Whiteness is a drug you’re addicted to.
And I know it’s a drug, cuz I’ve been addicted…
When you’re at Burning Man or some festival or whatever surrounded by your friends and you don’t notice that none of them are black and you don’t notice that there’s a certain way they all talk, even those of them who aren’t white, and you don’t notice that there’s a certain female body type that achieves maximum social capital, and you don’t notice there’s a certain male personality and bank account type that achieves maximum social capital, and there are any number of other things you don’t notice as you revel in the ecstasy of simple physical drug physical sexual physical safety pleasure you are addicted to whiteness.
It’s a simple drug, really, it’s a sort of calculated purity one part theft one part oppression one part hypocrisy to give it edge — crush it all up together and drag it up your nostril
When you’re celebrating an opulent Christmas empty of traditional meaning or any semblance of connection to the Divine, a Christmas without mention of the man who sacrificed everything for his connection to his innermost Truth and a man who was not white and a man who knew in his bones that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” yet you surround yourself with presents and food and revel in your excess and practice no Charity and nothing remotely related to Grace and white snow and white tinsel and white
The action of the drug is basically that it feels good. It’s a rush, the rush of simple pleasure untinged by nuance or complication or origin: it’s cold coca cola on a warm summer day (without the unpleasant “where did this coca cola come from?”) and it’s apple pie and ice cream (without the “who picked the apples?”) and so much has been written about this but the thing that as far as I can tell has not been written about it is
That it’s a drug. It’s a drug and you’re addicted. And your addiction is burning cities, and your addiction is torching the earth, and your addiction is an addiction in a long line of addiction, in a whole net of addiction which has ensnared almost the entire world in a net of colonization which has stolen the lands and the fruit and the honey and the milk from those who lovingly cultivated it and then turned that land and fruit and honey and milk into a bowl of dust and doesn’t realize because part of the drug is that it has the side effect of the shriveling of long-term memory, the forgetting, the inability to stop and think about what those words on the wind mean…
And, like all drugs, the high does not maintain, and now you need more and better access to the simplicity of domination — the ease of getting what you did not earn — the accompanying feeling that the fact that you got what you didn’t earn must mean that you are really on easy street —that you don’t even need to earn — that you can just have — and have — and have more —and as your dependence deepens you build all of the edifice of defense that anyone who has ever had or worked with or known someone with a Severe Drug Problem knows to be deeper and more complex than any pit of hell and thick as any jungle and we haven’t even gotten to the real problem here’s the real problem:
The real problem is it’s like you started doing cocaine but didn’t even know it was a drug and you’ve been doing it for years and it’s in your food and your water and you’ve never even come down once. Sure, the supply shrivels sometimes, and you get that itch, but it comes back it always comes back, it always always comes back, gotta get that next hit, everything will be back to normal soon and you’ll have your cocaine (and I think it is some weird cosmic joke that cocaine is so white and psychoactively similar to the drug that is whiteness itself and also done by the whitest of the white: the bankers, the VCs, the old boys, the rich snobby nothing men) anyway point being soon you’ll have your next hit but then suddenly. now. the supply shrivels up and it’s actually shriveling up for real this time
And now you’re in for the worst fucking comedown of your life. You are really in the shit now, because you never even realized it was a drug and maybe you don’t even realize it now and so you’re having this hollow feeling this tired feeling that those of us who have quit things that were hard to quit in their lives know: am I hungry? am I thirsty? what is it I need? what is actually going on right now? You’re confused and you’re getting the grumps and the shakes and you don’t know why yet and you don’t realize that this is really one of the most crucial moments in what will be actually the defining arc of your life: your battle to free yourself from your addiction to whiteness
(But, whiteness is not a drug. Whiteness is much deeper and vaster than a drug. Whiteness is every drug and every drug cartel and every distribution system, all wrapped up into one. It’s a seemingly endless graph that you are just one node in and you are so far beyond addicted, you are actually a part of it, you are a part of the drug itself that you are addicted to and…)
The first step is to realize that it’s a drug, and that you’re addicted, and that you need to stop, you need to stop now, not one more line, you need to stop now, the entire earth is screaming for you to stop, your mother, your father, your ancestors, my ancestors, all ancestors are screaming that it needs to stop it needs to stop it needs to stop it needs to stop no logic no defenses stop stop stop stop stop
