Diversity, Inclusion, and other natural flavors*

Preliminary thoughts on migrating and assimilating into the Cannibal Nation.

Image: (Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island ca. 1900). Digital Public Library of America.

In 2014, The New York Times published an article, More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White. Nate Cohn reported that: “An estimated net 1.2 million Americans of the 35 million Americans identified in 2000 as of ‘Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,’ as the census form puts it, changed their race from ‘some other race’ to ‘white’ between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, according to research presented at an annual meeting of the Population Association of America and reported by Pew Research.”

In 2018, The Daily Beast published Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups. In 2019, the Berkley Center for Right-Wing Studies published Culture and Belonging in the USA: Multiracial Organizing on the Contemporary Far Right: “Coming onto the scene in 2016, Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys are part of a trend of Far Right organizing that departs from their explicitly White nationalist contemporaries, and often fuses antiracist language into otherwise nationalist, misogynistic, libertarian, and xenophobic platforms. With people of color in positions of leadership and representing 10 percent of their August rally, the groups represent something substantively different from old-style White supremacism in terms of both ideology and organizing: what scholars and journalists refer to as the Multiracial Far Right.”

In 2021, The Washington Post released Black, Brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role. These are just a few interesting stories that have gradually surfaced over the last decade. For many, this can be a strange reality to comprehend, but this phenomenon is not new.

In much the same manner that many of our ancestors who became “white” after immigrating here in the early 1900s, built their lives on the backs of African Americans — those who are descendants of chattel slavery — many other groups are going through that same process today. Many European immigrants were at first made “other,” but the benefits of whiteness were already understood. The relatively new identity known as “white” could and would be used to not only create a buffer group to separate those in power from the rite of U.S. resistance of indigenous, enslaved African, and soon to be African Americans. Whiteness as a concept, identity, and technology would also be used to address another aspect of the colonial project: the physical containment and economic exclusion of those enslaved and their descendants onward into the future.

(Christopher Columbus arrives on the San Salvador peninsula, Bahamas, 1492 / John Vanderlyn, 1847)

It’s a process that started centuries ago — from Antonio Sánchez Valverde’s Idea del valor de la Isla Española y utilidades que de Ella puede sacar su monarquia to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; the process of whiteness hasn’t stopped cannibalizing, digesting, and excreting its prey.

We all know that race isn’t biological, but we know that white skin is typically found in Europeans, and of course the people that they’ve raped and intermixed with for centuries. However, this gradual and deliberate process would soon become about much more than just skin color. Along with that mixing of genes and cultures came the mixing of ideologies, through force or gradual coercion. So today in the United States, as is the case around the world, some of the people who are considered “non-white” have gradually been shaped to uphold and identify with whiteness to varying degrees. The liberal campaign of “diversity” and “inclusion” stands in opposition to the goal of dismantling white supremacy. It is merely the next phase of white supremacy under ‘late-stage liberalism’ (Povinelli 2011).

Within the ideological foundation of “diversity” and “inclusion,” the working assumption is that: as long as you are not “American/European white” then you are the opposite of that identity, and in some cases, disconnected from the history that birthed it. Therefore, the placement of ‘colonized/marginalized/non-white/white, female, gay, etc.,’ persons into positions of authority represents ‘progress’ and ‘change.’ “Diversity” and “inclusion” under the current social order of white supremacy means hiring more “brown” people in the police force, in politics and other institutions under the guise of fighting race/gender/sexuality bias, while transferring to them no actual power to overturn white institutions nor stop white domestic terrorism. In the struggle to ensure actual diversity and inclusion at every level of society, we must fully understand how those in power can, will, and have commandeered and undermined this social shift for their own benefit — the benefit of the white nation.

I use terms related to food and taste to frame this conversation— “natural flavors” and “other natural flavors” — in order to address the culture of cannibalism in the west; to show the connection between white violence, as well as the politics employed to perpetuate white supremacy and the deep connection to white peoples association with anti-Black — literal and metaphorical — consumptive practices that are responsible for creating such a cannibal nation (Woodward 2014).

