White Supremacy is a Mental Illness

When men and women support movements of hate, such as white supremacy, is that because they are desperately trying to shake off the feeling they are redundant in a culture that values the GDP more than human survival?  Or is it a desire to find a really deep hole in which to place all their rage and disappointment?

What is it about being white that makes us special? What has the white “race” achieved?

Colonialism, brainwashing that enabled invaders to destroy the aboriginal culture and call it discovery? Enslavement of African people and the ideology of race based on skin colour? A violent hierarchy that demanded absolute obedience to the pecking order? Capitalism that placed a higher value on possessions than life itself?

These things were not invented by white people - we inherited these practices along with science, law, medicine and education. Over the centuries we have refined the worship of power. We constructed class, race and gender. We promoted and normalized a virtue called the work ethic. But this could only work by cooperating with others, by creating a cohesive narrative to "explain" why the world is the way it is and how we have "conquered" it.

The problem is that capitalism reinvented then trashed and denigrated community, for the drive to get to the top, as quickly as possible. Whoever possessed the top position had the right to demean, judge and dismiss our human need for dignity. The conscientious leader is replaced with the trickster.

Cities are blown up, water is poisoned with chemicals, the air is polluted, trees cut down, territories dug up.

In this environment we are all marginalized refugees. This is a state of ideology. Nature, water, land, air and men only exist in terms of the economy and the only measure that your isolated ego can win are the little contests along the way.

White supremacy like misogyny, anti-semitism, Islamophobia - are symptoms of a mental illness brought about by centuries of abuse that has emotionally and spiritually starved our species of our human needs:- food, shelter, belonging, dignity and respect. When people are denied these things, when children and adults are routinely humiliated through neglect and the commons has been purchased by international corporations, the power of the isolated ego can only be felt through revenge.

We can acknowledge our feelings and use that awareness to restructure engagement in community that values life, good health, clean air and water, kindness and honest communication. The only true power we have is to help others be happy - not by violence but by the voice of integrity. We are vulnerable and fragile. We are not lizards and guns.

As soon as we fall back into ideologies of race, gender and class, we create monsters who must be fed by our neuroses and endless human sacrifice.