White Supremacy Mutilates the Morality Center in The Brains of Children

Note: I’m not trying to suggest white supremacy is a cognitive disability. I’m trying to explain the shortcomings of a deliberately truncated worldview and how it’s installed into the minds of children through a process of abuse.In one of my ongoing discussions with Will Fullwood, we compared our experiences with bullies. Will related an experience where he pushed a bully down and then instantly turned around to help that boy back up. He interpreted that situation as a sign of his essential integrity dictating his actions.I’ve thought about that anecdote a lot over the last few months. I like to consider myself a person of integrity. However, on the occasions where I had to put a bully down, and there have been many, I did not feel the impulse to help them back up.Not even once.In fact, I made sure they stayed down. I made sure that everyone watching knew that this would be the fate of all bullies who messed with me.I’ve been trying to figure out what my response means. What does my reaction say about my experience versus what Will had to endure? What do discrepancies like this reveal about our assumptions on the nature of integrity?For most of my life, I’ve reflected upon the cruelty I endured at what I call “the white supremacy school.” I grew up in an extremely conservative rural area. In fact, my parents built the cabin where I was raised. I’m likely among the last people you’ll ever meet who was raised in a log cabin just like the cruel pioneers we read about in textbooks as heavily redacted as the Epstein files.I’ve come to the conclusion that the venerated traditions of the United States regarding religion and the traditional family are all based on child abuse. I feel this child abuse is rooted in a concerted effort to disrupt the natural development of compassion based integrity particularly among white children.This is the seed by which white supremacy is planted and ultimately cultivated.I’ve often had the feeling that something was taken from me in my youth. It was the part that would have allowed me to reach down and help a bully back to his feet. I’ve spent a lot of my life attempting to restore this mental mutilation I endured at the cruel hands of those that torture children with the lies of white supremacy.I believe our integrity is something that has to be preserved and cultivated. With white supremacists tossing around phrases like “toxic empathy,” it’s not hard to find evidence for the contempt they hold for basic humanity.When I moved to Peru, I found a community of people who had been granted the privilege of having their integrity protected and cultivated. Children should be allowed to go through an appropriate developmental phase. We can’t have cruel men justifying their abuse by saying, “My dad did the same to me and I turned out okay.”I think it’s fair to say that white supremacy proliferates within the white community because, under the justification of rural traditions, children have their integrity castrated. It’s clipped. It’s trimmed. It’s deprived of Oxygen so it withers, dies, and eventually falls off.It’s surgically removed.For much of my life, I’ve found myself lacking an understanding of how I was expected to behave. The best example can be found in the character Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.In the film, Bickle attempts to take a woman on a date. But he doesn’t have the complete picture of what that entails. So, he takes her to the only cinema near him which happens to show pornographic films.Although I’ve never taken a woman to a pornographic film, I can understand this moment from Bickle’s point of view. He doesn’t have a completely developed framework of appropriate behavior in his mind. So, he has to guess. He has a general sense of how other people behave which he’s picked up through conversations and media, but he’s incapable of merging with the flow of appropriate behavior.When you have been subjected to this kind of abuse, you live in a perpetual state of fear that you’ll be found out. It’s natural to think that there’s something wrong with you. But it’s not you as a person who is flawed, your misbehavior is a consequence of the abuse you’ve had to endure.In the film, the woman storms out of the cinema and ghosts Bickle. It’s a natural response considering what he’s done to her. At the same time, it leaves Bickle enraged because he’s left with the understanding that he’s wrong, but with no means of correcting his behavior.He honestly lacks the context to conclude what about his behavior offended her.I grew up in a situation where emotional development wasn’t even recognized as a topic. In my family, whenever my dad did anything to hurt us, his only response was to wait until we were no longer hurt. There was no reflection. His emotion center had long ago been deliberately damaged by his family and his community. His response was to insist that life is simpler and easier without emotions, so he’d never apologize.This is a perspective from a person who had been robbed of the experience of feeling any form of deep emotional connection with anything. The problem is that people who were raised in situations where their ability to develop their own sense of integrity was protected often come to the wrong conclusion about white supremacists.They assume white supremacists are acting in denial of their own sense of integrity.Instead, white supremacists have had their integrity removed through mutilation and abuse.When I look at my own life experience, I can only compare it to acquiring a prosthetic. I had to come up with my own form of artificial integrity to replace what had been stolen from me.There were times I was so timid and uncertain I couldn’t even speak. Like