I am saddened by this country. I have been for some time.
I don’t understand our priorities. I don’t understand our obsession with competition, with creating hierarchy. Hierarchy: valuing one person or institution–or, hell, product–over another. Hierarchy is so deeply entrenched in our culture–yes, our white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture–that calling it out as deeply entrenched is fairly ridiculous. Merit and ranking and competition are apparently self-evident truths in our culture.
Why? Why does it have to be this way? And doesn’t it make you sad that it is this way? It makes me sad.
But beyond me being sad, the hierarchy of white supremacist patriarchy kills. Me being sad is fairly trivial compared to the piles upon piles of historical and contemporary injustices–kidnapping and enslavement, near extirpation and complete marginalization of indigenous societies, indentured servitude, Jim Crow, COINTELPRO, the weaponization of media to promote fascism… the longer I look at it, the more polemics I feel are necessary. I’m not going to persuade anyone to see obvious atrocities in this way; those who see, see; those who don’t want to see… probably aren’t going to read this.
How is this piece different? How is this an essay on becoming? I started this blog as a reaction, as a way for me to process and fight against the ignorance that spoils the very freedoms that Uber-Patriotism beats his chest and proclaims to protect.
I want America to become America. Land of the free, all that. I don’t see how aggressive policing of under-served and under-privileged populations makes us any freer. I don’t see how exporting violence and exploiting resources makes us any freer. I don’t see how a two party political system makes us any freer. I don’t see how the clunky mass machinery of representative democracy makes us truly free.
To really participate in freedom, we need to have control of our bodies, our minds, our lives. We need to have functioning communities, not suburbs and neglected inner cities slated to be gentrified. We need local economies and interdependence, not a globalized economy ruled by the military of the country that preaches independence and enforces dependence.
I don’t see how an economics of exploitation helps any of us. Not to get all Buddhist on your ass, but if my coffee comes from impoverished folks working coffee plantations in South America or Africa, I’m drinking exploitation and suffering to wake me up in the morning.
One of the most beautiful teachings I’ve found in my spiritual wanderings–and I’ve been here, there, and nowhere in those wanderings–is the Buddhist teaching of interdependence. The notion of nothing as no-thing. The reality that nothing and no one is ranked in a hierarchy. Instead, we’re a stew. We are all interdependent. We are not separate beings. We feel separate. We are not.
I’m an onion in the stew. The beef’s flavor depends on me. If I stop being an onion, the beef stops being the beef that it is. But my onion-ness is changed by the stew, by all of the other ingredients. You can see how this pretty quickly gets complicated and calls for diagrams that fall apart.
I’m the stew. You’re the stew.
The rational mind cannot grasp reality.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? In America. In Western culture and philosophy in general. We’re all rational and legalistic, we have lots of concepts and frameworks, but we’re pretty dense when it comes to seeing the real.
Look outside. When I look outside, I see a spring day. Sun and intense UV rays that require protection. Wait, back up. Simplify. Put on the sunscreen, but appreciate the warmth.
This is an essay on becoming stew, but the stew does not last.
It’s eaten.
This chain of becoming continues forever.
Western culture grasps. It manipulates. Western culture names and codifies. It attempts to make fluid concrete.
But Western culture is part of a cosmic stew. It’s a social construction concretized in millions, billions of bodies growing older and changing on a rotating planet circling around a ginormous ball of fire. And those bodies act and change as they grow, and they have children, and despite the inertia of misinformed traditions, the bodies evolve and realign over time. I am hopeful that they will realign into a stable formation, one that is not static, but dynamic, one that understands and embodies the fluidity of being in its traditions.
And, because bell hooks has made a career out of insightful cultural criticism and does such a great job articulating the structure of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, here she is:
We live in a shitty society. When you look at our history, which so few people aside from those overtly oppressed by this society–because, face it, overtly oppressed people have little or nothing to lose and much to gain from critiques of history and social norms–when you even begin to look at our history with a consciousness that is not colonized by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, you must come to terms with perpetual terror. Horror. Genocide, enslavement, the shackling of personhood to economic interests.
