Rethinking ‘White Supremacy,’ by Ray Zwarich

To all who are lost and confused as the storm waters toss your boat:

Taking Names… “There’s a man going ’round taking names… He took that Liar’s name, his tongue got all twisted, and he died insane… There’s a man going ’round taking names” — Peter Yarrow.. ‘The King of Names‘.
I am Caliban. And I’ve come to sort things out…This is an open public letter to Ms. Margaret Kimberly, writer for Glen Ford’s ‘Black Agenda Report’. I’ve had Ms. Kimberly’s name in my ‘book’ for some time. She’s very near the top of the section labeled “The REALLY Good Ones’.
I hope she will keep that in mind as she reads my critical comments that follow.

Ms. Kimberly (and others):

I am writing in response to your recent article entitled ‘Decolonizing the Mind‘, which I encountered as published on Joe Lauria’s Consortium News. I have long admired Mr. Glen Ford’s work at The Black Agenda Report, since I first became aware of it about 2007, when Mr. Ford had the courage to resist the stampede to glorify a shameless mercenary agent of the Ruling Elites, the morally disgusting Barack Obama, simply because he was ‘the first African American president’.
The basic premise of ‘Decolonizing the Mind’ is more than merely sound. It is a profound concept that we, the Common People, must ALL grasp in order to succeed in our objective, the one objective we ALL share, regardless of where our current beliefs may fall on the so-called political spectrum… That objective is surely to take back our nation from the clawed clutches of these morally demented Ruling Elites who have captured our nation under their morally depraved control, and have set us ALL “under the yoke”. (The latter phrase was often used by Caesar himself).
The basic concept that ALL our minds have been ‘occupied’ and ‘colonized’  by the power of the immense forces arrayed against us, is CRUCIALLY important that people understand. I have never used this specific term ‘decolonizing’, but I constantly promote the same idea. Witness that in my own most recent paper, I advocated that we each must “fight our closest enemy first’, (Sun Tzu), and that EACH of us can find that First Foe in the closest mirror.
We, the Common People, are currently our OWN worst enemy. We are too busy fighting each other to fight against our Common Enemy, the Ruling Elites. One large faction of us is fighting the Democratic Party. The other major faction is fighting the Republican Party. BOTH these parties are loyal ‘bought’ agencies of the Ruling Elites. With the Common People thus occupied with fighting each other, there is NO significant organized political opposition, let alone anything NEARLY rising to the status of “resistance”, none at ALL, anywhere in our entire nation, to the immense power of our Common Enemy, the Ruling Elites.
Our minds indeed have been ‘occupied’, and then ‘colonized’ with self-defeating ideologies.
I’ve never used term ‘decolonizing our minds’ for this CRUCIAL concept. Self-awareness is the term I prefer to use. When we become self-aware, when we can inhabit other perspectives besides our own, when we can thus “see ourselves as others see us”, we become aware of how our minds can be inculcated with ideas that are seductively attractive to us, but, unperceived by us, are VERY damaging to our own self-interests.
Perfect 20/20 vision of the ‘other guy’ is relatively easy. It is ‘seeing’ ourSELVES that is so MUCH harder. Have you yourself become self-aware, Ms Kimberly? Are you aware of the degree to which your OWN mind may remain ‘colonized’ by your own Enemy?
‘The pot and the kettle got into a nettle and called each other “black”. Each could see the other, but neither one could bother to see their own self-lack” — To the cadence of a jump rope ditty…
Perhaps you could muster the requisite self-awareness, Ms. Kimberly. to realize how your own mind has been thus colonized by this over-broad idea of “white supremacy”, and of how promoting that idea is egregiously damaging your OWN self-interests as a black woman, and to the best interests of the Common Cause of the Common People as well.
