White people are not okay. And in a time of crisis and collapse, we are perhaps the least resilient population on the planet when it comes to the life-sustaining cultural and communal connections that make human life livable. The pathology of whiteness is becoming increasingly obvious as the contradiction between human thriving and capitalism becomes sharper. The underpinnings of white settler colonialism are collapsing as they meet resistance along the pipeline easements and in the rubble of Gaza. White people are not okay, and the vast majority of them are fighting back ferociously and genocidally against what they expect will be their annihilation.
That is because, when push comes to shove, the power and privilege that gives us our existence are a mirage, a construct, that has no rootedness or substance to sustain it. White identity and its variants – whiteness itself – is not a thing. For 400-years we have wandered the earth spiritless, cultureless, and landless thanks to the colonial and capitalist project that de-created us, transforming us into drones dependent on theft and domination to give us flesh and blood and substance. Our connection to land severed, our cultural memories erased, and our skills of mutual aid and survival replaced by markets and consumerism, we are fundamentally ghosts.
That is the underlying reason why political theorists and identity warriors cannot identify or describe a white “culture” in any positive sense, leaving us with the hollow yet more-or-less accurate descriptor, “white supremacy culture.” And its positive inverse, “anti-racist white identity,” is the best we can do, a behavior awkwardly claimed as a culture with a perfunctory shrug. We show up in the world as dominators. We know no other way of embodying ourselves, having lost our indigeneity and connection to land centuries, even millennia ago. Having lost our memories of communal rituals, having lost our practices of mutual aid, we are dependent on exploitation and domination mediated by the state and markets to keep ourselves alive. We grow up without the ability to live in mutual dependence on others, and so we are lonely, emotionally crippled, only able to imitate culture through modes of appropriative consumption and cosplay (as someone recently termed it).
I think that is why a lot of BIPOC folks find us rather insufferable to be around. Our individualism, our habits of domination and consumption, make us toxic to ourselves and to others. Not only are we habitually harmful, we also lack the self-insight to see that harm and do better. We retreat into defensiveness when called out because we cannot imagine ourselves outside of these toxic habits that are baked into us at an instinctual level. Criticism and accountability feel like obliteration to us, and perhaps it is. If we have no communal or cultural resources to guide us or fall back on, all we have left is domination and consumption – the constitutive modes of whiteness. To lose these is to cease being white, and if the path forward is to cease being white, then what are we? What can we be?
The first step is to recognize that in spite of our ailment, we are human, and human beings are inherently collectivist creatures who depend on our connection to culture and land for our health and well-being. Because white people do not have access to these things in any direct way, we have to acknowledge that we are sick and dying as a result, regardless of how safe and secure our privilege makes us feel. To crudely mix metaphors, we are a branch severed from the vine, living on artificial life support. The necessary collapse of western “civilization” will destroy our life support. That is why we defend white supremacy either through overt fascism or by fighting to preserve liberal institutions (covert fascism). Without these false constructs, we evaporate, cease to exist.
This ghostly condition is not our fault – it is congenital, something we can thank our ancestors for – but we do have to take responsibility. We have to make an intentional choice to change. And once we make that choice, I would venture that it is harder for us to live into our humanity than it is for people who still have the cultural memories and skills to live in community with each other. Even displaced and migratory people have some sense of imagined ancestral connection. White ancestors are our worst enemies. We’ve learned toxic habits of individualism, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency that cripple our ability to be in community. It makes us terrible friends, family members, confidants, comrades, and caretakers. It stunts our capacity for empathy and emotional presence.
Once we’ve admitted we have a problem, we have to find a way back to connection if we want to be well. Paradigmatically, I imagine three paths we could take (and I give credit to Ayesha Khan for helping me think through this; any errors are mine): the wholesale invention of new cultural practices and memory-making; appreciative learning from other cultures past and present; and absorption or assimilation into other cultures. I see the first two of these as interrelated and dependent on each other, while the third is theoretical and a remote possibility for most, but for which there are historical antecedents.
Invention, learning, and nurturing collective practices is something accessible to all of us because we all have small things we can start doing here and now. It is a matter of experimentation in community with others. For instance, over the past several years I have practiced connecting to land by tending to the soil, growing food, and enjoying the nurturance the Earth gifts to me and my family and friends through it. I am growing vegetables on stolen land, so I owe something to the land and its Indigenous stewards because of that violent history. One mode of land return is learning practices of presence with land – caretaking – from Indigenous peoples whose expertise guides me away from extractive modes of production to nurturing reciprocity.