My naivete began to end on September 11th, 2001. Being from a white middle-class background, having been educated in public schools, somehow I assumed that, in the face of an overt terror attack, the government and citizens of the United States of America would take a measured response. Investigate. Ponder. Consider foreign policy. Consider the problem.
Naive.
Somewhere along the line, I missed the cultural indoctrination, the secret memo passed around that said, the Declaration of Independence and basic human rights don’t apply to all people the same way; people? Why, that’s a very limited category, don’t you know? No, rather, I took seriously the words of the Declaration, that all men (which I was educated to believe meant people, not just males) are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights like Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness with a capital H.
Naive.
I internalized the notion that women were equal to men.
Naive.
I took the Civil Rights movement seriously and assumed that we’d moved into enlightened territory regarding race–although, living as I did in South Carolina, certain tensions were evident. But I assumed those tensions were not widespread in the nation; this was, after all, South Carolina.
Naive.
I assumed that the hippies had won significant gains in the struggle for peace.
Naive.
I was 14 when Operation Desert Storm was executed. Watching the bombs drop on CNN, war playing out like a video game. That felt wrong to me.
Naive.
Perhaps Operation Desert Storm was the moment when cracks began to form in my cognitive model of my country. Ten years later, planes destroyed the World Trade Center and my country’s response to that act destroyed my faith in it. The backlash to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, commonly described as the “war on terror”, is ongoing. The trauma inflicted by this so-called war far exceeds the trauma of the destruction of those towers. It far exceeds any notion of justice. It is retribution. It is punishment. It is white supremacist capitalist patriarchy raging against the Other. It is not a war. It is a holocaust.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy knows how to execute a holocaust. The destruction of Native America–an insufficient term for the diverse indigenous societies so nearly extirpated by European colonization that the remains have been partitioned into reservations–is a holocaust. The execution of this Indigenous Holocaust was fundamental in shaping the world we all inhabit, this technological dystopia so frequently mistaken for progress. This Indigenous Holocaust is ongoing.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy knows how to execute a holocaust. The forced removal of millions of Africans from their homes; their subsequent storage below decks in ships in service of their dehumanization and subjugation, their treatment as property, as objects; the over two and a half centuries of enslavement; the fraud of their emancipation; the struggle of survivors of chattel slavery to come up and thrive in the face of and inside of a system that was and continues to be based on dehumanizing them–that is a holocaust. The execution of this African Holocaust was fundamental in shaping the world we all inhabit, this technological dystopia so frequently mistaken for progress. This African Holocaust is ongoing.
Refinement of bomb-dropping and on-the-ground combat into drone warfare is not going to protect us from terror; it is terror, and its result will be terror. Refinement of fuel consumption and pursuit of mythical sustainability in a world that has far exceeded its carrying capacity will not correct climate change; climate change is likely irreversible by now, and we are likely to be forced into a radical revision of the way in which we live on Earth and interact with its ecosystems. Reform of police departments through tracking of police homicides and the use of body cameras will not end the problem of police brutality; the policing system, like the military, is rooted in violent repression of the Other.
We cannot engage democratically with each other to solve our pressing problems in a framework of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which by its very nature is anti-democratic. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy excludes a high percentage of the population from meaningful engagement in the democratic process. It always has. It always will.
A wilderness, a wilderness
calling, calling. When I was younger,
I had a fantasy of foraging
in the ruins of western civilization.
The truth of the zombie apocalypse
is that the worst predators are human.
A wilderness is calling us,
a wonderness. Earth is shifting
and our signpost won’t direct us
no more. We need a human technology.
We need music springing around us,
drums, voices, strings. Grass underfoot.
Spring is calling us, wilder now,
wondering at how long, how long
we’ve been downpressed. No more.
We make a human technology,
music and language, the laughter
of Earth working. Grass underfoot.
Flowers burst and we’re wilder here,
raving, calling in the dawn. Snowmelt
and rising rivers, up to our shins
in richness, rich mud. And all the colors
come out. Now, now we move,
shake out from this chrysalis. Wings.
Metamorphosis. We are seeds, we sing
an Earth song. These tones are our home,
we feel our blood rise to the occassion
and how long, we wonder at how long,
but no more. There’s a freedom coming
we’ve none of us known before.
