culture fix

to breathe together.

whiteness is a trap. a fucking trick bag. a rather demonic game that robs humanity from all involved. a vicious lie with violence as its foundation, its manifestation, and its perpetuation.

whiteness feels omnipresent. when i'm alone, in my dreams, with friends, with enemies, with lovers, with family, in struggle, in silence, in thought, in action and inaction. omnipresent.

and whiteness sickens me and fails to keep me alive, fails to give me a space to speak and to breathe, particularly because whiteness asks me to strangle and silence my peers who are not white.

whiteness is the awkward pause between two people, trying to stretch towards each other but lacking the language to make it known.

whiteness is the horrendous, simple and subtle blindness that sends human beings into oblivion.

whiteness is the poison pie that bribed the masses to defend the masters, that creates masters in attempts at equality, that begs for niggers and secretly smiles with each new innovation in the systems of domination.

and whiteness is hardly ever talked about. especially not as a failure of humanity, a failure to keep folks like me alive.

whiteness is the baseline fuel for the growing conflagration that is me, that is my resistance.

but always, first, we decide we need to talk about whiteness in terms of how it operates as a functional idiocy. our spaces are so often plagued by the unintended cruelty and absent mindedness of folks raised white, and by the denial that comes with this cruelty, that, as a matter of self-defense, to survive, to get by, we choose to intervene.

we seek to stop, moment by moment, what was begun on arawak land, 1492, and done again, and redone, reshaped, reformed, resurrected, reassured, and reified a thousand times over in the past five hundred years.

like a dozen hands shoved against a crumbling dam, we seek to simply stop the onslaught.

and in this stopping, we forget about the human who has been carefully sculpted and crafted, indoctrinated and infected to the point of being a conduit for this great outpouring, this terrifying overflow of an internalized, and uncontainable violence.

whiteness violates those it chooses as hosts, begging them, demanding them to house an un-comprehendable viciousness and disregard for life, dignity and affinity, such that they are left no choice but to let the sickness bleed out their pores.

if the toxic lies of whiteness were better contained by some, there would be others who would step in their place, and still more who would choose to chastise and punish them for their break with the brutal consensus. there is a certain inherent messiness in the continuation of whiteness; an ugliness unparalleled in its sheer vastness, its seemingly insurmountable seamless-ness.

if we could find the language to do so, we might begin to describe whiteness as a process whereby a third of the world's people are forever buried by the devastating terror that has been perpetuated in their name and through their cohesion as one definable group. and in saying this, we are of course speaking also to the despicable slaughter of the rest of humanity: carpetbombed, lynched, disappeared, crowded into houses and burned alive, in mass graves, in chains at the bottom of transatlantic trading vessels, in napalm downpours, through nuclear incineration, with charity smallpox blankets, forced syphilis infections and government imported cocaine.

perhaps in the presence of this growing stench of death, we could begin to find the words to grapple with the grave depravity of the lives that we are all said to be living.

it is only through wrestling with this profound un-alive quality of everyone's existence that we might begin to create a circumstance in which we can remember how to speak and be heard, and how to share in one another's breath.

- Taylor Sparrow