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To The Person Sitting In The Darkness

by ozhaawashko-animikinini
Q1 2024 | 3/6/2024
“In the era of the Earth, we will effectively require a language that constantly bores, perforates, and digs like a gimlet, that knows how to become a projectile, a sort of full absolute, of will that ceaselessly gnaws at the real. Its function will not only be to force the locks but also to save life from the disaster lying in wait.” - Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

Mark Twain published a similarly-named article for the Anti-Imperialist League in 1901. While Twain's snark in the original article is appreciated, there will be only limited attempts to recreate it here. This article is written from an Indigenous perspective, and to lay on the sarcasm too heavily would make its reading incomprehensible to the intended audience: because if you are a white-bodied person reading this almost one and a quarter centuries after its original publication, the person sitting in the darkness, more than likely, is you. So slow down when reading this. Pause. Feel the air as it's drawn down into your lungs. See if you can feel your heartbeat quicken in your chest before you exhale again. Feel the tension in your neck, your shoulders, your face, and breathe deep to try to alleviate it. Repeat this as often as needed while reading what's below to ensure as best you can that you're actually present for it.

In the Shadow of Colonialism

The person sitting in the darkness thinks colonialism was an event (now over). To imagine colonialism as a set of structures upheld through violence, to imagine that the bedrock of “our” legal system upholds centuries of genocide to this day… that would be unthinkable. And the person sitting in the darkness can think of no shortage of excuses; if pressed, they can turn themselves into a veritable fountain of bullshit. There must always be something, anything, they can use to ward off the deeply unsettling feeling that they were raised to live a lie.

Even now their attention is already pulling away from the page.

The person sitting in the darkness thinks that climate change is a modern issue. Maybe it goes as far back as the 70's, when Exxon was first reported to have found empirical links between CO2 emissions and a warming atmosphere. The person sitting in the darkness has no idea how much further back it goes. The stage for global climate change was set the day settlers arrived to this land, a land they gave themselves the divine right to carve up and sell to the highest bidders. When nothing–not the land we depend on for life, not plants and animals, not people–were safe from being bought and sold, when settlers held nothing sacred but their right to profit at the expense of other peoples’ most basic dignities, this is when the seed of the global climate crisis was planted.

The person sitting in the darkness thinks that mental illnesses are a problem of individual brain chemistry. Never mind the study in 2022 which found "no convincing evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels". Never mind that after decades of research and new drugs, suicides in this country have climbed to an all time high. No, mental illness must be a problem of the individual because the person sitting in the darkness cannot imagine the world that was smothered and smuggled away to appease the insatiable appetite of Manifest Destiny.

The person sitting in the darkness would love to believe that what is required for one to "be a racist" is to be outwardly and overtly hateful, that enmity is the primary force holding together whatever remains of white supremacy. But this is far from true. Enmity is there, of course, but it has never been the most widespread social force of white supremacy. No, that honor belongs to apathy. For every Klansman, every cop, every neo-nazi and white nationalist, there have been at least ten people who passively support their violence through inaction. Some uncountable number of these in-actors were the audience at lynchings; others have been bystanders to police brutality. A great many have the privilege of sitting at home where their closest proximity to the violence of white supremacy is seeing it covered briefly in the news. To varying degrees, all of these people are culpable of upholding the violence.

The person sitting in the darkness is more than a little frustrated with the state of things they find themselves in today. How is one supposed to plan a life when the world is both literally and metaphorically on fire? But the person sitting in the darkness may not know, some of their ancestors are smiling! “This is the world we wanted for you! The freedom to pursue building wealth with abandon, the freedom to shut yourself away, to build up walls to protect yourself from the suffering of Others. A freedom built on the backs and graves of Black and Indigenous peoples. This is your inheritance!”

The Healing Journey - Emotional Burden

How are you faring now, person sitting in the darkness? Has this been a difficult read so far, or are you able to numb yourself even more thoroughly than the average white-bodied person? Are you filled with a deep conviction to do something about this mess of a world we’ve inherited? Or are you deciding on a list of expletives and derogatory phrases to hurl at the author? Maybe you’re more “polite” about it, and are choosing to embrace willful denial in reaction to what you’re reading. For those of you who are willing to become genuine allies (or capable of one day becoming one), what’s needed from you isn’t all that different, regardless of where you fall above.

What’s needed above all, from those persons stepping out of the darkness, is your resilience, and the understanding that your future is inextricably linked to ours. For many of you, this means rebuilding the empathy that centuries of white supremacy has stolen from you. That starts with recognizing that some of the emotions brought up by this article are ones you've experienced and likely suppressed without even thinking before. It means recognizing the deep uncomfortability you've felt talking about race, racism and Whiteness before, and resolving to change that. For a small minority of others who are conscious of already having run themselves into the ground due to these emotions, it means finding ways to build yourself back from that emotional exhaustion without withdrawing back into the cocoon of Whiteness, where “maintaining your mental health” depends on doing fuck-all to dismantle white supremacy while still reaping its benefits. The only way out is through: you cannot heal by repeating the White Supremacist Stress Response of attacking or avoiding what makes you uncomfortable. No, to step out of the darkness will mean celebrating uncomfortability, because it is necessary for you to learn and grow.

