White Supremacy Breaks You Down With Injustice, Powerlessness, and Self-Loathing

White supremacy teaches children to hate. It teaches children to be resentful. It is an ideology of violence and torture.White supremacy teaches young boys to see all other human beings as objects. It encourages sexual violence. White supremacy is rape culture, it is the quest for domination.These concepts were forced upon me when I was growing up. They were served to me in steaming bowls on a plastic cafeteria tray. The lunch ladies with their hairs tied in nets, smiled and said, “Eat up.”When I refused to eat, their faces turned angry. “You have to eat. A good boy must finish his plate. Eat it. Take the foreign thing into your body and thank us for the privilege. Don’t you know that other kids aren’t as lucky?”I actually couldn’t eat when I was young and being indoctrinated in white supremacy. I had to wear suspenders because a belt couldn’t make my pants tight enough. My mom worried. My dad was disappointed because I was such a frail little weakling.Vomiting became an issue with me. I thought something was wrong. I’d get sick and vomit all the time. The smell of food made me vomit. I hated the cafeteria, and I knew there wasn’t a chance of me choking down the nasty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they gave me.The peanut butter got caught in my throat.I took to bringing cereal and a thermos full of milk. This caused the cafeteria staff to freak out. “That boy isn’t conforming. Why is he bringing cereal to school? What’s wrong with him? It’s against the natural order!”So, they brought in my dad and my mom for a meeting with the principal. I had to go too.“Your kid is eating breakfast for lunch.”“Who cares?” my dad asked. He always hated having his time wasted with anything that related to me.The principal went into the authoritarian pantomime. He shuffled his papers, he fiddled with his glasses, he made a bunch of deep and disappointed sighs. The only way he knew how to interact with people was through disappointment.Too bad for him, my dad was the same way. Such behavior always left him piqued and enraged. Right in the middle of the principal’s routine of masculine intimidation, my dad interrupted him. “Let’s see the menu.”“What?” the principal said coughing.“The menu, let’s see it!” He started thumping on the table. I’d already learned from him that conversation could be warfare. When you were the guy talking, you didn’t give it up. That was like the ball in sports. You screamed and you rampaged until you got points, then you wrestled the ball away and scored again and again and again.“The menu…”“LET’S SEE THE MENU FOR THE CAFETERIA!” my dad shouted. I realized he was mirroring the principal’s disappointment. This is the only thing they had. They were always disappointed. You were always stupid. You were always an embarrassment. When you screamed at people about how much of a stupid, worthless, embarrassment they were, it made them jump to frantically try to win approval.“I think I have a copy of one right here,” the principal held up the calendar that detailed the cafeteria menu for the month. My dad looked at it. The principal tried to talk, but my dad held up his hand.“Just let me read this!”He scanned the page, then stopped and slammed his finger down on the calendar. “There, November 17th, what does it say?”The principal tried to read the calendar but he couldn’t. He strained. My dad turned the page around so he could see it better. “There, there, there,” he said, tapping the calendar with increasing urgency. “What does it say? Right there! Look at it! Read it! Can’t you read?”The principal squinted and said, “November 17th, French Toast.” He looked at my dad in confusion.My dad looked at him with a superior smirk. In a voice dripping with sarcasm he said, “The last time I checked, French Toast is breakfast!”The principal went pale. My dad wasn’t done.“Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast!” he said, slamming the desk with his finger each time for emphasis. “It’s f*****g breakfast! This whole idiotic school filled with entitled MORONS like you actually SERVES BREAKFAST as part of your lunch menu. Yet you have the nerve to WASTE MY TIME and make me come in here so you can sit in your cheap leather chair and your cheap Polyester suit and presume to LECTURE ME about how my kid eats BREAKFAST for lunch? What do you have to say for yourself?”The principal deflated. He just stared at the table and tried to pretend the moment didn’t exist.Then my dad, as if angry he couldn’t beat on the guy, grabbed me and grabbed my mom and threw us all out of the room and angrily drove us home.Like many moments in my life, I just went numb and waited for it to be over. I knew that the principal would come after me now. I knew I had to try to avoid him the same way I already knew I had to avoid my dad.There’s no accountability in white supremacy. There’s no admitting you’re wrong. When you are proven wrong in front of somebody else, the white supremacy mindset urges you to remove that person.They must be removed, by whatever means necessary.They’ve seen the embarrassment, and the embarrassment is only real because of their existence.That was true with my dad. That was true with the principal. That was true with my classmates.Show your ass to anyone and the person who saw it was dead. It didn’t matter if the witness had nothing to do with anything. They were dead. Their mere existence tormented you.I was taught all this b******t when I was six. I was up to my neck in it. I knew then, as I know now, that this worldview wasn’t my way. But they all made it seem as if this was the way of the world, and if I didn’t agree with how they saw things, then I wouldn’t fit in anywhere.I was a freak. I was a weirdo. I was a loser. I was worthless, weak, and broken.The first thing a child does when presented with a false ideology is find fault with himself. My teachers, my classmates, my parents, my community, they created a foundation of self-loathing.Self-loathing is the foundation of white supremacy. They gave me no other choice. To survive, I had to hate something, but I refused to hate anyone else. I refused to hate innocent people.So, I hated myself. It seemed to be a mechanism that allowed me to get around their programming. I could present their ideology of hate and avoid their scrutiny. As long as I hated myself and no other, I could persist.I survived until I became strong enough to leave the lies behind, but it was decades before I understood how much damage had been done.Note: Will Fullwood and I are working on a project where we compare stories about growing up while facing the pressures of white supremacy. Through this exercise, we hope to gain insight into how the mechanism of indoctrination targets the children of the United States. We might even combine this effort into a book, so please let me know if you’d support something like that! We need all the support we can get 😊!You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe