The Real Reason Behind the Myth of White "Supremacy"
It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's a good day for a brief primer on the myths behind the bizarre concept of white supremacy.
If you’re a white person, imagine yourself a Black man in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, captured at gunpoint, then lowered into a rat-infested ship that will cross the ocean to an unfamiliar land.
You have no idea what’s going on. The people surrounding you look different, speaking a language you don’t understand.
⚠️ !! Trigger Warning !! ⚠️
This post contains discussions of sexual and racial violence. Proceed with caution and, please, do not read if you have any sensitivity to this kind of writing.
Your shipmates are chained up like you. You’re laid within long rows of them, stinking, broken, screaming, looking nothing like the neat rows of sedate bodies on engravings we see in pictures. It takes but a day for the stench of sweat and farts and shit and piss to overwhelm your senses.
As the days and nights at sea drag on, the meals barely enough to consume without the intestinal rage of vomit hoisting its way up your gullet, you become delirious, barely able to see out of your swollen eyes.
If you’re lucky, those who don’t survive the journey are tossed into the sea, creating some much-needed space for you on the packed ship. Not that it matters much. You’re lying there in chains, unable to take advantage of the new gaps made by your dead brethren.
If you weren’t lucky, the illiterate, sullen, and drunken crew overhead, whom you only know by footstep, have left the bodies in your seaward dungeon to rot.
Flies buzz around the stench of decaying bodies, crawling on your face, lips, and eyes as you literally foam at the mouth from the lack of proper food and care. Rats nibble on the feet of corpses, sometimes scurrying over you to the next feast.
Somehow, you survive the trip. About half of your fellow shipmates didn’t.
Your body now filled with festering sores, rat bites, insect infestations, and fatigued, atrophied muscles, you are pushed by hostile men with pallid skin up out of the ship. They carry weapons you’ve seen shatter heads into bloody pieces of flesh and bone.
All this time, you know your wife has been on a similar boat, but you have no idea if your destinations are the same. Your original yearning for her voice, her touch, her smell, her eyes, has been replaced by exhausted resignation that you will soon be dead at the hands of murderers.
You walk onto the shore of a beautiful new land, but you don’t notice its luxuriously forested landscape because you’re nearly dead.
Finally, someone who looks like you helps you to a full meal and a day’s rest. He looks sad. He doesn’t talk in your language, other than the shared language of anguish, along with a rage that speaks through his tightened, bloodshot eyes. You remain in chains.
After you eat a full meal and drink copious amounts of water, and after you manage a few hours of sleep, remarkably, your body rebounds quickly. You feel strong. Stronger than you’ve ever felt in your life. Whatever is happening to you, you can do this. You can survive. Perhaps, you can even escape.
But not so fast. You’re next taken to a strange podium surrounded by people of sickly skin who resemble the people from the ship, but better groomed. Do these people not eat? Do they have no blood traversing their veins? What are these creatures? Demons? Again, their language is unknown.
You want to talk to people of your own kind, but their language, too, is often unfamiliar. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Apaadi is the only word that matters to you now. Your descendants would call it “hell.”
Then, a surprise. A miracle, even. You can’t believe your eyes. You are reunited with your beloved. And your child, the infant baby that you thought had been left behind, is with her. Your heart pounds with joy and excitement as the bloodless creatures push you to the top of a small set of stairs.
You don’t know what’s happening, but you no longer care. You are reunited! The harrowing journey was not endured in vain. You want to ask your wife how she and the baby survived the horrors of her old, creaking ship — surely its conditions were as bad as yours, but you know that these monsters with their explosive weapons will not tolerate such fraternization.
So you wait.
After a strange ceremony held by the bloodless savages around you, you are roughly guided off the podium.
Then, a blood-curdling scream. One of the bloodless has snatched your baby from your wife’s arms. The baby screams, too, but nothing can match the high-pitched ululating of your stricken wife, whose tears flood her beautiful, torn face as a bloodless man disappears with your child.
Next, you are chained up to other men, while your wife is chained to other women. You don’t know what it’s called, but we know the line you are each in as a coffle.
Your exhausted body is separated from your wife, who, unbeknownst to you, will become breeding chattel for a family of white-skinned “farmers” in Virginia. They don’t farm, though. Not in the way you know. They whip others who look like you into submission to make them plow the fields and harvest the fruit of blood-soaked labor.
There, your wife will be assigned the harrowing, cruel task of breeding workers on a plantation created by a society that values mercantilism over people. She will sire other slaves by men she does not know.
When she isn’t forced to breed more slaves, she’ll be raped by a bloodless man from the family that runs the “farm.” Or maybe by his teenage son, who is hungry for what she can give him at the edge of his knife. He’ll take something that he can’t get for himself from his own kind.
His descendants will become what we now call incels, who will stalk crowded venues with murderous weapons of war and slaughter everyone they can find. Men, women, children. In churches. In schools. In supermarkets.
