I often think about the global project of “Whiteness” and the impact that it has had on the world throughout the past 500 years of human history. When thinking about this racialized reality, there is deep sadness and deep shame that arises within me as a descendant of Mother Europe. For the fact of the matter is that shame and sadness have been deeply interwoven into the fabric of my family lineage and my ancestral cultures for a very, very, very long time.
This double sided coin of shame and sadness did not simply appear one day, a little over 500 years ago, when European colonizers took to the seas to “explore” (read: dominate) other lands. No, the seeds of sadness and shame were planted over 1500 years before under the domination and colonization of the Roman Empire and were then simply uprooted and replanted on foreign shores. This double sided coin thus took on the form of a double edged sword that was wielded, with profound violence and terror, against the peoples of Africa, the peoples of the so-called “Americas”, and the peoples of Asia and Oceania. However, being double edged, this sword of shame and sadness cut equally as deep into the souls and hearts of my own peoples, the “White” people, the lost children of Mother Europe.
I often think about the fact that I never refer to myself as “European American”. For there is, of course, the systematic and strategic tactics of White supremacy that position Europeans as the norm that everyone else in the world is compared to and measured against. But there is also this quieter and sadder truth that the descendants of Mother Europe willingly chose to abandon their ancestral cultures in search of something else that would hopefully offer them more power, safety, and security. More and more, I am searching for an understanding as to how and why my peoples could have allowed themselves, could have chosen, to forget who they were and who they came from. I am praying for a vision that helps to explain the pain and separation that my ancestors swallowed in an attempt to build something “better” for themselves, their families, and their communities. For no one wakes up one morning and simply decides to enslave an entire continent and then turn around and commit mass genocide on another. There is so much more to the story, so much more that I want to learn.
For my peoples, like all peoples, were once children of the land and our cultures, traditions, and ancestral ways were inextricably linked with the plants, animals, trees, fungi, waters, mountains, valleys, forests, fields, stones, and sands of our original territories. My peoples knew what it was to live in reciprocity, in right relationship, with the land and we did not view ourselves as being separated from or unrelated to nature. Rather, we knew ourselves to be an integral part of the earth and her waters as the stewards, guardians, and protectors of our ancestral homelands. My peoples knew what it was to belong not only to their families and their communities but to the land itself.
Now, comes the question as to how my peoples—the “White” peoples of Mother Europe—came to know ourselves as individuals that were somehow no longer in deep relationship with our lineages and our ancestral territories.
I often think about how Black, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous peoples write, speak, and create art about their personal and collective racialized experiences. I think about the conversations that must be had amongst friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and strangers—the knitting and weaving of a shared common experience that one can locate within the skin tone of another person that looks a bit like them. I think about how these people are able to identify a similar struggle with one another based on a shared racial identity and the catharsis and sense of belonging that it may offer to them. At the same time, I think about how I essentially never have conversations with other White people about the reality of the White experience: the shame, the guilt, the loneliness, the disconnection, the numbness, the sense of deep loss, the lack of true community, the silence, the profound sadness that we all carry in our hearts. We never, ever speak about any of this because we fear that if we began to open ourselves up to the reality of our suffering as culturally homeless descendants of European peoples, the floodgates of our tears may never run dry.
I often think about what the process of colonization looked like throughout the European continent in the 1500 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I think about the rape, torture, murder, forced assimilation, and unending violence that was enacted upon my ancestors. I think about the families that were ripped apart. I think about the languages that were stolen. I think about the warrior braids that were torn from our scalps, the kill feathers that were pulled from our hair. I think about the medicines, the songs, the prayers, and the rites of passage that have been lost forever. I think about the genocide, enslavement, cultural assimilation, and mandated religious conversion of my peoples that lasted for over 15 centuries. I think about how they were derogatorily referred to as “barbarians” by their Roman colonizers. I think about how the legions destroyed whole forests in their bloodthirsty quest to erect as many crucified Indigenous Europeans as possible. I think about how the decimation of an entire village, tribe, nation, lineage, and ancestral way of life is reflected in the decimation of the chopped down trees that held all of the crucified corpses.
I think about how the Roman Empire brutally conquered territory after territory, raping native women and forcing native men into legionary service. I think about the Indigenous European women that were forced to carry, birth, and raise the children of the colonizers who decimated their bodies and spirits with sexual violence. I think about the Indigenous European men who were given no choice but to leave their families—their recently violated wives, sisters, and daughters—and travel across the continent with the Roman legions to colonize and destroy the traditional life ways of other Indigenous Europeans. I think about what it must feel like to swallow the sour poison of self-betrayal every single day, to turn your blade outwards against those whose stories of suffering and pain perfectly mirror that of your own. I think about how much of your humanity you would have to sever yourself off from in order to stomach the act of turning into the exact thing that you hate most in the world.