I watched an hour long video interview with you, from just this past April, conducted by Persian-American activist Faramarz Farbod, which revealed that you are a keenly intelligent woman who was raised in a large loving family. You tell us that you and your 5 siblings were required to read the newspaper every day, and that your loving parents then led family discussions of world and national events.
Do you know how rare that is? Do you understand how privileged you are to have received that degree of loving nurture from your family? Were you economically deprived? Were you ever in your life disadvantaged in any way? You received an excellent education, and today apparently lead a prosperous life. If you have ever been disadvantaged in any way, how so?
An untrue belief, an untrue myth, has been propagated in our nation’s consciousness, (our minds have been ‘colonized’ with this false belief), that African Americans, in general, are disadvantaged, that they are all poor, that they all have to struggle every day just to survive. In reality, over half of African Americans, about 22 million out of a total African American population of 42 million, are leading middle class, or upper middle class lives. Many of those 22 million relatively prosperous African Americans have been the recipients of ‘helping hands’, i.e.: affirmative action, extended generously by our nation’s white population, to help them achieve the success they now enjoy.
Aren’t you one of those privileged and relatively prosperous African American people, Ms. Kimberly? Do you yet wrap yourself, absurdly, in the cozy cloak of victimhood? You want us all to ‘decolonize’ our minds? Do you make any effort to decolonize your own?
Those 22 million prosperous American black people are MORE prosperous than approximately 60 million American white people who are now living sub-middle class lives. Are you aware of these facts, Ms. Kimberly, when you use the term “white supremacy”? Are you aware that there are THREE TIMES as many white Americans as black Americans living in the crushing anxiety of poverty? (Poverty defined as ‘sub-middle class’ not the so-called ‘official poverty line’).  How do you suppose those 60 million white people, whose children are living in hopeless despair, many of them dying in moldy abandoned houses, or in dank rat-infested alleys with needles still stuck in their arms, feel when you, a person more prosperous than they, claim to be somehow disadvantaged by ‘white supremacy’?
Are you part of the problem, ma’am, or part of the solution? (I don’t know who coined that pithy phrase, but I first heard it from Eldridge Cleaver, shortly after ‘Soul on Ice’ was published).
I am personally very intimately familiar with the horrific reality of conditions in our nation’s Colonies of Misery, in which many sub-middle class black Americans are forced to live hellish lives. These Colonies of Misery are an ongoing stain of moral depravity on our woebegone nation’s soul.
But, in the midst of all this crazed ‘critical race theory’ nonsense, NOBODY is even talking about relieving these people’s ongoing hellish misery. All this crazed palaver about ‘critical race theory’ is only focused on raising the ‘best and brightest’ black people from poverty, through affirmative action programs, and, without them having earned the requisite merit, elevating those African Americans who have already achieved prosperity to higher levels of wealth and power.
We all surely know that our draconian economic system is a zero sum game. When you elevate some, you displace others. When those elevated have not EARNED merit, and those displaced have, we can all surely understand that virulent social dissension is engendered.
Does such dissension help us, does it help the Common People, unite against our Common Enemy? Or does it only serve to further divide us? Is it really any mystery that our Common Enemy supports and avidly promotes CRT?
 
