White supremacy is not an “extremist ideology” in America. It is the mainstream ideology today just as it was at the height of the slave trade & Jim Crow-era segregation. If it were truly extreme, it wouldn’t be so pervasive as to be at issue in every institution & policy.

Perhaps the greatest falsehoods circulating today are:

1) white supremacy is a new, extremist ideology
2) racist policing is a new phenom
3) white terrorism is a new phenom
4) the political establishment is responding in a way that’s markedly different from any past era

Status quo racism has always looked like this, actually. In 1968, Quincy Jones received an Oscar nomination for his scoring of “In Cold Blood”. That same year, King was assassinated & riots erupted around the nation. We keep marking things as progress that aren’t.

Folks don’t want to deal with anti-Black racism beyond surface-level, non-reforms because it’s so embedded in the foundations of western society & the construction of white identity that to truly dismantle it requires a reorganizing of the society itself.

This nation was founded as a slavocracy, a constitutional government organized around a system of slavery and anti-Black racism that had been in existence here for nearly two centuries prior. It is not a footnote in history, it is in the nation‘s social, political & economic DNA.

The notion that the chronic terrorizing & murdering of Black people by police is somehow shrouded in greater moral & legal ambiguity than the looting of insured merchandise from a store only makes sense in a society that’s built on the enslavement of people of African descent.

It is the air we breathe & the water we drink. It is the land & currency. It’s the Capitol & the capital. It’s the normalization of a 500 year world order that one can be perfectly oblivious to if never exposed to anything that interrogates the ideology behind white colonization.

Trying to resolve an issue like structural racism & white supremacy without fully grasping its scope is like trying to catch a lion by approaching it with a butterfly net.

The idea that we resolve this cycle of violence with bodycams & training for police is a butterfly net.