Trigger warning: racist rant presented in the beginning as inshallah I help fellow white people gain clarity on how to heal ourselves from cultural trauma, internalized racism, and how to understand our bigoted cousins who we can have new tools to work on them with not just on Thanksgiving but all year long.
Sandra Allik’s “Urban Icarus (Luke)
Why Study Historical White-on-White Violence? A Healing Needs to Take Place
by Shep Glennon
White person #1: Why are you so focused on past misdeeds of white people in your quest for "social justice"? Are you all about finding our ancestors as horrible people so you can say it's time for Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Muslims to get Revenge and take over our country? To justify your hate of Western Culture? Hahaha everyone was a villain if you go back far enough hahaha it's pointless to blame, what's next, do we let the Irish get their land back from the British or the British from the Vikings? Get over it. Life isn't fair. [IRA: 😑]
Or...is it to make Excuses for failure of most non-whites to get to the height of civilization and power white people are at now? Hahaha quit bitching and pull yourselves up without handouts. Get in line like everyone else. Life should be fair. [Wait, didn't you just say life wasn't f- 🤨 oh, ok...😑]
White person #2: It's not about Revenge or Excuses. That says more about how *you* view the world- a guilty conscience and a vengeance-based morality that projects Revenge as a motive.
And your own stifling 🤐 of your own pain at the unfairness of life- you don't allow yourself permission to complain because if you finally let out all of the unprocessed pain you've been repressing, you'd be paralyzed, you'd not get any work done. In your inability to be vulnerable you see life as transactional, transactional so you always know what to expect; you believe if you "work hard and play by the rules" you end up a success, you hope against a lifetime of stifled disappointment. Maybe you associate talking about pain with your *own* tendency to make Excuses. Well this is all YOU. Honey, I think you got you confused with me. And your standard of success isn't necessarily mine: if GDP, the sum of products bought and sold, is your only measure of the health of a place, you're really missing out on what life is about. 💸
I talk about the pain of the past because I talk about Healing. I want to know who did what to who, when, where and why. It's not just about finding historical counter-narratives or alternative narratives. Maybe all the counter-narratives in the world won't convince some people to change. It's about narratives that Heal. That make things click for people. To see themselves from an angle that puts everything in perspective. That makes tears of catharsis flow, so the ghost of inherited trauma feels understood and undergoes a joyful release. 😭💜And in that moment of context, of clarity, our ancestors and our selves Heal together.
I talk about the trauma white Europeans inflicted on ourselves, not to make us the new oppressed group or to justify anything we did to other people. But to help explain and understand what we did to people of color- how it was first necessary to mete out the trauma on our selves. Because it still is.
1. Self-Inflicted Wounds: Deny Parts of Self, and Project Them Onto Others
Whiteness and toxic masculinity is a fractured state: to live up to an unachievable standard/definition of human as unrealistic and damaging as photoshopped women's beauty magazines' standards,
it violently rips a person from the ability to be in touch with our bodies, emotions, social selves, and intuition. It violently rips us from a natural relationship with the earth. And Protestant countries (N. Europe, and settler colonists of Australia, S. Africa, N. America) as opposed to Catholic/Eastern Orthodox/Coptic/Jewish have the added bonus of being violently ripped from a strong sense of community norms, from a concept of relaxing and taking days off for sacred celebrations, and from the material plane that sees power in objects.
By raising the so called masculine, reasoning mind over the so called feminine emotions, and sensations of the body,
and thus above the earthly and material and the power of subjective voice,
and the individual over the community of belonging,
we created hierarchies of patriarchy that would project onto the Irish the very things we couldn't allow ourselves to feel. We brutally conquered these Catholic heathens who had indigenized their faith with local goddesses and cycles of nature and sacred landforms and objects. We said they weren't even Christian. Even in America, the Scots-Irish still did fertility dances and screwed on the fields. They still knew how to dance and make merry and express emotions and not be pretentious. We said they were uncivilized.
