Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 8: White supremacy More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Anna Denardin: Hi, this is Anna Denardin, and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. [dogs howling intro] Our colonial world order validates the rationales of white supremacy and even celebrates behaviors that reinforce it. The logic is simple: systemic privilege can only exist where systemic oppression is guaranteed. And as a cultural pattern so deeply entwined with power structures, white supremacy shapeshifts and evolves in step with colonial culture itself. A white supremacist is the European coloniser entitled enough to land on foreign shores and “bring civilization” as the gift of the greatest nations on Earth. It is the missionary arriving with Bibles to deliver salvation, certain that Western values and European Christian cultures are objectively better while Indigenous cultures are dangerous, violent, and savage. A white supremacist is the American Cowboy, riding into Indigenous territory under Manifest Destiny, justifying westward expansion as both heroic and inevitable because violence, when deployed in defense of white property, is noble, even righteous. White supremacist is the humanitarian sector, where time and time again, disaster response sidelines local expertise in favour of Western control. After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, for example, Haitian organizations — despite, you know, actually being Haitian and understanding Haitian needs — were deemed insufficiently "professional" by the international humanitarian industry to manage reconstruction funds. White supremacist is a gap-year volunteer building schools nobody asked for in countries whose traditional educational systems were destroyed by her own government's structural adjustment programs, while she photographs starving children for Instagram: "Grateful to serve these beautiful souls ❤️ #blessed”, only to return home with a permanently-altered sense of self importance. This is not about individual personalities. It is about a culture. So what is the role of white supremacy in sustaining the colonial world order, and what is the role of the colonial world order in sustaining white supremacy? How is it concealed behind white saviorism and white fragility? Why does “helping” the Global South so reliably advance the careers, wealth, and moral authority of white Westerners? What are the mechanisms and patterns that ensure this cycle continues? What does it take to break from white supremacy? And, how can privilege be held accountable? — Samantha Suppiah: Statement: The United States and Europe are powerful global actors because of their democratic and justice-centric values upholding human rights, equality and freedom. Statement: Big business is the main way that good is done in the world, usually by providing services that people need. Statement: Developing countries should aspire to achieve what developed countries have achieved, and developed countries are doing good by assisting developing countries to develop in that way. Statement: Some country in the West is the greatest nation in the world, because of its achievements and its culture. It represents a gold standard that all other nations should aspire to become. Statement: Western science and rationality is superior to all other forms of knowledge. Non-Western knowledges are best described as pseudo-science, primitively incomplete and ignorant at best, and dangerously irresponsible at worst. Statement: Western culture and western values are inherently and objectively better than other cultures and value systems. Statement: European Christian communities are humanity’s best models of planetary regeneration. Indigenous cultures are dangerous, violent and savage. Statement: Non-Western perspectives, narratives and systems should not be promoted under the vast majority of circumstances, except where it serves to validate and promote Western perspectives, narratives and systems. How many of these statements are true for most human beings alive today? Many of us grew up believing with every cell in our bodies that we could never be white supremacists. And yet we wake up every day with those ideas forming our fundamental beliefs about how our colonial world order is right and good. White supremacy is far more subtle and dangerous than what you had described, Anna. It is a culture which replaced original indigenous and traditional cultures via colonial ethnocide, the destruction of cultures. European colonisers went all around the world inflicting collective punishment onto other cultures and peoples by outlawing indigenous and traditional languages, religions, festivals, agriculture, food, and other customs and local methodologies. This was replaced with a culture of white supremacy legitimising colonisation, and incentivising those who would willingly serve under this system. — Anna Denardin: White supremacy is the immune system that colonialism developed to function without collapsing under the weight of its own moral bankruptcy. Europeans sailed for gold and profit, but the moment they needed to justify enslaving millions and committing continent-scale theft, white supremacy crystallised as the ultimate philosophical alibi. So white