White Benevolent Innocence
White Denial and Identity Development from Columbus to the ‘War on Terror’
by Dustin Craun
Ten years ago on a fall day in 2004 I sat with 239 other people in the middle of a Denver street to stop the annual Columbus Day parade in the state of Colorado, where the holiday was started in 1907.
On that day each of us were arrested one by one as we delayed the parade, what we called the caravan of conquest, for nearly three hours and then we sang freedom songs together as we were all transported to downtown Denver holding cells. While some may question the reason for this symbolic act of civil disobedience, to me it is the political act that I am most proud of in my life still to this day.
The symbol and reality of Cristobal Colon (Columbus) is the foundational symbol of this “New World” that was birthed with his journey to the Americas and the subsequent colonization, series of genocides against the America’s indigenous populations, and African enslavement that would shape the racial hierarchy and political economy of the global world order from that moment until ours today. Columbus literally believed himself to be the ‘cross bearer,’ as was the meaning of his name and his goals in his journey are laid out in his diaries to work for three things: gold, the spread of Christianity (God), and finally the glory and spread of the Spanish crown who he was in the employ of. As he stated so clearly:
What is amazing about the symbol of Columbus today and this legacy of Columbus Day is that at its core it is about erasing a clear historical record that shows that Columbus was first a slave trader in West Africa with the Portuguese, he allowed his men to freely rape the indigenous Taino women when they landed in the America’s and he set in motion both the genocide of American Indians and the transatlantic slave trade. This historical record being laid out clearly for the ages in the book The Destruction of the Indies by Barthalome De Las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his first two trips.
And yet still the statues of this genocidal maniac sit idly in our cities, triumphant, pointing towards some new discovery. While he is celebrated annually across the United States with the federal “Columbus Day Holiday” as most schools repeat the same lies they have told about him for generations, creating a reality that should be called what it is, holocaust denial.
White Benevolent Innocence
The memory and representation of Columbus today is the standard bearer for what is the foundation to most historical and contemporary white identity development, what I call, White benevolent innocence:
White benevolent innocence is the ideological, and visual construction of American Whiteness around the central tropes of benevolence and innocence. When White people, Euro/ American White culture, and Whiteness as a visual representation are presented it is almost always through salvific forms starting with Christian missionaries, transferring to the European colonial belief in the White mans burden, and more recently through forms of humanitarian imperialism. This while practicing a politics of erasure where the history of colonial modernity is erased, and the perpetrators of these crimes or their ancestors can sweep in and take credit for helping fix the problem they created without ever recognizing this history. This innocence is maintained through political systems where White people, and western governments are exempted from international courts, and are never held responsible for any of their countless crimes committed against humanity.
While Columbus sails the ship of White benevolent innocence, he has gained a boat load of passengers as war after war after war has led to few white people and never any high ranking American politician or military officers ever facing trial in a domestic or world court for crimes against humanity. This while almost always being celebrated as heroes instead in the United States. As Teju Cole summarized so well in one tweet the “White savior complex” allows white people to be sinners and saviors because of white benevolent innocence.
American Benevolent Innocence and the War on Terror
The child of White benevolent innocence is of course, American benevolent innocence and the ability to extend this matrix of denial tied to belief in the benevolent nature of imperial humanitarianism to United States citizens at large outside of a racial frame. We are here to save your women from you… Your inherent violence tells us that we have to go to war with you… We have been forced into this despite all diplomatic efforts. From American Indian genocide to the war on terror, you can easily follow the patterns to come up with a recipe that has been tweaked over the years but generally replicated to create white or American benevolent innocence by different groups in power.
A Recipe for Making White or American Benevolent Innocence
- Believe that no matter what you are doing (even if that is bombing people and killing innocent civilians) that somehow you are doing it for humanitarian purposes.
- Even if you don’t believe this you should lie as best as possible and say you believe it when talking about it in public. You know your real political or financial goals but you would never share them publicly.
- In the build up to war make sure you talk about the inherent evil that you are facing from your enemies and that this is some type of existential crisis to the White race or the country at large.
- When bombing countries and killing people make sure you force the countries that you are bombing to sign agreements that say your troops and officers could never be put on trial in the country you are bombing. Having anyone deemed ‘guilty’ in a court of law could have a major effect on the psyche of the public at large, and their belief in their own innocence.
- Never sign on to international criminal courts although you have set legal precedents when putting other governments on trial in international courts.
- Plant ‘experts’ and work with corporate press outfits whose larger parent companies will benefit from the war to produce fluff pieces about the military efforts.
- Bring more ‘experts’ who will put into question the ‘enemies’ culture, beliefs, and constantly remind the audience of the foreignness of the ‘enemy.’
