“We know the predator. We see them feed on us. We are aware to starve the beast is our destiny.”
— John Trudell
Dear fellow white men, but I hope others stick around as a Greek chorus.
An honest recognition of this culture’s history of treachery, kidnapping, torture, and murder is needed to read this — an acceptance of the need for cultural and psychological (personal) reparations. This is my starting point. So, I’m essentially only speaking to those white men who recognize this.
But I’m not going to speak of the need for cultural reparations, but only psychological or epistemological repairs. Without this primary reparation of our own damaged psyche, any cultural reparations will be undermined or at least resisted by this lingering sickness.
In other words, I’m arguing that we can’t solely focus on stopping overt racists, or eliminating the racism and sexism baked into our institutions. These are necessary goals of course. But ultimately, we won’t be very helpful if we don’t simultaneously (and primarily) work to expose the subtlest roots of racism in ourselves — in those of us willing to face ourselves or our conflation with a larger system that is still fundamentally corrupt.
And when we dig deeper, we do, in fact, discover that we’re contributing to this violence through our identification with many of this society’s seemingly benign (but in fact toxic) values.
Negative Geography 