Friends, we’re in a dangerous moment right now, and the people who have normally carried the labor of democracy have been targeted by a white supremacist fascist. There is no way to topple fascism without divesting, once and for all, from white supremacy. But white supremacy isn’t just about slurs, discriminatory practices, and social norms that dehumanize an Other. White supremacy is, essentially, the java script that runs through all of your social, political, personal, and private interactions— including even your relationship to yourself. This episode talks about some of the ways white supremacy (that java script) encourages all of us, but especially white people to normalize what’s happening right now.
The thing is: you can dislike fascism, hate Donald, have Black friends and a trans cousin— but that doesn’t mean the virus in your java script isn’t running in the background. And it’s really important we recognize it and hack the code so that we can accurately assess what’s going on around us, recognize we have agency, and use that agency to be relentlessly noncompliant in the face of a Christian nationalist coup.
There is one more reason why committing to divest from white supremacy— to recognize and rewrite the virus operating in your java script: without doing that work, you won’t be able to build the networks of trust necessary for taking Trump down. When we fail to address the malware uploaded into our once-youthful spongey brains, that failure becomes evident in our words, our actions, and even our presence— and failure to do that inner work communicates danger to everyone who happens to be on society’s margins.
There’s no way to be a good comrade and an unsafe person at the same time.
Trust that Donald Trump has been doing everything to tear you away from your peers by planting divisive, untrue stereotypes about marginalized groups. To prevail, he’s banking on the logic of white supremacy, which allows him to think that if he talks about someone with contempt or if he says something so outrageous about his scapegoat that you start to wonder if he’s really a little bit right about what he’s saying. That’s how white supremacy gets you: it encourages you to mind your neighbor’s business, accept lies about them (rarely rooted in fact), and fracture solidarity among your neighbors. Trump et al. knows this strategy works, because he and other rich-ass white men have been playing the same song for centuries.
This podcast isn’t scholarly— it’s an invitation to stumble into the dark and feel things you’ve been told not to feel or even acknowledge. This podcast is a prayer that maybe some part of what I’ve said here becomes a skeleton key that allows you to step out of the smallness you’ve been told to inhabit.
Because neighbor, specifically my white neighbors, we need you to rip out the virus in your code that teaches you, in a million different ways, how to prop up the power structures of white supremacy. White supremacy is the ultimate confidence game, and it runs, almost entirely, on other white people’s complicity. Donald Trump’s entire fascist grift relies on his assessment that whites stick together and all the “undesirables” can go to a hell he’s created for them.
Don’t let Donny win.
And more than that: don’t let him hurt your neighbors.
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