In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith reports that after the Civil War, newly freed Black people believed their future was assured, because they were the people who had been doing all the work, so of course they knew how to do all the work. And indeed, Black people prospered in many communities—until White people couldn’t take it anymore and killed them, drove out the survivors, and stole or destroyed everything they’d built. They didn’t just want the stuff; they couldn’t bear the sight of Black people who were smart and successful. This happened in many places all over the United States of America, not just the few we may have heard about. And it’s only a difference of degree rather than of kind that seems to compel nice White racists to try to diminish Black people who are brilliant by calling them “articulate,” as if what comes out of their mouths couldn’t possibly have anything to do with brilliance.
So how deeply hurt are we when the White fantasy of inherent superiority gets shattered on the rock of reality?
There are few things in life that arouse more rage than the loss of a fantasy. I’m a witness: I’ve had any number of romantic fantasies go splat, and I’m here to tell you that what might politely be called getting stuck in the rage pathway of the brain is more than a notion—it’s practically a way of life. A fantasy smashed to smithereens, if it doesn’t go to depression—anger turned inward—goes straight to the rage pathway. What is most painful about any threat to the fantasy of inherent White superiority—itself a romantic fantasy—is that it goes right to our identity as White, so it feels like a lethal attack not just on our lofty position at the top of the kyriarchy, but on our very selves. A lot has been written about White rage as expressed in attacking Black people who are successful based on material envy, but I believe that the white-hot, murderous virulence of White rage has its deepest origin in the loss of the specifically White fantasy of inherent superiority.
Luckily, the loss of a fantasy of inherent superiority is the farthest thing from a threat to our very selves. It’s a threat to a self-image that makes up a substantial layer of the wooden bushel over our light—what Sufis have called the false self, or nafs—which for most of us was installed at such an early age that we’re not even aware of it as something that not only isn’t us, it doesn’t belong to us and can be actively harmful to us. Not only was it installed on us without our permission, but also we were taught to draw all kinds of pretty faces on it so that no one, including ourselves, might know that it’s just a wooden bushel—and underneath it, our real selves are trapped and smothered, which is why so many of us are on a spiritual path to begin with. Our work is to scrape away at the wooden bushel over our light from the inside, where our healing power resides.
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