wasn’t ripped from the roots of those same cultures it erased at home.
Again, at no point do I "erase" the crimes of colonialism, or deny that enclosure involved the traumatic displacement of many people - I refer to both of these things in my original comment. Moreover, I don't think I'm "romanticizing," I think I'm providing sound reasons why one would prefer to live in modern European society than pre-Christian European society - modern European society is much richer, has a much higher life expectancy and less violence, and these things make life better.
>If you truly believe in facts and history, then face them. Don’t just cherry-pick citations that support the story you were taught. Examine the one you were denied. You might find the culture you think you are defending is not what was taken from you. It’s what was given to you in place of what was taken.
Again, this is what's very frustrating about more "woke" people - you honestly have such limited cognitive empathy or theory of mind that you just assume that anyone who has a different opinion from you must be brainwashed. The idea of engaging in good faith with somebody who honestly disagrees with you is anathema - you can't possibly just disagree with someone, you have to "educate" them because you presuppose your infallible wisdom. You take enormous pride in the belief that you are part of an enlightened few blessed with esoteric wisdom, and you respond with more demeaning and infantilizing lectures when somebody challenges this notion with precise, strictly correct evaluations of the historical claims that you make.
Why do these “reclaim your spiritual heritage” preachers always sound like Blood & Soil Nazis who also thought that modernism was a blight on the world and getting back to the Blonde Beast was like going home?
It's because the anti-liberal left and right are driven by common anti-freedom impulses that makes them pine for an idealized “organic society” of an imagined past
It's because the anti-liberal left and right are driven by common anti-freedom impulses that makes them pine for an idealized “organic society” of an imagined past
It couldn't be part of the old left, which for all its flaws was still progressive. However, the contemporary left is so dogmatically anti-capitalist that it defaults to being reactionary because it must always romanticize what it replaced.
Blah, blah, blah post modern nihilism, social construct theory, hate on white men, this shit was tired by the mid 90s Jew.
Here is the thing though objective reality exists, something you would rapidly acknowledge if a piano slipped it’s rope and was heading towards your head.
Yeah, it's parody, and the replies from earnestly self-hating whites are freaking hilarious. Unless they're also intentionally leaning into the parody, in which case the whole thing is just perfection.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are done arguing with this retarded nonsense. I like America, my neighborhood, my county, my state (Indiana). I support “the system” that you hate. Because it’s not what your deluded minds portray it to be. You think in almost religious terminology, brain dead tropes I could hear any woke college student regurgitate. We‘re done arguing. Want to tear down the system? You’ll have to come through us bitch. Also, American culture is our culture. Movies, clothes, our constitutional republic, our way of life. It’s different from the backwards myths of our ancestors that you romanticize, but it is a culture. And it’s not even about being white, though I am and I’m proud of my lineage. You just use whiteness as a straw man, some bait and switch for revolutionary indoctrination. So bite me you retarded losers. You don’t deserve a logical or thoughtful response because you don’t have a message worth even considering.
Your empty soul is so sad as you prove the points being made. I actually feel sorry for you and your thought processes. But like I said…you gave give support to the thesis.
Your intellect just oozes out in your comments. Teach me how to use outdated and unnecessary words as insults, while also teaching me not to grasp basic words and definitions. I'm super excited for my education to begin, so don't keep me waiting tio long.
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.
I won’t deny the historical wounds colonialism has left behind, not only on the colonized, but on those who became its machinery. Power structures co-opted everyone: some to dominate, others to obey. That’s real.
But let’s be clear: this kind of essay doesn’t heal, it divides. It doesn't liberate, it indicts. It assumes the worst of an entire group and demands repentance, not understanding. It tells people to “remember who they were” while scorning them for trying. It says, “you are broken,” then scoffs when someone asks, “how do I mend?”
And that’s a trap.
It’s true that whiteness, as a category, was shaped by empire, often to exploit and control. But you know what else is true? Culture isn’t dead. Memory isn’t gone. And people don’t need shame to recover what was lost. They need honesty. And respect. And space.
You don’t fix the legacy of cultural erasure by mocking people for searching. You don’t oppose racism by essentializing “white people” as envious, shallow, or soulless. And you don’t move toward justice by trying to make anyone feel permanently tainted by birth.
What’s needed is dialogue, not ideological cleansing rituals disguised as liberation.
I believe in accountability. But I also believe in dignity. I believe in looking back, but not with hatred. And most of all, I believe no one should have to crawl on broken glass to be allowed a seat at the table of humanity.
