Colonial Whiteness • noun • (kuh-loh-nee-uhl hwahyt-nis)
Definition: the infliction of terror and destruction upon non-white people to sustain white essence
Origin: SCL
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Following the racist shooting in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022, where Payton Gendron, a white male, entered a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood and fatally shot 10 people and injured three more, much time has been spent analyzing the racist manifesto he left behind and the beliefs that shaped his terrorist ideology and actions.
From his manifesto, we’ve learned that he believed in the “Great Replacement” theory which speculates that non-white people will eventually replace white people. The white individuals who espouse this fringe theory often focus on non-white immigrants as their primary source of frustration, but the supposed emphasis on immigration is a ruse that downplays the breadth and severity of this grotesque belief. The Buffalo attack shows that the Great Replacement theory is not merely about immigration. The Black residents of Buffalo that Gendron targeted were not immigrants.
To understand this attack and the beliefs that preceded it, however, we must divert our attention from non-white people, and instead focus on whiteness. If whiteness could hypothetically get replaced, we must examine whiteness and the anxious violent fragility expressed by these terrorists. No other community of people in America believe that they are about to be replaced, so why do some white people believe that replacement is just around the corner?
Colonial Whiteness and White Essence
In my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I shift America’s current discussion about race and racism to one about culture.
Ethnocide is the destruction of the culture of African people while keeping African bodies. Europeans stamped African people with a racial classification. Likewise, Europeans also stamped themselves with a racial classification, one predicated on false superiority to further justify their ethnocidal rampage in destroying African people by way of detaching them from their culture. In the ethnocidal New World of European colonization, the white and Black races lived in a perpetually divided, destructive, and cultureless world.
By having conversations about race, we are continuing our ethnocidal discourse, so it is imperative that we prioritize culture ahead of race in our language and understanding of the world. With ethnocide, the “white race” created and perpetuated a culture dependent on destroying culture.
Under ethnocide, the white and Black races exist within a culturally destructive environment, and this is the opposite to how human beings have lived since the beginning of time. A people’s culture derives from the place in which they all live collectively as they work together to survive in perpetuity. This is why the name that a collection of people call themselves normally derives from the name of the place in which they live. French people live in France. Japanese people live in Japan. A people’s identity and culture has an attachment to place.
In the United States, neither white nor Black have a linguistic attachment to a place. There are no places called “Black” or “White” where Black and white people come from, respectively.
When we talk about whiteness in America, we must realize that we are talking about an iteration of European culture that aspires to exist without the physical place that is Europe. This desire to remain European or sustain a European essence while never living in Europe is why white colonizers implemented the one-drop rule, in which one-drop of Blackness or non-whiteness would eradicate one’s white essence. This American or colonial whiteness exists differently than European whiteness even though they may have essentially the same ideas and beliefs.
In Europe, the Great Replacement theory focused almost exclusively on immigration. The fear is of people outside of Europe moving into Europe, and of how these African or Middle Eastern immigrants would replace white Europeans. Additionally, these people would bring their religions, and this started a wave of conservative, far-right Europeans proclaiming that Islam may take over the continent. These European fears are problematic on so many levels, but it is important to recognize how the American or colonial manifestation of these fears have similarities and profound differences.
Europeans are not indigenous to North America, so everything on this continent, and every place they colonize, equates to potential replacement. One drop of the land in which they currently live could erase their whiteness. The fear is not just non-white immigrants, but also Indigenous people and culture, and anything that is not European as they live outside of Europe.
Colonial whiteness encouraged Indigenous genocide because their whiteness could not coexist with Indigenous people. Colonial whiteness encouraged ethnocide upon African and Indigenous people because perpetual division and oppression would prevent the racial mixing that would eradicate and replace their whiteness.
White Americans like Payton Gendron, Tucker Carlson and others on Fox News, as well as the numerous others who support the Great Replacement theory are consumed with fear and anxiety because their colonial forefathers stamped them with a white identity that cannot peacefully exist in the world. If colonial white Americans stop terrorizing and dividing society, we will have a far more peaceful and equitable society instead of our dystopian norm.
Many Americans are fearful of replacing our dystopian society with an Eǔtopian one because we only know how to live within a dystopian status quo.
A Culture War Against Existence (A Perpetual War)
Whenever American society begins conversations pertaining to race and equality, conservative and Republican Americans often respond by proclaiming that a “culture war” is taking place. The cultures that are at war are rarely discussed or clearly articulated, but we all know that it is a war between what some Americans consider to be authentically American versus some iteration of an invading, foreign other. The reason why the two sides of the supposed culture war are rarely discussed is because once we have a clear understanding of the two sides, it becomes clear that it is a battle between good and evil, and that the “authentically American” side is the evil side.
Americans struggle to prevent our frequently recurring culture wars because the absence of culture wars would equate to the end of America as we know it.
America has constant cultural wars because the colonial white identity that has controlled this country since inception cannot survive if it equitably interacts with non-European cultures. One drop of the non-white people and non-European world in which they live would eradicate their whiteness. And as these non-white people grow and continue to express and embrace their humanity, their existence poses an essentialist threat to colonial whiteness.
Also, it is important to note that a decrease in the number of white Americans due to the equitable and peaceful coming together of people does not equate to an existential threat as it is commonly described by racist white people. No one’s existence is at threat in this scenario. The skin color of a future generation might change, but existence has never been threatened. The only thing that has been threatened by equality and peace is the idea or essence of a colonial whiteness that can only be unsustainably propped up at the expense of the existence of non-white people.
Likewise, the threat posed by Gendron, the Great Replacement theory, and colonial whiteness does present an existential threat to non-white people because these ethnocidal white people inflict terror and death upon non-white people in order to sustain their colonial white essence.
According to colonial whites, their essence precedes existence. Therefore, they are willing to destroy existence in order to sustain their essence. They cultivate perpetual warfare against existence and anything that is not themselves, and it is impossible for them to win this war.
The “replacement” that Gendron fears is one that the world desperately needs as we work to create a more equitable, united, and peaceful world.