How are we to overturn whiteness, and its racist, cannibalistic systems and culture, if those chosen as the diverse representations are from cultures and groups that have long been made anti-Black and anti-Black American?Surely most people across the world have had some degree of anti-Blackness programmed into them. Whiteness is something that existed in every colony-then country — throughout the West — it is not unique to the United States. Likewise, many revolutionary movements and political theories have been birthed from colonized countries, but the people involved in those revolutionary struggles aren’t the ones being chosen to represent diversity in the White House or US politics in general. So, as white people who want and need to stand on the right side of history — particularly by supporting reparations to those descended from US chattel slavery — we must be increasingly clear on the ways that white supremacy is currently undermining genuine struggles for diversity, and be increasingly discerning about where our support goes and what political lines and activism we follow.

Whiteness as an index and identity, as we well know, is a cultural production of Europe and has roots which can be traced back to “the long sixteenth century” (Horne 2020). An ideological technology which was created with the specific intent of perfecting intensifying the economic exclusion and social oppression of the descendants of US chattel slavery and Black people around the globe. Gerald Horne (2020) explains that the creation of whiteness was essentially a “Pan-European” and “class collaboration” project: “London and Washington created a broader base for settler colonialism by way of a ‘white’ population, based in the first instance on once warring, then migrant English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh; then expanding to include other European immigrants mobilized to confront the immense challenge delivered by rambunctious and rebellious indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans” .

Whiteness from its origin has been both rigid, in order to establish and define itself, and also porous when it required ‘others’ to increase its numbers. Horne’s description is exemplified in many early American written works including those of the nation’s Founding Fathers. In his 1751 essay, Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c., Benjamin Franklin revealed how ‘white’ was an interchangeable category in his concern for and thoughts about immigration at the time and its connection to slavery and production demands. By drawing the connections between access to available land, laborers for production on that land, and how those factors affect the ‘encouragement of marriages’ — and therefore population increase — Franklin applied quantitative projections on the future increase of ‘populations’ to ensure the growth of the white race in North America — a fear that is very much still alive today.

Benjamin Franklin profited handsomely from slavery. Not only did he own slaves in his life, he also brokered slave sales and facilitated the surveillance and capture of enslaved people who escaped through the printing of runaway and auction ads in his newspapers. Profits from the combined business of slavery and print — David Waldstreicher wrote that ‘Franklin was not only the largest dealer in paper within the colonies, he controlled paper itself and saw it as medium and money’ (2004:121) — which led to him becoming postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737 and then deputy postmaster general of the United States. By way of his social connections and the accrued wealth from slavery enabled Franlin to create the US Postal System (Sublette 2016), confirming how deeply tied institutions of power today are intrinsically tied to chattel slavery. Franklin’s concerns were also rooted in the fear that the enslaved populations in North America and in the colonies would outnumber the populations of whites.

In 1987, Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth, which was concerned about the declining number of white babies in the United States; one that outlined “solutions” to this “problem.” A book that is also currently out of print and, coincidentally, difficult to find in whole or in pieces. Wattenberg’s revival of this discourse was not the first since Franklin’s concern. Controlling the population of the descendants of formerly enslaved people was continually made possible through theory and policy since the Reconstruction era. The white North American population continues, through ideology and narrative, to shape and mobilize the white population (and those who are aligned psychologically and culturally with whiteness) against African Americans.

Although this foundational imperative has not changed, those who were in power understood that a project like whiteness, colonialism, and the United States would need to shift and maneuver properly in order to survive.