More recently I have been more intentional about involving other people in that practice, especially as my physical capacity has diminished due to chronic pain. And that brings me to another critical practice that a lot of people are talking about: mutual aid. In my experience of pain and disability I have had to accept help from others, and by doing so I strengthen bonds of community and mutual dependence. The work of relationship and community-building has demanded my intentional attention to sustain it. I have had to be persistent in my pursuit of relationship, perhaps even annoying, but also cognizant of ways I can give and contribute to make relationships reciprocal. I am learning how to nurture relationships in the same way I am learning how to nurture and be nurtured by the soil.
That third mode of cultural healing that I mentioned – assimilation – evokes the (possible) historical example of the assimilation/intermarriage of the “lost” 16th-century English Roanoke colony into the Croatan peoples of the Outer Banks, and the assimilation of white captives from the frontier warfare of 17th and 18th century “New England.” But these events were often a matter of necessity as much as they were a moral choice. Not all white colonizers who married into Indigenous communities abandoned their colonizing ways. Many did so for commercial reasons, or served in intermediary roles that ultimately facilitated colonization. There is a kind of “assimilation” that is just for show.
Another way of framing “assimilation” might look more like solidarity or accompliceship, and that is probably a more responsible way of imagining this path if we are to avoid the pitfalls of cultural appropriation. I would like to think that there were white colonizers throughout history who chose to abandon their colonizing ways, turn traitor, and revolt against their society by joining Black and Indigenous resistance, maybe by embracing marronage. I don’t know whether there is historical evidence of white maroons, and if there were such people, there weren’t many.
John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, is someone who did revolt, both against slaveholding society and against white liberal abolitionism that thought it could end slavery while maintaining white supremacy. I think white people today should look to him as a kind of ancestor. But Brown was an odd one by today’s standards. His revolt was not a self-conscious quest for a new cultural identity because nobody thought in those terms (though some Native voices did and do talk about white people as spiritually hollow). His revolt was rooted in a peculiar brand of austere abolitionist Christian Calvinism that had few antecedents. I think one could argue that Brown was inventing new culture by re-inventing his religious tradition in conversation with contemporary slave revolts and maroon societies. He was using the best tools he had at his disposal to reimagine his world. Maybe John Brown was doing a hybrid of my first and third cultural paths.
My fiction writing is my way of imaginatively playing with these approaches. The protagonist of my draft novel follows a trajectory that begins with joining in the daily life of an Indigenous community and ends by writing a blank check to the resistance, ultimately using her access to her colonizing society to become an assassin at the behest of the people who are adopting her. Along the way she embraces the possibility, even likelihood, that nonexistence will be the price she pays for her solidarity. Maybe her altruism is unrealistic, but she is motivated by empathy and a recognition that her status quo as a hollow shell is a fate worse than death. She doesn’t know if there is a new identity for her on the other side of solidarity. She is cautious about adopting Indigenous rituals and beliefs. Her caution is rooted in respect, though it becomes neurotic enough over time that her Indigenous friends enjoin her to loosen up and join the party. By then, she has earned their trust, and they know she will not abuse their acceptance of her. She stands in contrast to her colonizing compatriots, who enviously lust after the Indigenous cultures they can only observe and consume, never imagining that they could become truly human.
The more-or-less happy ending I imagine for my protagonist is hopeful. Maybe it is even wishful thinking. Maybe some would accuse me of letting myself off the hook with my supposition that a white person could transcend whiteness and have something more than “anti-racist white identity.” Certainly, the work of dismantling whiteness will take generations, so maybe I have compressed generations of deconstruction into one character. But I am dropping her into a future world where whiteness is literally ancient history. If we survive long enough to dismantle racism, then whiteness must die with it, including its anti-racist variant. If bodies are no longer racialized, then anti-racist behavior will no longer be necessary, much less become elevated to a cultural identity. For the sake of life on this planet, I have to hope that that is possible.
A powerful and fascinating post! Grateful you kept all these big ideas to a reasonable length. Here for the full dismantling of whiteness, hoping for the full de-racialization of us all. I’m curious about your fiction now too. Would you say it counts as climate fiction?