Artwork by Tema Okun

A BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT ...
​

As early settlers came to what would become the U.S. from Europe, those in leadership were male and Christian. They did not identify as white. They identified with their ethnic, national, and/or religious roots - they were English, French, Dutch and they were Protestant, Catholic, Puritan. They came with the desire to create a "new world" where they could profit and prosper. But once here, they faced a big problem. These ruling class elite and their families were outnumbered by the Indigenous people whose lives and land they were stealing and the Africans who they forcibly kidnapped for enslavement and forced labor. 

Because the ruling class elite were outnumbered, they had to persuade newly arriving immigrants from Europe to cast aside their ethnic, national, and/or religious differences into a solidarity that could meet the challenge. And so they created the category of "white" and whiteness and consolidated the idea of white supremacy as a way to organize these very different immigrants into a singular and unifying racial category. They did this by requiring them to disconnect from their ethnic and national identities in order to gain access to the material, emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual benefits of a whiteness designed specifically and intentionally to pit them against and place them above Indigenous and enslaved peoples.

They wed racism, and I use the word "wed" purposefully, to the construction of race; they created racism as white supremacy's tool. 

​Their goal was and is to undermine communal solidarity (thank you Paul Kivel). ​Their goal was and is to create a hegemonic Christian society (see box on the right) based on white supremacy ideology.

Throughout this website, when I use the term white supremacy, I am referring to the ways in which these ruling class elite or the power elite in the colonies of what was to become the United States used the pseudo-scientific concept of race to create whiteness and a hierarchy of racialized value in order to 

• disconnect and divide white people from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC);
• disconnect and divide Black, Indigenous, and People of Color from each other;
• disconnect and divide white people from other white people;
• disconnect and divide each and all of us from the earth, the sun, the wind, the water, the stars, the animals that roam(ed) the earth;
• disconnect and divide each of us from ourselves and from source (see below).

 
The power elite constructed white supremacy (and construct it still) to define who is fully human and who is not. 

INTERSECTIONALITY

The power elite constructed (and continues to construct) white supremacy to intersect with (thank you Kimberlé Crenshaw), support, reinforce and reproduce capitalism, class oppression, gender oppression, heterosexism, ableism, Christian hegemony, to name a few. These in turn function to support, reinforce, and reproduce white supremacy. So, for example, capitalism teaches us profit is more important than people while systematically advantaging those in the white group (although not all equally). Classism teaches us the wealthy are deserving and the poor are to be blamed while reproducing racism in the disparate reproduction of wealth and deadly exploitation of labor. Sexism and heterosexism teach us white men are superior to women (and all "others"), gender binaries are "normal" while gender fluidity is threatening, with the degree of threat (targeting all who defy gender binaries) tied to race and racism. Christian hegemony teaches us that Christians (and a certain kind of white Christian at that) are divinely capable of shaping and defining reality for the rest of us. The power elite design these ideologies to teach us who is valuable and human and who is not in the name of power and profit.

In other words, white supremacy operates in collaboration with other oppressions; they reinforce and reproduce each other. 
 
The power elite constructed (and continues to construct) white supremacy to serve capitalism, to commodify and dehumanize all living things in the name of power and profit for a few at the expense of the many. And they did this well (and still do), and they did this cleverly (and still do), constructing white supremacy to be ever more adaptable. So while historically those who benefit most from these constructions were and are white, male, owning class, gender conforming, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, English speaking ... (etc.) ... white supremacy has evolved to constantly extend an invitation to many of us, inviting us to join when assimilation (or joining) serves the ability of the power elite to profit at our expense.

This construction of white supremacy is alive and well. For just one example, we are living through a period where the U.S. Republican Party is overtly and boldy claiming a white supremacy, autocratic agenda. For more about this, sign up for Scot Nakagawa's online newsletter.

WHITE SUPREMACY IS A PROJECT OF CONDITIONING

​White supremacy is a project of psychic conditioning and toxic belonging.

I have found my own participation in this ideology both enraging and heartbreaking. What I know is that the invitation to join is toxic to all who say yes. When I say yes, when we say yes, we visit this toxicity on others and everybody suffers, including us. And when I say no, when we say no - for we have among us those who have said no from the very beginning - when we say no, we discover the secret of joy (thank you Alice Walker).