“History is ending,” Terence McKenna raves, “because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley”, and while it’s easy to dismiss a man who preaches the merits of DMT, presents an end-time model based on the I-Ching and the Mayan Calendar, and rants gleefully about “self-transforming machine elves” to ecstasy-eating youths over a techno-digeridoo soundtrack provided by Spacetime Continuum, he may have a point.
Climate change is destroying the world we know. Industrial democracy, neoliberalism, global capitalism, white supremacy, whatever you choose to call it, is breaking down. Not so long ago, the fictive nature of money was unveiled, but our attention was hijacked from the Wizard-of-Oz shenanigans of our global economy by those who perpetuate inequality and fear, talking about “too big to fail.” But what if society is failing because it’s too big?
My Name is Chellis & I’m In Recovery from Western Civilization suggests that what we believe is democracy is an elephant that should have been a mouse; that is, democracy can only function in small-scale, participatory societies. Chellis Glendinning theorizes that real democracy–that is, participatory democracy where individuals can directly participate in collective life–can only happen within relatively small groups. She posits that domestication of nature and self, thousands of years ago, inflicted an original trauma on the human psyche that has been exacerbated and amplified throughout history.
We find ourselves, uber-grandchildren of the traumatized, afflicted by traumas on all sides. Climate crisis, militarization of the police, perpetual war for perpetual peace, economic inequality: all arguably the products of colonial white supremacy. Or, as Riane Eisler, Terence McKenna, and others look further back, these are arguably products of “dominator culture”. Glendinning looks further still: our intractable situation is the product of our original trauma, the split of the human psyche from the primal matrix brought about by domestication.
Specialization and Incapacity
Given the multitude of problems we face, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Recently I was approached by a new friend with an invitation to interview relatives of students murdered by state and drug-related violence in Mexico, the Ayotzinapa 43.
On Nov. 7, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told the public that the students were shot, burned in a garbage dump and thrown into a muddy river in black plastic bags. His words were met with disbelief, anger, and indignation not only from the students’ families, but also by people throughout Mexico because they rely on the confessions of three drug cartel hit men, not conclusive evidence — human remains discovered near a landfill based on their information have not yet been identified yet.
But what does one ask? Say? In the face of such brutality, how do I, a stranger to the families and, until recently, a stranger to the murders, approach the trauma? Faced with such trauma, focused on the similar but different trauma of historic and contemporary state violence against Black people in the United States, what does one ask? Parallels can be drawn, but my unfamiliarity with the larger context of life in Mexico weakens my approach.
Language is an insufficient tool to bridge the gap of trauma, but it’s the best tool we have. Any tool can be abused, used as a weapon. Weaponized language is used by white supremacist society in subtle and unsubtle ways to subdue and destroy resistance. Language is a sharp tool. In an unskilled mouth, or crafted from the keys under unskilled hands, language can inadvertently wound. But we must proceed with language. We must communicate with each other.
I Assume That You Are Uneasy
Glendinning asserts that in nature-based, hunter-gatherer societies, human beings existed within a primal matrix of high attunement to the natural world. The consciousness of the hunter-gatherer differs in fundamental ways from our consciousness. The essence of the difference is the connection to and constant participation in nature. In Glendinning’s model, the human personality in a natural state is centered, but not ego-centric; the ego is integrated into the primal matrix. If we entertain Glendinning’s model to the extent that we take seriously the notion that human beings, for most of our million-year history on this planet, were integrated within the primal matrix, we may understand the context for our contemporary unease.
I assume, of course, that you are uneasy. You should be.
I Believe That the System Is Failing
Failure is an experience we all must accept, and this rhetoric of failure not being an option is the rhetoric of exceptionalism. We need to get over this notion of being exceptional, of being too essential to fail. We can fail. If our institutions are “too big to fail”, perhaps we need smaller institutions that allow for room for failure.
Humanity can fail. We are failing. The planet will survive the climate crisis. It will remain, life will likely continue in some form. Earth has undergone climate shifts before and life has persevered. Whether or not humans survive is an unanswered question, but we must begin to act like we want to survive.
