“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin.” – Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz)

The white world has a significant problem on its hands. The U.S. empire has disrupted the terms of longstanding agreements. European conquest and colonialism have long had an internal competition between powers, but things have transformed over time. Though these regions, empires, and states were not always friends, the advent of whiteness helped foreground some understanding among the so-called West. A self-selected racial superiority would help enrich their global takeover. The invention of the white race doesn’t have a history we should oversimplify, but what’s happening now during the apparent dissolution of the U.S. empire disturbs it. As naked fascism overruns the entrails of the U.S. administrative state, it seeks to consume and extract wherever it can. In practice, this looks like President Donald Trump, yet again, threatening Europe, Canada, and other longstanding U.S. allies in the name of a supposed isolationism that might unravel the global order we’re used to. 

To understand where whiteness has brought us requires a deeper study of Europe, the place that carved the world up in its collective image. However, before its modern relations came to fruition, Europe had much strife and turmoil. From antiquity to our current times, those propagandizing with the pseudoscience of race have worked backward to manufacture narratives to glorify specific histories. We may learn of the greatness of the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, and many other old societies—their whiteness implied, though the concept had not yet been invented. Still, all else can be rendered primitive to sanitize Europe’s own interior genocidal, war-torn, and downtrodden past. Things like religious struggles and the development of capitalism out of feudal orders obliterate the myth that intra-communal violence is a nonwhite phenomenon. The late scholar Cedric Robinson reminds us that these societies and civilizations contained racial characteristics in their domestic conflicts. Consider the prolonged oppression of groups like the Romani, the Irish, and Jews over several periods dating back generations. 

European powers, some with more influence than others, ultimately decided that the rest of the world was theirs for the taking. We can see this from the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided lands outside Europe between the Kingdom of Portugal and the Crown of Castile, to the Berlin Conference, which split the African continent between colonizers. Let the hundreds of years in between the dates of these colonial examples emphasize the incalculable killing, death, destruction, and loss that transpired. Their self-regulation, commerce, and contracts helped set a tone for business that’s been interrupted before and is now being interrupted again. 

Trump has done several things that recall disruptions among European nations. His resource demands on Ukraine, which is fighting against Russian expansion, shocked many. Why? Trump’s suggested rare earth minerals deal to pay for U.S. military aid recalls a colonizing pressure usually reserved for countries that are seen as or are predominantly nonwhite. Furthermore, he threatened Canada, Denmark, and the European Union with his desire to invade their territorial sovereignty. His demands shouldn’t be too surprising because the U.S. defines a particular fascistic whiteness true to its core from its beginnings. No matter how much culture, commodity, and innovation the U.S. has exported elsewhere, it also gifted the world something that even Adolf Hitler appreciated. 

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praised the U.S. as the “one state” that had worked toward a “better conception” of race-based citizenship, which was significant for several reasons. The Nazis were another interruption to white order to some degree. While U.S. mythology distorts interwoven relations between itself and Nazi Germany, what should be understood about the Nazis’ many atrocities is what they represent to the West. For it wasn’t necessarily what the Nazis did, but who they did it to. The representation of white Holocaust victims is often more widely known, while other victims like Romani people and Black Germans, for instance, are less recognized. What the Germans did in Africa, like the genocide in Namibia, and what Europe as a whole did all around the world doesn’t hold the same weight to many. This isn’t to say that the Jewish Holocaust should be downplayed, nor is it an erroneous projection of whiteness onto all Jewish people, which erases the Jews who aren’t white. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment that countless nonwhite people killed en route to the transnational formation of whiteness get reduced to an unfortunate bump in the road. And note that “unfortunate” here carries more than one meaning because resource-rich peoples were underdeveloped and robbed of their capacity to blossom while “the West” accumulated vast riches.

The white world has been doomed because its subservience to the U.S. empire was founded on race hatred, colonialism, and slavery.

A price is being paid for all this. The white world has been doomed because its subservience to the U.S. empire was founded on race hatred, colonialism, and slavery. It didn’t simply motivate Nazis’ aspirations toward the mythical community known as the “völkisch state” because of its citizenship practices—it also did so through border violence, eugenics, and sterilization. The Nazi Germany history recounted here is not to reinforce depictions of it as the most exceptional evil of all time for endless comparisons; rather it’s to illustrate the U.S. contribution to shaping it. What the U.S. did to Native people, immigrants, and Black people while establishing itself as an empire set it on this course for self-destruction. As Aimé Césaire wrote in his book “Discourse on Colonialism”:

The Indians massacred, the Moslem world drained of itself, the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a good century; the Negro world disqualified; mighty voices stilled forever; homes scattered to the wind; all this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think all that does not have its price? The truth is that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin of Europe itself and that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself. They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans. They have overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.

This dissolution of the U.S. empire as we know it is ugly to witness from the inside out. The rest of the world is becoming increasingly (and justifiably) perturbed by U.S. arrogance and aggression. This is a time when even white women working professional jobs for former ally countries are being kidnapped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the border, and that means much is changing. Many in the U.S. will finally get a clear lesson about why you don’t homogenize populations. Much like people in the U.S. wholly romanticize or condemn other countries based on their political sentiments toward said place, we will be subjected to the same judgments with Trump as our national avatar. You don’t decide another place is all one thing because of their government or oversimplified perceptions that eschew vast diversity among the peoples that make up the populace. This presidency is showing us why. Whether you voted for him or not, Trump will be the political representation of this place misnamed “America.” To make matters worse, the fascist regime that has overtaken this place is more visibly multiracial, which also signifies the changing nature of white supremacy the world over. 

It’s fitting that the white world that exploited divisions between peoples around the planet to fortify global white dominance should see its arrangement fall apart. Still, it’s regrettable many of us are entangled in the demise. As alarming as it may sound to many people, this is not all just a tragedy. There is opportunity amid all this terror. The world we want to see has to be created, while the one changing around us transforms into something much worse. Instead of longing to return to a past version of the world that gave us white supremacy, we should push to kill it at its roots. After all, racism and race science won’t just go away. Historian Nell Painter once wrote, “Many Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.” Let’s bring an end to these days, where we die over the fantasies of superiority based on race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, or any constructed division used to oppress others. 

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor