White supremacy is a hurricane.
I've hesitated to draw such a metaphor in public for a long time, because hurricanes are real and they are deadly serious. But… so is White supremacy.
When I talk about White supremacy, I'm not talking about people with pale skin—I'm talking about a system. If you don't understand that, you're not going to understand anything in the rest of this newsletter… so you may as well stop reading here. (Note that I still have Christian Ortiz’s “Racial Empire Logic: A Call to Surrender the Term ‘White Supremacy’” on my To Read list.)
I guess it behooves me to define “White supremacy” for the purposes of this newsletter. Drawing on Sayson et al. 20242, I’m summarizing “White supremacy” as a system of hierarchy that implements violent erasure to maintain and perpetuate itself. Such erasure is not only physical; it is also epistemological and ontological. White supremacy perpetuates itself in people’s minds by rebranding other ways of knowing and other ways of being as “primitive,” “irrational,” “Satanic,” and worse. This rebranding then serves as a justification for erasure. So when I think of White supremacy as a hurricane, I first think of what White supremacy has subsumed and destroyed… not just due to geographic colonization, but due to mental colonization. Indeed, the term “Worldeater” comes to mind.1
Now me get to the point: Hurricanes are massive. They are massively destructive. And all hurricanes eventually burn themselves out. While they are active, they are almost impossible to stop (though folks have sure tried). But when they run out of energy, they literally evaporate away.
I truly believe we are witnessing the self-destruction of White supremacy as a global system. White supremacy might seem superior and all-powerful (and it certainly propagandizes itself as such), yet it’s brand new in the history of the human species. It’s existed for no longer than a fraction of a moment. Peoples (plural) all around the world were traveling and trading with each other before the time of White supremacy. They were sharing foods, sharing music, and learning each other’s languages before the time of the Worldeater. And… they will be doing those same things after the time of the Worldeater.
Indeed, a system that perpetuates itself using erasure must eventually experience self-erasure. The “imperial boomerang” is but an embodiment of that.
So what does that mean for the rest of us?
Do we just hang out on TikTok (which I finally quit this Monday) and watch self-destruction happen? Do we just stand in the street and bow down to The Man? No… we resist, using all the myriad forms of resistance. Resistance includes caring for the people we really care about, rather than those people upholding the current system (let’s call those people… I dunno… White supremacists?). But there’s another kind of resistance you can do without ever leaving your chair: epistemological resistance.
Stop treating White supremacists as if their words matter.
Stop hanging out in spaces where White supremacists cough up the same old ideas about “progress” and “leadership” and “the future” using new branding.
Stop going to Davos. Stop going to UNFCCC COP meetings. Or if you go, don’t hang out with the people on the big stage… hang out with the people who were denied entry.
Stop trying to convince the existing powers of your own humanity. We’ve already seen how today’s international institutions have approached (or ignored) the genocide in Palestine. Have we not seen enough?
To those of you who’ve seen enough of today’s world, I ask the following questions:
What other rooms can you put yourself into?
What other conversations can you create?
Who do you believe is worth listening to?
Who do you actually care for… and who actually cares for you?
If you want a new world that is more equitable, more caring, more loving, and more authentic, you must begin building that new world. You must protect that new world from the global hurricane that is the current world. You must build relationships with people who want the same world as you. And you must do all of this without asking the current world for permission.
White supremacy is obsolete. Start treating it as such.
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My position
My name is Chris Musei-Sequeira, and I use he/him pronouns. My mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago as a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean during the time of European colonization. She came to the United States of America (USA) at the age of 10. My father is Goan and was born in India, in Mumbai, and raised Catholic and English-speaking. He came to the USA for his graduate studies, where he met my mother.
My sister and I were born in the USA and lived a middle-class life in the suburbs of multiple American cities. I studied aeronautical engineering and technology policy in university, then worked at the Federal Aviation Administration and as an aviation consultant. I've lived in cities up and down the USA East Coast since the age of 18, until very recently. Now I live in Eastern Europe with my wife and our cat.
I thank Heather Luna and Lavinia Muth for showing me the importance of publicly expressing our positions. Because of our positions, all of us are very familiar with some aspects of the world while having no idea of other aspects. Positionality expresses how our individual positions affect our relationships with other people and with the world as a whole.
1 Dunlap, Alexander & Jakobsen, Jostein. (2019). The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-26852-7.
2 Sayson, C. M., Suppiah, S., Denardin, A., Oliveira, L., Maldonado-Torres, N., & Mhlahlo, A. (2024). Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the Sustainability Industry’s Ecocidal Lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery. Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, 11(1), Article 6. DOI:10.24926/ijps.v11i1.5988
Image source: File:Dramatic Views of Hurricane Florence from the International Space Station From 9 12 (42828603210) (cropped).jpg - Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dramatic_Views_of_Hurricane_Florence_from_the_International_Space_Station_From_9_12_(42828603210)_(cropped).jpg — This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
