A Word for Collective Survival
Culture • noun • (kull-churr)
Definition: The practices and traditions that a group of people in a specific place create to sustain themselves in perpetuity
Origin: English
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
Earlier this week, Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, made a statement that succinctly speaks to SCL’s approach to culture, and how an ethnocidal society attempts to live without culture.
Despite being the best team in the NBA, the Warriors recently lost two out of three matches, and have failed to make the playoffs for the past two seasons. The Warriors brief dip in form prompted questions about whether Kerr needed to make a significant change to the team to get them back to winning ways. Kerr answered this inquiry by speaking about the culture he has developed since becoming the Warriors’ head coach in 2014.
"If you can't maintain your culture during the down times, then you don't really have a culture,” said Kerr. “It's just dependent on winning. The culture has to survive losing stretches."
Kerr was speaking in reference to a basketball team, but his perspective applies to all aspects of life.
Culture is what people create in order to survive and it must be able to last in good times and bad. Bad times will inevitably happen, and if your culture cannot survive during times of difficulty then you have not created a culture. You would have created something incapable of sustaining your people.
Instead you might have something that appears to be the same as a culture, but is far less sustainable and is contingent upon winning in order to survive. Ethnocide cultivates a façade of culture because ethnocide is dependent upon division and oppression, with oppressive ethnociders dictating the status quo. Ethnocide’s status quo is a “culture” dependent on the ethnociders “winning,” and that is not a culture.
A Culture of Survival
When I describe culture as survival and sustainability, I normally get two responses.
Firstly, people acknowledge that they’ve never thought of culture in that way and primarily associated culture with the arts, entertainment, and other activities that could be labelled as “cultured.”
Secondly, people seem underwhelmed by this perspective because they would like for culture to be more than merely survival.
Despite the life-threatening dangers of global climate change and COVID-19, we still prefer a discourse where existence is assumed, inevitable, and taken for granted. When we assume that survival is inevitable we distort the meaning of culture and are more prone to engaging in deadly, unsustainable actions.
To truly understand culture, we must focus on survival and sustainability, and build from there.
In a previous newsletter, I spoke about the Dutch’s cultural practice of polderen and how its focus on survival has often placed the Dutch at the forefront of European and global culture. I also provide a more in depth analysis of polderen in my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America.
Polderen derives from the fact that much of the Netherlands is below sea level. For about one thousand years, the Dutch have used dykes, canals, dams and windmills to pump out water and create new land from what was once submerged below water. However, this practice puts Dutch society in a precarious position because a heavy storm or malfunctioning windmill could result in large swaths of land getting flooded. Polderen is the culture that the Dutch have made that emphasizes efficiently using their land and bringing the community together to sustain the polder. (Polder means reclaimed land.)
Polderen made the Dutch the preeminent voices on religious tolerance in Europe and the northern Renaissance. Despite being smaller than Maine, the Netherlands are the second largest agricultural producers in the world because of how efficiently they use the land. Also, as the threat of climate change grows, the Dutch have become global experts at building infrastructure to combat rising sea levels.
The aspect of Dutch culture that most people would describe as profound and revolutionary derives from focusing on survival and sustainability, and then building a meaningful society.
Polderen is not perfect nor contingent upon winning. When a larger than expected storm occurs, the Dutch do not conclude that polderen has failed. Instead, they apply polderen to come together to clean up the mess, recover, and determine the steps they need to take to prepare themselves for the next storm.
The communal actions that a people make in order to survive are not drudgery, they are fonts for meaning. Working together to help ensure that generations of people can have healthy, sustainable lives is one of the most meaningful actions in the world. This natural human need for survival and meaning creates culture.
A Culture of Destruction
Ethnocide is a thin veneer of “culture” obscuring a terroristic force of destruction because an ethnocidal society aspires to live via the destruction of the culture of the other. Colonizers actively and intentionally destroyed the culture of African and Indigenous peoples, and they derived meaning from this destruction.
Europeans vocally spoke about the need to “civilize” non-European people by destroying their culture and indoctrinating them with European culture. European colonizers even described this process as the white man’s burden. By destroying culture, they believed that they were improving the world. They found meaning from this destruction.
Additionally, ethnocidal destruction is dependent upon division because the ethnocider does not want to destroy their own culture. They want to live via destroying the culture of the other, therefore, they must create an other. Due to this division, the ethnocider also derives meaning from not being the other.
Within an ethnocidal society, the ethnocider’s “culture” is contingent on them “winning” or being able to oppress. The ethnocider does not have a culture but the façade of culture, and their absence of culture creates an unmistakable fragility.
In America, white Americans have long been the ethnocider and people of color the ethnocidee. However, this does not mean that all white people today are ethnociders. Instead white Americans have to work to liberate themselves from the hereditary sin of ethnocide, and many white Americans do that by equitably engaging with and forming relationships with people of color, and cultivating legitimate, sustainable culture.
Yet plenty of white Americans still perpetuate ethnocide and their absence of culture results in white fragility, white rage, and toxic masculinity. The specter of no longer “being on top” or dominating society exposes a toxic, rage-inducing fragility because equality threatens their way of life. Their “way of life” is oppression masquerading as a culture.
To make matters worse, America has been linguistically prevented from accurately defining this problem because America’s divisive, unsustainable, exploitative, culturally-destructive ethnocidal status quo has been defined as a “culture.”
America uses the word “culture” to describe something that is in fact the opposite and absence of culture. This would be the equivalent of a society only having the word “good” for describing both good and bad things.
Unsurprisingly, the people whose “culture” is dependent upon winning are the first to launch a “culture war” in order to sustain their culture. Equality or defeat would end their “culture,” so ethnocidal people will find meaning from perpetual warfare and not sustainability.
American conservatives and the Republican Party unabashedly profess that they have a culture of winning. Their “winning” culture also displays their fragility in that whenever they lose they aspire to change the rules, so that it is easier for them to win in the next elections.
Donald Trump proclaimed that he would “Make America Great Again” and bring back winning. Anyone who disagreed with him was a loser, and when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden he falsely proclaimed that the election was fraudulent. Trump encouraged Americans to attack the Capitol building to “Stop the Steal” so that he could “win” the election.
Millions of ethnocidal white Americans believe Trump’s lies because they need to “win” so that their “culture” survives. They believe that if Trump loses then they lose, and if they lose their entire acultural way of life will disappear. Millions of Americans are terrified of replacing their acultural “culture” with legitimate, sustainable culture.
For America to grow, thrive, and liberate itself from our ethnocidal ways of life, we need to embrace sustainable culture. We need a cultural evolution from destruction in the name of “culture” to cultivating sustainable and authentic culture.