It’s good that you see none of what is happening to your wife, though. This may have finally broken you. Or maybe watching her endure the hundreds-mile trek by coffle to the farmer’s nefarious lair would have been enough to break your spirit.
You, too, are sent by gunpoint, chained to others, some who speak your language, many others who don’t. But by now, through shared song and a few well-chosen words of a new language that will form among your brethren, you begin to share that you are stronger than they are. Smarter. Tougher.
You had to be to endure all of this. You had to be more clever than anyone on earth, more intelligent, more patient, better able to tenaciously cling to sanity and spirit.
Through swamp and mosquito-infested forests, you are forced to walk for days to your next destination. Sometimes, someone will fall in front of you. You discover an alarming lack of patience for this as the men with guns beat the fallen man.
There are times, because someone who has fallen is too sick to carry on, a man without blood in his face unchains him. Then shoots him in the head.
Your coffle moves on.
You finally arrive at a large farming operation filled with people who look like you. But they are watched over by pale men on horseback carrying two things that have become painfully familiar: guns and whips.
You’re one of the lucky few. Because another miracle has happened. After years of beatings, whippings, and the merciless, overbearing, constant watch of an enemy with no remorse, you escape.
But you never find your wife and child. You spend years looking. That emptiness is never filled. When you finally find another mate in a northern land some call free, but isn’t, you can’t help but question yourself. What if she is still alive? What if my child is still alive, somewhere?
We’ve made some progress. No doubt.
But today, still, there are those who wish to deny your history. Your suffering. Your strength. Your will to live and prosper. Your intelligence.
They are the children of another kind of descendant. They are the children of a weaker, more fearful breed of people.
They aren’t the owners of supremacy. If anyone is, you are. You and your amazing descendants, who have fought for every single step they’ve made on your behalf. Every. Single. Step.
Everything those who followed in your footsteps managed to fight for, whatever opportunity they’ve finally won, they’ve turned into gold. Those of the bloodless skin will tell you that your descendants are only good at certain things. Like sports or entertainment.
But you know, when you see a quarterback play the position that requires the most intelligence in a sport called football, that the truth goes far beyond that. And you know too well that even that token opportunity was opposed with fury and hatred.
You know, as you watch from the heavens above, that your descendants master everything they can get their hands on. Everything. You’ve seen it. It’s magical, the way everything your people touch turns into legendary parts of the culture to which they’ve been forced to assimilate.
You know, because you saw it firsthand, that the ancestors of the people who try to claim something called “white supremacy” told a lie that was passed on by subsequent generations of fearful men.
It was a lie that said you came from an inferior stock of humans. It was a lie that said that you are a subhuman, even, because they saw the strength and intelligence and endurance that fueled your survival and success. They saw what courage, intelligence, and strength it took, became fearful, and tried to turn it against you.
Because it scared them. So they told their children: “Stay away. They’re heathens. They are less than you.” Because that is what frightened, weak people do.
To this day, their descendants continue with the lie. And fear. They cross the street when they see your descendants coming their way. They lock them up in prisons en masse, creating another form of slavery. They deny them housing and opportunity.
They throw them into debtor prisons and tell their children that they have no history worth remembering. They chase them around and kill them for having a broken taillight or a phone in their hand. And worse, today, you are seeing them do that to other people of color. You see a roiling cauldron of hatred growing out of a twisted mythology no rational human understands.
But you know the truth. And so do your descendants. If there is a superior race, you and they are part of it. Your accomplishments cannot be stifled by fear and hate. The real heathens, the real voices against God, cannot break the joy and pride born of the kind of achievements your brethren have made against impossible odds.
It is historic. It is unprecedented. It is the true story of America, one that will be cherished by historians hundreds of years from now, after the lame attempts of stifling history have been squashed by your descendants and the admirers of your cause.
It’s possible, just possible, that today, you even have a few allies among those with the pale skin.
But they’re all fearful. You know this. It’s been baked into their blood through multiple generations. Even the most aware among them have old tapes in their heads that will sometimes thrust an outrage into a society that stubbornly resists change.
So you watch the struggle with a mix of hope and cautious optimism, knowing that you led this fight long ago, and that someday, the bloodless will stop crying into the night of their forlorn rage, “What about us?”
Notes
Most of this first appeared in An Injustice on April 18, 2023. It was reposted here in September 2024.
Keep an eye out for my upcoming alternative history novel, Restive Souls, where a great African empire rises on the Carolina coast.
The following book should be required reading in all schools:
The American Slave Coast
A wide-ranging, powerful, alternative vision of the history of the United States and how the slave-breeding…www.chicagoreviewpress.com
The bloodshot eyes detail carries so much weight in this narrative. That small visual of shared rage between enslaved people says more about resistence than pages could. The framing here inverts the entire supremacy concept by showing what actual strength looks like, not the manufactured version built on fear. Dunno if enough people understand how deliberate that mythology was. Read something similar about how slaveholders needed the lie to justify the system to themselves as much as anyone else.
Thank you for this. An excellent read for MLK Day.