Mourning Supremacy
Can I be a less shitty pioneer?
From the series: Following the Regenerative Rabbit
A few months into my search for regenerative community and white supremacy rehab, de-centering my “self” was starting to become messy. Bayo Akomolafe calls it “Chasmagrophy. Research in the cracks… [A place] to put wounds to work, to treat them as portals.” I was in the crack. I was living into the questions, “Is it possible to create community without perpetuating white supremacy? If so, who do I/We have to become?” (If you want things to “make sense”, stop reading now.)
“To find our way, we must get lost.” — Bayo Akomolafe
I turned 40 under lock down in the year 2020 and looking back I can see the hurt, terror, and sadness rumbling in the belly. Most of my friends were busy being forged in new identities as parents and partners and my ovaries longed to nest on land in organic architecture. I was confused by a resurgence of longing and frustration at life for the things I still did not have, a definition of success I didn’t attain, and the paradoxical knowing it was all nonsense in the first place. My inner 23-year-old was loud and clear; I was a giant loser for not having my own house, a shit ton of money, fame, universe-denting social impact, and a husband I still want to have sex with.
Even while I was running away from capitalism’s definition of success and heading into the wilds of Montana, I wanted to be validated by it. I wanted to burn down its sick systems while still being on the VIP list, aspiring to be the generous philanthropist showering others with dolla dolla bills. I was simultaneously mourning the fact I wasn’t supreme enough and the promise of safety and security supremacy supposedly offered. It was starting to drive me crazy. The parts of me longing to win a[rigged] game and the parts desperate for a new world emerging.
“Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathing.” Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire
“Regenerative Community,” in my mind, is a group of diverse [in every possible way] humans coming together to practice putting nature at the center of our lives. Whoever hears the “If you build it” whisper of their ancestors and follows the invisible thread to a place. People who understand that all the “solutions” exist to our current predicament, it is only a collective will to practice that is required. Our neighborhood would be like most where people do whatever it is they do in the privacy of their passive home but here people will love to share meals, ownership [if that is even required], and the stewarding of land and kids. My neighbor would be an elder like Robin Wall Kimmerer I could follow around, learning the language of sweetgrass and how to embody a regenerative way of being. It might be terribly boring at first but slowly, slowly the addiction to being busy and important will wear off, as something subtle and sweet emerges. I don’t know exactly what it will look like but I think there will be singing.
In November of 2020 I am deep into an anti-racism course, “Heal Thyself”, with Reverend Brig Feltus and starting to dissolve alone on a ranch in rural Montana. I feel like some kind of reverse pioneer, heading East looking for land and home. Can I be a less shitty pioneer? Can I actually avoid perpetuating the same mistakes as my predecessors? It was election time and Trump flags were snapping loudly on the back of giant pick-up trucks. Am I supposed to respect this local culture? At night there was a glorious, vibrating silence and still I was having trouble sleeping. Between the millions of acres of wilderness just beyond my bedroom and the splintering of democracy in my News Feed, I have never felt more afraid of the world.
At some point in the dissolving I lost my center. A center I had spent a decade cultivating and facilitating for others. I could feel it happening bit by bit until I was an astronaut floating in space, tethered to center by a thin cable of faith. The moment I lost my tether was seeing a crowd of smug white faces as a black man’s feet swayed above their heads. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a photo like this, but this time I was unhooked. So many images of smug white faces in a landscape of black suffering overwhelmed all of my spiritual training. White fragility? Absolutely. I am fragile as hell. Somewhere between that photograph and the BBC Documentary, RACISM: A HISTORY, my center was annihilated in the scream.
Looking back, I can try and describe that moment but while in it, it was all despair and hopelessness, ice cream and netflix; a dissociation disconnection loop. I lost all trust that I had any awareness beyond an unconscious white supremacist lens. How can I know? How can I know or trust anything? The best metaphor I can point to is “The Sunken Place” from Jordan Peele’s film, GET OUT. It is an intentionally separate void beneath the floor that his black protagonist is forced into by his white girlfriend’s hypnotist mother. It is the space created by a perception of whiteness as supreme that creates a Truman Show world we are ALL competing for roles in and feel paralyzed to shift. It is in this space, we buy into, play accomplice, and prop up a collective delusion of separation. I do not pretend to say my experience is the same as a black person in this void, clearly not. Watch the movie. However, in this space of perceived psychological separation, I finally understand how any misunderstanding of supremacy, especially white and human, is going to kill us all.