Travis Bickle, I’ve been ghosted by close and developing friendships. This provided me with a clue that there remained something wrong with my behavior, but I had no idea what that might be.Living in Peru was a great help to me since I didn’t speak Spanish and I was deprived of the opportunity to put my foot in my mouth. Submitting to the care of others allowed me to essentially reexperience that developmental stage that I’d been deprived of before.It’s only in the last five or ten years that I’ve come to feel my integrity prosthetic has become real. I’m reluctant to go back and examine my mindset from before that time, but I think it’s necessary because it provides insight into the vulnerabilities of the white supremacist mind.As tough as it was for me, other kids had it worse. I’ve heard of special forces training where recruits are given a puppy. Then they have to survive in the woods with the puppy and train it. Then, as a final act of loyalty, they have to shoot the puppy. This is a cruel form of psychological torture.But as bad as it is to subject an adult to that kind of treatment, think of how much worse it is to do such a thing to a child. I remember many of my classmates who were involved in various farm programs. As young as third or fourth grade, they were given calves or piglets to raise. Then, at the fair, the animals were slaughtered.I remember my classmates returning to school in a zombie state. It was as if they’d been lobotomized. They were no longer like children. They no longer laughed. It was as if they’d determined that emotions brought too much pain and they’d prefer to live their lives in a numb state.This has long been the perspective of farm life. Animals are raised, used, and sacrificed and children are told that they must not grow attachments. It creates a distant and cruel adult. When you consider that human beings were once held as property on farms, you begin to build a structure for how the cruelty of white supremacy functions.Again, the more we know about it, the more we can exploit vulnerabilities.It’s useless to make appeals to integrity. The integrity center has been effectively removed through mutilation. This behavior has been normalized by culture, but it’s impossible to overstate the cruelty of this treatment. It steals a child’s ability to experience joy. The ones who are subjected to this abuse become resentful of anyone, man or child, who seems to retain the inner sparkle of happiness.They develop an instinctive reaction to stamp it out in others, because seeing joy reminds them of what has been taken from them.My father was a person who refused to even discuss this topic. He’d shut the door on the idea long ago and established for himself a set of boundaries that didn’t include the possibility of sincere and authentic relationships. There was no appealing to him about it because the center of his mind for addressing those concerns had been effectively destroyed.This is why it makes no sense to appeal to white supremacists using logic, reason, or even patience. The best thing is actually to ghost them and force them to recognize how much they give up when they accept the reality of living in a world without feeling. We may yet discover even better tactics. Most of the strategies employed by people who have not had to endure the trauma of extreme white supremacy indoctrination are simply deflected without any response whatsoever. White supremacists would rather abandon their own children than question their own lie of self-identity. They simply will not imagine a world that is dictated by integrity.The white supremacist mind is one that has been mutilated. They ridicule diversity because it causes them too much pain to consider how much the people they most trusted conspired to hurt them.They cannot forge healthy, strong, loving, sustainable relationships. This is related to the term white fragility, because if you push them to recognize their flawed assumptions they go to pieces. Their crude demeanor is their weakness. They are trapped within mental boundaries assigned to them by their abusers. You can’t get them out with kindness, you must push them into narcissistic collapse and then walk them through a rebuilding stage that doesn’t circumcise their developing integrity.In the movie The Help, the character played by Viola Davis tells the white children she cares for that they are loved. I interpreted this as an awareness of the cruelty of white traditions. She was attempting to cultivate a sense of integrity within these kids.My wife, who is an immigrant from Peru, often comments on the cruelty of white society. She’ll see parents taking their kids out into frozen temperatures without hats or jackets. Or she’ll watch them push their babies in carts with their skin pink from the sun’s rays. “Why don’t they care?” she says.The answer is that white supremacy indoctrination treats pain as inevitable because it’s easier to just wait for the pain to be over than to soothe it or try to prevent it.The fundamental lie of white supremacy ideology is that cruelty is justified because it’s unavoidable. But people only believe that because white supremacy indoctrination has deprived them of the opportunity to develop a natural and healthy ethical code. White supremacy only survives because our society conflates the ideology with the harshness of life.The truth that we have to tell our children is that joy is possible, compassion is strength, and integrity should be our guiding light. Denying these truths is the fundamental lie of all conservative beliefs.Our children deserve the opportunity to develop naturally. We can no longer stand by and say nothing as white supremacists attempt to mutilate the minds of our children.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