So we colonized them, dictated what clothing they could wear so we knew not to marry them or let them serve on juries, we put the heads if their warriors on a pike, we wiped them out and made them work for us and turned them into alcoholics while they starved in a famine we created. We kidnapped some prostitutes and beggars no one would miss, put them on ships of prisoners, as they sailed as servants to America, their children forced to drink the piss of their masters as punishment for wetting the bed. This leads to a discussion of child abuse among white people which philosopher and psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes as a leading cause of fascism in her work For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty and the Roots of Violence. The book looks at fascist strongmen (pre-Trump but he's a perfect fit) as a father-figure to rally around and displace anger towards the abusive parent, an anger that was never allowed to be expressed, onto vulnerable targets of society.
We saw our poor and Irish as hypersexual, our non-able-bodied and neural atypical as "invalids," our debtors and prisoners and children as irrational slaves and shiftless moral invalids needing to work all day in factories so they could become reasonable and thrifty productive members of society, and our women as sensually threatening vortexes of the chaos of the bodily pleasure distracting us, as portals to of nothingness vis a vis the meaning of life to be found in reason and productivity (I'm literally quoting Thomas Jefferson's view on women at this point).
Then we went to the "New World," Turtle Island, and did the same thing to the Indigenous people there, and to African slaves, making Blackness the face of everything we cut off from our full selves, the standard of non-whiteness and thus non-humanness, such that the Irish and Southern Europeans became "Black Irish" and "Guineas". We had practiced on the Irish and sent the parts of ourselves we denied onto a new host body to objectify, reduce, and essentialize, to help us deal with the cognitive dissonance of guilt over slavery, and to divide poor whites from uniting with Black slaves in rebellion.
Unlike the Natives who did not dwell close to our women, we hypersexualized the already feared Black man, so now he became the portal to sex and violence, the crazy and chaotic powers of creation and destruction that was really in us the whole time.
The self-violence if fracturing our selves into just individuals with reason was necessary for colonialism.
Greg Snyder, a teacher doing holistic work with white people and men at the Brooklyn Zen Center, reminded me that whiteness, maleness and oppression are linked by living life "from the neck up," prioritizing abstract thought over emotions and the body. Our brains are full of mirror neurons. We can't inflict pain on others without numbing ourselves.
White Male Culture is a numbing device. We are taught that emotions make us sensitive, subjective, vulnerable to stupidity and attachments and groupthink and passions holding us back. That made it possible to say, in our hearts of hearts, If it’s normal for Black people to still not be “over” (healed from) slavery, then it would be normal for me to be unable to fully transcend my wounds, but I was taught to not complain because I was taught to be invulnerable, to leave the past in the past, to heal in a linear fashion. That A cannot be not-A.
But reality asks us to hold things in tension: "🤔hmm i can be autonomous and have agency and be responsible for my actions, and I can be conditioned by a collective consciousness and be vulnerable to uncertainty, randomness and chaos. I can be *both* not defined by my past, *and* still in need of healing from my past)"
Our abstractions, stemming from making our lives from the neck up at least (and the chest up at most), rationalize turning human beings into commerce: Yes, slavery has always existed, but usually as part of debt, punishment for a crime, war prisoners and raids that ended up with people, mostly women and children, living in the home of the master and eating at their table and being adopted into the family. But to see humans as something to mortgage, to quantify at a bank, to expect a return on investment on to kick up profits to shareholders, is unique to Europeans in origin. It is pure abstraction.
Because Blackness had replaced white women and white pagans as the vortex of chaotic nothingness, because they seemed so alien and bestial and could represent at best a past we transcended, the antithesis of humanism, we needed to, in the words of Winthrop Jordan, keep them in chains or kill them (see his book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812).