So let’s talk about colonialism. Let’s talk about culture, and power, and history. Ireland anybody? Bueller, Bueller, Bueller? GAZA? You out there bros? But let’s not replace old dogmas with new ones, or old scapegoats with fresh targets. We already have an ongoing damn genocide going on; why incite another one.
If you want liberation, don’t preach cages. Build bridges instead.
You said, “This kind of essay doesn’t heal, it divides.” But what you’re actually saying is that truth-telling makes you uncomfortable. That calling out a system built on extraction, hierarchy, and erasure is too sharp for your palate. Healing doesn’t happen by tiptoeing. It happens by naming harm. If you feel “divided,” ask yourself why clarity feels like conflict.
You also said, “It doesn’t liberate, it indicts. It assumes the worst of an entire group and demands repentance, not understanding.” This is a distortion. The article never demands repentance. It demands reckoning. And it does not assume the worst of white people, it names the system of whiteness as one that flattened culture, weaponized identity, and manufactured obedience through false superiority.
Then you said, “It tells people to ‘remember who they were’ while scorning them for trying.” That’s not true. The essay scorches performative scavenging of other people’s cultures without doing the work to remember your own. If someone is honestly digging into their ancestry before whiteness, that is not mocked, that is encouraged. What is called out is the entitlement that skips remembrance and goes straight to appropriation.
You wrote, “You don’t oppose racism by essentializing ‘white people’ as envious, shallow, or soulless.” That’s a misrepresentation. The article never uses those words. It says whiteness created spiritual starvation. That white people have been conditioned to fill the void by consuming what whiteness took from others. That’s not essentialism. That’s a structural critique.
You said, “What’s needed is dialogue, not ideological cleansing rituals disguised as liberation.” Let me be clear, truth-telling is not ideological cleansing. It’s historical excavation. And if your version of dialogue requires us to mute our clarity to maintain your comfort, then that’s not dialogue. That’s a power play.
Finally, you said, “Let’s not replace old scapegoats with fresh targets.” No one is scapegoating. We are naming power. If naming whiteness as a system of violence feels like an attack on you personally, then you might be identifying more with the system than you realize.
This article is not an indictment of individuals. It is a mirror held up to empire. If it’s showing you something you didn’t want to see, don’t blame the mirror. Ask why it feels like a wound.
Because the truth is, if you want dignity, if you want dialogue, if you want liberation—then you have to start by standing in the fire of what has been erased, silenced, and sanitized. Not with defensiveness. But with humility, grief, and the courage to remember what whiteness made you forget.
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to keep this calm and clear.
You’ve misread me. Not because I didn’t speak clearly, but because your framework doesn’t allow room for dissent that isn’t fragility or power defense.
I didn’t say truth is uncomfortable. I said your rhetorical method; your framing of identity, your sweeping generalizations, your mood of contempt destabilizes the very empathy you claim to want. If your idea of “truth-telling” requires painting an entire demographic with psychological pathology (envy, spiritual starvation, mimicry), then I question whether what’s being told is “truth” or just vengeance dressed as history.
You say this piece isn’t demanding repentance. Fine. But it frames whiteness not as a system to deconstruct through mutual recognition and humanization—but as a spiritual disease to be reckoned with. That’s not an invitation to dialogue. That’s an indictment served cold, with the promise that any objection to its tone proves its point.
You say the piece encourages people to remember who they were. But it openly mocks “scavenging,” without nuance. That’s a problem. Because many people are trying to remember their roots in good faith. They’re just not doing it in your particular idiom, or according to your rules. That doesn’t make them appropriators. It makes them human beings trying to stitch something back together.
Finally: I don’t think dialogue requires silencing clarity. But it does require a respectful posture toward complexity and conscience. If you want real solidarity, not ideological obedience, then you have to make room for real voices. Including those who don’t fit neatly into your binaries.
Otherwise, this isn’t reckoning. It’s reenactment—of power, certainty, and moral hierarchy.
Me myself, I recognize the tribes of Europe, and the fact I'm an American First. I think all racial bullshit is bogus and destructive. Call me crazy if you will, but this is the only way to fly, IMO.
You say all “racial bullshit” is bogus and destructive, but that statement itself is a luxury of the system of whiteness in a country built on racial hierarchy. The fact that you can “opt out” of race while others are targeted, policed, and excluded because of theirs, that’s not equality. That’s the illusion of dominance disguised as neutrality.
