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Transmission: The Race Wave

Elite white bodies invented and institutionalized the myth that the white body is the supreme standard by which all other bodies’ humanity are measured. Then they blew much of their trauma through the bodies of Africans and their descendants—and made lynching into an American spectator sport. This served to embed trauma in Black bodies, but it did nothing to mend the trauma in white ones.

RESMAA MENAKEM

A few hundred years ago, presentations of race emphasizing white superiority became their own European cottage industry, much like some parts of today’s media, with its scholars, pundits, and interlopers confirming the superiority of white-skinned humanity. The racialized intent of this karmic wheel reached a new stage of momentum of transmission or communication.

The karmic stage of transmission is “the rise of race” as it’s referred to in The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah. By the nineteenth century, in the world of the North Atlantic, the “racial fixation” was everywhere. But this consciousness did not occur by accident, nor is it the outcome of divine intention; it is the direct result of the intent to permit greed for domination, backed up by militarism. White supremacy became the defining criteria for self-worth, accumulating wealth and power through subjugating others and the natural world.

Images and beliefs around race have permeated the academy and the institutions of Western education. The sciences and humanities of the eighteenth century were rife with the racialization of consciousness given legitimacy by religious leaders, academics, and anyone who wanted to assert their right to power. This racial fixation insinuated itself within the psychological and social fabric of the world.

This wave produced clever, diabolical ways of institutionalizing common derogatory images and code words for nonwhite non–Christian otherness, which continues to this day. While it is not unnatural for us to fear what we do not know, this is different because it is the intentional nurturing of fear-based stories in the minds of individuals and the policies of society.

America’s racial karma is transmitted in the intellectual creation of a hierarchy of racialized consciousness, passionate orations of white superiority, anti-otherness publications, and movements supporting white racial superiority. Successfully transmitted anti-otherness was now popularized and fueled by kitchen table discussions and backroom treachery. These behaviors have been embodied in customs, laws, and communities throughout the United States, on the one hand claiming equality and on the other, denying nonwhites a sense of belonging in this country.

Redlining in the United States and other discriminatory practices specifically deprived nonwhite Americans of homes. When Peggy and I went to close on our first house together twenty-five years ago in Idaho, in reviewing the documents I was stunned by the Covenant, Conditions, and Restrictions section of the contract, commonly known as CC&Rs, which restrict what homeowners can and can’t do with their property. Property was supposed to be passed between white men only. I, of course, questioned this and would not proceed without a change in the language of the contract. The second stunning thing was when the paperwork was complete and ready for my signature, I noticed there was no place for Peggy to sign. Women were also not worthy of homes either, apparently. Again I stopped the process until this was also corrected. This felt like a personal wake-up call, showing me how white superiority started in the Eurocentric patriarchal mind.

Lest you think this is some anecdote from the distant past, in 2019, Zoe Ann Olson, executive director of the Intermountain Fair Housing Council, Inc., described this insidious pattern of racialized consciousness in American real estate:

About a year ago, a homebuyer came into my office and showed me the CC&Rs for a home that he wished to purchase that was part of a homeowner’s association. He was shocked to see that one provision said, “No persons other than persons of the White race may reside on the property except domestic servants of the owner or tenant.”⁹

The momentum of the superior-inferior race construct found adherents as it reached beyond Europe and crashed upon shores all over Planet Earth. Stereotypes of nonwhites were transmitted widely through the media and imbedded and imprinted on the American soul. In the 1857 Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney dismissed the humanness of those of African descent and decreed that the full rights and privileges of the US Constitution did not belong to Black Americans. This legal ruling, so recent in our history, was the legal backdrop to a popular culture that reduced nonwhite Americans to caricatures, at best ludicrous and at worst evil, as we saw in the “White Man’s Burden” cartoon. Ghastly images proclaiming, “The Chinese Must Go!” jostled with cartoons of the Cuban people needing to be fed American values as medicine to make them well enough to rise from barbarism (the same rhetoric rolled out again in this century’s wars in Iraq). The intent to promote racialized hierarchy was on full display. Anyone shocked by American racism in 2020 needs to spend some time studying history and understand that the imprints of the past are still present in our consciousness, like seeds waiting for just a little watering to grow.

Study racism and don’t look away. Understand how it works. We can see here the karmic action from intent to manifestation to transmission implanting the seeds of ideas of racial superiority in our hearts and minds with its mission to subjugate nonwhites. Note your physical and emotional responses and scan your mind to see how these implanted images hide in your consciousness too.

This transmission stage of the wheel, having extended itself to the New World, accelerated the worldwide making of a Eurocentric, Anglocentric identity as the white race. It stirred a fresh sense of pride, privilege, and power to make the world over in its own image. It conveyed the message of the Doctrine of Discovery as it inspired the idea of white nationalism as America’s destiny.

The successful transmission of racialized consciousness at the roots of America’s foundation affects us all whether we know it or not. There is no hiding from the wheel’s tracks visible in the lands stolen, lives lost, and backs sold insuring pride and profit. The truth of the matter is an inversion of the white man’s burden of carrying Black and Brown bodies to the salvation of true civilization. We know America was built on the backs of slaves and founded on the bodies of the first peoples of this land, but many still find difficulty in accepting such facts because they go against the American Dream narrative. We have spent the last five hundred years becoming so skillful in denying our atrocities and projecting the shadows of America’s racial karma onto the bodies of nonwhites that we are like people suffering from traumatic brain injuries and amnesia.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me, presented as a letter to his adolescent son, tells the story of violence against Black bodies in the American landscape as an American tradition. The American police officer

carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy (a legacy which gave them a strange birthright; the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body), and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be Black. In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. And, because it is heritage, the destroyers will rarely be held accountable.

Trauma lives in the body. How do I know America’s racial karma is still alive in me? I know because of my body’s experience of living in this racialized society. Hearing the word “race” still sends shivers up my spine and makes my stomach tighten, and my mind’s defense mechanisms go on high alert.

How about you? What do you feel when you discuss race? I say this because this book may be activating you or making you more conscious of your physical sensations around race. If discomfort arises, good: it means you are alive. Bring your attention to your breath as it is, let it be as it is. It may help to focus on the rising and falling of your abdomen as the cycle of your breathing moves through your body. Feel your body’s weight on the earth; feel the earth’s stability as you relax your breathing. It means you are touching the roots of your humanity—your precious body.

9 Rachel Spacek, “ ‘No Persons Other Than Persons of the White Race’: Racist Language Remains in Older Homes’ Documents.” Idaho Press. November 05, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2020.