I remember riding the bus to the white supremacy school. When we got there we’d stand at attention and recite our pledge of loyalty. Every parent in the community insisted that this reinforced the enduring message that we were members of some superior class. All of our lessons were carefully chosen to elevate the lies of the fatherland.
When a teacher walked into the room who was a woman, we were supposed to give her the same respect we’ve been told to give a man. But when the principal walked in, who was a man, the teacher turned to face him with deference as if she was as lowly as the rest of us.
There was a religious school in my small town. The kids from those religious schools knew who was a member of their select group and who was not.
It didn’t matter what you did, you would never be welcome to walk among the religious kids. From the first moment you stepped off a bus and they looked at you they considered you dirty. It was clear that no amount of bathing would ever make you clean enough to occupy the air they intended to breathe.
There wasn’t an official uniform at the white supremacy school, but the students were expected to shop at Gilbertson’s.
Gilbertson was a person of power in our little town. He owned a bar, he owned the car dealership, and he owned a sporting goods store. The sporting goods store carried clothing for children our age.
The school couldn’t force parents to shop there, but kids who didn’t shop there would be ostracized.
My parents didn’t shop there.
It was never explicitly stated, but the kids who were outfitted at Gilbertson’s store were treated to certain privileges. They could beat you if they wanted. If you fought back, you were the one who got punished. After all, the Gilbertson’s kids could do no wrong.
All of this posed a problem for me. My father was a farmer and he was stubborn. The entitlement of a white supremacist overlaps the entitlement of a farmer. They’re built from the same blueprint. But like things tend to clash, particularly when you’re indoctrinated with white supremacy and nothing is explicitly stated.
Orders are given through innuendo, and your defiance can be shown through innuendo as well. White supremacists can easily be left with their heads spinning, forever uncertain if they’re in the company of someone they should shoot or salute.
You were never rewarded for doing things correctly in the white supremacy school. Instead, recognition came through the fact that you weren’t punished. White supremacy festers just beneath the surface, and this is what has allowed it to endure for so many decades. It’s a philosophy of terror built on grievance with an emphasis on desperate and pathetic survival.
White supremacy is hounded by inevitable confusion, and it was within that space that I learned to live.
White supremacists try to pressure you to react, but they have no long term strategy. They’re like the ghosts in Pac-man. They’re programmed to corner you, but they’re incapable of independent thought. The result is that they get tangled up with each other and leave blind spots where you can rest and recover.
Farmers like my father, like white supremacists, are stubborn and they believe the rules don’t apply to them. Bullies always shrink away when they find themselves in the presence of a greater power.
In my first days at school, I found myself surrounded. My father didn’t like Gilbertson. He said the guy was an “a*****e.” As is so often the case, I was the one who had to pay the cost for his rebellion.
Both the teachers and the students rode me pretty hard. Eventually, a meeting was called by the school. White supremacy schools like to make sure the parents feel good and guilty when they target a child they intend to use as an example.
But when the day of the appointment came, my dad showed up with defiance. This wasn’t out of a paternal sense to protect me, but out of a selfish anger that they’d called to waste his time.
My father is a large man. He stands 6 feet tall and weighs 240 pounds. He wears a farmer’s scowl of defiance and he rolls into rooms like he intends to plant seeds in the bricks and wrestle a crop from the concrete through his stubborn force of will alone.
The principal took one look at him and I saw his confidence erode. The meeting was over before it started. The folks at the white supremacy school were left uncertain as to whether I was somebody they could attack or not.
In the end, they decided it was safer just to move on. They picked somebody else to become the target of their cruelty. I lacked the power to fend them off, but I helped the best I could.
The white supremacy school offered no medal for second place. The only credibility came from victory. You had to win. Second place was just the first loser.
The competition became ferocious. The children aspired to be athletes, to win at sports, to fight for the glory of the town. In doing this, they felt they “deserved” the adulation of the girls. They never once were taught or even considered that adulation could be earned through kindness.
The only reprieve from the constant pressure came in the closing seconds of a game they were certain to win. But the moment the clock went to zero, the joy of the victory would begin to fade. They lived in the eternal present of an endless need for conquest. They experienced a sense of painful frustration from the constant pressure that everything they’d ever gained was about to be stripped away.
It was like living in a village that had never learned how to can food. All they did was consume, consume, consume knowing their gluttony could never save them from the coming hunger.
I couldn’t run with the other kids. I was diagnosed with trauma asthma. At home I couldn’t breathe and at school I couldn’t eat.