Over the last two decades, the notion of race and racism as the foundation of the United States and American culture has grown in and out of popular discourse and many people believe we live in a post-racial society. However, instead of resting comfortably in such false notions, it would serve better to comprehend that “[i]n order for capitalism to thrive in spite of technological innovations that are introduced to perpetuate capital accumulation by sustaining White domination over a Black people, the social relations between the two races must undergo modification at least to some extent” (Willhelm 1986). Immigration and diverse representation across US society has contributed significantly to this myth. However, the results of our social and political systems have generated the same racialized outcomes; outcomes that are not only produced unconsciously. Anti-Black violence and other forms of oppression persist through the same legal and extralegal means. “Any candid observer of American racial history must acknowledge that racism is highly adaptable. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolved and change as they are challenged” (Alexander 2012). Understanding and discerning changes in an adaptable system and culture of oppression are critical in navigating that system to dismantle or overturn it.

This perceived post-racial perspective gives liberal and conservative white Americans — and Americans in general — a reason to think that there is much less, if anything, to fight for. A perception which also gives more overtly racist white Americans a reason to be antagonistic when faced with discussions of contemporary racism; “[w]hatever the ‘post’ may mean in ‘post-racial’, it cannot mean that racism belongs in the past. Post-racial turns out to be — simply — racial; which is to say, racist” (Fields & Fields 2014). The challenge remains to demonstrate how nothing has changed about a system that is constantly shifting its appearance. Not because there is a lack of good examples or that they are all hard to see. It is a matter of one’s willingness to see and understand. It is also a matter of the cognitive dissonance instilled and nurtured in us from birth and the bad education and propaganda that reinforces it all along the way.

As a descendant of Eastern European immigrants, my parents were Americanized and I was raised ‘white.’ Being made white means growing up very confused about yourself, about the people and world around you. All European immigrants — and all current immigrant groups — have been allowed by the U.S. government to come here, settle and build lives for themselves. This is not an act of benevolence from the nation. It is done first and foremost to stimulate the growth of a much labor force at different class levels. However, the labor force isn’t given such priority because there is merely a lack of workers; a new labor force that does not come from the lineage of the enslaved who built this country is very important for maintenance of whiteness. This is done — partly — to physically push out, and further economically exclude Americans who are direct descendants of U.S. chattel slavery.

W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote about the Souls of Black Folk, giving America and the world a rich portrayal of a powerful and amazing people. In 1910 he wrote about the Souls of White Folk, in which he held a magnifying glass to the deep roots and intricacies of white people’s hatred towards the Black race and desire for world domination. The supposed greatness of Europe — and the ancient world that make up the foundation of what became the West and the United States — due to what was stolen from Africa. Imperialism fed the West and created the American empire we see today. An empire and culture built on so many horrible things creates a very weak foundation. Keeping that empire alive has required the shifting of faces, ideologies, and performances in order to convince citizens that “everyone is equal now,” and “things have changed.” That all of the mistakes of the past led to a better world, and, therefore, ‘the ends justified the means.’ Not only have issues of race and racism persisted, they still remain because the system of oppression that requires them still stands; able to stay in power by way of an aesthetic and ideological adaptability.

A not-so-new type of racism would eventually pass under the radar but still be present enough to not disrupt the most important functions within society: the surveillance and containment of African Americans in their communities and wherever they move inside and outside of those respective communities; exploiting their labor, extracting capital, maintaining racial segregation and exclusion from the economy, and other forms of control through sadistic violence.

The idea that we live in a post-racial society is partly the fault of academia and the humanities. The work of Anthropologists has contributed to the understanding that “race” and “culture” are not, in reality, clear cut concepts as we believe. While there is truth to this, it does not change the fact that we live under a system of oppression based on race and culture as fixed; one that is primarily founded on anti-Blackness — domestically and globally. To accept that race and culture are merely fluid concepts results in less critical research, dialogue, and analysis into race issues and therefore result in a lack of critical solutions.

