Fighting White Supremacy

3,077 words

Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin
How We Fight White Supremacy
Bold Type Books, 2019

How We Fight White Supremacy is a curated, multidisciplinary collection that serves as a showcase for some of our most powerful thinkers and doers. It starts in the middle of a Black-ass conversation; you won’t find any explanatory commas about our cultural mores here.
-From the introduction to How We Fight White Supremacy

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Americans do white supremacy so much better than the British or Europeans. They must do, because during the Biden administration – or Obama’s third term, as you please – the phrase was repeated with the regularity of a Touretter with a particular fixation. Those in or around Europe have to make do with “far right”, a vague and intentionally undefined term, or plain old “Nazi”, a meaningless insult today.

Perhaps “white supremacy” has more bite in America because of the powerful cargo of visual associations the phrase brings with it: The Klan, Birth of a Nation, Jim Crow, whites-only drinking-fountains, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the police dogs at the Watts riots. We no longer think novelistically, as our forefathers would have done before cinema, we think visually. There’s a whole romanticized set of optics available to fund the idea of white supremacy, to keep it in the mind’s eye of the black activist and the white liberal. But what exactly is white supremacy? I would suggest it is history correctly interpreted, but then I am white, with my portfolio of privilege and racism, and my people’s history of enslavement of the black races. What do blacks think white supremacy is? Let’s ask them.

This is the first time I have read a whole book on white supremacy. I’m familiar with the concept from various articles and inferences, but I approached How We Fight White Supremacy (edited by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin) with what can only be called prejudice. That’s right, I pre-judged the book because I suspected it contained extrapolations on the following themes:

1. White privilege rigs society against blacks.
2. The history of the West has been one of oppression of blacks by whites.
3. It is not possible for blacks to be racist towards whites.
4. Blacks have an innate nobility and built everything.

That’s what I was expecting, along with the usual low-level hustle for reparations, so I was interested to see if the editors could surprise me and show me up for the white supremacist I so clearly am (and I am). Also, I wanted to check the rhetoric, the tone. I wanted to see how militaristic it was. The book’s sub-title is A Handbook of Black Field Resistance, and it was published a year before the death of George Floyd. If this is how blacks felt before the death of the world’s most famous drug-dealer, this book is useful as an indicator of how they feel now.

Should you wish to broaden your horizons and partake of the new black wisdom we have been persuaded exists, then you will find yourself, in publishing terms, in a high-availability zone. Cookery books are high-availability, for example, because there are lots to choose from. Biographies of Meister Eckhardt, on the other hand, the Medieval scholastic and mystic, are low-availability because there aren’t that many. If “white supremacy” is what you seek, you are strolling through a very high-availability zone indeed. Boy, are there a lot of books about what bad guys we are. Where to start? I just selected the first one, but I got lucky because it is an essay collection, and so at least contains the potential to have more than one voice, although my prejudice still told me it wouldn’t mean anything of the sort.

There is no doubt about who the contributors are, all of whom are pictured at the start of the book. There are over 70 black faces (and one white, but I stopped counting) spread over the first 20 per cent of the book, indicating an early truth about any black cultural artefact; It is always a catwalk. It takes six sentences of the introduction before the first two of the topics I expected to be covered are addressed:

The fact is, White [sic] supremacy defines our current reality. It is not merely a belief that to be White is to be better. It is a political, cultural, and economic system premised on the subjugation of people who are not White. That subjugation takes on an infinite number of forms and is enforced with varying degrees of physical violence, mental abuse, and robbery. White supremacy is the voice in our collective heads that says it makes civilized sense that one group of people gets to annihilate, enslave, incarcerate, brainwash, torture, sterilize, breed, and terrorize other people. White supremacy establishes, upholds, and normalizes hierarchy based on the premise that the less Black [sic] you are the closer you are to God.

I will try not to over-quote from this essay collection, but one more from the introduction is too good to resist: “Although we sought out a diverse group of contributors, this collection isn’t exhaustive: it does not apply an international lens, and it doesn’t include Black ‘conservatives’.”

Boy, do they have some fancy names for those folk. The reason there is no “international lens” is that America is the only majority white nation where blacks are prospering with their grift. In Europe, Muslims have grabbed the microphone. This will concern European blacks, or would if they understand how culture is changing. For many Muslims, the only good black is a convert.

The first chapter strikes an alliance between the black struggle and feminism, because we all know how black men respect bitches, right? It quotes Patrice Khan-Cullors, the woman who done got herself a great property portfolio by scamming blacks and white companies with the BLM grift. The chapter has no argument, and one becomes used to the underlying lack of reasoned discourse as the chapters pass in dull procession. This book is one big whine about black exceptionalism in the face of white aggression. It simply sets that as the tone, like you would decide the background and characters for a video game. There is no proof and no evidence except black failure (always due to white racism) and what blacks think is black success (always due to innate blackness).

