On White Supremacy

It was a psyop then, and it's a psyop now. Never forget that.

It’s such a little thing. All the differences in the colors of our skin, eyes, and hair, of whether our hair is straight or kinky, or we have round eyes or epicanthic folds, or our noses are snubbed or elephantine, are determined by less than 0.1% of our DNA.

Little adaptive differences forged by the different material environments in which our ancestors lived were used to establish and maintain a monstrous system which ruined or destroyed a billion or so lives and still dominates the thinking of far too many of the descendants of both its beneficiaries and its victims.

An American Marxist historian named Theodore Allen traced exactly how white supremacy was created out of whole cloth by English colonial planters in Virginia and the Carolinas in the 17th Century in his two part book, The Invention of the White Race. It began with letters between the wealthy and a longing to establish a “yeoman class” in the colonies to protect them from servile revolt, and got a turboboost by Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676-77. (Below: The burning of Jamestown by the rebels)

In Bacon’s Rebellion, a drunken rabblerouser named Nathaniel Bacon, who was a relative of some wealthy tobacco farmers, literally whipped up the flames of revolt. The European colonists were upset because they wanted some land belonging to an indigenous nation which had signed a treaty of nonaggression and alliance with Virginia’s governor, who had the temerity to keep his word with the natives.

Depressed tobacco prices and perceived high taxes at the time helped fuel the revolt. Bacon enlisted whoever would join—independent European farmers, indentured European servants, and African slaves alike. As a result, he was initially successful, burning the capital of Jamestown to the ground and almost destroying the indigenous nation in question—the Occaneechee.

To make a moderately long story short, Bacon himself died of the “bloody flux,” probably dysentery, and the rebellion fizzled out, but not before it had completely panicked the colonial authorities and the English Crown.

They made concessions to European indentured servants, and started phasing out the practice. Previously, there was no hard and fast rule on the status of the children of African slaves born in the colonies—it was more or less up to the master—but soon a campaign was underway to make slavery for African people hereditary and permanent.

It took awhile, for there was resistance. The Virginia Slave Code establishing hereditary chattel slavery wasn’t enacted until 1705, and free Africans in Virginia could vote until 1735.

I think one reason it took so long was that the psyop of white supremacy took years to take hold with most European colonists. After all, it was a completely new way of thinking.

It was after Bacon’s Rebellion that learned Englishmen started talking about how this thing called “whiteness” made the newly termed white race superior, and how it, like African chattel slavery, was hereditary as well.

The bottom line was that white people would at least have the chance of social mobility, but black people were destined to be a subservient class. Forever. As for the indigenous, well, they were not quite as inferior as Africans, since their skin was lighter and it was known they made poor slaves, but they were still on land the settlers wanted, and that was really the bottom line.

It was always about the land, and how to profit from it.

The fact that this notion of superior, hereditary whiteness was always total bullshit is illustrated by how the definition of “white” has changed over time.

The Irish who immigrated in the first half of the 19th Century were frequently depicted as apes, much like Africans were. For example,

Jews have run the gamut of being everything from white to cockroach. Mexicans have been everything from white to almost a n-word, depending on the time or place. Asians have been everything from a different, inferior species(though still not as low as the African one) to a dangerously clever Yellow Peril to respected—nervously and reluctantly—scientists and math whizzes, according to different white supremacists over the centuries.

Whiteness is this moveable indicator of status, you see, which can be conveniently changed by the ruling class at any time to include a group they need or to exclude one they fear.

Most importantly, whiteness became this nebulous Holy Grail of respectability to which one group could cling to claim privilege over another, while never questioning what that whiteness thing meant, where it came from, or why some “white” people had most of the money and the privileges while the majority of them and a supermajority of everyone else did not.

Yes, white supremacy has been a brilliant psyop, and it has metastasized to non-Europeans who have come up with concepts every bit as silly and ridiculous as the original absurdity, such as this story of Sun People vs. Cold People or expanding Turtle Island, which is a real place now known as Mackinaw Island, into the whole bloody North American continent which was supposedly absolute Paradise before whitey showed up. (Bad news: It wasn’t.)

Some “nonwhite” people have even latched onto the idea that whiteness is not only hereditary, but that it includes undesirable behavioral character traits, which is nothing more than a mirror image of what the white supremacists themselves have been projecting for almost 400 years.

That’s as scientifically stupid as saying that a shot which prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease is a vaccine, or that homosexuality is a sin when it’s just natural for some people, or that some deity promised the continental United States to the Americans or Palestine to European Jewry, or that the Earth is flat.

Our species is 99.9% identical when it comes to DNA. Isn’t it time to let that majority rule how we see other people rather than these selfish and convenient ideas of the 0.1 percent, such as whiteness and this whole idea of some small, genetically or intellectually superior elite who should just naturally rule over the rest of us?

You know, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Fink?

I think it’s way past time.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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