- Fund think tanks and creative agencies to produce ‘academic reports,’ films, propaganda pieces, and websites to teach the general public about the enemy.
- Constantly re-affirm the public’s own belief in its own benevolence and innocence throughout the war.
- Never show casualties of war that you have committed but always show casualties of war committed by your enemy.
- If the enemy is not clear manufacture one so that the public will always have an idea of black and white, and good and bad in their minds.
- Repeat… over and over and over again.
White Double Consciousness, Solidarity and Ending White Supremacy
To end white supremacy we have to get serious about the study and overall recognition of White and American benevolent innocence.
One of the first to theorize on the global, systemic, and psychological nature of White supremacy was W.E.B.DuBois with his essay written in 1910, “The Soul of White Folks,” At the time of DuBois writing, the state of Whiteness was such that he called it “the new religion of Whiteness,” which White people followed as they looked past their own ethnic roots and any form of class solidarity.
Somewhere between our European ancestors migration to these lands and our present moment, most White people paid what James Baldwin called “the price of the ticket” to fit within the normative idea of what Whiteness was and is today. A category always related to the tropes of benevolence, innocence, and racial purity. As Baldwin wrote of what was created in this space of cultural nothingness and lack of true community created by the
idea of Whiteness,
“It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was white before he/ she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”
So while Whiteness was once not a uniform identity as people were Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish Americans, etc., today this amalgamation of whiteness into one racial category has created an identity, which is as complex as any other racial identity. However, because the reality of living in the skin of the dominant racial group goes unrecognized by the majority of White people, its complexities are most often ignored
and not discussed publicly.
In my research, which I explore in depth in my forthcoming book White Benevolent Innocence: White Denial and Identity Development from Columbus to the ‘War on Terror’ I have found there to be at least eight sub categories which form White racial consciousness and identity today: White benevolent innocence, the White supremacist consciousness, poor Whites/ White victim mentality, the ethnic White consciousness, White liberal color blind consciousness, White melancholia, culturally specific White people, and finally Anti-racist White double consciousness.
Over a hundred years after DuBois’ writing, plenty of people still bow down to this false god of Whiteness, as the Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported there were just under 1000 hate groups operating in the United States in 2013, many of whom have explicitly White supremacist agendas.
While this is representative of a distinct group of White people, the majority of White folk today would rather not talk of race, and when race is discussed it is talked about as an abstract issue only pertaining to People of
Color. This stance of White racelessness or White racial denial has created its own form of twenty-first century racism, what the Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls, “Colorblind Racism,” a concept with central importance in the so called ‘color-blind’ era of Obama.
Then there is a growing population of White people who are working to confront Whiteness head on, who have done in-depth studies of race and who work to build anti-racist alliances with the hope of creating a new world free from White racial rule, White racial/ historical amnesia and a world which begins to heal from racial hatred and division. After 500 years of Western modernity’s unending colonization, war, genocide, rape and continuous exploitation of the world’s people and resources, we know that we must turn inward to make these critiques, we must critique Whiteness and its reign of death ourselves as White people for it truly is our ‘burden.’ It is our burden because, regardless of our personal stance on race, we reap the benefits of the legacy of White Supremacy by virtue of the fact of our belonging to the category of Whiteness and its societal implications domestically, internationally and psychologically.
Bearing this “White Mans burden of liquor, lust and lies,” as DuBois called it, instead of looking at the world through the eyes of the pale skinned world conquerors, we look at the world from below and centered in our hearts. Our heroes are not the great colonizers of Western civilization, instead we see them as merchants of death and at the same time we realize that this burden is bred into our skin and is always with us. We do not follow the attempts of others to ‘abolish the White race,’ for we know its false
signification has become too deep of a global reality and Whiteness is an inescapable fact of life that is central to any White persons social identity whether they want to recognize this or not.
To develop a critical anti-racist consciousness amongst White people today it is necessary to constantly deploy what the Latina Feminist philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff terms, White double consciousness. She states of this idea that,
“for whites, double consciousness requires an ever-present acknowledgment of the historical legacy of white identity constructions in the persistent structures of inequality and exploitation, as well as a newly awakened memory of many white traitors to white privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human community.”
The ever present possibility of White supremacist violence, and the historical trauma of its endless acts of White supremacist violence are always present with us as a community if we are unwilling to confront this legacy. The reality of this legacy of genocide will live on for as long as the lie of White supremacy has currency in our world. For as long as its myths stand and as long as White people are given false privileges for simply having light skin. Much of this then is about orientation, and how we orient ourselves, who we align ourselves with and ultimately who we look up to for our examples of moral character and great examples of living lives of truth.
To transform our world we must see clearly through the lies of White supremacy and white benevolent innocence to struggle to create a world where as the Zapatistas have taught us, the existence of other worlds is even possible.
