Shades of White

            White Supremacy is a very real force, historically and Today. With the still-stinking carcass of the legacy of slavery and legal segregation festering in our minds, and housing and employment discrimination, along with a host of pressing social tensions not yet resolved, many are tempted to see America as the hub of racism. But culturally and historically, much of Europe and the English colonies that lacked a Revolution such as ours’ are unconsciously ensnared by subliminal Eurocentric values and judgments of which many younger Americans today are blissfully ignorant.

            The first myth we must tackle is that these prejudices are commonly held to uplift and promote all peoples with lower melanin levels whose ancestors came from the Continent. As has been demonstrated by Friedrich Nietzsche in his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, with his clever, all-too-clever philological insight, the Aryan cult of nobility first imposed itself in Persia, India and south-eastern Europe. Many of the people living and leading in these areas had been of various African, Semitic and Mediterranean origin; their skin, whether black, brown, yellow, red or olive, along with their oily, kinky, curly, or bushy hair, were taken by the new militaristic elite as an identifying marker of their otherness, which, to coarse minds, translated as inferiority.

            There were certainly many cultural and social innovations that these invaders brought with them, some of which the world is a better place for, today. It would be wrong to turn a mirror to intolerance and say that the Indo-Europeans are inherently bad or that all white people are racist, especially since the majority were soldiers and laborers following orders, that they may survive and sustain their families, and they did not all luck out and become aristocrats.

            But plenty did, and they guarded the land and their cultural prerogative jealously against perceived threats both real and imagined. Over millennia this has fostered a resentment towards those seeking to better themselves, especially those whose “otherness” seemed easy to pinpoint: Jews since a couple centuries BC, Africans particularly during the rise of Empire in Western Europe and after, Native Americans and Pacific peoples in the age of exploration, and, in some societies more so than others, women, from whom all tribes, races and nations are born.

            To say that I am somehow privileged for being ‘white’ is not entirely groundless. But I can tell that when my face starts getting red and my hair is not neat and combed, when I walk with a stocky trudge rather than slender ‘grace’, not everyone approves of me as being truly ‘white’, either.