Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 11: Your Reckoning With The Machine

The first exit I want to close is paralysis, and paralysis tends to show up as a type of humility.

It sounds something like this.

It's too big and it's too old and it's everywhere.

You're one person and you alone cannot make a difference to it, not measurably, not in a way anyone can say single-handedly point at.

So that is a correct diagnosis.

So the conclusion is what is wrong because from an accurate description of, say, your own sense of smallness, the person who feels paralyzed at the vastness of white terrorism and just the terror it has left in its wake might conclude or infer that nothing they do counts.

It sounds modest, but it is not.

It is a conclusion of someone who has decided that unless your action is decisive, it doesn't count, which is not humility.

It functions on the premise that if you cannot be the one who ends it, then you would rather not be involved at all, and it produces the same outcome as agreeing with the machine.

The machinery of white terrorism does not require your enthusiasm.

It requires your compliance.

And paralysis is a form of compliance that allows you to, in some weird way, keep your sense of self-respect.

The second exit I'd like to close is heroism, and it is the same error as paralysis.

It is the person who, you know, knows all the facts, has all the knowledge, and they determine to be the person who dismantles it, who will fix the entire supply chain, who will decolonize the institution and save the world and the continent and everybody who has been sidelined or marginalized in it.

I have watched this destroy so many people that I care for and respect.

The scale of the ambition guarantees the failure, and then the failure gets read as a personal inadequacy rather than a proof that one person was never the right unit for the job.

And then sometimes what happens is the person who ends up wanting to change everything actually ends up doing nothing at all.

Heroism and paralysis are not necessarily opposites in this context.

They are the same type of error, the belief that the individual is the unit of change, arriving essentially at two speeds.

The third exit is the newest and the most flattering, and a lot of people who are engaged in this work, uh, will have taken it at least once, including myself, and it is a form of ideological purity or purity in general.

It is the belief that the correct response to being implicated in a system is to make yourself clean of it.

The ethical brand, the boycotting, the decolonized bookshelves, the reading list, the correct vocabulary, the carefully audited consumption, the language so scrupulously updated that no one can accuse you of anything.

And some of this is genuinely good.

I know I do it intentionally, and I engage with my life intentionally.

It is valuable, and I am not going to sneer at people trying to live decently inside a machine that they did not build.