I often think about the state-sanctioned and church-supported witch hunts that targeted poor, working class, and, often, elderly Indigenous European women. I think about the birth keepers, plant walkers, community organizers, village healers, lineage carriers, story weavers, soothsayers, great-grandmothers, and guardians of ancestral life ways that were tortured, drowned, burned at the stake, and hung in the public square. I think about the family and community members that were forced to watch these so-called “trials”—forced to watch their loved ones die in front of them for the crime of being a wise, outspoken, brilliant, tactical, strategic, organized, well-respected, magically-gifted, knowledgeable, cunning, poor, and, sometimes, widowed woman. I think about the men who must have witnessed this mass genocide of their women and who, in their fear and desperation, sought to protect their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters through means of silencing, control, and, eventually, outright domination; better to command their women to be meek and obedient than to watch a vibrant and powerful woman end up with a noose around their neck.
I often think about the horrendous practice of scalping that was utilized by European colonizers against the Indigenous peoples of the so-called “Americas” and how the slur “red skin” came directly from this act of violence. I, then, take a step back in time and think about how Scottish colonizers perfected the art of scalping on native Irish peoples before exporting the tactic to the Western hemisphere. Then, I take another step back in time and I think about the fierce and bloody Scottish resistance against the British Empire that sought to annihilate the indigenous life ways of the Scottish clan system (look up correct term??). Next, stepping further back still, I think about how the island of so-called Britannia (England and Scotland) was once home to countless native tribes of peoples who were united under their gods and shared ancestors: the Eceni, the Caledonii, the Belgae, the Trinovantes, the Ordovices, the Silures, the Dumnonii, and all the rest. I think about how the indigenous peoples of Britannia, Hibernia (Ireland), and Gaul (France) sent their young warriors and shamans to the island of Mona (modern day Anglesey) to be trained and educated in the ancient ways their collective codes of war, shamanic dream ways, and the responsibility that they held as stewards of the land and waters that they belonged to. Finally, I think about how profoundly heartbreaking it is that we, the descendants of these Indigenous Europeans, have strayed so far from this sacred, delicate balance of thriving life. How we could have turned on one another so violently. How we could have lost ourselves, our lineages, and our European indigientiy so completely.
I think about the grandmothers and grandfathers. The wisdom keepers. The lineage carriers. The elders. Those who were entrusted and divinely guided in the passing of their stories and teachings onto the future generations. I think of how they were starved. I think of how they were neglected. I think of how they were forgotten. I think about how soul-shattering it must have been for them to witness the mass extinction of their traditions and cultures and to be unable to do anything about it. I think of the profound loneliness in witnessing the end of your people’s way of life.
I think about the children, always the children. The children who were ripped from their mothers arms and hauled off into slavery. The children who witnessed their fathers being cut down in front of their eyes. The children who never inherited the ancestral war blades of their family lineage. The children who were severed from their people’s dreams, songs, medicines, and shamanic teachings. The children who were never allowed to utter the melodic vowels and slippery consonants of their original tongues. The children who watched their villages go up in flames. The children who yearned to return to the time of the ancient ones, a time before sickness and scarcity plagued their ancestral lands. Always, I think of the children.
Then, inevitably, I think about how I have never once spoken about any of this with my White family or White friends. I think about the lifetimes of research that I have done regarding my European ancestry. I think about the countless ceremonies that I have sat in where I have begged my ancestors to come to me and share their creation stories, their native languages, their traditional foods, their understanding of the gods. I think about the tears that I have wept alone after being visited and blessed by my long-deceased elders. I think about the pain and trauma and sadness and silence that are encased in my cells. I think of how I used to refer to myself as someone who came from a “colonizer/oppressor lineage” and how easy and natural it was to entirely forget the colonization and oppression of my own peoples, to dishonor their suffering, to erase their stories from my lips. I think about the collective experience of cultural amnesia that is so-called “Whiteness”, the ancestral memories that have been so long-forgotten and so deeply repressed that we, as “White” people, don’t even remember what it is that we have chosen to cut ourselves off from.
I think about how I never allow myself to vulnerable in the sharing of all of this except for in the quiet of my own heart where I know that my ancestors are always listening. More than anything, I think about the loneliness of Whiteness and what I can possibly do to break the spell of this spiritual illness that has been cast upon my lineage, my peoples, and my family.
