A Radical Alternative to Whiteness

Is it just me or do white people kind of suck lately? I mean more than usual. That's not racist, I use to be one. I sort of still am, I guess. More on that later. It kind of seems like white folk have fallen into two equally obnoxious sub-species. There's the White Alpha Douche, bitching like a 13 year old emo kid that he's the real victim because everybody else is playing the fucking victim card and that's his card. Then there's the equally tiresome Squishy White Apology Addict, who's just terribly terribly sorry about all the savagery his ancestors have dished out to minorities, but now he looks to the Noble Savages and Magical Negroes to show him how to walk and talk and censor people like me for not stepping in line. He's probably banning me again from Facebook as we speak for self-identifying as a tranny and patting himself on the back for being part of the solution. 

Both of these unbearable archetypes are offensively one dimensional and, lets face it, downright racist in their shallow world view. The first one blames all the world's woes on people of color, and the second relies completely on this same coalition of minorities to save him from his ancestral evil ways. Black folks have enough trouble getting home from the grocery store without getting shot full of ketamine and chucked in the back of a police cruiser without having to choose between smacking us or holding our hand. Why can't we just get our shit together? Well, believe it or not, it's not all our fault. Not exactly anyway.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, white people are a race without an ethnicity. These two words get switched around a lot, especially by cantankerous racial renegades like yours truly, but most sociologists essentially view ethnicity as some one's cultural heritage while race is merely the aesthetic nonsense that cops and porn producers fixate on, namely skin color. So we'll roll with that definition for this post. I don't think it should be controversial to say that race is silly bullshit that has sadly become deadly bullshit. But ethnicity is very important. It tells us where we've been and helps guide us to where we're going, like a Jungian compass, and white people, as a group, just don't have one. That's because white is not an ethnicity. It's merely a ludicrously broad and inherently globalist blanket race. A race that seems to thrive on the suffocation of ethnic individuality both from within and without its strict confines.

The concept of whiteness is a relatively recent one. The Oxford Dictionary puts it back somewhere in the late 1600s, which unironically was a time of great civil unrest in America's colonies. Before whiteness, everything was defined by traditional English nobility and Protestant Christian zealotry. Nobody identified as white and the only permanent slaves were those who refused to convert from their indigenous heathen ways to what empires had mangled Christianity into. There were indentured servants of every color, Black Africans, American Indians, Irishmen, and even English commoners, but as long as they assimilated to the violence of colonial order, they too could have a piece of that bloody pie. It wasn't altogether unusual to have a slave, even an African slave, work his way up to landowner status and own slaves of his own. (Women and gender non-conforming folk of any shade were still fucked though.)

This only changed when poor landless folk started to get pissed off with this predatory social arrangement and began to launch multi-ethnic rebellions against it. After they literally burned down Jamestown, the British Crown began to dread the very real possibility of losing their colonies to the unwashed masses. So they made the decision to divide us into two major groups, white and not-white. This way they could pay off the European peasantry with petty privileges and create a permanent slave class out of those who could easily be deemed outsiders among the pale skinned majority. This quickly turned into a booming industry at the turn of the 17th Century, with the violent export of Africans multiplying nearly tenfold. Even then, whiteness was still more of a class than a race. Most people in this country who now consider themselves white weren't when they first immigrated to the New World. Irish, Jewish, Polish, and Italian people all had to earn their privilege by losing their ethnicity and joining in on the institutional violence of white supremacy. This is why I become so furious when right wing imbeciles bitch about "White Genocide." White is genocide, not just to black, brown, and indigenous folk, but to all the unique European cultures that were annihilated in its melting pot.

Most modern day left-wing intellectuals are fully aware of this history and readily admit that whiteness is a violent class construct. But their analysis virtually grinds to a halt there, because the question of 'what now for white people?' is just too politically incorrect to be asked. Liberal America likes to pretend that ethnicity doesn't matter to anyone but people of color but it matters to everyone. Everyone needs a sense of belonging and cultural history. Without it, we're lost. This is why post-colonial societies like North America and Australia are so vain, vapid, and materialistic. The shrinking white majority has nothing but the empty trappings of vulture capitalism to cling too, and those privileged trappings are undeniably the fruit of a white supremacist culture that continues to drive our countries violently imperialist foreign policy. Americans only have cheap excess crap to binge on because the shithole countries have nothing, and for all its virtue signaling woke culture, the liberal left offers very little to address this problem or, not so coincidentally, the white question. According to the Ivy League arbiters of social justice, white people should just feel like shit and never stop apologizing, but this just isn't a viable solution, especially when you consider that many white people are getting railed just slightly softer than the people they're apologizing too.

The solution, ironically enough, can actually be provided by the example of Black people. You see, Black was the other manufactured global race. African people had their tribal cultures forcibly stripped from them, their languages, their gods, their everything. But instead of accepting their status as a permanent slave race, they resisted, often violently, and constructed a new ethnicity from a culture of resistance to imperialism. American Indians, Chicanos, and Queers followed suit. This is how I ceased to be white. I never felt anything resembling a sense of belonging in the community I was born into. Even before I realized that I was a genderqueer transwoman, I was always treated like something dangerous by other white people in my rural Pennsylvanian town. I was born an intruder. It wasn't until I came out of the closet and rejected many of the puritanical standards of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that I felt a sense of belonging that I had been thirsty for my whole life. Queer became my ethnicity, my shared history and culture, one built in defiance to whiteness and every petty thing it stood for. 

I believe that this is the solution to white supremacy. We need radical alternatives to whiteness, ones either built on pre-white European ethnicities like Irish, Welsh, German, or Scottish ancestry, or new ethnicities built in defiance to the colonialist order. Hillbillies, Rednecks, Cajuns, Italian Americans, and French Canadians have all been victims of colonialist class subjugation. Their privileges are just that, privileges, not rights. Trinkets and tokens of compliance to good white people, and with the empire drying up like a salt flat, they're beginning to rust. Well stop being good white people and embrace the renegade traditions of rural European Americans. Those same fucking Americans who joined their Black brothers and sisters in burning Jamestown to the fucking ground.

White people suck because being white people sucks. Lets ditch this honky drag and try on something a little more revolutionary.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones

*  Guilty of Being White by Minor Threat

*  Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed

*  White Riot by the Clash

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Slip Away by Perfume Genius

*  Rock n Roll Nigger by Patti Smith

*  John Wayne Was a Nazi by MDC

*  Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras