Whiteness is But One Way of Diversity.

What do White supremacists and anti-White radical Leftists (total racists themselves) have in common? They both believe that Whiteness is not a result of tremendous human cultural diversity. They both wrongly believe that Whiteness is a pure and unblemished ancestry of only one perfectly unified group of people with no true cultural blending or deeply complex human heritage. The difference is that where White supremacists idealize the fantasy of unchanging Whiteness and endanger other peoples while they’re at it, the racist Radical Leftists scapegoat and demonize that same racial fantasy, which they, too, have bought into, aggressively applying their imaginary ideas of racial sins committed to all living White people. We begin by untangling this mess with the love and pride which acknowledges that Whiteness is valid and worthy of ancestral celebration precisely because it is but one of so many complex human ancestries. Whiteness is valid and worthy because I am not only French, only Scottish, only English, only Danish, only German, or only Swedish. I am ALL OF THESE, and my life as the living descendant of this diversity, especially as an American, cannot and should not be parsed into ancestral pieces. Whiteness is itself but one of the living proofs of cultural diversity. Any who fail to recognize this ought to be challenged passionately. As for me and my living Whiteness, I will decide who I am.

The Hide of My Whiteness

I know my Whiteness is something I can never shed. It is this literal animal hide I carry upon me, as evident to my fellow humans as their ancestral hide is to me. I have to have some self-protective limits around it: my ancestors live in it and my own blue rivers run under it. I cannot take onto it all the pains of those who have suffered because of some parts of its history. But this white hide of mine is already as uncolonizedly animal as yours and convictedly no less wild or softly permeable to the heart beating beneath it than that of my darkest brethren. It did not come into the world begging anyone’s pardon, nor does it demand answer from others. My Whiteness can adapt and breathe and blend and expand its identity and self-understanding, but it doesn’t want to apologize for its existence.

In Search of American Peoplehood and the Strangeness of Being Human

It is the same old strangeness, finding myself here, waking up in the garden of Eden past dark. The Gardener is hiding in shadows and the fruit of the tree of knowledge lies half-eaten at our feet. Even the snake is nowhere clearly seen, and we feel only our own hominid nakedness in the night. Where are the skins of the ancestors, thickened and fur-lined? How vulnerable is this humanity.
I see that the conversation I have entered is a passionate one. I do have a strong instinct myself to run headlong into a fight for the true and the beautiful. But I joined this group to find lovable centrist and conservative friends that I can engage with face to face, not on the darned internet! What a sorrowful fill I’ve had of that in my dumber days. I say, if we argue, let’s do it with laughter together, live in the body! I’m all for hashing things out, but my heart is tired of not trusting or even knowing my people. And who are my people? We Americans are, and now I shall not be moved from it. How I want to live in peoplehood together. How I have stupidly missed this before, looking everywhere for this providential identity I already have. This peoplehood of we Americans: I want to keep my eyes on this, look forward to this, carry this with me.
The older strangeness of being human never ceases to tug at me. It hangs bittersweetly on the heart, you know. It follows at the back of my neck, just there under the hairline where the stem of the reptile branches into the tenderness of mammalian affection. What to do with this strangeness, this knowledge we carry of our hearts’ own utter defenselessness?
I have set out to find this country of my birth. Where are you, my people? Where are you, my mountains? I am in search of the flowering of the spirit.