For too long we’ve been acting like we don’t care about ourselves, about each other, as human beings. Whether that’s due to white supremacy, or dominator culture, or domestication is not irrelevant, and I think we could approach our existential dilemma acknowledging that all three theses are true and related. How we approach the struggle now, from our situs within a brutal culture that puts profit over people, must be informed not only by analysis, but also by will, by the belief, being articulated in the Black Lives Matter movement, that we can win.
I Believe That We Can Win
We need new systems. We need roots-oriented, community-oriented, on-the-ground democracies. And we need thousands of them, localized and decentralized. Believing that we can win is a process that is intertwined with understanding the monumental problems we face. Believing that we can win does not mean that we don’t believe that we can fail. Believing that we can win means acknowledging that failure is part of the process. Believing that we can win means, I think, being committed to transforming hegemonic, technological, exploitative society into heterogeneous, human, relational societies.
How can we get there? I recently attended a meeting of concerned citizens and community activists in my city. We met under the banner of a Communication Workshop on Racism and ostensibly focused on learning techniques of non-violent communication. What actually happened, though, was that all of us as individuals were trying to be heard, and in our effort to be heard, bypassed the techniques of non-violent communication being taught. So, from one perspective, we failed to learn about and practice non-violent communication with each other. But I don’t think that anyone attending that workshop would describe it as a failure. In a city and society that is still segregated, still separate and unequal, the act of white and Black and biracial and Latino people coming together to talk about race is itself a success. It’s practice, it’s a start for us here, and we should count it as a success. Because that is how we get to the better society we are longing for: by practice.
Practice
One thing I like about my local Buddhists in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh is that they practice. Every Sunday, they gather to practice sitting and walking meditation, to practice deep listening with each other. One person speaks at a time, and engaging in speaking/listening is intentional and respectful. Everyone sits in a circle. If you want to speak, you bow, state your name, and begin speaking. When you are done, you bow to indicate that you are done. This is usually followed by a moment of silence before someone else decides to speak.
This sort of respectful, intentional communication would have been beneficial as we talked about race at the Communication Workshop. It would be beneficial in our centers of government. It is a tool, one that we can use to create respectful, intentional spaces where we speak and listen.
Transformation
We must transform by engaging in a practice of community-building, of localization and engagement. This is bound to be messy. We are not always intentional or respectful; we may be confused or agitated. Our practice of democracy is not going to look like my local Buddhists. If we are serious about survival, if we want to thrive as human beings, we need to be serious about engaging with each other locally, about knowing each other.
This is a process of recovery; we are, or should be, in recovery from Western Civilization. We’ve been colonized, but not civilized. Civilization implies civility; the United States of America is not and never has been civil. But we can work on civility, locally. In order to come to terms with our trauma, our colonization, our dehumanization, we need to know each other as human beings.
One way that I can work in solidarity with those suffering from the excesses of Mexican state and extra-judicial violence is to focus locally. I must work to empower my community, so that we can work to achieve a new kind of power in America: a grass-roots, a people power in service to human needs.
The transformation we need is from exploited beings in service to a hegemonic, technological society into human beings participating in heterogeneous, relational societies.
I woke up this morning with Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in my head. Why? I had not encountered “We Didn’t Start the Fire” anytime recently. Why do I find that song so catchy, even invigorating? I don’t particularly like the song, but it does have an effect: to pump me up, yeah, I didn’t start the fire, it has always been burning since the world’s been turning, so then…
Wait. Fuck that song. I prefer Ani DiFranco’s “Willing to Fight”, with its lyrics of “I know the biggest crime is just to throw up your hands, say this has nothing to do with me, I just want to live as comfortably as I can.” So, yeah, okay, we didn’t start the fire, but what do we do about the fire burning that is the system of global white supremacy? I don’t want to live in a burning house, on a burning planet. I don’t want to live within that system; it’s inhuman. I can argue that “it has nothing to do with me” in the sense that it is historical and I am one individual, but I know that is disingenuous.
We can’t change history, but we need to be honest about our history because history informs the present. The dominant media and education we receive tells a version of history and the present that serves a system of white supremacy and does not serve humanity as a whole. We need to challenge false narratives of history and the present.
