Where We Seek Love
I believe that white supremacy is the attempt to love oneself through the subjugation of others. A while back I had someone ask me what the opposite of this statement was - in other words; what’s the wounded equivalent for the rest of us, what’s ours to heal? I sat with this, and worked through this, for a long time. I recognize that there’s a tendency for folks to try and create an alternative - to try and manufacture the idea of “reverse racism” (which is actually a fiction used to perpetuate white supremacy). There is no systemic, collective, “reverse” equivalent of white supremacy. There are only the spin-offs and the sequels born from the impulse to find one’s worth in the perceived worthlessness of another. Understand this; Black people protesting or affirming ourselves is not the equivalent of white supremacy - it’s the opposite of white supremacy.
The opposite of white supremacy is love.
When we are conditioned by a culture of white supremacy we are conditioned to make an impossible, and co-dependent, calculus. We are taught to seek love in something that sustains itself through the hatred, indifference, and erasure of us. Which means we will never get what we’ve been taught to seek.
We come to recognize that “they never loved us” and when we point out the obvious our cries are greeted with silence because there is no response.
Of course they never loved us - how could they when they never loved themselves?
When we don’t find the love we’ve been conditioned to seek; we do what has been done to us - we treat ourselves, and each other, as we have been treated. We search for where we can attempt to find our worth in the worthlessness of another. We do white supremacy’s work for it by silencing and mistreating ourselves. We internalize the belief that our power lives elsewhere.
We are conditioned to seek love through oppressive paradigms that are without love - that are love’s opposite; man-made constructs rooted in fear, scarcity and mutual self-destruction.
There is no such thing as “reverse racism”
The opposite of white supremacy is love.