Whiteness is Dead | The Wild Hunt

Highly recommend a read through of this…

Whiteness is dead. James Baldwin proclaimed it back in 1972, prophesying ominously that there would be “bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come.” The holding actions have gotten bloodier and bloodier with the rise of Trump and the self-described “alt-right,” but these are death throes of a doomed egregore. Whiteness is damned not by progress, but by entropy, by the truth that “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” It’s become cliché to state that “race is a social construct,” but from an occultist’s perspective, that which was birthed through sorcery can and must be killed by the same means.Loyalty to the land, the black and brown and anti-racist ancestors, the gods and spirits [It’s Going Down].

Whiteness is dead, but we do not live in a color-blind society. To understand that whiteness is an egregore, a collective thought-form, is not to diminish the lived experience of black and brown people, but rather to contextualize it. I’ve quoted W.E.B. Du Bois on this subject before:

The badge of color [is] relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult.

Those experiences and that kinship are real, and the “badge” encodes those experiences, but the experiences themselves are anything but natural. The fact that, in the United States, “blood quantum” laws are used to determine federally-recognized Native American tribal membership while the “one-drop rule” has historically been used to define blackness show the flexibility of racist ideology in the interests of the white ruling class. And for many white-passing people of color who witness insult to themselves and their kin, it is obvious that the “badge of color” is not what is important, but rather the “social heritage.” Whiteness is also a set of experiences, but they are the experiences that result from allegiance to the egregore and the rejection of other forms of kinship and solidarity.

Whiteness is dead, but I see self-proclaimed anti-racists trying to resuscitate it. Personally, I don’t want to see any more groups of white people gathering for the purpose of talking about their whiteness, about their white guilt, about their white ally-ship. All that does nothing but reaffirm and reify whiteness. I want to see aspiring race traitors, aspiring accomplices, aspiring ex-white people.

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