Due to the fact that racial segregation is not technically worded in law, the continually racialized spaces of real estate, for an example, are interpreted as unintentional. While claiming that an ethnographic study of a high school in Ferguson revealed race neutral operations, young African American males are still continuously funneled into prison (Mullings 2005: 680). The end result remains the same, and yet the systems which produces those results are labeled color-blind or race natural. To understand these systems as unintentionally biased is to assume that those who structure these systems are unaware of the effects they will have on particular groups. The racialization of these systems cannot happen without the compliance of white Americans (680). To understand this compliance further, one only needs to look at race, crime, and prison as a mode of perpetuating and reinforcing systems based on race and racism.

Savannah Shange’s 2019 ethnography on the Robeson Justice Academy in San Fracisco exemplifies the performance politics of our late-Liberal, “post-racial” America. Robeson “was founded through an organizing effort by activist educators and parents of color as a way to provide meaningful education for Frisco youth” (2019:24). Shange writes that Robeson exists within a progressive dystopia, “a perpetually colonial place that reveals both the possibilities and limits of the late liberal imaginary” (11). Progressive dystopia is an appropriate correction to a “post-racial” framework. In 2014, the Robeson Justice Academy coordinated an #OurLivesMatter campaign to represent the struggles and oppressions of the diverse student body; an inclusive, multiracial solidarity effort in step with mainstream “resistance” politics today. However, while the #OurLivesMatter campaign “index[ed] a critical, even combative, relationship between the institution and the carceral state,” this generalized grouping of all groups and oppression together caused American Blackness to be “eclipsed by the more equivocal ‘people of color’ ” (2); a term which obfuscates the specific experiences, violence, and trauma that is unique to the descendants of US chattel slavery and the respective and specific claim to federal reparations owed to them.

At the very same moment that their #OurLivesMatter campaign was mobilized, “Robeson had the district’s highest suspension rate for Black students, as well as far higher rates of disciplinary referrals and expulsions” (2). Clarity about the objective conditions, fostered under late-stage liberalism and white supremacy, help us to understand why a school like Robeson succeeded against but also replicated the very racial and racist outcomes it was meant to counteract. Even with the principles that Robeson was founded on, they still failed an African American student, who Shange mentions as Keenan. Because of his lineage, Keenan was reliant on “survival economies and gang geographies,” which led to his early death. Although the founding principles of Robeson should have made clear the conditions Keenan lived in, somehow several members of the staff mobilized to get him expelled from the school because of his “bad” behavior. Although his social affiliations outside were independent of the school, Robeson contributed to the white status quo that they claimed to stand against.

The prison and its operations mirror planation slavery and that is by design. Michelle Alexander (2010) details how the process of pipelining African Americans — largely males — into what is known as the prison industrial complex is rooted in the state sponsored counterinsurgency against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s (41). “Law and Order” became the racist dog whistle of the state to signal to the white population that the containment of Black bodies would be enforced. At that time, the FBI began to report a supposed increase in homicide and other street crimes. Although criminology and sociology experts had confirmed the numbers, much of the context of the crimes being reported was left out. At the time of the Civil Rights movement the unemployment rate for Black males was rising. Crime is a logical outcome within communities that are politically, socially, and economically disenfranchised, especially if they have an increasing number of fifteen to twenty four year olds who are in need of work (41). A government — which actively attacked any and all attempts by African Americans to achieve legitimate civil rights, self-determined lives, and economic inclusion while at the time same not providing jobs for those African American communities — cannot pretend to be unaware of the short and long term effects of those actions. In the War on Drugs, we can easily see how policy helps shape the adaptable, strategic, and deliberate tactics implemented to perpetually exclude African American from the economy, leading to a social death.

Race is primary to gender, class, and religion but lineage matters most.

Class and gender are secondary oppressions within spaces and territories that were/are slave colonies, founded and systematically structured by racial hierarchies. The formation and growth of whiteness was the result of class collaboration. In this section, I will begin to touch upon my thesis regarding the nature of “diversity” and “inclusion,” as concepts captured and manipulated by neo-liberal white culture, perpetuated the culture of whiteness, in the realm of group collaboration — being part of the immigration process.

Various political ideologies, although framed as revolutionary, still work to uphold the system of white supremacy in the late-liberal twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In attempting to obfuscate US racial histories, many white people (and those who are culturally and ideologically aligned with whiteness) have become politically, socially, and psychologically attached to the idea that class solidarity is the solution to achieve freedom for “all.” However, in the United States and the West, this is insufficient for revolutionary change. In fact, both gender and class are deeply connected to race, which supports the argument presented above. Anti-Blackness has long been understood and accepted globally — consciously and subconsciously.

Gender~~White women were roughly fourty percent of the slave-owning population; they were “power brokers, traffickers, and owners of enslaved African Americans during slavery,” and they “exerted [power] in buying and expanding plantations, as well as managing hundreds of enslaved Black people even in the wake of their husbands’ deaths” (Goodwin 2021:1081-1082). White women were also violent perpetrators of the rape — like their men — and other sexual abuse of Black males under slavery and otherwise active participants in upholding white supremacy (Jones-Rogers 2019, Curry 2017, Foster 2011). White women have only been oppressed to a particular degree and only within the realm of their whiteness and “these women were quite successful in purchasing land and establishing profitable plantations on their own throughout the South” (2021:1083). The existence of middle class/bourgeoisie Black and colonized people does not change that; it merely exemplifies the more extensive process of the inclusive absorption into the system of whiteness.

Class~~Race and lineage cannot be understood as secondary oppressions under a system of white supremacy. Those who self-identify as “marxists”/”socialists” etc., focus purely on class relations, the distribution of labor power and control of the means of production. Marxist economic ideology and politic is incomplete, however, because it commonplace indexing and critque of the “ruling class” leaves out the fact that the ruling class who “happens to be white” and who regularly extracts “still more wealth from Blacks and by so doing drive still more Blacks into the ranks of poverty” (Willhelm 1986:216). This, of course, reinforces the fact that “Marxism simply cannot confront the indisputable facts concerning Black unemployment” and “[fails] to offer any explanation for the persistence of depression-level unemployment rates for Blacks during recessions and, more significantly, even during recovery and periods of prosperity. In other words, Marxists lack the analytical capacity to account for racial differentiation as evidenced by the unemployment ratio and have yet to explain the continuation of extremely high unemployment figures with the appearance and sustainment of economic expansion” (1986:217).

Therefore, theories which push gender and class to the forefront of solutions effectively uphold political objectives of whiteness, constructs false — or at the least incomplete — strategies for revolutionary change. The focus on class solidarity as a revolutionary analysis is how white people attempt to avoid complicity in a country and dominant world system founded and reliant on a racial hierarchy in order to avoid doing what is needed to deal with whiteness head on. This caste system is upheld willfully by all classes.

Race~~The reality of anti-Blackness illustrated by Wilderson (2020) reveals the depth at which such violence is rooted, helping us to understand how self-critical we must be in attempting to ally with African Americans and Black people in general. Even as I write about the system and concepts referred to as ‘white supreamcy,’ it is also important to understand the limits of such a description. My use of ‘white supremacy’ in the context of US immigration is to discuss how our nation’s society is structured and how it impacts the descendants of those who built it. ‘Diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ come into play as a mode of maintaining that system of anti-Blackness through politics of representation.

“Among the diverse settlers — Protestant and Jewish; English and Irish et al. — there was a perverse mitosis at play as these fragments cohered into a formidable whole of ‘whiteness,’ then white supremacy, which involved class collaboration of the rankest sort between and among the wealthy and those not so endowed.” — — (Horne 2020)

While Europeans try to avoid race by pushing ‘class solidarity,’ various immigrant groups that are building their lives in the US often push for ‘racial solidarity’ at times lumping all ‘oppressed’ people into the same category by creating new labels such as “BIPOC” or “Black and Brown” coalition. Both strategies often do lip service to the struggle of descendants of US chattel slavery; both strategies equally erase the specific needs, histories, and the Federal claim those descendants have for reparations. White proponents of the “class solidarity” theory claim that race antagonisms were created and stoked by the ruling class, making it sound as if the idea was enough to create this social division. However, this theory falls short because it cannot explain the statistical reality of the unequal economic data between white and Black Americans. Numbers show, and prove, that a structure of racial exclusion is, and has been, present all along — a reality which confirms that class consciousness cannot be the solution to any revolutionary change without dealing with race first.

In his 2021 article for The Nation, Frank B. Wilderson adds more to this discussion:

“The besetting hobble of multiracial coalitions is manifest in the ways Black members become refugees of the coalition’s ‘universal’ agenda. In social movements dedicated, for example, to prison abolition, the ‘selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone’ — to quote Noam Chomsky’s definition of how consent is manufactured and consensus enforced — and the way debate is bound within premises acceptable to non-Black coalition partners, work to crowd out a deeper understanding of captivity and anti-Black violence by limiting the scope of the dialogue to those aspects of state violence and captivity that non-Black coalition partners have in common with Blacks. It’s sometimes as blunt and straightforward as our coalition partners simply telling us to ‘stop playing Oppression Olympics.’ ”

(Kim DeMarco)

Our privilege as white people always puts us in a different standing by default, regardless of how rich or poor we are. However, a new phase of whiteness has not only taken form but is fully stabilizing before our eyes. Along with many other European immigrants, my people went through a process from “non-white” to “white” — which consists of being initially excluded, to varying degrees, from participating in the economy and experiencing the trauma and hardship that came along with that, to being absorbed into “whiteness.” That first stage of absorption (the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century) having been completed, the next stage continued with more recent waves of immigration (from the 1950s until today).

Today latinos, Asians, and Arabs are groups which are already in the process of becoming “white,” accompanied by the acquisition of rights, protections, and authority to — effectively — participate in the patriarchal American social order known as white supremacy. Participation in and acceptance of whiteness requires anti-African Americanness — and this is well known by most other groups. As time progressed, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ politics afforded more latino’s, Asian’s, etc, opportunity to join the fight to stop ‘crime’ and make the streets ‘safe’ by allowing them into the police force. Eager participants, lacking the historical context and blindly following highly racialized narratives and definitions of ‘crime.’ It would be irresponsible to not understand how policies of immigration (a form of inclusion) in the United States as being a part of a larger process of the exclusion and removal of the population who are direct descendants of U.S. chattel slavery — a specific lineage who is owed reparations for the building of the United States and many other factors and experiences which followed ‘Emanciaption,’ all of which continue into the current day; a justice claim which has been — and continues to be — conspicuously avoided and undermined by white and ‘diverse’ politicians. A claim which needs to be addressed first and before anything else, if true change is to come to our country.

When it comes to liberal campaigns of “diversity” and “inclusion” the mere act of “representation” in political office or other spaces of authority does not signify the replacement of whiteness or white supremacy. Especially if representatives of that same racist system are the ones choosing whom to place and where within that system. It does not necessarily follow a logical ideological trajectory to assume that very same system will willfully participate in dismantling itself, nor to think that the same aging racists that have been in politics for the last fifty years have “changed their ways.” Part of the role of being the gatekeeper to itself, those tasked with upholding white supremacy will also do so through the manipulation of language (Samson 2021).

It is in looking at the ways that both (newer) immigrant groups and white Americans (older immigrant groups) act as social actors in facilitating anti-Blackness, and more specifically, anti-Black Americannes and do so through connecting across political and ideological landscapes.

