I’d like to invite you into an exploration I’ve been doing, what I have, so far at least, discovered, and what it’s making me think. This will likely require a series of issues to explore in depth, but here I want to start into it, at least, and continue in future issues. What’s here is simply my curiosities and where those curiosities have taken me to date. I’m not trying to name this as The Truth™, the Right Way to Think About This™, or anything in that vein. But I do think the question I’ve been exploring is a good one, what I’ve discovered so far has pushed me considerably, and that it has significant consequences for right now, especially. But I’ll name, because I think it’s important, that I’m not an expert on anything except my experience of life, and even that’s questionable. What follows might be true; it might be wrong; it might be incomplete. It’s probably all of those things at once. But it’s what I’ve explored and the sense I’m making of it at this moment.
For about a year or so now, I’ve been fairly rigorously exploring one question: What is the core wound / trauma of white people that resulted in colonization, genocide, racism, chattel slavery, land, language, & cultural theft, and imperialism?
I’m really interested in this question because well, I’m white. The consequences of these systems are enormously painful and disastrous for those we’ve subjugated to these systems and us as white people. And I think understanding the answer matters for all of us who are trying to build a world actually free of these systems and not one where we simply rearrange who is in a dominant power position (or worse, keep endlessly talking about progress and not actually making it). Given the United States’ imperialism and the exportation of our culture (and laws...and systems) around the world, I think the answers to this question have impacts not just here in this country, but everywhere.
My path to even asking this question has been a long journey of exploring identity, trauma, community, and belonging: both my own experience of these things and the intellectual conceptions of them. Where I am in answering it isn't complete and has some gaps that I am still exploring further (two examples: 1- Colonization and land theft didn’t come to us white people out of thin air with Columbus’s fateful expedition and we didn’t invent slavery with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; what motivated the excessive edits we chose to make to these systems at that particular time that seemed to perfect their capacity to cause the most suffering possible to the most people? 2-What is unique or the same among Western colonialism and Eastern? What are the legacies of Eastern colonialism and what is there to learn about its shape, origins, and why it didn’t evolve into the same level of horror as we see driven by the West? Or did it, and I’m just currently ignorant about that aspect of human history?).
But I came to get serious about this question because I wanted to see if answering it could also help me understand answers to other questions like:
Why do I find it so impossible to feel feelings? Why am I more comfortable in stoicism?
Why do I struggle so much to relate and connect with other human beings? Why does “being human” feel like a threat to me?
Why is empathy such a forced and practiced reaction for me? Why do I struggle to know how to connect with others when they’re suffering and why is my initial reaction to run (or at least look) away?
Why do I feel the need to do everything alone, instead of with others?
Why am I full of a rage that is so big that it cannot possibly be my own or born from my life?
Why was I (and were we) taught to be so reliant on what can be proven, observed, tested and not also on what can be intuited, felt, or shared?
Why, as a white woman, was I socialized to connect with others through explicitly lying to others and putting still others down?
Without question, my own personal history, experiences, and trauma shapes the answers to these questions for myself. But I also find that these questions can be and are applied to more than just me; more and more, I find these questions are true for all of us, and especially us western white people. For example, I’m curious to understand why we white people look at suffering all around us and struggle to apply empathy instead of blame. I’m curious about why we white people see the lopsided suffering of so many who don’t look like us and find a way, as Sarah Schulman outlines in her book Conflict is Not Abuse, turn from our neighbors’ suffering and instead invent our own abuse (like we see happening with the war on critical race theory right now).
I won’t deny I am intellectually interested in these answers. I am bookish as hell. I am, however, more interested in what these answers might offer me - us - about healing, about a way forward out of this suffering, about creating a liberated world. I am not interested in these answers as a way to bypass the responsibility and accountability we hold for these cursed systems; in fact, I’m interested in the answers so that we might actually start “doing sorry” for creating and benefitting from them to begin with.
