If, as James Baldwin said, the job of Black people in the United States of America is to define the bottom, and White people think they belong at the top, once White people have extracted ourselves from the top of the kyriarchy and come to see clearly that Black people do not belong at the bottom of even anything, the rest of the intersecting, intertangled hierarchies of abuse may begin to collapse very nicely, and we can all be the whole, fully human beings we came here to be.
James Baldwin went further, actually. In an interview, he said, “As long as you think you’re White, there’s no hope for you. As long as you think you’re White, I’m going to be forced to think I’m Black.” Wait, what? We can get a little deeper into this as we go along, but for now, it’s worth considering that the “double consciousness” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk is found in one form or another in every arbitrarily defined group. White people may think that we’ve pulled a fast one and made Whiteness the default, so we imagine that we always think of ourselves as “just another person” in a world where all the real persons are White. And yet we think of ourselves as White right quick when we’re reminded to, whether another White person reminds us or whether we find ourselves in a situation where, if we want to be members in good standing of the Tribe of White, we’re expected to be mean as shit to the people around us who aren’t White—or, if we don’t want to do the violence to our souls that makes it possible to be members in good standing of the Tribe of White, firmly remind ourselves to treat everyone with the same respect.
What Neely Fuller, Jr., said bears repeating: If you don’t understand White supremacy, everything else that you think you understand will only confuse you.
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