The Healing Journey - Cathartic Disclosure

Understand that the next step in your healing journey involves cathartic disclosure - talking to another white-bodied person about how growing up in a racist and settler-colonial country has emotionally affected you. As an example of something to talk about, go listen to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech from the 1963 March on Washington. It’s often referred to as the I Have a Dream speech, but searching for this title will pull up mostly short clips of the most famous section. What we want is his full address, which is only about 17 minutes long. Remember to stop and focus on your breathing once in a while; listen to the optimism and electricity in his voice. And then cry, with the knowledge that he was shot down less than five years later, and that the struggle we find ourselves in today really isn't all that different from the one he was rallying against 60 years ago. Pay attention to the physical sensations in your body from grieving the loss of Dr. King, from grieving the life you could have had if centuries of racists and white bystanders hadn't created an environment where we have to be exploited just to survive. Talking about these feelings with another white-bodied person is not an intellectual exercise, it is visceral. Do you feel the muscles in your face or chest tighten? A twisting pit in your stomach? Or is there a hot flush of anger? If so, it is up to you to ensure that this anger is directed where it belongs: at not only every settler-colonizer and slave-holder in our history, but also every white in-actor that stood by and let it happen, that continues to let it happen.

Lifelong Healing and Community Against Colonialism

Enmity and apathy; remember these adversaries. They are the lifeblood of white supremacy. Too often the anger of white-bodied people is redirected at Black and Indigenous people for resisting oppression. Even now, countless millions are spent manufacturing consent for the continued genocide of Palestinians. You do not have to agree with all of the ideology or tactics of Hamas to be able to see that Palestinians have every right to resist Israeli settler-colonialism, and that they have a right to do so with violent means. Nobody can pull your head out of your own ass for you. It’s a private affair, which is best done collectively. Combatting the twin adversaries of enmity and apathy will require you to go on your own healing journey, taking as many other white-bodied people with you as you can. And once you have a community of people committed to antiracism, your focus needs to grow from not only lifting up the most disadvantaged people here within our own borders, but to figuring out how to dismantle the systems of oppression and extraction that have grown onto a global stage.

The instrumentalization of all life: this is what the settler-colonial machine has always sought and depended on. Tearing this machinery apart will require tactics you may not expect. For those white-bodied people stepping out of the darkness, it will mean (to those still in the darkness) becoming a traitor to your race. It will require a radical empathy - the ability to listen to the most fucked up things a racist can say, and to hear the pain behind their words. Perhaps the most difficult part, as this article set out to do, will be to help those people sitting in the darkness learn to soothe a ragged nervous system in ways that don’t result in returning to the sidelines. Look into somatic (body) therapy for help with this, but not just for others. Start with yourself. It’s surely something that’s even more effective with professional help, but the changes and breakthroughs you can accomplish just practicing a little at home will be surprising. The person sitting in the darkness is only still there because they’re stuck in cycles of trauma. Somatic therapy does what no amount of talking or thinking alone can: teaching our body to move in new ways to help process and grow around our traumas.

Racial justice will also require you to be willing to continually learn and heal, checking in with yourself for likely the rest of your life. On what grounds, exactly, do you plan to base your notion of success? On making money? Supporting your family with benefits? Buying a big house? A new car? Having a little extra on top to gamble on the stock market? If actively dismantling white supremacy and settler colonialism aren’t in that list of things to get done, I ask you to reevaluate your shit. The time has long since come and passed for white-bodied people to continue standing by and waiting for racism to sort itself out. You no longer get to call yourself innocent while being a bystander in this system, because to be a bystander makes you a critical part of the infrastructure that holds it in place. Two of the most important things you could be doing instead of sitting on your thumbs are ensuring that Native Land gets returned to Native Hands (LAND BACK), and devoting your life to helping as many other white-bodied people join in that pursuit as you can. Beyond that, find ways to ensure that BIPOC are financially supported for helping educate you and others, and if you can't find the infrastructure to get that job done locally, you and your community should be building it. Other important projects include learning how and when to get out of the way of BIPOC, and developing new tools other than complaining that anti-white sentiments are "racist". You're going to need to be willing to be wrong, a lot. And it’s up to you and all of your relations to learn how to get back up and keep moving each time it happens.

"It's useless to wait - for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides." - The Invisible Committee

Oh, and if you’ve managed to read to the end of this article and still don’t support Palestinian liberation and the end of the Israeli occupation, you are invited to eat my ass like groceries.