I want to better understand what is in our past as white people that must be acknowledged, healed, & repaired so that our response to incoming climate and violence refugees from the Global South (that we directly caused through policy, interference, and other military action) isn’t “build a wall” but “how can we help make you feel at home here?”. I want to better understand what must be healed so that our response to Black teenagers isn’t to call the police and threaten their lives but to roll our eyes and laugh at whatever they’re doing because it is a universal fact that teenagers are fucking weird and make mistakes while being so. I want to better understand what needs to be repaired in us so that our relationship to the earth isn’t “how can we extract as much from you as possible” and is instead “what do you need from us to recover?” I want to understand what it takes to heal the Windigo within us, as many First Nations & Native American cultures would name it. I want to understand what took us away from a path of belonging and care and set us instead on a path of destruction and extraction. I want to understand what it takes to exponentially grow the number of people on this planet who are obsessed with creating a new way of being and doing with one another and the earth so that we might give the next generations a hope for survival and for collective liberation. I want to know what the root of this trauma is in us white people that would not only help us heal and be accountable to undoing these systems that give us power over others, and I want to know what it’s like to be in community with each other as white people and for that to be a beautiful (and not a scary) thing for us and others.
I simply do not see a way around healing this core wound to get there. I support loads of people - particularly people of color - saying this isn’t their interest, isn’t their work. I think we all have a role to play in the revolution, and I desperately hope that it is a revolution of ideas and healing, not of weapons and more destruction. Some of us will be artists and help us all imagine bigger, more expansive, more beautiful worlds and, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, will “make the revolution irresistible”. Some of us will be activists who never let us forget the pain that is caused by our current behavior and choices. Some of us will be organizers who grow coalitions and get them in action together. Some of us will be disrupters from within, and still others from without. And some of us must be healers. Because of my identity and skills, and because the charge given over and over again to white people by people of color is to do “white people’s work”, I am interested in what it will take to heal the core wound that eventually led to the creation of whiteness.
Okay, so what have I discovered so far in answering this question? Well, dear ones, this is shaping up to be a tale about climate change, the economic shift to production, patriarchy, technology, the spiritual and physical separation from nature and land, and our obsession with science. I gotta be honest: I did not see climate change coming in this story. And I certainly didn’t expect to find the witch trials to play so critical of a role. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start by acknowledging that the first human ancestors came into existence on Earth about 5 to 7 million years ago, though scientists say modern humans came to be somewhere between 120-300,000 years ago. Now, that’s a lot of time (for us, at least; for Mother Earth, it is but a heartbeat). And while we don’t have records of every single human or human ancestor that has lived during that time, what we have discovered in the archeological record is that humans lived pretty peacefully with each other until about 12-15,000 years ago. I just want to reiterate that timeline: for at least one hundred thousand years and possibly several hundred thousands of years, modern humans lived mostly peacefully with one another. This isn’t to say the times weren’t hard or violent - the megafauna of these times, for example, are downright terrifying and living in any ice age sounds truly terrible; I bet the fights people had with each other around the fire were less than pleasant. It is to say, though, that before 12-15,000 years ago, we didn’t tend to fight each other in any organized, group-based, or sustained way. So, we see in the archeological record evidence that we are not, contrary to Abramanic religious teachings and much of western pop cultural teachings, prone to violence. So, I think it is worth really investigating what happened 12-15,000 years ago to change that and what choices we have made since that conditions us for violence in our contemporary times.
In the 1960s, scientists discovered the Jebel Sahaba Cemetery in the Nile Valley in Sudan. The findings at the time indicated that it was the first known site of group warfare (instead of the extraordinarily isolated and sparse interpersonal instances of violence that show up well before this period). Just last month, a new study was published from researchers who analyzed the bones (which, btw, are OF COURSE stored in the Great Hall of and Tribute to White Colonialism™, aka the British Museum in London; seriously, y’all, give it all back to who it belongs). The new findings suggest that the violence wasn’t a one battle situation, as was previously thought, but more a repeated set of attacks on the villagers, most likely in competition for resources as Earth’s climate changed significantly as it exited the last ice sustained ice age. Moreover, scientists speculate the Nile Valley was a refuge for many during this chaotic time because of the wide diversity of people found in the relatively concentrated area. I don’t know about you, but I am WILDLY FUCKING INTERESTED in learning about what this story - and what came before and after - has to tell us, as we stare down an even more intense competition for resources than perhaps these ancestors faced and certainly we do it with a much longer, more sophisticated relationship with warfare and the capacity to cause each other systemic harm.
