Racism as our Default (part 2)
(Trigger warning: descriptions of racial violence, dehumanization, and terrible things up to and including genocide written in an urgent, matter of fact, and direct tone by a white person.)
In part one I introduced the premise of Racism as a Technology, including its primary purpose: to steal wealth and power from non-white people, and create surplus leisure and wealth for white people.
If you didn't read it, you might want to start there. It’s probably a 5-7 minute read.
But how does it work? How does it function? What roles does the system assign to us?
In these next parts I want to break down the broad functions of the technology of racism and begin to distinguish the standard of whiteness.
Sorting people (Consensus Categorization)
One of the main functions of the technology of racism is to allow people to identify, visually, (and almost instantaneously) people that are protected and valued as fully human by the culture we live in by the standard of “whiteness.”
Conversely, and by contrast, the technology of Racism also allows a person to identify visually, (and for all practical purposes, instantaneously) NON-white people who are NOT (or not fully) protected and valued by the culture we live in by the standard of whiteness. Or, to put it more bluntly, to identify people who can be mistreated by white (or whiter) people with some degree of impunity: killed, enslaved, deported, imprisoned, brutalized, silenced, domesticated, raped, overcharged, overworked, or simply marginalized.
Now, I’m not saying that we look at non-white people and THINK “wow, I could really take advantage of this.” I’m saying that we pre-verbally KNOW it, that we operate from it, and it shapes (as context) all interactions between people everywhere in our culture. Then, as opportunities arise we take advantage of it by either enjoying the protection of whiteness in our day to day life (interviewing for a job, talking to a policemen, getting a mortgage), or by mistreating BIPOC (paying them less, charging them higher interest, threatening them with the police).
What this means is: if you are not ACTIVELY pushing against this system, you will automatically perpetrate it because the technology is designed to weaponize your day-to-day automatic way of being into support of the standard of whiteness and the technology (or system) of racism. Oh, and then its designed to be really easy, almost unavoidably easy to hide from yourself.
To paraphrase Dr. Ibram X Kendi in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” its not enough to be Not Racist we have to be Antiracist.
The standard of whiteness (like all technological standards) disappears from view (at least for white people) and operates pre-verbally, faster than thought. The design of racism doesn’t want whiteness to be seen so people operating inside the system (almost all people, almost all of the time) collude to keep it occluded behind behind anti-blackness: racist ideas about black people. (Anti-black racism also serves to hide or minimize the racist mistreatment of people who present as other races other than black: e.g. LatinX and Asian people, people of Middle Eastern descent, and Jewish folks.)
So, what I’m suggesting is that every time you interact with another human being, running in the background of your mind the technology of racism is categorizing and sorting them (and you) into buckets by race and informing you about where they stand in the racist (and sexist, and classist and homophobic) consensus hierarchy: including who gets to mistreat who, and how.
Simultaneously, in my experience, (instantly, and all the time) the technology of racism is constantly intruding in my internal dialog with what I can only describe as pre-recorded stories about how and why that person is the way they are because of what race the system tells me they are.
For example, something I’ve personally experienced dozens if not hundreds of times is walking down the street at night; I happen to look up and there is a Black man on the street with me. What intrudes in my mind is an urgent, automated, sense of danger that (by way of comparison) does NOT intrude if I look up and see a white man of the same build and clothes. (I get a different intrusive experience if I see a Black woman, or an Asian person, or a person of Arab descent, or an observent Jewish person, but for now lets stay with the superstition of the dangerous Black man.)
The experience of danger comes first (and sometimes action, e.g. crossing the street or standing up straight and appearing alert) and what follows in the mind is a flood of self talk explaining and justifying what I’m experiencing and doing: What other things besides race can I notice that justifies my thinking they’re dangerous? Why it is or is not racist for me to think they’re dangerous? Scolding myself for thinking they’re dangerous and telling myself to not be racist. Wondering if they know I’m thinking racist thoughts and trying not to show it. The catalog of chatter is endless. Some of that chatter might naturally lead to violence if that were what I was into.
When I dig deeper, (and when others I’ve spoken to, of all races, dig deeper) at the core, regardless of one’s beliefs, regardless of one’s race, regardless of what one WANTS to experience, one experiences Black men as dangerous (circularly) because they are black men, and then immediately your mind (and the tricknology) will supply you with a personalized explanation that matches your actual thoughts and beliefs:
So, the system of racism says: He’s dangerous because he’s black
Then we provide the justification in the form of a personalized “because statement”.
Now, your “because” statement might be what Dr. Kendi calls segregationist (e.g. because black men are like animals). Or, your “because” statement might be assimilationist (e.g. because black men are so disadvantaged and mistreated by society that they would be justified in being violent). Either way, congratulations, you are now operating out of a racist idea, no matter what your intentions or beliefs are about any of these matters. Your beliefs, you morals, your thinking self is overruled by your conditioning by the technology of racism and the standard of whiteness.
Racism destroys your integrity, and steals capacity to be a moral, responsive, present human.
Reading it laid out like this, it is my sincere hope that you can recognize that all of these thoughts (especially the premise that Black mean are dangerous) are nonsense: irrational, illogical, superstitious, and racist nonsense. But recognizing it theoretically is easy compared to actually changing how we operate moment-to-moment, day-to-day, year-to-year.
White folks, we can’t work effectively to dismantle racism if we’re being run by racist brainwashing. On automatic, we are a hazard to Black people, other non-white people, and to each other.
I believe the first thing to teach ourselves to be free of the technology of racism/whiteness is to catch ourselves doing this racist consensus categorization, and interrupt it before the chatter, and the self talk (and the accompanying white fragility) begin.
