“Conquering” is one of my favorite white words.
Any examination of social injustice, economic disparities or racial discrimination eventually reaches the point where the examiner will blame inequality on one of three culprits:
White supremacy
Capitalism
Conquering
I’m sure you’ve heard of white supremacy. It’s been doing its thing for a while. The “career highlights” section of white supremacy’s resumé includes race-based slavery, Jim Crow and the current president of the United States. Anyone who cites white supremacy as the source of America’s woes is not necessarily wrong.
Conversely, any vegan who has ever paired a Che Guevara T-shirt with vegan Birkenstocks will tell you that white supremacy is just a byproduct of capitalism. According to Bernie Sanders, many Black intellectuals and left-leaning, colorblind “it’s-class–not-race” warriors, capitalism is the real supervillain. And, in many ways, they’re correct. In a nation whose structure was built atop a foundation of racial hierarchy, white supremacy might be the most American form of class division.
Then, there are these people:
I’m sure you’ve heard someone whitesplain away inequality, injustice and violence by noting that they shouldn’t be castigated just because their forefathers were good at “conquering” other lands, cultures and people. And, in all fairness, they have a point. After all, to the victor go the spoils. That’s how history has always worked. And if you don’t like capitalism, white supremacy or being conquered, go back to…oh, wait, their ancestors conquered that continent, too.
What if everybody is wrong?
What if capitalism is not that bad? What if socialism has the same problems? Every society has its own unique social flaws; what if white supremacy is just a uniquely American glitch in the system we built? What if we are just one collective casualty in the long history of conquerors?
No matter which of these theories you believe, there’s only one thing that white supremacists, capitalists, every failed socialist experiment and history’s greatest conquerors all have in common:
What if it’s white people?
Today’s Reading List
How Redlining Shaped Black America by Michael Harriot and Felice Léon
The Medieval Empire of Ghana by A. J. H. Goodwin
The Clapback by Michael Harriot
The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Will He Lynch Letter: How White People Were Invented by Michael Harriot
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