WHITE SUPREMACY IS A PROJECT OF COLONIZATION
​
White supremacy is a project of colonization - a project of "appropriating a place or domain for one's use" (according to the Oxford Dictionary). White supremacy colonizes our minds, our bodies, our psyches, our spirits, our emotions ... as well as the land and the water and the sky and the air we breathe. White supremacy tells us who has value, who doesn't, what has value, what doesn't in ways that reinforce a racial hierarchy of power and control that dis-eases and destroys all it touches. When I say, as I do elsewhere, that our goal is to get free, what I mean is that we are engaged in the collective project of freeing ourselves from this project of colonization. We are decolonizing ourselves - our minds, our bodies, our psyches, our spirits, our emotions, our work, our homes, and the land, water, sky, and air.

WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
 
Culture reflects the beliefs, values, norms, and standards of a group, a community, a town, a state, a nation. White supremacy culture is the widespread ideology baked into the beliefs, values, norms, and standards of our groups (many if not most of them), our communities, our towns, our states, our nation, teaching us both overtly and covertly that whiteness holds value, whiteness is value. It teaches us that Blackness is not only valueless but also dangerous and threatening. It teaches us that Indigenous people and communities no longer exist, or if they do, they are to be exoticized and romanticized or culturally appropriated as we continue to violate treaties, land rights, and humanity. It teaches us that people south of the border are "illegal." It teaches us that Arabs are Muslim and that Muslim is "terrorist." It teaches us that people of Chinese and Japanese descent are both indistinguishable and threatening as the reason for Covid. It pits other races and racial groups against each other while always defining them as inferior to the white group.

​White supremacy culture is reflected in the current realities of disproportionate and systemic harm and violence directed towards BIPOC people and communities in all aspects of our national life – health, education, employment, incarceration, policing, the law, the environment, immigration, agriculture, food, housing. For one example, white supremacy culture is reflected in the current reality that 22 percent of Black households, 18 percent of Latinx households, and 9 percent of white households do not have enough food. One in 7 of our children go to bed hungry. This means that our culture accepts this level of hunger and food insecurity as “normal.” If we did not, we would not allow it. We would not allow any of the ways in which our society prioritizes profit over people if we did not have dominant cultural beliefs that make normal what is deeply and alarmingly inhumane.
 
WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE COMES AFTER ALL OF US

We are all swimming in the waters of white supremacy culture. We are all navigating this culture, regardless of our racial identity. We are not all affected in the same ways – some of us are encouraged to join and collude without awareness that an invitation has been extended, some are invited to participate at the cost of separating ourselves from our communities and families, some are shamed because we can never fully join no matter how hard we try, some are denied any invitation in order to be targeted or exploited or violated.

Because white supremacy culture is the water we swim in, we inevitably internalize the messages about what this culture believes, values, and considers normal. We absorb these messages as individuals and as a collective. As a result, white supremacy culture shapes how we think and act, how we make decisions and behave. As a result, white supremacy culture reminds us over and over again, sometimes out loud, sometimes in a whisper, that white is right and that there is a right kind of white (thank you Kari Points). 

REFUSING TO COMPLY
 
The good news is that while white supremacy culture informs us, it does not define us. It is a construct, and anything constructed can be deconstructed and replaced. We are not victims; our history is both witness to and record of how many of us refuse(d) to cooperate, how many of us are brave and bold enough to vision a future we often do not live to see. We honor our radical freedom fighting ancestors, those on the front lines, those whose names we will never know, those who fed the babies and swept the floors and offered nurture while committed to living with mutual dignity, respect, and love. We are here because of them.
 
Given how others have shown us the way, the good news is that we can and must be equally brave, bold, and fierce ancestors for those who come with and after us. 
​

---

a note
about my use
of the word
"source"
​

I use the word “source” to refer to what I understand as universal energy, the divine, god, goddess, one, the quantum field, essence – a state of being, an energy, a faith in our essential one-ness.

​Several ironies occur. I was raised by a fundamentalist atheist, a Jewish man who thought any notion of god or spirit or divine was unscientific nonsense. My mother, raised Methodist, never talked about her religious or spiritual beliefs although she did play piano for the evangelical church at the bottom of the dirt road where she lived in the summer.

I also know that many people have experienced tremendous trauma in the name of religion, god, the divine, source. I do not mean to project or require any beliefs; I mean simply to explain mine.