Divide et impera… Divide and rule… It’s quite literally THE oldest trick in The Book, as old as human civilization itself, and YOU seem to be falling for it, Ms. Kimberly.
It’s long been recognized, as long ago as 1965, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who dedicated his career to the War on Poverty, talked extensively about this, how various welfare programs extended to black Americans only served to decimate the Black Family. Today 75% of black children are born to single mothers, and are raised without fathers.
It has been that long that we have recognized that affirmative action programs have decimated the once vibrant ‘black community’. When you take a segregated and poor mass population, and continually provide opportunities for the best and brightest among that population to lift themselves up and out of that poor segregated population, the very gene pool itself of the remaining population becomes impoverished.
The American Black Community once contained talented entrepreneurs. The community was characterized by thriving and prosperous black-owned businesses. Today most businesses in that community are typically owned and run by prosperous Jewish people, or prosperous Asian people. The money earned by those once thriving black-owned businesses once remained in the community for the benefit of all. That money is now drained out of that community, leaving it ever more impoverished, both culturally and economically.
As the Black middle class has now grown to comprise over half the total American black population, the living conditions, the culture, indeed even the very gene pool itself, of the community ‘left behind’, have only grown more hellishly impoverished. Those people’s lives have steadily grown more horrifically and inhumanely hellish.
Yet NOBODY is talking about this. Are YOU, Ms. Kimberly? There’s not even any such thing as ‘the black community’ anymore… Class interests ALWAYS manifest themselves… Aren’t you, ma’am, a prosperous, privileged person, simply promoting the interests of YOUR social class?
When was the last time you, and other privileged and educated black Americans like you, stopped talking about “white supremacy”, stopped claiming that your privileged and educated ranks of the relatively prosperous black middle class are somehow ‘victims’ of “white supremacy”? When was the last time we have heard ANYONE talking about programs to eliminate poverty altogether.
You spent MUCH more time during the above-linked one hour interview talking about ‘climate change’, and about the need to eliminate fossil fuels, than about any concerns of yours for the lives of black Americans trapped in the hellish conditions of our nation’s ‘concentration camps’, or our nation’s morally disgraceful Colonies of Misery.
You, ma’am, are, by all appearances, first and foremost, a privileged and relatively prosperous middle class person with very typical middle class values and attitudes. (Marx himself called people like you, “the bourgeoisie”).
Do you really think people living in our Colonies of Misery, people whose very lives are at risk any time they walk out their front doors, give a shit about ‘climate change’ and eliminating fossil fuels?
The drive to eliminate fossil fuels before we, before Humanity itself, are anywhere NEAR having the ability, anywhere NEAR having the actual capacity, to replace those fuels with ‘clean’ energy, (wind and solar, in the current state of the technology, simply do NOT have even the POTENTIAL capacity to replace fossil fuels), is the typical greatest concern of prosperous middle class people such as yourself. Do you REALLY think people in our nation’s black ghettos give a shit (‘scuse my ‘french’) about what you tell us is your TOP priority concern, eliminating fossil fuels?
Yet you use those people’s ongoing suffering to provide yourSELF, under the warmth of your cozy cloak of victimhood?
Eliminating fossil fuels anytime soon is only going to make the lives of impoverished people all over the world MUCH worse. Our international food production systems are entirely dependent on fossil fuels. This drive to eliminate fossil fuels IMMEDIATELY, which you identify as your own HIGHEST priority, is only going to cause greater deprivation, and even actual starvation, among people of color all over the world.
You are a keenly intelligent woman, Ms. Kimberly. But hasn’t your own intelligence been ‘colonized’?
You are 60 years old, you tell us in the interview last April. Some14 years younger than me. You are clearly the beneficiary of a good education. Back then, back in the 50s and 60s, the drive to ‘dumb down’ education had not yet even begun.  Even starting in grade school, we were taught HOW to think, not just WHAT to think.
Were you ever taught ‘set theory’? Set theory is one of the most basic foundation stones of Reason itself.
The ‘set’ of all the Ruling Elites are almost all white people, (not exclusively, of course, but largely). But the ‘set’ of all white people is many times larger than the ‘sub-set’ of the white Ruling Elites. Even if we define the Elites as the ‘top 1%”, the sub-set of the white Ruling Elites is some 200 TIMES smaller than the entire set of white people. In reality, the Ruling Elites are better defined as the top .1%. One tenth of one percent. That makes the set of all white people 2000 times larger than the set of the Ruling Elites.
The divisive and highly counterproductive term “white supremacy”, is egregiously racist, Ms. Kimberly. It makes a completely absurd, and egregiously pejorative generalization about a mass population of living breathing people based SOLELY on their race.
During the height of the hysterically crazed race riots of 2020, I saw a video of a professor on a college campus trying to reason with an hysterical mob of young black students. One angry young student said to that professor, “What you don’t ‘get’ is that my ancestors were slaves, and YOUR ancestors were slave owners”.
Does the actual Truth even matter? Does it even matter that what those students believe is COMPLETELY untrue?
That hysterical mob’s minds have clearly been “colonized”.
Have you even read much History, Ms. Kimberly? Those students obviously had NOT read ANY. Only about 6% of the entire population of the antebellum South owned slaves. Only about 25% of the entire population of the antebellum South benefitted from slavery. The lives of working people in the South were greatly damaged by slavery, which is precisely why that uneducated, unsophisticated population came to resent and hate negro slaves so virulently.
This SAME dynamic took place in ancient Rome. The large ‘latifundia‘ , (Latin for ‘plantation’), were worked by slaves, most ALL of whom were white people. The Roman working class had no access to land to grow their own sustenance, and then had no labor to earn a living because slaves were doing the work.
The cunning Ruling Elites of the antebellum South, the actual slave owners, exploited the hated of the uneducated working class, in order to “divide and rule”.
Do you know Dylan’s song ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’?… Do you know that Dr. King himself invited LittleBobby to sing that song, only a short time before the greatest prophet our nation has yet produced gave his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. Here’s then peach-faced LittleBobby singing  through the same microphone through which Dr. King would shortly later give his soul resounding speech.