I think I say thank you to you a lot Mr. Ortiz. This time it’s for providing an explanation for an emptiness that I’ve been feeling for a few years now.
One of the most ignorant articles written with 0 anthological facts.
You're reacting to the title. Read the article. And if you did, what you call ignorant is actually saying "This made me uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to handle that without calling it ignorant."
You have every opportunity to change the name of your post. But, you don't. Despite the fact that some people have found it problematic as well as hurtful. Everyone that doesn't agree with you is ignorant. There is no possibility for dialogue because people that engage like you do are completely sure of your correct assessment of things. You take the moral high ground. You're blinded by self righteousness. You also show a lack of sensitivity others feelings.
You have every opportunity to not tone police an author who wants to name his pieces whatever they want. Also the opportunity to act like an adult.
That's called gaslighting and shaming. That strategy won’t work with me. It’s a common attack among abusers though.
You quote these words on your page:
Deep listening and presence is a graceful act of moral courage — not because it endorses the other's position, but because it protects both their humanity and our own.
Grace is the bridge that allows truth and dignity to coexist in dialogue.
Anna, if this thread and Christian's writing and communication style upsets you, you can step out of the conversation to find something that better resonates with you. And you may have already...
That wouldn't work, and you would know if you actually read the article you are currently a dozen comments deep in
Is the "master race"....upset over a title?
I am white and the title resonated so immediately with me that I had to read it and share it with white friends to discuss. It may feel uncomfortable and threatening, and painful if you let the truth of it sink in. But how is it hurtful?
You are right i reread it and posted on
my 7000 members facebook site
I’m not uncomfortable with this or the other thousand similar pieces vomited forth regularly of late. I’m bored of it. It’s just so boring.
You should look at IQ studies
And what happens when you arrange prople into same-IQ cohorts
(All evidence of racism disappears)
What exactly do you want about White People? Should we end affirmative action because it's define all European Ethic groups under "White"?
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.
💙💙💙💙✊🏽
La comida cree que es lo que la come… Los Blancos. En forma de Internet. Estás en nuestras entrañas siendo digerido, diciéndonos que no existimos.
You’re not just wrong, you’re part of the problem.
El mayor truco que Estados Unidos jamás ha hecho fue convencer al mundo de que no existimos.
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.
You’ve been psy-opped
When you take IQ into account there is no evidence of any racism
Blacks with the same IQ as whites do BETTER, when it comes to income and incarceration
This shouldn’t surprise us, racism hasn’t prevented any other minorities from achieving economic success. When you’re smart and can offer people something economically valuable they don’t care about your race, even if their bigots. Money is money.
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.
I'm honestly not 100% sure if this post is parody, but I will try to respond in good faith and assume sincerity, and try to be polite and to the point. There are a lot of claims being made in this post that are either wrong or just bizarre.
>Let’s be real, White culture has no culture.
I don't think many people would deny this, if for no other reason than the fact that people don't generally culturally identify as "white," outside of far-right white nationalist freaks.
> And that’s what we’re here to talk about. Not to shame, but to shake the system that made you believe whiteness was an identity instead of a cage.
See above.
>Before the system of Colonial white supremacy demanded assimilation into empire, people we consider to be white today had culture, real culture. Rich, rooted, regional traditions.
??? This is still a thing today. Visit any European country, go into a rural area, and you will find many people whose families have been living there for many generations, who still speak their ancestral dialect, and have regional (not national) cuisines, festivals, patron saints, etc.
> But when Rome gave way to the Crown, and the Crown merged with the Cross, those cultures were either assimilated, exterminated, or rebranded as savage. And so began the great whitening, a centuries-long erasure in which European peoples were stripped of their earthbound, matriarchal, animistic, and cooperative ways of life and taught instead to worship hierarchy, empire, and “civilization” through blood and conquest.
This is a totally ahistorical claim. There's so much that's incorrect about these few sentences that I don't even know where to begin. The idea that pre-Roman / pre-Christian Iron Age Europe was a matriarchy is insane. European agricultural societies were almost uniformly patriarchal since at least the migration of the speakers of proto-Indo-European (pastoralists tend to be extremely patriarchal.) Pre-Christian Rome was actually one of the more gender egalitarian societies of Iron Age Europe and the Mediterranean, and Christianity drew most of its support from the "downtrodden" in the empire - slaves, freedmen, and, crucially, women! There's no evidence that Christianity negatively impacted the status of women in late Antique and early Medieval Europe.
