White Guilt is a very serious affliction in this country. Its symptoms include cultural appropriation, political correctness, and obsessive NPR consumption. Fall is peak White Guilt season, wedged between our country's most cherished celebrations of genocide, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A common misconception is that White Guilt is a mental illness. While it can cause delusions in more severe cases, White Guilt is actually a completely natural response to conspicuous consumption, particularly when this addiction to material garbage is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Lets face it people, like it or not, this country's grotesque surplus of wealth would be scientifically impossible without a veritable banquet of holocausts spanning three continents and the entire Western Hemisphere. Scores of tribes in North and South America and Africa were reduced to cinder to create a level of concentrated wealth in Western Europe and its bastard breakaway states that is downright unnatural and white people on both sides of the Atlantic continue to enjoy the luxuries that this legacy of brutality provides us. Luxuries like slowly murdering ourselves with trans fats while others starve and declaring it a holiday. So if you're white, you probably should feel a little bit guilty. Our ancestors did some dicked up shit, even mine. Though they may have came to this country as white niggers escaping their own holocaust on potato boats, my Irish Catholic kin still earned their right to whiteness by whooping on school buses full of black kids as good as any Catholic bashing WASP could.
So we've zeroed in on the cause of white guilt, now how about the cure if there even is one? The prescription currently preferred by most milquetoast, limp-wristed, liberal, sweater vest jockies is some form of charity. Whether this means cutting checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center or voting for extravagant welfare state packages, honkies seem convinced that they can buy their way out of rape like Kobe fucking Bryant. This doesn't work. However well intentioned, forking over fists full of cash to poor people does nothing but make them dependent on the same kind of hierarchy that imprisoned them in the first place. Africa doesn't need food, they need farms that aren't owned by Monsanto and more than anything they need the bloodsucking monkey of Western Imperialism off their fucking back. So unless you can give them debt forgiveness save your money.
Welfare strings people along and gives them just enough money to exist while keeping them reliant on and thus subservient to the state. I know this from personal experience. My agoraphobia makes me ill-equipped to function in conventional society, the fact that I'm permanently stuck between genders doesn't exactly help either. But rather than adjusting society to meet the needs of people like me and encouraging our strengths, the state prefers to give me a stiffened that affords me just enough money to cover my meds while preventing me from seeking the part time work that might be enough to get me started but not enough to cover my expenses. The result is being trapped in a kind of limbo of economic dependency. This snare serves a whole other purpose when we're talking about even more heavily marginalized communities. What sane black person living under the yoke of a police state wouldn't want to strap on a Ruger and hit the nearest Howard Johnson's? Well, one that needs that same racist state to feed their family. It's no coincidence that LBJ's Great Society came amidst some of the biggest black insurrections since the Restoration. It was payola in the form of high rise slave quarters called projects. The welfare state seeks to cripple not empower.
The more radical white leftist solution to White Guilt usually comes in the form of some kind of #pandering. You can keep your gentrified town house and hit up the ATM for your trust funds in your cherry new Tesla as long as you sip fair trade lattes and support Black Lives Matter and queer rights on Facebook. Not only is this brand of plush armchair activism offensively counterproductive but it's also downright counterrevolutionary. It's easy to support someone else's struggle from the comfort of the suburbs. And marching off to someone else's barrio thinking your going to save the peasants with your menthol E-cigs and your Che Guevara iPhone is just a petite bourgeois version of humanitarian imperialism. So congrats Sandernistas, you're Clintonians after all.
So what is the cure? Your probably begging your browser by now. The harsh reality is that there really isn't one. The damage has been done. Contrition is a lifelong sentence, not a solution. But that doesn't mean things can't be done to help equal the playing field and live a long fulfilling life with WG. How do we do that? I think founding Black Panther, Huey Newton came up with the best answer to that question when he was asked what white kids could do to support his cause. His response? Start a White Panther Party. There are poor white folks from the Ozarks to the Rust Belt that are just as thirsty for revolution as any person of color and for many of the same damn reasons. Sadly, too many of their kids have turned their backs on them and left their righteous fury to be poached by race baiting twats like Donald Trump. These kids go on and on about intersectionality without realizing that the best way to show their solidarity with oppressed minorities is to organize their own communities against the state that threatens them both. They could use a brief history lesson.
For the most part, Huey's sage advice fell on deaf ears but a few radical honkies got the message. John Sinclair's appropriately titled White Panther Party worked to unite Ann Arbor and Detroit's disenfranchised white youth around dope, sex, and Rock&Roll. He managed to galvanize the weapons grade angst of youth culture to create an authentic vanguard against Nixon's fascist state. They joined the Black Panther's revolution from their own neighborhoods, creating the terrifyingly unthinkable; the teenage suburban guerrilla, armed with a blunt and their daddies gauge and ready to fight the pigs that crashed their kegger knowing they were the same pigs that shot Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.
Perhaps even more fascinating was the Young Patriots Organization which later manifested itself into the sadly short lived Patriot Party. These were a loose knit collection of rural white radicals who realized that hillbillies, white trash, and rednecks were the new white niggers and that their hunting skills were put to better use taking aim at city hall than joining the Klan to fuck with other poor people. So they dressed in berets and denim jackets emblazoned with the Stars and Bars and joined Fred Hampton's militant Rainbow Coalition to take down the state. I think this cuts to the heart of the White Guilt conundrum and how to treat it by lending a hand to the people our ancestors fucked rather than belittling their cause with charity and empty calls for solidarity.
You see, dearest motherfuckers, the best thing we can do to make up for the crimes of the white race is to secede from it. The very concept of whiteness was invented to justify one small cartel of pale faced oligarch's theft of three entire continents. We should reject our membership to this jerry-rigged caste by recognizing that all poor people are their playthings and we're done with being played. We need to reinvest into our own maligned cultures and declare independence for our true tribes separate from the inherently classist monstrosity of White Supremacy, be we queers, headcases, delinquents, hillbillies, or trailer trash. Our act of contrition for getting high off the fumes of the white race should be to burn it down.
It's one of the reasons why I'm proud to be a part of a site like Attack the System. It celebrates true tribal diversity as well as the one thing that brings us all together, our thirst for liberty and our hatred of the state that deprives every shade of this radical rainbow its god given right to radical self-determination. It's like the Breakfast Club for renegades. Here we are all the nigger, the faggot, the redneck, the bandit, and the call-girl. So let them call me a token tranny or a NatBol. I share Huey's dream of an America of a thousand flags even if a few of them are emblazoned on the back of pick-up trucks. This is all of our fight. So swallow that guilt and pick up a torch, we've got mansions to burn together.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno
* Serve the People by Handsome Furs
* Great American Hoax by the MC5
* Common People by Pulp
* Sonic Reducer by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Rebels by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
* Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack
* Sit Down by James
* Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds
* Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello
No comments:
Post a Comment