supremacy became the operating system, and once you build your entire civilisation on an operating system, you can't just delete it without the whole thing crashing. White supremacy isn't maintained just by white people anymore, it persists because it's the water we're all swimming in, and as you said Samantha, white supremacists rarely identify themselves as white supremacists. This phenomena is described by Robin DiAngelo as white fragility, the psychological immune system that protects white supremacy from examination. White fragility is what happens when someone benefits from a racist system their entire life but finds it unbearably painful to face it. It manifests as: Emotional outbursts when racism is named (popularly known as white women’s tears). There are defensive virtue signals, for example sentences such as “I have Black friends!” “But I didn’t mean it that way!”) where the offender's narrative about being a good person matters more than the experience of harm they perpetuate. They often center themselves in conversations about others’ oppression. They tone-police people for not being “nice enough” in calling them out, and they normally withdraw when discomfort appears. The irony is that white fragility proves the point. If white supremacy didn't exist, merely naming it wouldn't cause such spectacular emotional meltdowns. White supremacy is a festering abscess left untreated for centuries. And now, with the accelerated collapse of the West, we're watching the final stages of gangrene — the necrotic tissue clinging desperately to the half-rotted body, convinced that acknowledging the infection is more dangerous than the rot itself. When it comes to harmful systems, the choice has always been amputation or death. At some point, the cost of prioritizing comfort and profit for the few comes due. — Samantha Suppiah: Did you say Europeans sailed for gold and profit? White fragility would say that this is an incomplete picture and quite insensitive and rude, actually, because Europe really needed international trading opportunities due to challenging epidemics and wars at home. European colonisers might've done some bad things but they set out with good intentions of spreading Christian values like freedom and democracy. Who could've known that centuries of ecocide, genocide, ethnocide and epistemicide were bad for human and planetary health? No one could've known that. This is a structure in which there is a European Christian god at top surrounded by European Christian angels, and then below that is the European Christian king surrounded by his European Christian nobles. Then you have European Christian common people, and then you have the human beings who are not European or Christian, with some places on the hierarchy upon which dark-skinned people have equal status as non-human predators, and then you have the non-predators and prey animals, and below that we have the plant kingdom, and at the very bottom, deep below the surface of the Earth, is where hell is. What I am describing is the Great Chain of Being, a conventional, scientific "fact" across the centuries of the European colonial era, which figures equivalent to today's Elon Musk, Taylor Swift and even the British monarch, believe in as a fundamental, natural structure of the world. Sidenote: the Great Chain of Being, as a concept, is at least a few millennia old. But the structures that have been set up by European colonisers and imposed upon the planet are just a few centuries old. We all sit somewhere in this structure. We may not have power over things at the top, but we certainly have power over things within our control. We can choose not to perpetuate structural harm. We can choose to let the buck stop with us. If you think it's wrong that the white man is on the top of the hierarchy while other humans are relegated to lower statuses, then by this very same logical reasoning, you must also think that it's wrong that the human should be on a higher hierarchy than animals and plants. You must also think that factory farming and commercial agriculture is wrong. If you think the Great Chain of Being is wrong, then you would adjust your lifestyle to suit the change that you have in your power to make. Because most of humanity has been colonised by Europeans for so many generations in the past, and will continue to be mentally slaved by Europeans for many generations in the future, most human beings alive today are actually white supremacists. One does not need to be white or privileged to be a white supremacist. Today, it’s increasingly common and even expected to have rainbow executive teams and advisory boards of every gender, every race, every creed who, with great skill and competence, uphold white supremacy. — Anna Denardin: Colonialism severed people from their communities and culture, leaving them more vulnerable to its grip. If you were born into white supremacist systems, lived your whole life in white supremacy systems, were rewarded by white supremacist systems, and will probably die in white supremacist systems, it is only natural to assume that you will adapt into the white supremacy culture. You are indoctrinated through Western education to aspire to the white supremacist ideal: get into the elite university, land the prestigious job, climb