(essay)
How Come I’m Better Than You?
How come you don’t deserve all the things I deserve?
How come you’re not as worthy as me?
How come how I look is superior to how you look?
The answers to the “how comes” are the fairy tales that formed the notion that some of us are better than the others. The original sin that fostered the fairytales goes back the to ultimate fairytale of a superpower who proclaimed that those he liked were his “chosen” people.
To those who walked in fear of the pretended divine tyrant, silliness started. The seeds of cultural immaturity were planted.
Time passed.
The longer the passage the more imaginers of the “chosen” created the stuff of which fairy tales become more pure and more sure than common sense, common wisdom and the highest good of all concerned.
Lightning flashed repeatedly, thunder rolled repeatedly, the earth quaked, the waters flooded, the land alternated between fertility and barrenness.
Only a superpower could make such things happen. How could humankind reason with the divine tyrant?
The imaginers appointed themselves middlemen between the imaginary super power and the commoners, most of whom with abject gullibility bought the substance-less snake oil propounded by those imagining mental midgets.
Soon the mental midgets figured out a way to enshrine their midgetness.
Laws …
Events and happenings that had no connection to any super power summoned them as symbols of divine whim.
Events and happenings that knew no laws in nature were suddenly seen as obeying an imaginary law proclaimed by the super power. Laws went into law books beginning with oral histories and folk tales, then later recorded and published as the will of the imaginary super power.
Such is how traditions get started.
Such is how traditions become doctrine.
Such is how doctrine becomes dogma.
Such is how cultures engender religions based entirely on imagined tradition –> doctrine –> dogma.
Such is how authoritarian-defined cultures figured out how to justify themselves.
Such is how authoritarian cultures assume and authorize who is chosen and who is not.
… so here we are
… here we have it
A culture started by an ignorant humanity is now feeding on itself; devouring all the non-chosen based on fairy tales of who is better, who is more worthy, who matters more than anyone else.
Where the personal fear manifests itself:
I refuse to tell you why I’m better than you.
I just know that it is true and don’t you dare ask me to explain myself. In the first place I cannot admit that I live in ignorance of or disinterest in cultures, ideas, or people outside my own experience. In other words I own the only true way to perceive reality.
Otherwise, I would have to admit that others around me have valid views.
If others have valid views then my ignorant expectations for my own racial comfort are weakened. I would be revealed as having little strength to face racial stress.
Even a minimal challenge to my white privilege place in life becomes intolerable. I get triggered. I go to my supply shelf to pull down defensive moves of my denial. Invalidation of my sacred place in life forces me into argumentation.
In my immature fears I fall into silence. I withdraw from discussion and whine about being attacked and misunderstood. What I’m forced to do is reset my circumstance to the unconscious smugness of my life.
I absolutely must reinstate my own white equilibrium so I can maintain what looks and feels to me like control.
I was born into a racial culture of control.
It sounds like liberal whining when I hear that this great country was forged by many Fathers who owned slaves, took them for granted while buying and selling them with no regard for their humanity or family togetherness.
It sounds like liberal whining when I hear that the Manifest Destiny that extended our shores from sea to shining sea involved an attitude of racial superiority and purity over Native Americans.
It sounds like liberal whining when someone tells me that what it means to be American is what it means to be white first and foremost.
As an American I am free to express my hurt feelings, my resentment of those who challenge my notions. White folks who are told their whiteness is their own curse and scourge become victims of the very identity politics upon which I thrived as a white boy.
Don’t tell me my whiteness has shielded me from growing to maturity in the way I insist non-whites are obligated to.
Why?
Cause those with the biggest mouths are still leaning on it to make it through their own lives.
What anyone else does should not threaten us privileged and fragile personalities as we try to remain hidden in our high castles.
Recommended reading:
I am afraid of why I think I’m better than you.
What’s happening in the here and now is about the toppling of one particular notion:
The pretense that white America is being illegally and immorally disrespected by those who defy their betters.
Like the transparently immature and childish former American President, crowds of fragile white protestors, gun-toters and Kindergarten Konstitutionalists continue to pretend that there is a hierarchy of social status.
Such have no idea that their prancing and dancing reflects ignorance; no awareness that comparatively they were born on third base with a silver spoon in their mouths rather than a broken wooden ladle.
Such folks are part of my own racial identity. I am in their category. I believe I have much to learn about notions that I ignorantly took for granted all my life.
However, many among us white folk are afraid of a mental and moral checkup – much in the same way someone who suspects they might have a terminal illness refuses to go see the doctor and learn the truth.
It’s a truth about what the internal thoughts and assumptions that generate fear, hostility and fragile thinking might be.
Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.
We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses.
These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. –
DiAngelo, Robin J, White Fragility. Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
Over the hundreds of years of our evolution from a band of rebellious colonies many who look back seem to have enshrined concepts and notions that never existed;
… many deliberately ignore the good and evil sources of how status, regard and dignity were formed.
