It’s Not Just Video Games — It’s Everything
Once you see the truth, it is impossible to unsee it. What I do see people do is excuse it, explain it away, and lie about it. Yes, I’m talking to you.
White supremacist, patriarchal capitalism (whiteness) is the core of our societal ills. This is the poison. This poison affects everything in the world slightly differently, but with the same results — poverty, exploitation, and violence. The people who are the most violent take what they want under the threat of torture and death. They institute laws to protect their actions, laws they never intended to apply to them. They create a security force who benefits from protecting the violent and greedy in return for access to some of that power and its benefits. If they do not comply, they are violently disposed of — be it socially, emotionally, or physically. Those who are victimized by both this violence and its enforcers must resort to disobeying the laws to survive. Because the victims greatly outnumber those in power, it becomes imperative to escalate the violent punishments inflicted, while simultaneously rewarding people for complying with the laws and ignoring the consequences inflicted on those who only sought to survive.
Violence is rewarded. Apathy is encouraged. Community is fractured as we all struggle for the same rationed resources that are intentionally restricted to ensure that we are desperate and only have access to the same limited resources as those in their immediate vicinity. Black Friday is a clear example of the battle royal whiteness loves to create and mock for entertainment. They create entire narratives blaming victims for their poverty while ensuring it remains profitable for them. And the clear beneficiaries of this chosen behavior are white people.
Whiteness assigns a price tag to humanity and not only are we all for sale, we’re all expendable. We are fodder for the engines of their greed, and we are sold the dream that if we work hard enough that we can, too, become voracious monsters who dehumanize everyone in the quest for personal power. “Protect us so you can join us” and because the punishments for rebelling are so steep and many of us are too scared to do anything, we cling to the illusion of escaping this manufactured shithole or kill ourselves trying.
We don’t need to imagine an apocalyptic dystopia. Many of us are living it — some burning out slowly while others are not so lucky. And in times like these, I wonder if maybe they are the lucky ones because even though my life isn’t in hardcore survival mode, it’s an icy, pain-laden, uphill journey with no reward in sight.
Because I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, I have read and watched a lot of aspirational visions for the future written by many american visionaries. I’ve read and watched comics universes where the only limit on the possibilities are the ones they create. I play video games with space travel, dragons, fantastical creatures that only existed in the imaginations of their creators. And what I find every single time is a society centered around oppression and violence. I find imaginary worlds consisting of the same social hierarchies brutally enforced. The different being that instead of Black people or POCs, the violently oppressed are cat people, lizard people, mutants, dark elves, trolls, or other humanoid but not human sentient beings. Oppression is always part of the narrative. Violence is always part of the game. White supremacist patriarchal capitalist violence is encoded into our art, politics, and day-to-day lives. It is rendered heroism through the filter of time and glorified through the lens of capitalism. Whiteness values violent suppression of thought and will. It glorifies conformity and the illusion of kindness. It is a bow of faux benevolence wrapped around the gift of blood and entrails. It is a brutally violent lie that victimizes everything it touches. And I don’t know how to stop it without becoming its righteous mirror, inflicting on them what they have inflicted upon the world.
I sit here shocked but not shocked at how people refuse to acknowledge the violence of whiteness and how it informs culture globally. How it has repeatedly harmed entire civilizations and erased their contributions only to be replaced with an ill-informed replica that actively seeks to revert to its primitive ignorance that resulted in unnecessary death from excessive filth. I’ve seen whiteness dismiss personal hygiene, vaccinations, holistic medicine, music, fashion, culture, and almost anything onto which they can superimpose their whiteness. Whiteness perverts everything it touches because its priority is to elevate its mediocrity to excellence and to do that it must destroy everyone and everything that challenges that idea. Whiteness seeks to ensure that not only will we never be great as a species, but that it will kill us all to keep that from ever happening.
There is no logic to this, only an immoral drive to overwhelm, overpower, and oversee everyone and everything and the only thing that will stop it is its overwhelming destruction that they will never do to themselves.
Everyone who co-signs on this bullshit is shit. Everyone who helps them with this agenda is garbage. Every person who sacrifices pieces of themselves and others to maintain this shitshow is immoral, anti-human, and unethical. We train our young to be predatory monster, protect them, and then wonder why they turn on us. We enable monsters to thrive in our silence and our complacency and then wonder why the world in burning. We thoughtlessly consume the scraps of whiteness and then wonder why we cannot find community to help destroy the monster. We are its little minions keeping the machine running in hopes we will not be fed to it.
We are the sustenance of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. We were born fed to it; we are the food that sustains its existence and our creations constantly reflect that.
When are we going to make them choke on it?
Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on August 5, 2019.