> European empires like the British, French, and Spanish realized they could manipulate poor Europeans, "peasants", farmers, and workers, by convincing them that they were “better” than the people being colonized, enslaved, and dispossessed around the world. Even if they were starving, landless, and exploited themselves, they were told: “At least you’re white.”
I don't think that's correct. Many economically peripheral Europeans benefited from the crimes of colonialism - in fact, the primary purpose of colonization is to provide a safety valve for excess population. Many of the people who founded homesteads in the present-day US were landless back in Europe.
> They made the Irish forget that they once revered goddesses and followed Brehon laws, a legal system based on restorative justice, not punishment.
I don't have the background knowledge to assess this particular claim, but I think the idea that pre-Christian societies didn't practice punishment is very dubious. Broadly speaking, justice in the ancient world was about vindicating the victim, or restoring their honor - i.e. state regulation of cycles of violence before they escalated. "Prisons" as such generally didn't exist, but this was in no small part because many things were considered capital crimes; for instance, adultery.
> Then came enclosure. Communal lands in Europe were fenced off, privatized, and stolen from the people to create wealth for the elite. This was a dry-run for colonialism abroad. Europeans were displaced and forced into urban wage slavery, then told their enemy was not the landlords or monarchs who took everything, but the “savage” in Africa or the “heathen” in the Americas.
This is almost right, but not quite. Many people dispossessed by enclosure could not and did not find jobs in urban areas - hence colonialism! Moreover, enclosure did not create elite wealth primarily through the first-order effects of enclosing the commons, but by increased crop yields due to greater economies of scale.
> But in doing so, it also hollowed out the descendants of Europe. It severed them from their ancestral cosmologies, burned their folk traditions, outlawed their dialects, shamed their earth-based mythologies, and replaced them with the machinery of empire, war, and control.
I'm not really sure how Europe has been "hollowed out" by the absence of paganism. People still have local culture without "ancestral cosmologies" and "earth-based mythologies." I'm not entirely sure how Europeans would be better off today if they still believed in magical beings who controlled the weather or arbitrarily dictated peoples' fates.
> ENVY IS INEVITABLE!
Basically everything that follows this sentence is just pathologizing cultural osmosis, which is a very normal and healthy thing and has been a feature of human society basically forever, and certainly did not start with the Bad White Men doing Capitalism and Other Bad Isms.
***
Insofar as European cultures have changed over the millennia, they seem to have changed for the better. Christianity is rooted in an ethic of agape, or unconditional love, whereas paganism was rooted in a transactional power/fear dynamic rooted in the fear of nature's arbitrary power (pagans made sacrifices to the "gods" because they feared their power!). Violent warfare is far less common in Europe (and the world) today than at any other point in history, despite Ukraine/Gaza/wherever. Average incomes and life expectancy are much higher in Europe today than in pre-industrial (and pre-enclosure!) Europe, and log per capita GDP is correlated as closely with virtually every measure of self-reported happiness as such measures are with each other. Moreover, Europe absolutely still has within-country regional cultures - as does the US!
Frankly, this article is an artifact of an era in which the worst excesses of exceedingly woke people went unchecked. A lot of the claims made here are wrong and, frankly, insane, and the implied conclusion - that Europe needs to "decolonize" by going back to some imagined past before Christianity/Imperialism supposedly ruined it, is just ridiculous.
This kind of response is exactly why the piece was written, not to “debate” history, but to expose the systemic conditioning that frames responses like this as objective, rational, or “just logic.” What you’re reading as “wrong,” “insane,” or “parody” is actually your discomfort speaking, dressed up in academic cosplay.
Let me be clear:
You are not actually arguing from neutral ground. You are arguing from within the worldview that the article critiques. That worldview, the one that sees empire as progress, Christianity as salvation, and “culture” as unchanged regional cuisines and tourist-friendly rituals, is not timeless. It is produced, and enforced, by the very colonial systems the article names.
You say you don’t think many people identify as white. That is precisely the point. Whiteness was never about shared cultural identity. It was about constructing proximity to power across otherwise diverse groups of Europeans. It flattens culture and offers access to dominance in exchange for complicity. If that sounds abstract to you, that’s because your own history has likely been sanitized, standardized, or replaced, not preserved. That is not an opinion. That is how hegemony functions.
You cling to the idea that Europe retained its regional dialects and patron saints, as if that proves cultural continuity, while refusing to acknowledge how much was obliterated by Church and Crown.