The systems and institutions of white supremacy do not care what color you are as long as you believe in ideas such as “law and order”, “Black on Black crime”, and that “policing keeps your/our family safe”. Those phrases are code worded, dog whistles to whiteness. Cultural phrases inherently imbedded with the ideas that African Americans — especially males — are a dangerous threat to you and your loved ones. But “you and your loved ones” is an equivalent of the white family, or the family units which are aligned with whiteness. As long as our racist systems gradually consume “non-white” racial groups and digest them into people who identify with those ideas — conscious or unconsciously — then they are no longer a threat to the white nation and its slaveocracy, regardless of how they chose to identify.

It doesn’t matter if police officers are now wearing Hijabs or dancing to Bachata in their uniforms. It doesn’t matter if police are hiring South Asians, Hispanics/Latinos or Arabs. These are not signs of revolutionary change, they are signs of the inclusion of once “othered” groups being absorbed into upholding the system of white supremacy. Just because every individual cop from the above-listed groups has not committed anti-Black violence on the job, it does not change the fact that there is no way to be a police officer and not uphold white supremacy. Nor is there any way to avoid complicity in the violence committed by other cops. It is a part of the job. Complicity in colonial police violence cannot be circumvented, regardless of race. In the same way, all white people do not commit anti-Black crimes, however, our culture only exists because of anti-Black violence and we cannot pretend that there is no connection.

Whiteness is codified into Western cultures. It has been an integral part of the social order in the entirety of the West. Many, if not most, cultures have been conditioned in or around whiteness for a long time, but this is not an issue regarding individual persons; it is a systemic problem. It is about race and culture as a whole. Another vital part of this is understanding that secondary oppressions, such as gender, class, and bigotry do not remove complicity in whiteness either. Worshippers of Christianity, Judaism and Islam participated in the Atlantic and domestic slave trades in the west, and people from various racial groups commit and have committed anti-Black and anti-Black American violence.

Religion, gender, and sexual orientation do not put any white people into an equal or adjacent oppressed category with African Americans, Black, or colonized people anywhere in the world. But those categories will continue to be categories and identities used to poorly obfuscate various groups attempts to willfully be absorbed and consumed into whiteness.

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” are deceptive labels similar to the “natural flavors” and “other natural flavors” under white supremacy and late-stage liberalism; labels created to obfuscate meaning; labels which actually refer to combinations of ingredients that — to whatever degree might have some natural essence creating a flavor (or taste) experience — in the end, have negative, detrimental consequences. A linguistic manipulation to decoy a heavily processed product which consists of ingredients that are the opposite of the language used to represent them. Labels that serve as a means to an end of profit; satisfying the requirements of a corporate/national body/identity. In the case of food, these ingredients are unhealthy and addictive. Regarding people and policy, this deliberately misleading language also causes negative physical and material consequences as well for African Americans and their children.

White America is a cannibal nation. It consumes those whom it first considers ‘other’ and then produces or excretes a person/mind/culture that is more acceptable/digestible for the white race to more easily absorb. That consumptive process is a multifaceted function required for whiteness to survive. European slavers may have been unaware of what their colonial designs would actually look like five hundred years later, but there also appears to be a pretty clear plan — a process of consuming and making digestible the ‘dark’ and mysterious ‘savage’, one that has long term and far reaching effects.

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References

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• Curry, Tommy J. “The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood”, Temple University Press. 2017.
• Franklin, Benjamin. “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.”, Printed in [William Clarke], Observations On the late and present Conduct of the French, with Regard to their Encroachments upon the British Colonies in North America, Boston: Printed and Sold by S. Kneeland in Queen-Street. 1755. (Yale University Library)
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• Jones-Rogers, Stephanie F. “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”, Yale Universtiy Press. 2019
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• Wattenberg, Ben J. “The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies”, Ballantine Books. 1987
• Wilderson III, Frank B. “An Afropessimist on the Year Since George Floyd Was Murdered: Notes of a (Minneapolis) native son”, The Nation. 2021.
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