I’m going to say a lot more about this later but there’s no reason you can’t start today. Try this: catch yourself having the experience of racism, and then reframe the experience so that instead of being about them (“Black men are dangerous” in this example) it’s about you and what your mind has brought to the interaction (“I’m doing that thing where I automatically react to black men as dangerous.”)
See if you can catch yourself doing this. See if you can observe the technology at work in your own mind. See if you can interrupt it. Don’t worry if you find it difficult at first, its there!
Keep trying until you can see it consistently and until you have some facility to interrupt it: and if you want, post in the comments here what you learned, how you experienced it, and what successes or failures you generated.
How does this apply to law enforcement and Black Lives Matter?
The tricknology of racism conditions all people (including police) to both accept and to perpetuate a belief that Black men are dangerous. This consensus, at its mildest, has thousands of white folks crossing the street to avoid black men (hurtful), but mixed with law enforcement norms and culture serves as internal justification to routinely mistreat, abuse, and murder black men. The technology of racism and the standard of whiteness demand it, promise immunity, and are used to justify to the world that the abuse (or the micro aggression of crossing the street for that matter) is necessary, justified, and deserved.
I’m not saying we THINK any of this. We might or we might not, but because these racist ideas have been turned into a technology they are operating in our minds faster than thinking or language (because that’s how people operate technologies).
When driving, your foot hits the brake before your mind tells you what the threat is. When the phone buzzes you’re picking it up before you have to think about it.
Police officers are kneeling on the throats of black men and watching each other kneel on the throats of black men not because they THINK they will get away with it. The system PROMISES them that they will get away with mistreating black people. They know it automatically (whether its accurate or not) because that that’s how technologies work: by allowing human beings to operate automatically, to think less, and therefore respond faster.
Once you learn to drive, you automatically follow the standards of driving. Once you master a typewriter, you automatically type according to the QUERTY standard. Once you internalize whiteness, you automatically and naturally act perfectly in line with the consensus reality of WHITE SUPREMACY, and that means you automatically operate inside a technology that collectively weaponizes you against black and brown people.
So, I hope you’re NOT okay with what I just said, because what I’m saying is that you and I are essentially programming each other ongoingly to to be either: hurting black and brown people or covering up and making sure we don’t notice that white people are hurting black and brown people, all the time, by default.
The system of racism is at its most dangerous when white people operate automatically. Once we learn to be white, (which happens simultaneously when we learn to speak) we automatically start to put the mistreatment of black people (by ourselves and other white people) into our blindspots before we’re old enough to even know we’re part of a system.
The logical consequences of this phenomenon are played out repeatedly between law enforcement and black and brown people every day: thousands of times per hour, hundreds of thousands of times per day, tens of millions of interactions per year. Inevitably, the harm piles up, the fear piles up, the murders pile up, constantly, and beyond what we even can comprehend.
George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and God knows how many others are dead because of white police officers operating mechanistically, effectively brainwashed by the system of racism white supremacy AND because their colleagues turned their heads AND their management created the environment AND the public (including you and me and our other white friends) are brainwashed to push this phenomenon out of our minds, and think that more police, more prisons, and discipline applied to black bodies will make us safer.
And by the way, the predictable, almost certain future, is that we’re going push it out of our minds AGAIN as soon as these protests end.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but when the protests are over in a few months, white people, en masse, are going to simply push out of their minds what happened to George Floyd. Without conscious intervention, most of us are going to go back to living like this never happened: the same way we have to struggle to keep it in the foregrounds of our minds what happened to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Emmett Till, or Fred Hampton. We’ll forget unless we’re reminded, and then we pretend we remembered all along.
That’s why I’m releasing this now, before it’s really ready. I’m acting before I backslide, and I’m hoping to catch some of us before we backslide. White people, we have to help each other remember what is real and what we believe, or we will end up believing what the technology tells us is true.
It’s like a sick joke. Look at our history. We’ve been ignoring collectively this for decades. Sure, maybe we know the odd white person that says something about it. Maybe you even like their posts on facebook, or retweet their entreaties, but the fact is that without smartphone video evidence AND years of black people protesting and organizing we wouldn’t be marching for justice for George Floyd.
And not to overwhelm you, but police violence is only the tip of the iceberg. Wrapped around encounters with law enforcement are billions of interactions with white teachers on automatic mistreating Black and brown students, white employers on automatic mistreating Black and brown employees; white neighbors on automatic racism calling racist cops because they have a feeling that Black and brown kids in the neighborhood are up to no good.
It’s not an accident. It is a system. And the system is not broken. The technology is functioning as designed.
Dismantle the system.
Sunset the technology.
The system cannot function without our cooperation and consensus, white people.
Black folks don’t #saytheirnames for publicity. Black folks say the names of the people who were killed to REMEMBER and to REMIND one another to resist the technology of racism and to never forget to protect one another from the threat of brutality and mistreatment.
What do we need to do for each other to keep from forgetting? Here’s what I believe works after doing this for 20 years, however irregularly.
Practice interrupting the technology as it runs in your own mind. I’ll remind you. You remind me.
Recruit other white antiracists in your life and help help each other to see the machine and to clear each other’s blindspots.
Create a micro-culture around yourself as a community to help keep the reality of racism in your field of view before your mind pushes it away (or to bring it back into view after your mind pushes it away.)
Stop punishing, mocking and avoiding people who bring up the system of racism or the standard of whiteness.
Let me know if you’re agreeing to do all of this, or any of this, in the comments, and let me know if you have questions, ideas or lessons learned you’d like to share.