We live in a time, not unlike the
entire history of this country, where the
lives of Black people are undervalued,
discounted, disregarded and ended through
violence. And that violence comes in the
form of laws and policies, the state and its
institutions, and from the culture and
society - and the media. Black people always
fought against this regime of violence, but
is White America creating and enlisting new
people in this struggle?
Black people never were safe in
America, the land in which we were never
intended to serve as more than kidnapped
free labor and three-fifths of a person -
deprived of rights, citizenship,
self-determination and humanity. Here we are
well into the twenty first century, and the
efforts to erase Black people and blackness
are underway. Whether it’s the elimination
of Black Studies departments and the
destruction of DEI policies, the hundreds of
thousands of Black people, particularly
Black women who recently lost their jobs, or
the evisceration of voting rights, the
ominous signs are all around us.
And just like the days of ol’ Jim
Crow, Black people are hanging from trees
throughout the South, with at least 22
Black folks found hanging since March 2025.
Others, such as Nolan
Xavier
Wells, 18, are found dead under
suspicious circumstances, in this case
washed ashore following a Mississippi boat
trip with white friends. Mississippi, of
course, is the place where Emmett Till and
the civil rights workers were lynched, as
countless other unclaimed bodies remain in
the water - in the lakes, rivers and swamps
of the South, not to mention those souls who
succumbed to the Atlantic Ocean in floating
slave dungeons of the Middle Passage.
But Jason Arday died from a digital
lynching, Arday, 41, the youngest Black
professor at the University of Cambridge,
was found dead in his London home following
a white supremacist campaign leading to his
resignation from his position. Left,
liberal, moderate and conservative media
alike participated in a pile on of Arday,
accusing him of plagiarism and fabulism, and
fabricating accounts of his life. With 249
articles written about him in 22
days in the UK, and at least 30
articles written in the U.S. in 12 days
before he died, Arday faced far more
scrutiny than white professors accused of
plagiarism, or even Jeffrey Epstein
associates accused of far worse. Ultimately,
those who believe Black scholars are
unqualified and incompetent and should not
exist got exactly what they wanted. This
includes Nathan
Cofnas, the American eugenicist and
ringleader of the Arday lynching campaign
who was dismissed by Cambridge because of
his racial beliefs. Cofnas once claimed that
in a true meritocracy, there would be no
Black professors at Harvard or
Cambridge, and “blacks
would
disappear from almost all high-profile
positions outside of sports and
entertainment.”
Meanwhile, on August 25, 11 days
after Jason Arday was found unresponsive in
his home, we lost Dolly Parton. A white
woman who grew up in poverty, Dolly touched
people across lines of race, gender,
sexuality, and across generations. And she
helped people. With her Dollywood
Foundation, she tackled high school dropout
rates. With her Imagination Library, Dolly
gifted millions of books to children up to
age 5 in various countries. She even
anonymously funded band uniforms and
instruments to Black high schools in the
South. In many ways, Dolly Parton reminds us
of white women such as Ms. Rachel, the
YouTuber and educator who speaks out for
Palestinian, Black and migrant children. And
while everybody loved Dolly Parton, Black
folks really loved them some Dolly Parton,
and have been in mourning over her passing.
Christina
Brown took to Instagram with a video to
talk about it. “I too have been sitting here
like, damn all the good white folks is
dying. All of them! And why is this
happening? And then I really sat and
thought, and now I have a spiritual theory
that I think white folks, white Americans,
y’all are gaining collective ancestors,”
Brown said. White people feel “spiritually
and culturally lost” because they traded
their identity for whiteness, which is a
spiritual void, she added. And this is
something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Black people remember their
ancestors and call upon their ancestors for
power, wisdom and guidance. In African
spirituality, and many indigenous cultures,
the ancestors are among us and connected to
us, part of the living and spiritual realms.
Many white folks, and white America
specifically, forsake their ancestors,
culture, customs and spirituality - the
so-called pagan belief systems they followed
especially before Christianity - for the
sake of whiteness. Whiteness promised
absolutely nothing, no values except a rung
or two above Black and indigenous people on
the ladder, a false sense of community
solely to control and genocide against the
darker people, and an empty, fake proximity
to white wealth and power they never will
attain.
The power and yet the vacuousness
of whiteness was on display during the
pandemic and the George Floyd summer, when
Black people were on the move and fixin’ to
tear down the statues of white colonizers,
genocidaires, confederates, Klansmen and
other revered leaders of whiteness. In
Philly, this meant the removal of the Frank
Rizzo statue, erected in honor of the evil
late police chief and mayor who terrorized
and killed Black people. But it also meant
they were coming for the statue of
Christopher Columbus, who got the ball
rolling on over half a millennium of
colonialism, slavery, genocide, plunder and
everything that followed.
Men armed with guns,
bats
and hatchets guarded their beloved Columbus
statue so the bad Black folks could not get
to it. And presumably, they did so because
Columbus was the man who bestowed whiteness
upon Italian Americans. After all, Columbus
Day helped bring Italian Americans - most of
whom originated in Southern Italy and
Sicily, where the Moors once controlled,
were not considered white and were subjected
to racial discrimination and lynching in
America - into the white category. Race is a
social construct held together with duct
tape and Elmer’s glue. When whiteness is all
that you have, you’d better protect it with
a baseball bat or anything you can find.
And the era of Trump has been a
crashing out period for white America, as
demographic realities do their thing, and
now a majority of children born in the
settler colonial nation of the U.S. are
Brown and Black. The goal under Trump is to
deport, ethnically cleanse and ultimately
exterminate as many of those people as
possible. White supremacy always ends in
death, as history shows us. Unfortunately,
there will be more Nolan Wells, more Jason
Ardays when blackness is the ultimate threat
to white power.
"The spiritual warfare of white
supremacy is evil,” as Christina Brown said.
Will White America choose to create more
Dolly Partons? Will white ancestors like
Dolly provide some spiritual direction to
their descendants and give them the power to
finally destroy whiteness and what it means
to be white? Time will tell.