They represented what we used to see in the Irish: everything vital in us we repressed and conflated with the hyper-expression of: emotional means overly emotional, sensual means hypersexual, communal means groupthink (the opposite of our new anti-monarchical anti-Catholic republic), ancestral ways means trapped in a damn cycle of nature and being tied down by community elders and ancestors, also known as burdensome stagnation, and superstition to boot! Cultural invalids! It's no wonder white Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) invented Eugenics and Nazis learned it from us, in their quest to make Germany one race, one religion, a unified nation free of the messiness of the disabled, who remind us of our vulnerability, and the queer, who fuck with our rigid categories of gender and sexuality in a nation defined by a pure singular type of masculinity.
2. The Homogenizing Violence of "Purity"
Such reasoning could only be accomplished by the destruction of pagan European religion and ethnic European cultures through the homogenization of Christianity, nationalism, and the concept of "race"- three Puritanical movements. Catholic Spain had the first go-around, killing or expelling not just all the non-Christians but the non-"our type of Christians", erasing every ethnic language but one (and today we see Spain fracturing in independence movements and wonder why). In Latin America, almost all mixed, they became obsessed with proximity to racial purity apart from just skin color, just to serve Power-Over
Gender purity was also a thing, thanks to patriarchy both cultural and Christian, but especially Christian as the Pope now controlled the law. And Platonic Reason as the Ideal was certainly a thing amongst theologian-philosophers.
And indeed purity movements existed all over the world that play a role that affected our situation. The proposed Yahwist movement which purged Jerusalem's temple of other gods such as Yahweh's wife, Asherah, because it could not envision monotheism as a harmonic balance of parts that point to a deeper unity but instead pictured monotheism as "one deity at the expense of all others." The Ezra-Nehemiah movement to purify the nation of Israel of all the foreign women who had been taken up during the time of the Exile. The Maccabees movement of self-righteous, "religion-of-the-sword" warfare that would find a mirror in al-Qaeda. These all played a role in making a strand of the Bible puritanical before Europeans even got to it, and interestingly, the latter two examples I gave involve a context of trauma against the Jewish people (destruction of the Temple, exile, colonial occupation and sacrilegious disrespect by colonizers). This suggests, as I am suggesting about Europeans, that a quest for purity can be driven by ancestral trauma, an idea that will be explored more below.
So Jewish and Catholic Puritanism existed. But it was Protestants who invented the modern Puritanical movements we live with today. While Spain gives us an example of Nationalism forcing the supposed unity of language, race, culture and religion onto its subjects, the ideology of Nationalism arose in the 1800s via Protestant nation-states. The formation of America provides a proto-example of this form of nationalism. The Tidewater region, formed in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina, was very different in ethnicity, culture, language and religion from Puritan New England and the Quaker and German Midlands and the Scots-Irish Appalachian mountain region, even from the Deep South, which originated in Charleston from the Caribbean sugar-and-slave culture. New England and Tidewater have always been richer, however, and more educated and elitist, and they spent centuries standardizing "proper American English" and educational standards, much to the dismay of other American cultures. "White trash," and the failure of Appalachians to be accepted into the white family due to their closeness with ancestral ways and failure to adhere to the Protestant work ethic, was a direct result of this East-Coast White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domination of what it meant to be of the "respectable" white class.
Said of those who migrated from Appalachia to the Midlands for work in places like Detroit and Indianapolis, following the Hillbilly Highway: "These people are causing a terrible problem in our cities. They can't or won't hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or another, they absolutely refuse to accommodate to any kind of decent, civilized life" (Indianapolis newspaper, 1956). A 1951 Detroit sociological survey found 21% of respondents declaring them "undesirable" (compare to the 13% who ranked Black people the same way, perhaps to sound more enlightened, but still telling). And one Chicagoan employer said, "I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings" (late 1940s). (all quotes from Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell). Through mining the land the Scots-Irish had been so close to - recall these were the people who were still having sex on crop fields around the early 1900s as part of pagan fertility rites- through the violence of mountaintop removal, and the disposability of entire communities due to deindustrialization of plants following World War 2, and the discrimination against migrants - some of whom were welcomed into Huey Newton's "Rainbow Coalition" of the Black Panthers as they understood a common enemy of police and class interests - it may be that Appalachia is to America what Igboland is to Nigeria or Catalonia is to Spain, an example of internal victimization inherent to Nationalism that precedes the external victimization when Nationalism becomes Expansionist or Colonialist.