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin, ” they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used, it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

The Ruling Elites, even way back in the Antebellum South, (even those way back in ancient Sumer 6,000 years ago), were EXPERTS in “divide and rule”. And in using this egregiously RACIST term, “white supremacy”, you are only showing us how your OWN mind has been ‘colonized’.
I am of Slavic descent on my father’s side, Ms. Kimberly. My Ukrainian grandparents hardly spoke English. Did you know that our very word ‘slave’ derives from the fact that Slavic people were once regarded as the best slaves? Did you know that MANY times more white people, than black people, have suffered under the inhuman indignity of slavery, if we look at all of Human History?
Most ALL the white people who were cunningly beckoned by the Ruling Elites to escape their bondage, to come to America, where they would be enlisted to slaughter the native population and colonize the the land, were themselves indentured slaves in Europe?
Most ALL Americans, white, black, or otherwise, are descended from slaves, NOT from slave owners.
Even back then, Ms. Kimberly, in the antebellum South, the ‘set’ of all white people was thousands of times larger that the sub-set of the white Ruling Elites. Throughout human history, the Ruling Elites have been “equal opportunity” oppressors. They have oppressed and enslaved white people with every bit as much zeal as they have people of color.
I could go on… But a person as seeming ignorant of Human History as you seem to be, can’t learn everything in one sitting. Did you ever read Jack London? ‘The People of the Abyss’? ‘The Apostate’? The Iron Heel? The blacks grew and picked the cotton in the South. The white workers in the North, working in the mills to spin the cotton into cloth, lived MUCH more miserably hellish lives than the chattel slaves of the South.
A strong male was worth about $30k, in modern dollars, at any slave auction. Do you think the plantation owners did not take good care of their extremely valuable ‘livestock’?
The poor white immigrant workers in the Northern mills, choking on lint, going deaf from the constant din, were entirely expendable. Children went to work at the age of 8 or 9, pulling 12 hour shifts to earn a daily bowl of thin gruel, and a short night’s sleep on a bug infested mattress, before getting up to do it all over again. Whenever one broke down in her of his mid 30s, choking to death, lungs bleeding with ‘lint-pneumonia’, there were 10 more immigrants being unloaded on the docks of Boston and New York every day. These people, Les Miserables, were completely expendable. They were NOT extremely valuable owned-property.
I’ll cut this off, there… (Believe me, I could go on for another 5,000 words easy, trying to teach ‘the facts’ to a person so clearly ignorant of the actual FACTS of History as you seem to be)…
Don’t feel too bad… THIS ignorance is deliberate. It is a MAJOR factor in the “Colonization of our minds” that you write about.
Your basic concept is truly brilliant, Ms. Kimberly. We MUST decolonize our minds. But you need to find your own First Foe, ma’am, which you can easily do in your bathroom mirror.
You need to decolonize your OWN mind first.
When you use the egregiously RACIST term “white supremacy”, you are only revealing yourself as ‘part of the problem’, NOT ‘part of the solution’. You are only helping your OWN Enemy, our Common Enemy, to keep us divided, and thus “under the yoke”.
The Common People will NEVER prevail over our immensely powerful and insufferably evil Enemy unless or until we UNITE!
People who should be allies must FIRST stop being enemies.
R Zwarich
‘Caliban’
The Common People United
Bent Birch Farm
63 Webber Rd
Brookfield, MA01506
774 449-8030

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