I have also witnessed how an insistence that we are all one in the eyes of god and the divine can be used to deny or defend against seeing how our racial and other identities shape and inform each and every one of us. I am not a fan of erasing differences in the name of one-ness. I believe this is known in some circles as spiritual bypassing.

That said, I do personally believe in source, in the divine, in essence – I do believe that we are all one. And I also grasp the power of this belief after spending a lifetime understanding and witnessing the devastating ways that our racist culture carves out radically different life experiences for us individually and collectively based on our racial and other intersecting identities. So I caution against claiming an essential one-ness without also acknowledging our constructed differences, our cultural differences, the differences that thread our lived experiences, differences that have shaped us so forcefully and for some of us so violently. When I reference source or essence or the divine, I am speaking to a way of seeing the world that makes sense to me, that provides support and healing for me while also honoring the power of our differences. If you prefer, you might substitute creativity or imagination or magic. I do not require you to share my way of seeing the world and if you are discomfited, you can replace the words I use to reference the divine with “Keanu Reeves.”

Hegemony is defined as the predominant and pervasive influence of one state, religion, region, class, or group. ... A hegemonic society functions not just to establish a homogeneous way of thinking, but also to try to make any alternative disappear. ...
One might say hegemony is "the language of conquest."
                              Paul Kivel

Whiteness is
not a privilege, it is a death sentence.
– Public Theologian Ruby Sales

While white supremacy culture does inform us, it does not define us.

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
-Toni Morrison

---

Toni Morrison speaks truth about the toxic power of whiteness. From an interview with Charlie Rose.

a note 
about my use
of the word
​"we"

I say a number of times on this site that white supremacy culture affects all of us across lines of race, class, gender .... and yet it does not affect us all the same.

Nonetheless, we all have to navigate this culture and the various and devious ways this culture invites us to collude with it even when and as it targets us. 

My intention throughout is to use "we" purposefully and thoughtfully to refer to all of us when I am speaking to how it impacts all of us. My intention is to specify when I am speaking to and about white people and/or when I am referencing BIPOC people and communities. 

I also know that my intention to be inclusive where appropriate and specific where necessary, while important, is no guarantee. I may have missed my unfounded  assumptions or some of the nuances based on those assumptions. If, while reading this, you feel misrepresented or left out or in any way unseen, please - if you have  the energy and desire - do reach out and let me know.

I am learning all the time. This  is one of the great gifts of racial justice work and practice - to be in community with so many people who are wiser. Thank you for whatever patience you can bring to my limits.

Another take on spiritual bypassing by a website reader (thank you Ben Johns): 
My understanding of spiritual bypassing is that the term is more broad, that it is the conscious or unconscious avoidance of one’s actual problems and problematic behavior by using spiritual concepts to get around doing the real work of becoming a better person.  It is a form of denial and the effort at a spiritual short cut to bolster an inaccurate self-portrayal based on egoism.  In western versions of yoga practices, for example, there are beginner classes and some intermediate, but most people quickly go to advanced and consider themselves advanced.  That makes spiritual bypassing necessary or else people will have to own mistakes, humble themselves, and do the real yoga, which is how we think, speak and act on a daily basis.  There is so much overlap with this type of spiritual bypassing and the hard work of becoming less racist, and I have observed with all too much frequency that as a white man I have unknowingly embraced the culture of the “white moderate.”  The work continues for me, and us.

A short and incomplete
list of books offering
​BIPOC wisdom
about white supremacy
​and
​white supremacy culture

Please know there is no way to list all the incredible resources that are available to
widen and deepen our understanding of white supremacy, white supremacy culture, and racism, as well as what we can do to resist and transform. The web offers multiple booklists and articles.

• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
• bell hooks, Killing Rage
• Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria
• Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy
• Cathy Park Hong: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
• Cherrié Moralga and Gloria Anzaldúa,This Bridge Called My Back
• Claudia Rankine: Citizen
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists
• Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning
• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
• James Baldwin: The Fire This Time
• John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats: Yellow Peril!
• Kai Cheng Thom: I Hope We Choose Love
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
• Moustafa Bayoumi: How Does It Feel to be a Problem?
• ​Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race
• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• Robert Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
  

And in addition ...
Amaliah offers a list of Ten Books to Understand How Islamophobia Became a Global Industry.
Ibram X. Kendi offers an Anti-Racist Reading List. 
​First Nations Development Institute offers a compiled list of essential reading.
The Luz Collective offers Books by Latina Authors to Read in 2021.
Remezcla offers 13 Chicano Lit Must-Reads.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a U.S. History booklist by Native American authors .​

What chou mean we, white girl, revisited

by Becky Thompson

Anne Braden's
​"A letter to white Southern women."

