Whiteness is a cult

I have been away for the past few weeks, finishing up the semester and traveling to Vancouver for LASA and to visit friends. I want to say something about the trip, but another time. This morning I woke up to a notification that something I had said on Twitter last year, “whiteness is a cult,” was repeated by Sierra Thompson (@blkgirltragic on TikTok), and white fuckery ensued. I don’t know that much about Sierra’s work, but want to send my support, as I’m sure she’s going through a lot.

But I also wanted to think a little more specifically about how whiteness is a cult.

Merriam-Webster says:

cult

1: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious (see SPURIOUS sense 2)

also : its body of adherents

2 a: great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)

especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad

b: the object of such devotion

c: a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion

3: a system of religious beliefs and ritual

also: its body of adherents the cult of Apollo

4: formal religious veneration : WORSHIP

5: a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator

So there are 5 related entries, all of which have to do with the systematic worship or adherence to a set of ideas (be they religious or secular) by a group of people. The use of cult as a spurious or unorthodox belief only comes in the early 19th century, which I think we can track to the rise of not only messianic religious sects in the US, but (proto) eugenic anthropology, the collapse of the US plantation economy after the Civil War and the endurance of racial taxonomies throughout Reconstruction.

So, in fact, it makes more sense to think of the hardening of US conceptions of whiteness as a racial logic and systematic exertion of power (of course with origins in the colonial period), alongside the rise of messianic christianity and Manifest Destiny, than it does to imagine whiteness as a purely epidermal phenomenon that has no relationship to history, power, and society.

The white people objecting to “whiteness is a cult,” often do so with a facile reverse argument: “if I said Blackness is a cult you would vilify me”. But this does not account for the obvious discrepancy in power and the historical dimensions of race as a system of engagement with (and disciplinary structure of) that power. I chuckle a bit at this, but the issue remains that so much of the current political impasse in the United States about race and gender has to do with a biological essentialism that was in fact developed in the very period in which “cult” in this negative connotation was formed. It’s ironic.

But whiteness is a cult in that it draws adherents with the promise of salvation, understood through the capitalist logic of bourgeois comfort. It endures because of the legacy of its accumulated wealth and the promise of future distribution of that wealth. It endures because of the concentration of power in the hands of small men (think Trump, DeSantis, etc), who labor under the sign of whiteness not only to ensure their own capital gains, but to do so at the expense of anything other than a surface reading of the social.

White people are victims of whiteness, too. They are of course its primary benefactors, but they also are subject to the limitations of its imaginaries and the demand for fealty, obligation, and obedience. And in that obedience, we see the furor of white supremacists shattered into a thousand daily moments of white guilt, white pause, white interrogation, white tears. The problem is not the individuality of white people, but that white people have the most to gain from cleaving to whiteness, the promise of its deliverance, the purity of its intentions.

And yet, we know, we who have always known, that whiteness is a cult of demented, delusional, destruction. It is a fire that consumes everything it touches, fueled by the arrogance of white people who say “not all white people,” who say “but what about reverse racism,” who say, “but I was just born this way.” In order for whiteness to lose its deadly power, it has to shift from an innate birthright of murderous potential to nothing more than a quaint memory. It has to divest from itself, render the cult bereft of adherents. It has to become abject in order for this world to have a future.