There is nothing worse than a self-aggrandizing black, and there is no other type on display here. Here’s a key snippet, a black woman telling us all about how she became an activist: “I was a really conversant twelve-year-old, but until I found 21st Century [sic], I didn’t have a way to put that into action.”

No, and then white liberal women and uppity blacks gave you a way to do that, and by golly, you sure grabbed that chance. There follow a few pages of unfunny and misleading cartoons, in case black people are tired of following the text with their fingers. Pictures are always good when reading becomes too oppressive, or if you can’t read. That’s why there are so many pictures in Catholic churches.

The second chapter is titled The Struggle is Real, which is true in itself. It’s just that the struggle is inside black people’s heads, eternal war-zone that it is and will remain. Because of this scrambling of mental eggs, the book is more or less unreadable in parts, and contains sentences such as this: “Like we’re perpetually having a sock slid down in your boot, bonnet came off last night so your twistout is fuzzy.”

It is not easy to review a book a good deal of which you don’t really understand, and I don’t mean that in a Hegelian way.

The book is chaotically edited and much of it consists of transcribed and self-congratulatory interviews. Blacks prefer talking to writing, although Ta-Nehisi Coates has an essay here, and I had at least heard of him as an author. One of the many sub-headings is titled “On the Trauma of Being Black in White Spaces”. It’s generally whites who are traumatized in this eventuality, but we’ll let that pass.

Out of the fog of confusing typography, a poem emerges. The first stanza, for your pleasure:

Heaven is full of white folks but they got
These glasses on that they don’t know they’re
Glasses they don’t know they’re wearing but it’s not
Glasses ’cause it’s a wide black blindfold ’cause
It wraps around their heads it’s thick and covers
Their ears and it ain’t glasses ’cause they can’t
See through it ’cept I know they see forever
Felt like forever I watched for my chance.

This chap is one of those who thinks that if you just write like you speak and use the keyboard return key early, it becomes poetry.

The next chapter deals with the power of black humor, which turns out to be a mighty fine protection against the white enemy:

Humor is among our toughest suits of armor against White supremacy. One-liners, irony, tall tales, impressions, satire, signifying, playing the dozens, and trolling are all tools that we’ve used to reinforce our culture, pass down mother wit, and vent our rage without getting lynched, fired, or otherwise destroyed.

What emerges from a rather scatter-brained chapter is a sort of neo-minstrelism in which blacks take away the pain of having to share anything at all with whitey with their thigh-slapping humor. One black stand-up comedian interviewed is under the impression that it is “illegal to be black in public.” The white reader may become wistful reading that claim, and think such a law might be a start.

I took a coffee-break. It is punishingly difficult to read this stuff. Derrida is far less impenetrable. It’s not just the mangled prose and ebonic syntactical fireworks, it’s the whole tone of nobility, of fighting a good fight, of still being slaves. Blacks are enslaved, of course, enslaved by their own chaotic mental landscape and lack of the basic ability to reason. I would be pleased about that if it weren’t for the fact that whites suffer because blacks have a wasp nest in their heads. It drives home to the reader that the Enlightenment really was a white thing. Coffee-break over, I dive back into the fray, back into the land of boasting and lies.

Next up is a chap who produces “Black punk comics” because he hopes that “what I do inspires people to act, or at least to think about contending with White supremacy in ways that seem intentional and sort of fun.” Fun. The one thing black people are not, if you are unfortunate enough to be white in their vicinity, is fun. There are a few pages of the man’s comic art, and it is really very poor. One of my brothers is a very talented cartoonist and so I do know what I am talking about. I don’t imagine the black chappy will ride out the rise of AI in the comic industry.

Blacks have a co-axial language, a language inside a language. They seem to feel it necessary to subvert the way white people express themselves, to indulge in a linguistic dadaism that at times is breathtaking:

I’m not one of those. I’m more like: Where does she keep digging up these Black-ass gifs? Yup, she’s right, that is a word, bitch, your auntie is hella shady funny. As my Bumble connects know, my hobbies include baking, reading, getting lost in Twitter black holes, and talking shit both inside and outside. My texts are full of side eyes, laughing so hard they’re crying faces and skulls, ’cause I stay killing it in my ‘this seat’s taken’ -ass group texts. And I’ve been known to earnestly describe myself as a funny bitch, ’cause, Aries.

It doesn’t let up, there are no pauses. The entire book is a taxing linguistic maelstrom which conjures up Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: “A tale of sound and fury, Told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”

The Bard, unknowingly, was reviewing this book and, I suspect, all of CRT.