Then there was Protestant Puritanism, which sought to rid Christianity of "culture" aka the pagan-infested Christmas and Easter which the American colonial Puritans and Quakers banned, as well as the names of the days of the week, and burned down the town of Merrymount for resurrecting pagan English practices and having fair relations with Indians and escaped servants. And as for racial purity, there was the creation of whiteness as white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, which made all immigrants feel inferior and powerless unless they assimilated (European immigrant kids were coming to America in the 1900s with long last names and garlic amulets they wore to school but were laughed at until they changed their names and stopped their ancestral ethnic practices that made them unique; radical Jews and Catholics, often sympathetic to communism, if not communists themselves, assimilated to bourgeoisie whiteness and created their own golf clubs). The handmaiden of these three purities- nation, religion, and race- was an Enlightenment sense of the pure individual and Pure Reason as the only source of being and knowledge, later religiously honored by the French Revolutionaries as a statue in a temple, and included a Protestant disdain for the supposedly sensual and easily trance-induced carnivaling white peasants dancing in the streets. Humanity and the self became the axis of the universe.
And in the WASP Victorian era, Teddy Roosevelt white masculinity and white-gloved white femininity were created, models we still see in the Boy Scouts and obsession with Victorian era romances: big chested men purifying their mommy-support and feminine technological comforts through nature and sports, and women sucking in their stomach with Spanx and policing to daughters what it means to be lady-like.
3. Somatic (Bodily) Trauma in Our Cultural Body
According to Tada Hozumi, a somatic antiracist ancestral healer, we traded in our kilts and our sitting on the floor, along dancing with our thighs up in their air and our supple bodies, for chairs, stiff movement, and the rigid, vertical bodies and pants of the American man and the corset of the bourgeoisie Victorian era woman that left no room for the midsection. The violence of homogenization has left white people with not just a rigid mind but a rigid body. It was seem as demonic and barbaric to act out of the area existed from below the belly button to above the knees.
And this collective homogenized body called whiteness, they would argue, suffers from the "violence, abandonment, and neglect" a child might suffer from if kept by evil parents from loving parents. Our loving parents are our cultural bodies, the ethnic ones who knew the names of our trees and rivers much less the names of everyone we lived in community with, they are waiting for us. The ones who before patriarchy had a sense of "two spirit" sexuality and gender, such as Odin going ergi to learn seihdr, a Feminine magic, and Loki mothering a horse. But our detachment from our "ancestral caregiver cultures" produces crises that psychologist Bowlby described in "attachment theory", but Tada argues occur on a cultural level.
Cultural appropriation is one such consequence. Another is organized white supremacy.
"It's useful to see acts like racial violence as not necessarily coming from an individual's agency," they write. If we are just looking at someone's personal life, I think it's harder for us to see all the reasons why they might be expressing racist patterns. But when we turn to the possibility that our bodies are tethered to larger fields of consciousness that accesses material such as ancestral trauma from European-on-European violence, it offers us new possibilities of justice."
Not Vengeance, not Excuses that avoid holding individual white supremacists accountable, but Justice, one based on the understanding that in order to get out of the way of people of color, white people need to learn how to Heal, need to know we're even in pain in the first place.
The normativity of "the American way" is an echo chamber of people in various positions of power reflecting back what it means to to be a civilized, good, just, reasonable person - all of which are ideas with a contested history we can trace. Erasing that history is a goal of power. We don't even know what alternative ways of being in the world, of knowing things in ways beyond being able to count or measure them with five senses, of being in relation to our bodies and the earth were lost.
We become blind to our pain of cultural trauma in the white middle class and colonized-mind worlds. This status quo of the white masses is equivalent to an unorganized white supremacist movement because most people don't consider themselves white supremacists. But we maintain and uphold white supremacy with our white ways of thinking, with minds colonized centuries ago during the enclosure movement, the witch burnings and standardization of medicine, with ancestors assimilating to white Anglo Saxon Protestantism to survive but falling prey to their tempting idols of purity with its myths linear progress, certainty, and lack of randomness.