Having been raised in a liberal and leftist family/culture, I am intimately familiar with conversations about diversity, inclusion, racial equity, cultural sensitivity, affirmative action, anti-racism, and all of the other social justice tactics that are supposed to help us heal and transform the current reality of our racialized experiences. As the Good White Person that I am, I applied my White Perfectionism to the task of Stopping All Racism by reading all of the books, listening to all of the podcasts, watching all of the documentaries, and posting all if the “correct” antiracist content onto social media so that everyone (ESPECIALLY my non-White peers) would know that I’m not a Bad White Person. I called myself out on my White Privilege and my White Fragility and my White Tears and my White Guilt and then I turned around and did the same to all of my White friends, family members, coworkers, and strangers on the internet. I redistributed my White Wealth to BIPOC organizations and I went to the Black Lives Matter protests as a White Ally. I started a White Co-Conspirators Antiracism Zoom Group and Book Club and educated other White people about the violence and horrors of policing while simultaneously policing the words, actions, and thoughts of all White people (including, above all, myself). I passed the mic and took a backseat and stopped reading, watching, or consuming any media that was produced by White people, ESPECIALLY by White men (aka The Ultimate Enemy). I did everything right (or, rather, everything White) and, yet, at the end of the day I still hated myself and my ancestors for all that we did to fuck up the world. Nothing had actually been healed. I was still just as lost as ever, just as lonely, just as numb and disconnected. I was still in pain. What’s a White girl to do?
If I’m being fully honest, I cannot say that any of the social justice work that I undertook got to the root of my White suffering. Yes, I learned a lot of extremely important things about the insidious violence of both systemic and interpersonal racism. Yes, I developed a deeper degree of understanding about how the concept of Whiteness was created out of thin air in order to justify slavery, genocide, and global domination. Yes, I took a lot of time to rethink my place in the world and the amount of privileges and advantages that were created by and afforded to me and my ancestors as a person of European descent. I absorbed and digested a lot of important things and that was certainly not for nothing.
However, in this process, there was never any space carved out amongst my White family, friends, or community members to connect over our shared racialized experience of grief, sadness, shame, numbness, disconnection, loneliness, disembodiment, and guilt. There was never a moment when we all came together to acknowledge and give voice to the centuries upon centuries of violence and unhealed trauma as people who are intimately familiar with the experience of having been both the colonized and the colonizer. There was never a time for catharsis, for recognition, for witnessing, for community with other people of my race. Thus, the message that we continued to perpetuate and uphold was that the suffering that we experience within the racialized context of Whiteness was to forever go unspoken, even amongst ourselves.
In my early 20s, I dated a Good Liberal White Man from Virginia (aka a Bad Southern State filled with Bad White People) who shared with me that late at night, as a way to help him fall asleep, he would listen to a YouTube ASMR channel where a White man would repeat the following mantras in a low, soothing voice:
“White man, you are not evil.”
“White man, not everything is your fault.”
“White man, there is goodness in you.”
“White man, you bring value to this world.”
“White man, you are loved.”
At the time, I had no idea how to respond to his secret confession. In his vulnerability, he was attempting to communicate something to me about his suffering, his pain, his need for witnessing and connection and care. This was, obviously, not something that he could have, nor necessarily should have, ever shared with a person of another race for it is not the responsibility of Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous peoples to comfort White people in our pain. However, he was entrusting me, another White person who shares a very similar lived experience, with the sadness, loneliness, fear, and self-hatred that he was grappling with. He was opening himself up and asking for a conversation to be had in regard to our shared racialized experience as White people, as lost children of Mother Europe. And, yet, I was incapable of meeting him there. I was incapable of being honest with myself and with him about the profound loneliness, shame, and sadness that I carried in my own heart in regard to my lived experience of being White. I had no idea how to touch this shared wound within us. I had no idea what it would take for us to heal.
So, the big question remains as to where do I begin? Where do we begin, those of us who have been so violently ripped from our European indigineity? Those of us who have turned towards our long-forgotten elders with hatred, vitriol, and shame on our lips while cursing their names, their memories, and their stories. Those of us who have never felt our bare feet touch down onto the ancestral homelands of our original European territories. Who have never drank from the streams of our original mountains, who have never eaten the berries of our original forests, who have never learned to translate the morning-time songs of our original bird kin, who have never sat in ceremony with our original gods. How do we find our way to healing? How do we find our way home?
In Silvia Federici’s seminal work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the author speaks at length about the extensive, exhaustive, and profoundly violent process that was undertaken in the transition from feudalism to capitalism throughout medieval Europe. Covert acts of rebellion, carefully planned counter-tactics, and outright peasant wars plagued the European countryside for centuries as the soon-to-be ruling capitalist class ripped the soon-to-be proletariat workers away from their divine, god-given connection to the land that their ancestors had lived upon for countless generations. These European peoples, like all of our ancestral peoples, lived by the laws and timing of nature. They followed the seasons and cycles of the sun and the moon. They listened for the rain. They took no more than they needed. They cared deeply for their plant and animal kin. They maintained a sacred relationship with all living and non-living beings in the territory that they collectively stewarded. They lived in extended family systems. They worked enough to meet their needs but no more than was necessary. They did not hoard. They knew not of greed. They lived simple, humble, peaceful lives and they knew, deep in their hearts, that they belonged to the land.