You reference proto-Indo-European pastoralist patriarchy as a rebuttal to the matriarchal structures that existed across pre-Christian Europe, especially among the Celts, Basques, Etruscans, and countless others. You dismiss animism as if spirituality rooted in land, nature, and reciprocity was simply fear of weather.
That is colonial bias in full form, pathologizing anything not filtered through Western rationalism. Full stop lol
You claim Christianity uplifted women, yet ignore the witch burnings, erasure of priestesses, and the ecclesiastical criminalization of female sexuality, medicine, and midwifery. You don’t mention Christianity grooming girls for marriage.
You applaud the GDP rise of Europe while erasing the fact that it was built on the back of enslaved labor, land theft, genocide, and extractive empire. You are praising the benefits of a stolen future while ignoring the body count that paid for it.
And this part is key. When you say cultural osmosis is normal, you conveniently forget that theft is not the same as exchange. That extraction is not collaboration. That mimicry under occupation is not admiration. Cultural exchange is only beautiful when it is mutual. Colonialism was not mutual.
You do not get to romanticize Europe’s “progress” while erasing what it cost the rest of the world, or pretending it wasn’t ripped from the roots of those same cultures it erased at home.
If you truly believe in facts and history, then face them. Don’t just cherry-pick citations that support the story you were taught. Examine the one you were denied. You might find the culture you think you are defending is not what was taken from you. It’s what was given to you in place of what was taken.
And that is what the piece was trying to say.
I don't think I'm engaging in "academic cosplay;" I'm not an academic historian or anthropologist and at no point do I use any jargon-ey terms. I think I am trying to be historically correct.
This conversation doesn't make me "uncomfortable," it makes me frustrated because I'm trying to have an actual discussion about cause/effect and the historicity of some of the claims you make, and you assume bad faith on my part and give me a lecture composed of "woke" word salad instead of actual, precise arguments.
> You are not actually arguing from neutral ground. You are arguing from within the worldview that the article critiques. That worldview, the one that sees empire as progress, Christianity as salvation, and “culture” as unchanged regional cuisines and tourist-friendly rituals, is not timeless. It is produced, and enforced, by the very colonial systems the article names.
This is odd, because I never claimed to be "neutral," I'm clearing taking a stance in this argument based on background knowledge and experience. I also don't think that European imperialism was a net positive development for the world, nor am I a Christian! Although I may not be "objective," since that's strictly impossible, I'm trying to make arguments rooted in generally understood historical fact.
> You say you don’t think many people identify as white. That is precisely the point. Whiteness was never about shared cultural identity. It was about constructing proximity to power across otherwise diverse groups of Europeans. It flattens culture and offers access to dominance in exchange for complicity. If that sounds abstract to you, that’s because your own history has likely been sanitized, standardized, or replaced, not preserved. That is not an opinion. That is how hegemony functions.
??? I don't think I've ever denied that "race" as a concept (and therefore "white" as a category) was created as a tool of European imperialism. It's very frustrating that you are inferring things I didn't say and don't believe in order to falsely assume ignorance on my part. This is a very common thing that overly woke people do.
> You claim Christianity uplifted women, yet ignore the witch burnings, erasure of priestesses, and the ecclesiastical criminalization of female sexuality, medicine, and midwifery. You don’t mention Christianity grooming girls for marriage.
I actually didn't claim this; I actually claimed that it's a stretch to believe that Christianity diminished the status of women in late antique and Medieval Europe. What I did claim was that early Christianity was disproportionately adopted by women and other marginalized people; moreover that the status of women was higher in Rome (before and after Christianization) than in other Iron Age societies. Both of these are widely agreed upon historical facts. Certainly, Christianity has historically endorsed many patriarchal practices, but these are hardly unique to Christianity. You have made a specific historical claim that Christianity diminished the overall status of women in Europe, and this claim is ahistorical.
> You reference proto-Indo-European pastoralist patriarchy as a rebuttal to the matriarchal structures that existed across pre-Christian Europe, especially among the Celts, Basques, Etruscans, and countless others.
You're assuming "matriarchal structures" among a lot of very poorly attested to societies. I'll take the Etruscans as an example - the best evidence we have for Etruscan gender politics is artwork depicting men and women socializing together. We can reasonably infer from this that the Etruscans may not have had seclusion norms that were common in many Iron Age societies, such as classical Athens. But Rome *also* didn't have seclusion norms, but it was still patriarchal (albeit less than most Iron Age societies.) We have absolutely no surviving textual evidence that suggests that the Etruscans were a female-dominated society; they were probably just less patriarchal than the norm.