Poet's Notes:
​ Lorraine Bethel, “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?
​Or the Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence (Dedicated to the Proposition that All Women are not Equal, i.e. Identical/ly Oppressed)” Conditions Five: The Black Women’s Issue, Vol. 11, no. 2, 86-92. Italics from Anne Braden’s first open letter appeared in the Southern Patriot in 1972.

​

​Asking them to consider their role
in lynching Black men, Anne Braden
wrote an open letter to Southern
white women, saying our guilt
fastens its shackles to ourselves. We
who took picnics to lynchings,
sized up Black women on auction
blocks, voted for Agent Orange: how
can we not hate the high pitched, little
step, hair flinging lessons we learned
as kids? I grew up sobbing at the zoo,
 
bereft for the giraffe with no room to
stretch, the elephant with her sorrow
steps. There was no bench big enough
for my tears as my aunt sat me down,
told me to toughen up. Betrayal starts
early by those meant to teach us love
as they step over a man with a cup on
the street, un tip a waitress, keep us
from a piñata birthday party. In second
grade I made a report on slave ships,
pasted a photo on construction paper
 
of Africans who were chained to each
other, children’s eyes falling inward. Now
I look at white women in grocery lines.
Would you cut in front of my brown
daughter, try to touch her braids? Would
you protect your purse from my son with
his cumin eyes? I want to disown you, but
I’m in this mess too, with my limp wrists
at meetings, eyes averted when my boss
tells another praise the proud boys story.
Must I belong to white women, a place of
 
dread? What will it take to lean in, carry our
bodies from certain white men’s beds, go
beyond holding up Black Lives Matter signs?
To switch our kids from the good schools
to places where Double Dutch and Mandela
matter? In 1979 Lorraine Bethel asked, what
chou mean we, white girl? We who believe there
are only so many seats at the antiracist table:
what’s it gonna take to earn a we worth living
our lives for? Let’s add leaves, sturdy chairs.
Take our seats. Make sitting there irresistible. 
 

​Lama Rod Owens

from his book
​Love and Rage

When white folks hear me or others speak of white supremacy, there is a tendency to hear this critique as a personal attack rather than an invitation to understand how whiteness in America is and remains an expression of dominance if there is not effort to interrogate this expression. To be white is to be racist. That's how America was established. I am deeply hurt by this system, and that hurt means that I experience being pissed at the system of white supremacy as well as how white folks continue to buy into this system.

a conversation about
​white supremacy and belonging 

In this zoom call, healing justice activist Susan Raffo and I - Tema - have a conversation about the ways in which white supremacy distorts our birthright of belonging, contracting those of us who are white into a hyper-individualism that narrows our desires to the personal and does not serve us. Susan describes how this transactional belonging operates as a collective experience of contraction and suggests we understand the pursuit of happiness as a collective and expansive enterprise. The convo is full of juice if you have time for a listen.

Find more about the definitions of

white supremacy culture and racism
​
at the drworksbook website.

​Dorothea Lange | 1942
Already pushing boundaries as a woman photographer, Dorothea Lange went to work for the Farm Security Agency (a 1940s New Deal program) to document the migrant experience. She was motivated to make work that would inspire change and she did - her work sparked federal aid and other support. She went on to produce photographs for several other government agencies following the Depression. In this photo, a banner boldly proclaims the citizenship of the shop's new owners who seized the shop from the previous Japanese American owners as the government began rounding up Japanese  Americans, most U.S. citizens, into internment camps. 

i am an american

by Tema Okun

I am an American
and the good fortune
of this
is buried underneath
the wanting
 
I am an American
and I mourn daily
the smell of blood
 
the catalog of
deadly intentions
masquerading as
shiny belonging
 
I am not particularly
brave and I disappear
often into
the afternoon and
washing windows and
feeding the hand
that bites
me
 
I don’t fear
everything and I do
want this day
 
the virtues of
breathing
feel good
even as they take me
down
 
I am an American
and I am fed
yet again
on the barricade
of your belonging


​