Like a square peg into a round hole, these Indigenous Europeans had to be violently and coercively forced into the capitalist framework that soon came to dominate our globe. Capitalism was experimented on them first before it was perfected, exported, and shipped out across the oceans. Thus, it was their loss of belonging and the severing of their connection to the land that allowed for them to eventually leave their ancestral territories behind in search of something else that could hopefully fill the gaping hole inside of them that capitalism and centuries of unending colonization and oppression had created. My ancestors, above all, were looking for a way to belong once more.
Belonging. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been missing. This sense of true belonging that cannot be replaced by a large bank account with many zeros, a big house with multiple rooms, a fancy car with all the hottest new features, an expensive university degree, or a capitalist vision of “success”. Belonging, the true sweetness of the word, can only be found in the ancient whisper of the trees. It can only be felt in the gentle caress of the river on my naked skin. It can only be known when my hands are deep in the dirt, pulling up vegetables for dinner. It can only be appreciated when I have fresh air in my lungs. It can only be honored when the herbs blossom and bend towards me, offering their potent medicine to my humble, open hands. It can only be remembered and maintained outside the confines of money, greed, power, exploitation, capital, accumulation, and supposed wealth. Belonging is what we are all searching for. Or, rather, what we are truly searching for, in our heart of hearts, is a way to re-belong ourselves to the land once more.
For what is this man-made concept of “Whiteness” if not the ultimate expression of capitalism? And what is capitalism if not the ultimate act of betrayal against the laws of nature? Nature says tells us to take only what we need while capitalism goads us to take far more than our fair share. Nature councils us to weave our familial and communal life around the flow of the seasons while capitalism argues that the sun and moon know nothing of productivity and growth. Nature warns us that we will wither at our roots if we do not take time to rest while capitalism counters that pauses and delays will never help us get the job done. Nature offers us an irrevocable and irreplaceable sense of belonging while capitalism fills us with an overwhelming and all-consuming sense of fear.
Fear. That’s what it comes down to, then. Unshakeable fear. Unbreakable chains. Fear that drives us to self-betrayal. Fear that robs us of our humanity. Fear that pushes us away from relationship, intimacy, vulnerability, and true connection. Fear that keeps us trapped in alienation, individualism, and loneliness. Fear that tells us that we do not belong, we have never belonged, and we will never belong again.
But what else is down there below the fear? For something cannot be feared if there is nothing to lose or nothing that has been lost. The loss that has created profound grief. The grief that has been cloaked in sadness. The sadness that has been cloaked in shame. The shame that has been cloaked in loneliness. The loneliness that has been cloaked in greed. The greed that has been cloaked in Whiteness. The Whiteness that is a way to fortify ourselves against feeling the grief that is forever alive in our hearts, begging to be witnessed and healed.
What if instead of turning, once again, towards the trauma response that is “Whiteness”, we decided instead to become true WITNESSES to our own pain and to the pain of our ancestors? What if we challenged ourselves to go deep into the suffering that has so long been numbed and shut down? What if we looked towards our Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian brothers and sisters and learned from them about what it means to grieve, what it means to remember, what is means to hold the truth of living in a racialized world? What if we believed that we are allowed to honor our ancestors’ pain and suffering while simultaneously acknowledging the pain and suffering that they, in turn, enacted? What if we came to Mother Europe, on our knees, with the deepest humility on our lips, and asked for her forgiveness as the prodigal sons and daughters that abandoned our homelands in search of something that might put an end to our pain, sadness, and loss of belonging? What if we chose to re-belong ourselves to the land? To take a stand against exploitation and the hoarding of resources. To say to ourselves and the rest of the world, “I choose to live simply, humbly, and truthfully in the way of my Indigenous European ancestors.” What if we remembered that our peoples were once warriors, healers, dreamers, weavers, singers, seers, herbalists, craftsmen, smiths, and, above all, stewards of the land?
What if we chose to remember? To no longer participate in the cultural, ancestral, and trauma-based amnesia that is the lie of “Whiteness”. What if we came home to the elders of the elders of our elders? What if we realized that, despite our best efforts, we could never, ever truly forget who and where we came from as the returned and resilient children of Mother Europe? What if we never stopped dreaming, never stopped singing, never stopped praying? What if we never stopped planting, never stopped harvesting, never stopped growing? What if we remembered that loneliness is impossible as long as there are trees to embrace and flowers to pick and herbs to infuse into stews and teas? What if we believed that the rivers run through our blood, that the mountains perfectly mirror the raised humps of our spines, that the birds sing their hymns from within the expansiveness of our ribcages? What if we chose to re-belong ourselves to the land, once more? What is we remembered that we have belonged to her all along?
ART CREDIT:
"Seidr" by Fatih Öztürk
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