Violence is the White Normal
The past year we’ve seen more media coverage of the violence of white supremacy. This isn’t new shit. We all know this isn’t new. Religion has been an exploitative and vicious tool used by shitty humans since…just since. All our written history confirms it. And it’s not necessarily the religion that’s the issue. It is how people use it to gain and maintain power over others.
You can look back at the crusades, the holy wars allegedly fought to push forward christianity. We know that the true motivation was not to spread the word of some god, but to conquer other nations. Regardless of whatever religious movement you see, you have to ask yourself what someone has to gain by converting you. They say it’s to save your soul, but is it really?
Regardless of the whys, we quite clearly see religion being used as a tool to discriminate, persecute, exclude, and even attack people whose religion has been declared “wrong” by dominant culture. In America, we see this with Islam, which, more than an attack on religion, is an excuse for white people to attack people of color (POCs). There are white Muslims, yet that’s not who we see or hear being harassed. Much like the anti-immigration movement in amerikkka, the attacks are skin-color based. White immigrants aren’t being stopped on the street and detained by immigration kidnappers; brown people are. It’s not white people being snatched up for not having “appropriate” identification on them at all times; it’s people who don’t look white enough.
Not that white people have ever needed a reason to attack POCs. Unfortunately, this is the modus operandi for white people for as long as anyone can remember. The entire rhetoric around white history is conquer and rule. Nowhere in european history is the idea of co-existing. It is always about conquering and assimilating. They gain power through murder, subjugation, and exploitation. They maintain power through their love of torture, terrorism, and complete willingness to maim and annihilate anyone who resists them, and this includes friends and family. They protect their power (i.e. comfort) at all costs and refuse to entertain anything that challenges or contradicts it. Resistance is met with extreme violence — the police is testimony to that.
White people made themselves into the best monsters and made that shit their moral code. They normalized violence and brutality for white people then demonized and criminalized it for everyone else. Best. PR. Strategy. Ever.
Think about it. Open carry laws, the insistence on the right to bear arms, but Black people, including children, who have anything that might be a weapon are brutalized and murdered.
There are currently self-appointed militias, white people with guns, actively patrolling the U.S./Mexico border. Yet, the Black Panther Party is painted as violent anarchists for having any guns at all. And if you think those militias aren’t murdering people, you are living a lie.
ICE agents are audaciously rounding up and detaining POCs with zero oversight. Like the militias, this is something these “officials” want to do. The only difference between them is official government permission.
Torture, mutilation, and murder were considered family-friendly events by white people — so much so that postcards were made commemorating the horrors. But Black people are violent and scary, Muslim people are terrorists, and Mexican people are rapists. Yeah, no.
White people are violent as fuck and instead of owning that shit and trying to fix it, they spend all their time trying to pathologize it to prove it’s an aberration or a form of extremism, when it’s not. Just this past week three people were murdered by white supremacist civilians. White supremacist police have been murdering Black people as usual, but the surge in white people both verbally and physically attacking POCs and Black people is outrageous and terrifying. And every fucking time, white people bend over backwards to show how those people are outliers. How they are different. How that’s a one-off that just keeps happening through some fluke. Anything to avoid addressing their barbaric past and violent present.
These people aren’t crazy. They are doing what white amerikkkan society has always done — enforcing white supremacy by any means necessary — even if it means killing white people, too. They advocate for violence through media — there’s a reason why Black characters always die. They advocate for it in the news — there’s a reason why news stations use mugshots of Black people, even when they are the victim of a crime. Black people get murdered and without fail, if they have any criminal record, it’s mentioned. In the meantime, a white man can murder people and we get to hear how he was a “gentle loner.”
Amerikkka humanizes white savages who kill and dehumanizes Black people and POCs for dying.
So when I see white christians calling for violence, crying white genocide, and threatening to take this country back, I don’t see outliers. I see the norm. These aren’t fringe groups. These people are the core. Trump supporters aren’t extremists — they are the majority, because even though Clinton won the popular vote, she won it with a large swath of POC voters. White people voted for 45. A lot of white people voted for 45. And again, these are not outliers; they are the white norm.
And the thing is, white people know this. Every supposedly liberal white person has “conservative” friends and relatives that they say are entitled to their opinions while never acknowledging that conservative views are polite white supremacy. What we have is that phenomenally successful PR campaign that rebranded racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, and genocide as “conservative.” Mass murder and enslavement definitely sounds better when it’s just called conservative values. It also sounds great when the catchphrase is “Make America Great Again.”
PR is a hell of a drug.
The fight for equality isn’t about Black people or POCs learning to work with white people. It’s about white people overcoming their genocidal tendencies and learning to accept they aren’t the best. They aren’t dominant. They aren’t the bastion of creativity and learning they’ve told themselves they are. Throughout history, white people are violent, terrifying, greedy bullies willing to inflict the most horrific of atrocities on others while standing in judgment of those who inflict the same upon them. White people traveled around the world and murdered POCs into submission and did it proudly. So this shit, this violence, isn’t anything new. In fact, POCs have spent the last couple hundred years busting our asses to fucking civilize white people so they can actually coexist with us…because their usual move is to kill and enslave everyone they could and enforce their “dominance” through terrorism.
White history is terrorism. White supremacy is terrorism. White fragility is psychological terrorism, as are white tears. Denial of this is a lie. Refusal to admit and accept this is a falsehood of immeasurable proportion. If white people want to know why there are so many issues around racism, they need to look in a mirror and own their shit. They need to own their ignorance, throw that shit in the trash and start learning their real history and try to make themselves better humans.
White people insistence on pretending it didn’t happen is fueling the violence we are seeing right now. It’s time for them to stop rebranding their brutality and start dealing with this shit. White people have been the best monsters. How about trying to be the better humans instead.
Originally published at talynnkel.com.