I recently discovered the materials for the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and am reading through them. This is how the CWS Workshop defines white supremacy:
White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and people of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.
I appreciate the CWS materials I’ve read so far because they not only define the problem of white supremacy clearly, but also define the problem of America clearly. A document titled “RACE: The U.S. Creation Myth and Its Premise Keepers” exposes three facts about the United States that are consistently obscured by the exceptionalist lens of our history and media:
The United States is a nation state created by military conquest in several stages.
The United States could not have developed economically as a nation without enslaved African labor.
The third major step in the formation of the United States as a nation was the seizure of almost half of Mexico by war. The United States has consistently engaged in aggressive military expansion since that time.
The above points are summaries of those made in “RACE”; I encourage everyone to read the full document. It’s short, six pages, and accessible.
In his 1957 book, Albert Memmi drew portraits of The Colonizer and the Colonized. He wrote about the specific situation of colonized Tunisia in a fashion general enough for readers to extrapolate the portraits to other specific situations of oppression. Memmi identified with both the colonized and the colonizer. In our complex contemporary situation in the United States, I believe that many of us would identify as Memmi did: not exclusively with one portrait or archetype, but with both.
Memmi concludes from his portraits that the colonial system is unsustainable and that its failure is inevitable. He does not discuss colonialism in terms of white supremacy, but we must draw the same conclusion, as white supremacy is the assumption that drives colonialism.
White supremacy is unsustainable. It denies the humanity of both those that it oppresses and those that it requires do the oppressing. But we are human, whether we are comfortable with our humanity or not, and white supremacy, by the way, needs us to be uncomfortable with our humanity, whether we are the oppressed or the oppressor. White supremacy exists only because a division has been made between oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized.
The division, of course, is false. Not only is it false on the societal level; it is false on the individual level as well. We’ve all been colonized. Our perceptions, imagination, and actions are colonized by capitalist, white supremacist ideologies. To the extent that we allow that colonization–that oppression–to continue, we perpetuate both societal and personal dehumanization.
Billy Joel wants us to believe that we didn’t start the fire, but he’s selling a false narrative about who we are. We are individual people, but we are also social animals, and because of that, our individuality is created by and exists within a social matrix. Whether we started the fire or not, the fact remains that the social matrix is burning. As humans threatened by a burning environment, what is the sensible thing to do? Sing along with the song of denial? Or invite other songs in, allow them to reverberate at the deep level of humanity, that human core within us that has been and continues to be stifled by ideologies of division?
I am here on the precipice
looking out on work to be done
diving finding ground on which to walk
my voice is not my own is owned
is owned and it is I who do the owning
of my voice now
I am here on my own
holding your hand
discarding my clothes
together we turn to see the land
see it and taste it and walk on
on the ground we are finding
I am here with you
with your skin close to mine
I am afraid of all we must see
but the bare grass on my feet
and the music we speak
reminds me of youth
I am here on my own
owning a maturity a fruit
hard earned I am here
with you with your skin
close to mine I am sorry
for loss for the loss of life
I am here I own sorrow
but that is not all you say
and I affirm that we will be
more after all you have endured
and I say I cannot fathom
how you thrive
I am here and I cannot
choose to ignore any longer
the losses they have inflicted
and I am not complicit
in the blind rush to the precipice
but I watch the future fall
I am there with my sons
the extension of my flesh my thought
my love I am there with my sons
who are there coming to terms
with what has been done
and the work to be done
I am here which is nowhere
and I search for a place to stand
I see that the ground must be made
must be made of words of love
that will nurture the future
to blossom over the fire of the past
I am here I am not burning
am I burning who am I here
the television is telling us it is not us
it is telling us so much by
what it refuses to say
by its inability to hear
I am here demanding with you
that the present be accountable to the past
that our language be precise and authentic
that our technology serve us
that we serve the earth
I demand respect each other
I am here overstanding history
I have come to terms
I have come to shape the future
with words of love that nurture
skin and flesh and ground that blossoms
and demands that we be more basic
we are here and we must thrive
or we will die as we have died
and kill as we have killed we must stop
we must learn to bear fruit
we must learn to tend roots
we must learn we are here