My shortness of breath deprived me of the opportunity to elevate my station through sports. I feared I’d go through life alone, “unworthy” of a companion since I’d never scored a point for the glory of our village on the court of a neighboring town.
Instead, I turned to academics where the contradictory messages became almost unbearable. Everything about the white supremacy school involved putting kids in their place. They told us we were no good. They shamed us. They told us we were cognitively impaired. They accused us of being a drain on all the resources of our nation and that we didn’t even deserve to live.
In response, we knew we had to express gratitude every day to the indominable authorities that granted us the privilege of our worthless lives.
The only possible reprieve was to be the best, even for a moment.
I wasn’t the best at sports, but I was often the best if you gave me a test. Sometimes I was second, sometimes I was third, but when I “won” the test, my breathing came easier. I allowed myself to eat.
Finally I had a lifeline. I despised everything about the white supremacy school, but I found a mechanism that allowed me to survive. I had to dominate the other kids academically.
That would be my identity.
I didn’t know it then, but even that ambition was a way for the white supremacy school to plant a seed of sabotage in my psyche. Anytime you allow your thoughts to be dominated by a competitive quest for victory, you make yourself vulnerable to toxic influences.
To get through the desert, I drank spoiled water.
Even though academic achievement wasn’t something that the folks at the white supremacy school elevated or respected, I used the certainty of the rules I’d been taught to insist that I be treated differently. When they tried to diminish my accomplishments, I used their tactics against them. “You’re just saying that because you’re jealous.”
Faced with that, their brains sizzled out and I was left alone. Most of all my objective became to be left alone.
Again, white supremacists do not openly state their own laws. To tell me I was getting it wrong would be to admit that those rules existed at all. They also didn’t know for sure where my family sat in this hierarchy. I continued to live and gather power in the blind spots.
The teachers didn’t try too hard to crush me. They had bigger problems. Besides, if they tried giving me an assignment that I would fail, I would still do better than anyone else in the class. I’d already learned that I could seize my laurels that way.
Why pick on the smug kid getting As when there were easier targets?
I survived the white supremacy school as a child and into high school. Even so, I didn’t realize how much trauma it inflicted until I went to college.
Growing up that way deprived me of learning how to work in community. Whenever I met people to work with on a task, I looked at it as an opportunity for domination. I saw everything as a competition. I had a deeply rooted need to emerge as superior.
Where had that impulse come from?
It had been indoctrinated into me.
It was also a matter of self-preservation. I must have seemed strange as a freshman, a traveler from a foreign land. Many of my fellow students tolerated me only for a moment. I don’t blame them.
I ruined potentially strong friendships because I could only see the world through the lens of white supremacy.
White supremacists burn the evidence that any other lens might exist.
The most malicious aspect of white supremacy is that it trains you to be hostile to the world. The only time white supremacy provides comfort is when you’re faced with the repercussions of the people you have been taught to mistreat.
It’s only when you become the rightful target of derision for your intolerance that your abusive community comes forward to finally offer an embrace. “See?” they say. “See, see, everyone is cruel. We’ve been trying to tell you. Now do you understand? Everything we’ve ever done was to prepare you for this terrible realization. Welcome home!”
The first time they show love is their final act of betrayal.
The truth is that you’ll never belong with them. Nobody is white enough for the white supremacists. They’ll always find a reason to denounce you. Just wait.
It’s not about race at all, white supremacy is an ideology of hate. It’s an ideology of child abuse. It’s an ideology of genocide. If you take that hate into your heart and treat the world that way, you close the door on your chance to live a life of significance.
Your membership within the community of white supremacy is always on the verge of being revoked or betrayed. You’re tricked into making a sacrifice without any chance of a reward. You deprive yourself of ever appreciating any of the beauty in the world.
It saddens me to think that I grew up in a white supremacy school. It enrages me to think that these schools are still in operation in areas that are rural.
There are good people that try to go and give the good kids a chance. I met a few. I drove them away, and yet they saved me.
Acts of decency resonate throughout history. Hate fades into oblivion.
White supremacy closes its ranks. It burns the books. It bans the theories. It drains all the joy and life and color from the world. White supremacists leave little children so beaten and broken that they forget about rebellion.
But some escape anyway.
It is possible to overcome all the lies that you were told at the white supremacy school. It’s the shame of this nation that we turn a blind eye and demand children fight this battle without resources or assistance.
Good people of decency and privilege have to find the resolve to make a difference. White supremacy is the cancer that will consume the world.
There’s nothing to understand. There’s nothing to preserve. Don’t hesitate. Don’t be fooled. We must all come together and tear down every white supremacy school.
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