When the slave ship made its way across The Atlantic ocean from the ports of West Africa filled with hundreds of stolen black men, women, and children and crashed into the shores of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, the shore became the slave ship. The fledgling collection of colonies became the ship and all who lived here were cast in roles as captains, first mates, cabin boys, and cargo.
— Bayo Akomolafe
Not everyone will respond to an anti-racism education the same. I have a deep neural groove in my brain, generations long, that easily gets looped into a savior belief set. I know I am in it when I am trying to “maximize social impact”, nothing I do is ever enough, and I am taking responsibility for the suffering of the world. The early stages of de-centering my “self” led to a snap of the rubber band. I ejected myself out of this white body and ate my shame into a widening gut. I avoided all of the spiritual practices I knew would actually help. How dare I live in peace when there is so much suffering? Without a doubt, all of this shame and self-righteous loathing of white people was my resistance to witnessing the pain of black people. I made it about me, about my shame, my responsibility. I also invoked my privilege to avoid feeling the pain directly by distracting by any means necessary for awhile. I chose rapidfire middle-finger guns in everyone’s direction.
Brig invited us to “remember who we were before we forgot” and offered us an enormous amount of material to read and watch by renowned black authors. (I will not mention the content specifically to respect her curriculum.) One woman’s PhD dissertation finally penetrated my loathing. She helped explain the fertile ground upon which we built white supremacist systems in America, how it became the “air we breathe”. Many early white settlers, like my ancestors, came here running from famine, feudalism, and brutal aristocratic and religious oppression. When they arrived, especially in the South, poor white people used to being at the bottom of economic and social hierarchies were offered an immediate raise in social capital. Enslaved black people, it was taught, evangelized, and agreed to, were now considered “the bottom”. No matter how disgusting and shameful that rationale may be, I get it. A perfect storm of ignorance, unworthiness, dehumanization, religion, and capitalism can make human monsters.
I just saw a beat up old sedan at a gas station in town with a bumper sticker that read, “Certified white. Born this way.” I wanted to take a bat to their already cracked windshield. The sticker captures white supremacy perfectly, as if whiteness is something of which to be proud because it holds inherent worth. It is this very identification with a manufactured identity that keeps poor white people poor and clinging to a made up idea of superiority, yet dying at record rates of suicide and drug and alcohol addiction.
The worst part of letting go of the myth of any form of supremacy, be it white, human or otherwise, is in the horrifying realization that we are all exactly the same. I have exactly the same amount of worth as any other human, ant, deer, or Pine tree. Even that wretch at the gas station. No matter how “good” I am, I will never be “better than” or “chosen”. The profound Improv Commandment of “yes, and” is always at work. All facets and expressions of life are co-existing in an ecology of relationships. It isn’t a pyramid, never was. Without a set of metrics for an ego to measure its value, it will inevitably invent one, and compete to uphold it. “Whiteness” as supreme was invented and now we live in the world it created. I, for one, would like to get out.
But I can’t. There is no getting out or away from what is happening here in any rational sense. No regenerative, off-grid community exists where I can be separate from extractive ways of being. Shame spirals, although infuriating in their seeming futility, hopefully facilitate some necessary dissolving, revealing some subterranean basement with an eye of a needle for an exit for us to swizzle through and emerge as something else. All I know is that my buying into the illusion of separation in order to “fight it” is not the answer. The paradox is a forge of some kind, all shapeshift and swizzle. How dare I live in peace when there is so much suffering? Then again, if peace is available, how dare I not?
Read the last installment, “Leaving Oz for Kansas (or Montana)” and the next, Regeneration and Frank Lloyd Wright.
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