Regarding the Basques, I think the only evidence that they were not patriarchal in the Iron Ages was Tacitus or some other ancient Roman historian referring to the "Vascones" as being gender-egalitarian. This may be true; again, they are a poorly attested to society.
Regarding the Celts, I really don't think pre-Roman or pre-Christian Celts were matriarchal! The best attested to pre-Roman (and therefore pre-Christian) Celts were the Gauls, whom many sources clearly show were ruled by males. Pre-Roman Gaul was an extremely materially unequal society wherein a few powerful males (the Romans called them "principes," roughly translating as "chiefs" or "princes" or "leading men") and everyone else was bound up in a patron-client system. The coat of arms of Ireland is a harp - an instrument that in Celtic society denoted aristocratic status due to the leisure time it took to learn the instrument - this is a telltale sign of material inequality, which usually co-occurs with patriarchy. Women in deeply patriarchal society often have prominent social roles - as priestesses, for instance, but that does not make these clearly male-dominated societies matriarchal!
> You dismiss animism as if spirituality rooted in land, nature, and reciprocity was simply fear of weather.
That is colonial bias in full form, pathologizing anything not filtered through Western rationalism. Full stop lol
This isn't pathologizing, this is just historical fact! Ancient polytheistic societies *made ritualistic sacrifices to their deities because they believed that bad things would happen to them if they didn't do this*! This is just how polytheism worked! If you hopped into a time machine and asked any pre-Christian polytheistic community, that's what they'd tell you! Here's an example: in the famous Melian dialogue, in which Athens, a strong city, demanded that Melos, a weak city, pay them tribute, the Athenians *compared their actions to the Greek gods, who are strong and therefore demand tribute from weaker mortals*! This is the entire foundation of polytheistic practice!
> You cling to the idea that Europe retained its regional dialects and patron saints, as if that proves cultural continuity, while refusing to acknowledge how much was obliterated by Church and Crown.
Of course Christianity and enclosure changed European culture! But cultural change does not imply the *literal absence of culture* which is the precise claim that your title is arguing for!
> You applaud the GDP rise of Europe while erasing the fact that it was built on the back of enslaved labor, land theft, genocide, and extractive empire. You are praising the benefits of a stolen future while ignoring the body count that paid for it.
??? I don't erase imperialism at all? I clearly refer to colonialism as a "crime" and clearly laid out how it supported enclosure, which in part enabled European prosperity. Modern European wealth is probably based in part on the spoils of empire, and in part on the development of certain institutions, such as free markets and the rule of law. Importantly, European imperialism certainly diminished the wealth of the periphery - see for instance the deindustrialization of India.
> And this part is key. When you say cultural osmosis is normal, you conveniently forget that theft is not the same as exchange. That extraction is not collaboration. That mimicry under occupation is not admiration. Cultural exchange is only beautiful when it is mutual. Colonialism was not mutual.
I think accusing people of "theft" for eating Korean BBQ is a bit of a stretch. This sort of cultural exchange certainly is mutual to an extent - see all the people who walk around the streets of east Asian cities wearing Yankees caps.
> You do not get to romanticize Europe’s “progress” while erasing what it cost the rest of the world, or pretending it wasn’t ripped from the roots of those same cultures it erased at home.
Again, at no point do I "erase" the crimes of colonialism, or deny that enclosure involved the traumatic displacement of many people - I refer to both of these things in my original comment. Moreover, I don't think I'm "romanticizing," I think I'm providing sound reasons why one would prefer to live in modern European society than pre-Christian European society - modern European society is much richer, has a much higher life expectancy and less violence, and these things make life better.
>If you truly believe in facts and history, then face them. Don’t just cherry-pick citations that support the story you were taught. Examine the one you were denied. You might find the culture you think you are defending is not what was taken from you. It’s what was given to you in place of what was taken.
Again, this is what's very frustrating about more "woke" people - you honestly have such limited cognitive empathy or theory of mind that you just assume that anyone who has a different opinion from you must be brainwashed. The idea of engaging in good faith with somebody who honestly disagrees with you is anathema - you can't possibly just disagree with someone, you have to "educate" them because you presuppose your infallible wisdom. You take enormous pride in the belief that you are part of an enlightened few blessed with esoteric wisdom, and you respond with more demeaning and infantilizing lectures when somebody challenges this notion with precise, strictly correct evaluations of the historical claims that you make.
