The Anti-Culture of Whiteness

In the large-scale view, one of the primary roles of a culture is to provide people with tools, rituals, and infrastructure for dealing with difficult and painful facets of our material existence.

Much of the richness of cultural diversity involves the myriad ways in which we have come together: to seek answers, to find meaning, to achieve a sense of purpose, to cope with the inevitable things that otherwise might overwhelm us with their senselessness.

In short, culture is what we collectively do to avoid our existence devolving into nothing but a series of traumas.

By this metric, the construct of whiteness, and the social patterns and ideologies of white supremacy, create an anti-culture.

At the global political scale, whiteness and its attendant oppressive mechanisms (including colonial imperialism and capitalism) operate and maintain power by keeping people as traumatized as possible.

On a literal biological level, our most profoundly powerful and effective social capacities require us to not be experiencing active threats to ourselves or our well-being. The more stressed, exhausted, and threatened we are, the less capable we are of genuinely connecting with each other.

Whiteness, as a system of anti-culture, exploits this to actively disrupt interpersonal and intercommunal solidarity, while reinforcing the false narratives of individualism.

Nothing threatens whiteness quite like finding safety, community, solidarity, and purpose outside the narrow lanes that it attempts to proscribe for us all.