Black people have to say everything now and you must listen. But what they have to say is so limited it becomes like listening to a football chant or one of those crappy Hare Krishna drones. Even when it is possible to follow the contorted pidgin-English of the majority of contributions, we find another aspect of the book which at least spoons itself out of the mire for professional reasons. Here is a lawyer (and so at least semi-literate) explaining the way she sees her role in society:

I am a civil rights attorney working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and eliminate the mass incarceration of Black children in America. I represent children in civil rights cases and policy initiatives, focusing my efforts on reducing racial disparities in education and the juvenile justice system. I used to think my goal was to get favorable decisions in court, help children avoid expulsion, and reduce racial profiling of Black children and their subsequent contact with the system. But time, experience, and raising two children of my own helped me realize the true purpose of my work: I fight for Black children to be free.

Black children, in one sense, are free, and don’t white people just know all about that. You just watch them exercise their freedom in shopping-mall and classroom, track-meet and nightclub. In another way, they are manacled tighter than any slave ever was by their feeble, witless mindset, their high time-preference, their arrogance and pomp, their addiction to failure as long as white people pay for it, and by the fact that they make themselves into niggers. We didn’t do that. But blacks are not just gang-bangers, drug users and pimps. They are in court-rooms across America, they are mayors and police chiefs and politicians. What they think matters in the real, pragmatic world. And the worldview sketched above travels with them as a big part of their brief.

Apart from the odd lawyer and university professor – all of whom keep quiet about affirmative action – everyone in this book is, or was, a community organiser, a race adviser, an activist, or some other confection. Just like Obama was. This type of thing counts as a job now. Really, they are just professional blacks who recognize a good hustle when they see one. If just one of them had signed off as a “gold-toothed hustler” or “a talentless black woman with hair weaves”, I would have felt the warm glow of honesty, but their lives are all pretend, made-up, like kids with a dressing-up box pretending to be adults in Mum’s outsize shoes and dresses, Dad’s tie and hat.

Like all primitive tribes, blacks have a tremendous oral tradition, and as the strange prose scrolls by, there are plenty of sentences such as this:

Another teacher, we heard [italics added], was overtly racist. He once told a Black student eating an apple that she should be eating a banana instead. Another time he told a Black girl wearing a headwrap that she looked like Aunt Jemima.

Those events obviously never happened, not in the real world, but that doesn’t matter in BlackWorld. There, you just have to think something up, and it’s as real as Wakanda, a non-existent country which gets a few mentions here.

There is in the book some garbled version of Christianity which bobs up from the depths on occasion. Blacks have always liked religion if it serves their grievance, and there is much talk of “Black grace”. One pastor “spends his days attacking White supremacy from the pulpit and on the streets”. Blacks always run a little shy of the full-on, European-style religion, however. After all, the Bible is a very white supremacist book. Lots of the more religious writers here were assaulted by whites at Bible school, as you would imagine. Yea, so it is written.

You get with the rhythm after a while, which is that of the mentally ill. I don’t know if you have ever known anyone who is seriously mentally ill, and thus delusional, but there is a congruence about the self-image of blacks – and boy, is there a lot of self-image – and the insistence with which the mentally troubled return to their world of small concerns. It’s the same way older people stricken with dementia prize some trivial object like a comb or a brooch. Part of me wanted to work through this book and get to grips with a cogent argument. That is how I am trained to approach texts, and it is both educational and enjoyable, where it is available. But it is not available here. This is not the academic writing it poses as, it’s really just graffiti within book covers rather than scrawled on your front wall. The whole book is like listening to a braggart in a playground, and just as unflagging and tiresome.

Blacks have also learned how to leech off other non-whites, how to forge alliances:

While addressing inequality in Muslim-majority societies, the marginalized among us draw on Islam’s antiracism ethos to critique power. I resist by believing, learning, creating, and connecting with others to be free within our communities and in society at large. Working in antiracism education allows me to name the system that seeks to alienate me from my Black female body, my sense of connectedness, and my yearning for transcendence.

“Islam’s antiracism ethos.” Blacks are at their funniest when they are being serious.

Blacks also have a tendency to stray quickly from what might actually be an interesting topic. One of the writers here begins his chapter boldly with the horrors of the Middle Passage, another piece in the puzzle of black mythology, but not one I know that much about. I would have been intrigued to learn something. But, within a couple of paragraphs, the author is telling us about his braided hair.

It is strange to read such a loathsome, puerile book and yet still recommend it to the reader. How We Fight White Supremacy reminds me of the burqa, the ugly body-suit which hides Muslimas from the general public (and doubtless hides the odd black eye as well). The burqa has recently been banned in public in Denmark and France, and there are those who want it banned in the UK. I disagree. When I lived in London, every time I saw one of these black Daleks, it reminded me of how superior my own culture is. It reminded me of white supremacy. So it is with this book.