The End of Whiteness

A few years ago, I declared in a video that trans people aren’t white anymore. As I watched a concerted effort sweeping through American state legislatures, I named what was happening.  Transness was becoming racialized. And white trans people were being removed from the white race.

Whiteness isn’t real.  It’s not a skin tone.  It’s a social construct.  A contract between numerous ethnicities that they will prefer each other over anyone else. With colonization, every European empire was horribly outnumbered.  Even if they had an advantage in military technology, they wouldn’t stand a chance if Europeans truly allied with the people being colonized.  Divide-and-conquer is an effective strategy, and it works both ways.

We actually see aspects of this truth in the French and Indian war, in the Haitian revolution when Polish conscripts switched sides. And every time, white people found solace, being welcomed as equals.  They didn’t have to live under the strict hierarchy that white supremacy demands.  They could just be themselves. And freedom. Freedom is dangerous because freedom is contagious.

There was this moment.  In Seattle, during the George Floyd protests, a group of white moms who had studied antiracism, who were taking those lessons into praxis, formed a human chain, standing between protesters of color and police. I remember the shock on their faces when police attacked them for doing this.  It was radicalizing.  The social contract was, “white people don’t systemically brutalize other white people.” Except, there was always a caveat to this, “Unless you side with non-whites.”

I’ve always found family systems to be an interesting analogy when describing our racialized society. If Black peoples are the scapegoat, white peoples the golden child, the state the parents, and other races are other children given different positions in the pecking order, then the greatest sin a child could make was siding with the scapegoat.  It disrupts the entire system. Well, the racial hierarchy of America is being disrupted.

There’s this book, White Rage, that describes how white people will use the state to punish any gains made by people of color as a kind of backlash. And the election of a felon to be the 47th president of the United States captures this perfectly. Throughout history, whiteness has consistently expanded by convincing different communities to betray their neighbor in exchange for protection. This was strategic and it worked. To be on the side of the more powerful feels safe.

But something happened during the pandemic.  There’s been a trend since as white people, specifically white queer people and the white parents of queer children, started to break the intergenerational trauma of their broken family systems. This often culminated in going no contact, a familial rupture that seemed to permanently rob parents and grandparents of passing on their value systems to the next generation. And at the center of that value system was the worship of power.  That the strong have the right, nigh have manifest destiny, to take what they want when they want it.

And their children said no.

If you will refuse to see and treat us as equals, we will stop practicing family with you. And that scared them because whiteness isn’t real; it’s a social contract.  And this epidemic of the next generation breaking contact was a clear signal. White people were siding with the non-whites.

If you listen to Nazis and white supremacists, they will state it even more clearly: The white race is on the edge of extinction. And they’re right. The white race is about to go the way of the Aryan race. It’s going extinct. The Aryan race died out with the Nazis. Remember, races aren’t real. They’re social constructs, ideas on how to group people. And the Nazis had this idea that there was a certain kind of German, a superior race to the rest of humankind. And that idea died with the loss of World War II. What kind of superior race loses, at the height of their power?

Fascism is a death cult. It always fails because, at its core, it is a chasing of racial purity. How do you purify a race if races aren’t real, if they’re just ideas? You don’t. It’s like how Christianity devolved into hundreds of denominations as believers debated who was the most pure in following the word of god.

Every people-group depends on immigration for survival. In society, generational isolation is usually a precursor to extinction. But fascism happens when a people-group begins to demand generational isolation, chasing purity to its final end: extinction. The racialization of trans people was a first step.  And I thought, two years ago, that they would stop there.

But the purity contests have already begun. It’s surreal.  The “white rage” of this moment is supposed to be hurting non-whites. But they are targeting white trans people, white gay people, white disabled people, white medically complex people, white poor people, white civil servants, white women, white old people.

Tell me. Do you know a single white person who isn’t at risk or already harmed by this administration? Who isn’t worried for a family member or a loved one? The rule of intersectionality is that all oppression builds on each other. And to defeat one, you must fight them all.  This is why the disability rights, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights movements are all so closely connected. And people in power took this to mean that anyone with a marginalized identity is an enemy.

They are breaking their own social contract, going to war with any marginalized white person in a misguided attempt to force them back into community. They are, as we say in the Black community, showing their entire ass.

It’s almost sad to see. The “end of the white race” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, I believe we passed the tipping point. In family systems, when an abuser begins to lose power over people they’ve always had power over, they tend to do something called an “extinction burst.” They lash out, using whatever power they have left to cause as much harm as possible as fast as possible. White supremacy is experiencing a global-level extinction burst. They’ve already lost their power. And without power, the social contract that makes whiteness possible doesn’t work.

And they don’t even understand why they feel so helpless. They have the money. They have the government. They have the church. Why is it so hard to bend the rest of the world to their will? Because we want freedom; we want liberation, the one thing they can’t offer. So they’ll keep lashing out, playing their purity tests until all that is left is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cis straight able-bodied men who own land. Feudalism all over again.

What a pathetic tiny group of humans. Whiteness will die with you. And you will be the cause of it.

Photo by Angel