Why do these “reclaim your spiritual heritage” preachers always sound like Blood & Soil Nazis who also thought that modernism was a blight on the world and getting back to the Blonde Beast was like going home?
It's because the anti-liberal left and right are driven by common anti-freedom impulses that makes them pine for an idealized “organic society” of an imagined past
It's because the anti-liberal left and right are driven by common anti-freedom impulses that makes them pine for an idealized “organic society” of an imagined past
I know what you mean but this sort of whackadoodle mythologizing of "culture" can never really be part of any kind of "left".
It couldn't be part of the old left, which for all its flaws was still progressive. However, the contemporary left is so dogmatically anti-capitalist that it defaults to being reactionary because it must always romanticize what it replaced.
Blah, blah, blah post modern nihilism, social construct theory, hate on white men, this shit was tired by the mid 90s Jew.
Here is the thing though objective reality exists, something you would rapidly acknowledge if a piano slipped it’s rope and was heading towards your head.
I came here for the white cuck comments and I'm not disappointed.
Yeah, it's parody, and the replies from earnestly self-hating whites are freaking hilarious. Unless they're also intentionally leaning into the parody, in which case the whole thing is just perfection.
I hope you are right. It feels like a parody, but this is way more work than I would bother putting into it
I admire your patience, Jacques! (And the levelheaded and respectful tone.) Great comment!
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.
Brain dead hack
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)
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.
Excellent. Thank you.
I should tip my hat to my professor J Kameron Carter who wrote Race: A Theological Account. I’m just summarizing his ideas.
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 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.
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.
This reads like ChatGPT...
I format my articles for my neurodivergent audience.
Lolllllll 🤣
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
We are done arguing with this retarded nonsense. I like America, my neighborhood, my county, my state (Indiana). I support “the system” that you hate. Because it’s not what your deluded minds portray it to be. You think in almost religious terminology, brain dead tropes I could hear any woke college student regurgitate. We‘re done arguing. Want to tear down the system? You’ll have to come through us bitch. Also, American culture is our culture. Movies, clothes, our constitutional republic, our way of life. It’s different from the backwards myths of our ancestors that you romanticize, but it is a culture. And it’s not even about being white, though I am and I’m proud of my lineage. You just use whiteness as a straw man, some bait and switch for revolutionary indoctrination. So bite me you retarded losers. You don’t deserve a logical or thoughtful response because you don’t have a message worth even considering.
Your empty soul is so sad as you prove the points being made. I actually feel sorry for you and your thought processes. But like I said…you gave give support to the thesis.
Retard
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Retard
Your intellect just oozes out in your comments. Teach me how to use outdated and unnecessary words as insults, while also teaching me not to grasp basic words and definitions. I'm super excited for my education to begin, so don't keep me waiting tio long.
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.
I won’t deny the historical wounds colonialism has left behind, not only on the colonized, but on those who became its machinery. Power structures co-opted everyone: some to dominate, others to obey. That’s real.
But let’s be clear: this kind of essay doesn’t heal, it divides. It doesn't liberate, it indicts. It assumes the worst of an entire group and demands repentance, not understanding. It tells people to “remember who they were” while scorning them for trying. It says, “you are broken,” then scoffs when someone asks, “how do I mend?”
And that’s a trap.
It’s true that whiteness, as a category, was shaped by empire, often to exploit and control. But you know what else is true? Culture isn’t dead. Memory isn’t gone. And people don’t need shame to recover what was lost. They need honesty. And respect. And space.
You don’t fix the legacy of cultural erasure by mocking people for searching. You don’t oppose racism by essentializing “white people” as envious, shallow, or soulless. And you don’t move toward justice by trying to make anyone feel permanently tainted by birth.
What’s needed is dialogue, not ideological cleansing rituals disguised as liberation.
I believe in accountability. But I also believe in dignity. I believe in looking back, but not with hatred. And most of all, I believe no one should have to crawl on broken glass to be allowed a seat at the table of humanity.
So let’s talk about colonialism. Let’s talk about culture, and power, and history. Ireland anybody? Bueller, Bueller, Bueller? GAZA? You out there bros? But let’s not replace old dogmas with new ones, or old scapegoats with fresh targets. We already have an ongoing damn genocide going on; why incite another one.
If you want liberation, don’t preach cages. Build bridges instead.