Okay, so between 12-15,000 years ago we started to compete for resources and that competition was forced, most likely, by a changing climate. Is there anything else to know about this time that got to do, eventually, with white people and core wounds and all this modern day suffering? Well, yes.
First, it’s worth noting that up until this time, we tended to live in small, egalitarian, nomadic communities and we also tended to have spiritual beliefs that reflected seeing the masculine and feminine equally. In many cultures, there was a Sky God and Earth Goddess who were of equal and necessary consequence in our lives and there was a lived experience in our cultures of being stewards of the Earth and all its inhabitants. By many accounts, we seem to have universally taken our role as a companion species very seriously.
However, as we transitioned into the neolithic era (aka the New Stone Age), most humans started to domesticate crops and animals and our tools started to get better. These technological advancements led to a more sedentary social structure and you could say (and I imagine many have) that this begins our obsession with production. We are still many years from Adam Smith’s cursed fucking capitalism and free markets, but the seed is certainly planted during this time.
So we’ve got many converging forces here: the climate is changing; because of that, we’re changing how we organize ourselves by domesticating animals and plants and building housing, our technologies are changing to meet our new needs, and resources are both seemingly scarce due to climate change and we see the need to compete over their production and, in some instances it seems, we started to learn how to kill each other for those resources. This is a massive moment for the psyche of humans. It took place across virtually all human civilizations over the next 10,000 years or so.
During these ~10,000 years, we (and here, it would seem this “we” applies mostly to European, Asian, and African cultures) hone our ability to produce food, rather than forage and hunt it, and this creates surplus food. From this reality, we invent private ownership, the concept of wealth, and the reality of inequality. We invent patriarchy, first as a way to exchange “needs” among settled tribes and groups, and later as something much more violent; we codify hierarchy, and we put our own species at the top in our thinking. We invent widespread militarization and create new weapons, and the taking of slaves (to produce more food) and the raping of women becomes acceptable behavior in the aftermath of war. In our domination over the plants and animals through domestication, we begin to move away from our role as a companion species and we begin to apply this dominator logic to each other as patriarchy becomes increasingly more violent and as some religions begin to shape into evangelical, political forces. We invent currency, we write things down, and many of our religions stop having equal priority given to masculine and feminine forces, and instead we see masculine god(s) playing a leading role in the shaping of culture. This period, I cannot emphasize enough, is a massive departure from the earth-centered, peaceful, egalitarian periods of human history that preceded it and, again, I want to emphasize that climate change seems to have kicked this all off.
Okay, but what about what this tells us about white people, Athena? So far, it seems we’ve stayed at the level of “all of us”. Yes, dear reader, that is correct. I think this history is consequential for what comes next for white people, specifically starting about 500 years ago, and I think it’s worth remembering or knowing about all of our histories and what that might mean for the future we create.
From this brief foray into [very condensed] history, I have these questions on my mind:
What does it mean to know that we aren’t inherently violent, but that we’ve conditioned ourselves to it via production economies and “civilization”? That for at least one hundred thousand years we lived without evidence of group warfare?
If production and civilization have conditioned us to violence, what must we create instead, knowing that we can’t simply “go back” to nomadic times (nor should we)?
What does it require of us, in a modern reality, to advocate for policies, practices, and habits that bring us back into resource abundance, mutuality and sharing, and cooperation?
What strength might our social movements draw from a recognition that it is inherently human and historical to organize ourselves in communities of care and mutual support?
What can each of us do to begin coming back into (or welcoming others into) an earth-based relationship and one of companionship and care to all the beings with whom we share this planet?
Next time, friends: we will explore what shifted in the west to take this domination logic that we see starting to take shape here and mold it into the oppression that continues today. Next time, we get to the witches.
Love all of this. In particular, I really appreciate the questions. They are similar, but wildly different to the ones I find myself asking. Looking forward to the next installment!