White Supremacy and the Fate of the Earth | Sojourners

Source: White Supremacy and the Fate of the Earth | Sojourners

Our environmental crisis is rooted in a European worldview. The cure will require white humility.BY RANDY WOODLEY

…..Dualism and the origins of whiteness

WHEN WE THINK about the ongoing ecological damage to our world, we seldom consider white supremacy as a cause. Although the connection has certainty and is provable and logical, making that connection takes some explanation. Let’s begin with the ideals behind whiteness itself. Whiteness, born in ancient Greece, is a 3,000-year-old mythological construction created to judge who is fit to rule. Christendom simply added the theological fallback: “who God made fit to rule.”

The Greek philosopher Plato separated the idea of a thing from the thing itself, creating a duality between a thing’s ethereal essence and its material existence. Platonic dualism places more importance on the ethereal than the material. Once dualism is a basis for reality, everything is seen in hierarchical order. Aristotle, a student of Plato, is sometimes referred to as the originator of whiteness. He categorized what he considered “natural” social placement based on something immutable about a person. There was an immutable essence, he said, that made some naturally suited for enslavement and some suited for ruling—and, not surprisingly, he considered the lighter-hued peoples, such as himself and his people, to be natural rulers.

Plato’s student Alexander the Great was, among other things, an evangelist for Greek culture. Hellenism was spread by Rome and then Great Britain, and later romanticized in the West as the ideal form of civilization with the lighter-hued at the top of the social hierarchy. It included concepts of categorization that became a part of Western systems of “progress.” Western Christianity and American systems of thought inherited and embraced a false value of separation rather than embracing a whole reality. In the Western mind—and Western worldviews are not limited solely to white people—one’s “correct” beliefs even equate to action. The result for many Christians has been a theology rife with dualism that looks nothing like the teachings of Jesus.

Although Hellenistic influence can be found in the New Testament, Jesus did not seem to be terribly affected by it. Perhaps his rural Galilean childhood kept his more Hebraic and holistic worldview intact. A number of early church fathers, however, were influenced by Greek dualisms and hierarchies that directly shaped the church. Platonic dualism and racial hierarchies became even more distinct during the Age of Reason, including the idea that Western, white, and male human beings are qualitatively different from and better than all other creatures, and qualitatively superior to nature herself.

These anthropocentric notions surfaced directly in pseudosciences such as race theory, craniology, and the modern eugenics movement. An array of false racialized theories was used to justify Native American genocide and African American enslavement. The false science of eugenics had a direct influence on Hitler’s Jewish extermination plan, on tens of thousands of forced sterilizations of Black, Indigenous, and other women of color in America, and on the infamous Tuskegee experiments that intentionally withheld treatment from Black farmers with syphilis without their consent. Craniology, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, resulted in tens of thousands of Native American heads being severed from dead bodies and shipped to museums such as the Smithsonian, where many of them remain today.

When Western society wanted to use these now-debunked theories of Western science for economic gain, it used “blood quantum” to do so. African Americans could be enslaved as free labor with only “one drop” of African blood, whereas Native Americans, who they hoped would eventually disappear through assimilation, needed to meet much higher blood quantum to be considered “a real Indian” and obtain any treaty rights. The roots of this system of white supremacy fueled the Indian reservation system, residential boarding schools, Jim Crow laws, separate but “equal,” and even modern maladies such as the school-to-prison pipeline and the use of excessive force on Black and brown bodies by law enforcement.