Some of us white supremacists do feel pain, clearly seeing part of the root of the problem, but only the part convenient for the status quo who are also white. These organized and self-aware white supremacists are expressing a fear of losing Culture that everyone else in the world seems to be allowed to have- right wing pagan star Carolyn Emrick talks about how racial nationalism is normal and okay as long as people stay on their respective continents (ignoring colonialism's legacy because "decolonization happened and people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps" as if neocolonialism doesn't exist), therefore Europeans need their own cultural preservation against migration under a system of white nationalism.
But whiteness and nationalism were the very enemies of unique European cultures, their very destroyers. For those feeling pain for the loss of ancestral culture, to protect them, or Christian nationalism, on the surface seems irrational. But Tada clarifies the situation:
"The behavior of extremist white supremacists is very similar to children who over-protect violent foster parents because they are too afraid to leave their abusive family.
When I hold white supremacists in a kind light, I see children that can't bear to face the fear of being alone and abandoned again, like their ancestors were."
They cling to a false concept called "Western Culture" as if Simba clung loyally to Scar, not knowing he was responsible for Mufasa's death. White culture is the enemy of not only ethnic ancestral diversity but the diversity *within* ethnicities. The two-spirit gender and sexual potential within ancestral Norse ways, for instance, was clearly not always celebrated by everyday practitioners just as Christ's example is not always acted out, but can be developed. We're not going to to be purists and fundamentalists- that is whiteness. We people of European Dissent can and perhaps must, however, recover from the dominant WASP Culture through dealing with our cultural attachment issues, through healing our more racistly inclined people by speaking the language of cultural trauma.
Perhaps we can heal along with our ancestors in recovering the vast diversity lost to the big homogenizing forces of pure gender, pure whiteness, pure national unity, and pure religious unity, and the self of pure reason and pure self separate from attachments to the world and the burdens of the past that creates pure virtue through an often-sudden redemption.
All of these notions can only lead to ignoring, denying and repressing vital parts of the self, of reality, projecting them onto other people, surveilling and containing them as containers of our fears and desires, and redemption stories of sordid youth or being "tempted" to stoop to their level (often in war and sex depicted in box office movies on assignment to learn their culture in order to fight them, seem to be envious of the enemy's simplicity, but ending up killing them as they should) and then regenerate ourselves through violent rhetoric and action against the people we "once were" (former fat people doing fat shaming as a microcosm of former forest-dwelling-tribal or communal-agricultural and non-capitalist people shaming tribal/communal/non-capitalist peoples- both the fat-and-non-capitalist lifting themselves up as standards of where everyone else should be at, and as paragons of virtue, who can't seem to mind their ... business)
I hope I helped us heal by exposing what I see as the lineage of white supremacy, and pointing us in a direction I think we need to go.
Conversation partners:
white person #1 is a composite of the large group of people I have met who debate the value of, and laugh at, the lives of people of color fleeing to America as economic refugees
Colonial white American ideas of masculinity from Thomas Jefferson directly from, and the idea of whiteness as fractured self inspired by Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, and for more on the invasion of Ireland as a dress rehearsal for the colonization of the Americas, see A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America
Kelly Brown Douglas Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies & The Justice of God for trajectory of ideas of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy and other European immigrants having to assimilate, and her essay on anti-Blackness' trajectory in "More Than Skin Deep: The Violence of Anti-Blackness" in Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics by Vincent Lloyd
Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America part of his Regeneration Through Violence trilogy
Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Colin Woodward's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
Numbness and invulnerability ideas coming from Karla McLaren and Brené Brown
Denying and then projecting parts of self onto Black people coming from James Baldwin, and Annie Lee Jones and Megan Obourn, “Object Fear: The National Dissociation of Race and Racism in the Era of Obama,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