Right Wing Evangelicals with home-school textbooks insist the the Founding Fathers were the same kind of judgmental, literal-minded religious conservatives they themselves pretend to be today.
The truth is, our current representative Right Wing Evangelical Christians were spawned in the early twentieth century. The holier-than-thou notions of who is saved and who isn’t with its consequential discriminatory mindset involving holy worthiness is our own modern curse.
It’s not something social conservatives can pin on our Founders, many of whom were deists as well as slave owners.
Bottom line is that the sands of racial purity are shifting underfoot with every passing moment. The BLM movement long ago lost its limitation of being nothing more than a single racial minority making noise.
All non-whites have skin in this exploding movement. In truth white folks have skin in this game and if we don’t reset their priorities we will be left behind and left out.
Wise, truth-facing and truth-confessing whites need to stop pretending that their High Castle is forever
White Privilege Denial: An unconscious conspiracy to consider a fiction the truth.
In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific “conviction” and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.
During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted without question the genetic and cultural superiority of the Caucasian; they also asserted that the Caucasian race held a monopoly on evolutionary progress, arguing that “inferior races” were no more than evolutionary survivors doomed by their genetic legacy to remain outcasts from evolution.
Hereditarians and evolutionists believed that “less fit” human races were perishing from the rigors of civilization’s struggle and competition. Indeed, racial inferiority lay at the very foundation of the evolutionary framework and, remaining there, rose to the pinnacle of “truth” with the myth of scientific certainty.
The fiction was never the truth, regardless of who told us white folks it was. Where I grew up Native Americans didn’t exist even though place–names and roadside histories said otherwise. Who then existed that did not enjoy the same privileged color identity as me?
Well, Injuns, Mexicans and those whom my grandmother called Negroes and my grandfather niggers.
Who to blame for how I learned to see the world?
Parents?
Extended family?
Community of white farm folks.
Church that taught scripture and doctrine regarding Nephites as white, fair and delightsome and Lamanites as dark, loathsome, wild, savage and unworthy?
Family, community, church, county, state, and nation all of them contributed to my social domestication. They dished it out, but I’m the one who ate it.
What got promoted in the name of whiteness as good and non-whiteness as less-than got became a fiction-turned-into-fact in my young mind.
I bought it, internalized it and lived as if the fiction were the truth.
Own what you say and do. Don’t point at someone else for what you believe and do.
Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled recounts the Myth of Orestes:
The Myth of Orestes and the Furies
… Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra murdered her husband, Orestes’ father, Agamemnon. This crime in turn brought down the curse upon Orestes’ head, because by the Greek code of honour a son was obliged, above all else, to slay his father’s murderer. Yet the greatest sin a Greek could commit was the sin of matricide (killing one’s mother).
Orestes agonised over his dilemma. Finally he did what he seemingly had to do and killed his mother. For this sin the gods then punished Orestes by visiting upon him the Furies, three ghastly harpies who could be seen and heard only by him and who tormented him night and day with their cackling criticism and frightening appearance.
Pursued wherever he went by the Furies, Orestes wandered about the land seeking to atone for his crime. After many years of lonely reflection and self-abrogation Orestes requested the gods relieve him.
A trial was held by the gods. Speaking in Orestes defense, Apollo argued that he had engineered the whole situation that had placed Orestes in the position in which he had no choice but to kill his mother, and therefore Orestes really could not be held responsible.
At this point Orestes jumped up and contradicted his own defender, stating “It was I, not Apollo, that murdered my mother!” The gods were amazed. Never before had a member of the House of Atreus assumed such total responsibility for himself and not blamed the gods.
Who taught you and pushed, pulled or dragged you into this unconscious conspiracy to consider a lie the truth?
Do you go along with those of inferior minds who consciously or unconsciously attempt a social coercion to conform with the conspiracy?
If you still haven’t taken a stand either way regarding the myth of racial superiority …
If you hide behind the gaslight slogan “All Lives Matter” …
Then it’s time for your personal and civic maturity. Tackle your own version of believing the fiction. Think about your active and passive reactions.
Do you actively or passively participate in ridicule, demeaning ideas, persecution or exclusion?
Is it easier to look the other way rather than accept maturity in thought, word and deed?
Does the implication of white hypocrisy regarding white privilege bring you to self-righteous and self-conscious alligator tears?
Well, grow up my friend.
Change is upon us.
It’s long overdue.
It’s time has come.
I myself am not sure how to proceed other than speaking up even when my voice shakes;
I know my indignation is real whether I’m courageous about it or not;
I never again want to give in to the temptation to remain silent when supposed white friends, white authority figures and pretend patriots defecate all over our national dignity and honor.
They’re doing it within their own immaturity; their personal cowardice – based on a fiction we can no longer accept as real.
The Saga of Crooked Donald 