You said, “This kind of essay doesn’t heal, it divides.” But what you’re actually saying is that truth-telling makes you uncomfortable. That calling out a system built on extraction, hierarchy, and erasure is too sharp for your palate. Healing doesn’t happen by tiptoeing. It happens by naming harm. If you feel “divided,” ask yourself why clarity feels like conflict.
You also said, “It doesn’t liberate, it indicts. It assumes the worst of an entire group and demands repentance, not understanding.” This is a distortion. The article never demands repentance. It demands reckoning. And it does not assume the worst of white people, it names the system of whiteness as one that flattened culture, weaponized identity, and manufactured obedience through false superiority.
Then you said, “It tells people to ‘remember who they were’ while scorning them for trying.” That’s not true. The essay scorches performative scavenging of other people’s cultures without doing the work to remember your own. If someone is honestly digging into their ancestry before whiteness, that is not mocked, that is encouraged. What is called out is the entitlement that skips remembrance and goes straight to appropriation.
You wrote, “You don’t oppose racism by essentializing ‘white people’ as envious, shallow, or soulless.” That’s a misrepresentation. The article never uses those words. It says whiteness created spiritual starvation. That white people have been conditioned to fill the void by consuming what whiteness took from others. That’s not essentialism. That’s a structural critique.
You said, “What’s needed is dialogue, not ideological cleansing rituals disguised as liberation.” Let me be clear, truth-telling is not ideological cleansing. It’s historical excavation. And if your version of dialogue requires us to mute our clarity to maintain your comfort, then that’s not dialogue. That’s a power play.
Finally, you said, “Let’s not replace old scapegoats with fresh targets.” No one is scapegoating. We are naming power. If naming whiteness as a system of violence feels like an attack on you personally, then you might be identifying more with the system than you realize.
This article is not an indictment of individuals. It is a mirror held up to empire. If it’s showing you something you didn’t want to see, don’t blame the mirror. Ask why it feels like a wound.
Because the truth is, if you want dignity, if you want dialogue, if you want liberation—then you have to start by standing in the fire of what has been erased, silenced, and sanitized. Not with defensiveness. But with humility, grief, and the courage to remember what whiteness made you forget.
That’s not division. That’s decolonization.
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to keep this calm and clear.
You’ve misread me. Not because I didn’t speak clearly, but because your framework doesn’t allow room for dissent that isn’t fragility or power defense.
I didn’t say truth is uncomfortable. I said your rhetorical method; your framing of identity, your sweeping generalizations, your mood of contempt destabilizes the very empathy you claim to want. If your idea of “truth-telling” requires painting an entire demographic with psychological pathology (envy, spiritual starvation, mimicry), then I question whether what’s being told is “truth” or just vengeance dressed as history.
You say this piece isn’t demanding repentance. Fine. But it frames whiteness not as a system to deconstruct through mutual recognition and humanization—but as a spiritual disease to be reckoned with. That’s not an invitation to dialogue. That’s an indictment served cold, with the promise that any objection to its tone proves its point.
You say the piece encourages people to remember who they were. But it openly mocks “scavenging,” without nuance. That’s a problem. Because many people are trying to remember their roots in good faith. They’re just not doing it in your particular idiom, or according to your rules. That doesn’t make them appropriators. It makes them human beings trying to stitch something back together.
Finally: I don’t think dialogue requires silencing clarity. But it does require a respectful posture toward complexity and conscience. If you want real solidarity, not ideological obedience, then you have to make room for real voices. Including those who don’t fit neatly into your binaries.
Otherwise, this isn’t reckoning. It’s reenactment—of power, certainty, and moral hierarchy.
i’m white and i think it’s one of the best things i ever read - spiritual starvation of whiteness is real
I’ve thought this for the longest time but was never able to articulate it as well as he did.
Me myself, I recognize the tribes of Europe, and the fact I'm an American First. I think all racial bullshit is bogus and destructive. Call me crazy if you will, but this is the only way to fly, IMO.
You say all “racial bullshit” is bogus and destructive, but that statement itself is a luxury of the system of whiteness in a country built on racial hierarchy. The fact that you can “opt out” of race while others are targeted, policed, and excluded because of theirs, that’s not equality. That’s the illusion of dominance disguised as neutrality.
I think I say thank you to you a lot Mr. Ortiz. This time it’s for providing an explanation for an emptiness that I’ve been feeling for a few years now.
What a gift. Thank you!