experience these as they arise. Then let them go as well.
Our bodies exist in the present. To your thinking brain, there is past, present, and future, but to a traumatized body there is only now. That now is the home of intense survival energy.
Most of this book is set in the present, but small parts of it will trace two bloodlines of trauma from the past to the present.
First, we’ll trace trauma as it was passed from one European body to another during the Middle Ages, then imported to the New World by colonists, and then passed down by many generations of their descendants.
Second, we’ll trace trauma as European colonists instilled it in the bodies of many Africans who were forcibly imported as indentured servants, and later as property, to the New World. They, in turn, passed down this trauma through many generations of their descendants.
On this same soil, trauma also followed another earlier path: one that spread from the bodies of European colonists to the bodies of Native people and then through many generations of their descendants.
An estimated eighteen million Native people were custodians of the North American continent when European colonists arrived. They and their ancestors had lived here for an estimated 14,000 years.
Today this same land contains over 204 million white Americans, over forty-six million Black Americans, and just over five million Native Americans. The story of the unique arc of trauma in the Native American body is only now beginning to be told. I don’t describe this arc (except tangentially) in this book. I hope a wise and compassionate Native writer soon will.
In the meantime, I offer my respect and acknowledgment to the people who were stewards of this land long before folks from Africa and Europe made it their home.
As I write these words in early 2017, America is tearing itself apart. On the surface, this war looks like the natural outcome of many recent social and political clashes. But it’s not. These conflicts are anything but recent. One hundred and fifty-six years ago, they spawned the American Civil War. But even in the 1860s, these conflicts were already centuries old. They began in Europe during the Middle Ages, where they tore apart close to two million white bodies. The resulting tension came to America embedded in the bodies of Europeans, and it has remained in the bodies of many of their descendants. Over the past three centuries, that tension has been both soothed and deepened by the invention of whiteness and the resulting racialization of American culture.
At first glance, today’s manifestation of this conflict appears to be a struggle for political and social power. But as we’ll see, the real conflict is more visceral. It is a battle for the souls and bodies of white Americans. While we see anger and violence in the streets of our country, the real battlefield is inside our bodies. If we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved.
The conflict has been festering for centuries. Now it must be faced. For America, it is an unavoidable time of reckoning. Our character is being challenged, and the content of that character is being revealed.
One of two things will happen: Ideally, America will grow up and out of white-body supremacy; Americans will begin healing their long-held trauma around race; and whiteness will begin to evolve from race to culture, and then to community.
The other possibility is that white-body supremacy will continue to be reinforced as the dominant structured form of energy in American culture, in much the same way Aryan supremacy dominated German culture in the 1930s and early 1940s.
If Americans choose the latter scenario, the racialized trauma that wounds so many American bodies will continue to mutate into insanity and create even more brutality and genocide.
This book offers the necessary new insights, skills, and tools for creating the first scenario. It is written for every American—of any background or skin color—who sees this scenario as vital to our country’s survival and who sees the second scenario as America’s death warrant.
When people hear the words white supremacy or white-body supremacy, they often think of neo-Nazis and other extremists with hateful and violent agendas. That is certainly one extreme type of white-body supremacy. But mainstream American culture is infused with a more subtle and less overt variety. In her book, What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo1 describes white supremacy as
. . . the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white, and the practices based on this assumption . . . . White supremacy does not refer to individual white people per se and their individual intentions, but to a political-economic social system of domination. This system is based on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group . . . . I do not use it to refer to extreme hate groups. I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority.
One aspect of this type of white-body supremacy involves seeing “whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm . . . an actress becomes a black actress, and so on.” In a piece for Salon she adds, “Thus, we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g., white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves).” This everyday form of white-body supremacy is in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the culture we share. We literally cannot avoid it. It is part of the operating system and organizing structure of American culture. It’s always functioning in the background, often invisibly, in our institutions, our relationships, and our interactions.
The cultural operating system of white-body supremacy influences or determines many of the decisions we make, the options we select, the choices open to us, and how we make those decisions and choices. This operating system affects all of us, regardless of the hue of our skin.
Here’s a typical example: Two economists responded to 1,300 help-wanted ads in the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune in the fields of customer service, clerical services, sales, and administrative support. In all, they responded with more than 5,000 made-up résumés. The names on those résumés were randomly assigned, but some (e.g., Jamal Jones and Lakisha Washington) sounded African American, while others sounded white (e.g., Emily Walsh and Greg Baker2). The researchers counted the number of employers who asked to set up interviews or get more information. The imaginary white candidates received interest from one in ten employers; the imaginary African American candidates received interest from one in fifteen. (Similar studies have since obtained similar results.)
Here’s another recent example of everyday supremacy: My wife, Maria, purchased some household items at Wal-Mart and was pushing her cart toward the exit. A Wal-Mart employee stopped her, asked to see her sales receipt, and checked the items on the receipt against the items in her cart. Maria was thirsty, so instead of leaving the store, she bought a soft drink and sat down on a bench near the exit. Over
