We are seeing the ideology of whiteness and the rhetorical strategies that keep it in power enacted everywhere. Part of the work of antiracism that we as white people must take up is naming these hidden thought forms. A thread: /1

This isn’t about language policing, getting a bigger intellectual hammer, or defeating trolls. It is about understanding how a dominant consciousness works to keep class, race, and capital together as a force that destroys non-white life. /2

The rhetoric suprematism used to respond to racial violence is a part of a history that is doing everything it can to maintain dominance in society. Roland Barthes called it a mythology that people enact with specific strategies to stay in power. We should get to know them. /3

The first rhetorical form is Inoculation. This happens when a just enough difference is taken on board to keep supremacism in power. When the “acceptable” MLK quotes are deployed. When one incident of violence is mourned, but the system that upholds it is left unacknowledged. /4

Second is the Privation of History: treating the murder of black people as isolated events, not as a part of the 400 year long history of America. Not learning the history of racial violence in a neighborhood, city, or territory. Denying historical processes and responsibility./5

Third is Identification: a reduction of difference to what the supremacist consciousness already believes, insisting on sameness and blind to difference. “Well, cops kill white people too.” “There were Irish slaves.” Supremacist consciousness denies the other as other./6

Fourth: Tautology. “Bad cops will be bad cops.” “Violence is violence.” This negates new data or information by filtering it through already established concepts. “It’s just the truth.” “Because I said so.” It’s an authoritarian rhetoric with no further need to use reason. /7

Fifth: Neither-Norism. “This isn’t about race or about cops, it’s about X.” It feigns neutrality and objectivity. An ‘all things being equal’ thinking that feels like the higher ground, but it really supports the dominant status quo. “Let’s wait for the facts to come in” etc. /8

Six is the Quantification of Quality. “Do the numbers.” Once you can quantify, you can then what-about and negate the quality of the human experience in focus. This rhetoric makes the supremacist view seem objective. It is managerial, a way of staying enclosed and above. /9

Seventh is The Statement of Fact: “Well the fact is…” with little attention to anything beyond the ‘common sense’ of the speaker. “What about the fact of black-on-black crime?” is a common one. /10

These statements assert a picture of the world that denies the black experience or rehearses other myths to keep ahold of the stable power of supremacy. It's false wisdom that resists revolutionary truth and love. /11

All seven of these rhetorical forms serve to support the dominance of witness consciousness. They keep us from practicing, seeing, and feeling truthfully, from loving and engaging peacefully with our neighbor who is different and from being unconditionally for them. /12

Understanding how whiteness consciousness operates is part of repentance and antiracism. We must resist a suprematist cultural logic that calls us to enact it, entices us to mimic it, and demands loyalty. We white people need to challenge its power and our empower of/by it. /13

Commit to keep listening, keep learning, and keep amplifying black and brown voices. But let's also do our own learning and have the hard conversations. Naming dominant rhetoric isn't the magic cure to white supremacy, but its an important step we can take. /14/end