to the top of the hierarchy, become the best version of yourself, a white supremacist. That's the dream everyone should aspire to, right? To succeed in the pinnacle of what humanity calls “civilisation”, right? Today, everyone is a master and a slave in one. We enslave ourselves. Far more effective than to repress, is to ensure people subordinate themselves voluntarily. The system today doesn't operate through deprivation, it aims to please and fulfill. Coloniality immunises itself against resistance by exploiting freedom instead of repressing it. Exploiting freedom does not promote resistance. If the Great Chain of Being once placed kings just below God, today everyone wants to be the king. We live in a disconnected, predatory society where social climbing replaced community, and domination became a survival instinct. Everyone is hunting for a higher spot on the ladder. When the system makes you both prisoner and guard, liberation starts with refusing to perfect your own captivity. Yes, we live in a colonial world order. Survival within it is necessary, but not an excuse for replication. As you said, the work begins with adjusting what’s within reach: your habits, your consumption, your relationships. Every choice is an interruption in the system's logic. Small, maybe. Insufficient on their own, certainly. But the colonial order depends on enough people voluntarily participating in it. It depends on you believing there is no alternative, that you have no power except the power it grants you. So withdraw that belief. Act otherwise in the spaces you occupy. Reclaim power from systems of harm by intervening in contexts within your control. — Samantha Suppiah: Mm-hm. An insidious colonial mechanism for self-enslavement. Global South governments create education curricula for children that promote white supremacist ideologies, histories and technologies. Global South media broadcast content for citizens that are filled with outright fabrications intended to manipulate emotions rather than to inform. Regardless, they are funded by Global North covert operations like those notoriously conducted by the now-defunct USAID, or today through Western intelligence agencies such as the CIA, or Western NGOs through global networks like the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED for example were behind the intentional stoking of local youth political tensions in recent flashes of colour revolutions in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia and Philippines. These mechanisms only work because of decades of white supremacist ideology introduced by education systems and media narratives -- and, in the case of the Philippines, from formerly being colonised by the US. So when it comes time to light the match, it all goes up in flames. Don't be a pawn of the West. Don't be another datapoint of collateral damage in colonial regime change operations. Reject white supremacy. Reject Western hegemony. Don't participate in regime change operations. I don't know how hard it can be. As a Crew, we've stopped engaging in mainstream media long time ago, because we understood the influence of hegemonic narratives through dominant channels and news sources. We've been spending considerable amounts of effort researching colonial propaganda tactics, learning patterns and identifying agendas. This is where white supremacy touches geopolitical affairs, through what is known as hybrid warfare. And this affects everyone, everywhere, all the time. They say that the people get the leadership they deserve. But in a colonial world order, it seems leadership have for a long time been cultivating the slaves they would like to profit from. As the Global South rises with more and more countries and cultures waking up to the lies of the West and their agents in the Global South, we must take active steps to rid ourselves of white supremacy. — Anna Denardin: Absolutely. White supremacy operates both through explicit ideology and institutional structures, and through insidious internalisation. The most powerful antidote begins with rigorous self-examination as an ongoing practice of awareness, skill-building, and environmental curation. It requires brutal honesty about how we’ve internalised white supremacist values, assumptions, and hierarchies. The next step is learning to identify patterns, to recognize how white supremacy shows up around us and develop ways to disarm it. This is what Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon refers to as combative decoloniality. Combative decoloniality means refusing to be passive observers of our own colonization. It calls us to become active agents of liberation, resisting the narratives, systems, and internalised hierarchies that white supremacy imposes. Through this, coloniality loses its influence, whether in mainstream media manipulation or the overt lies of those in power, and we begin to cultivate intellectual and emotional independence. If the relationships around you are invested in white supremacy, seek new ones. Curate a healthy environment as best you can. White supremacy constantly seeks to infiltrate and normalize itself; maintaining decolonial spaces demands vigilance, boundary-setting, and continuous recommitment to the values that make them possible. As we become more aware of ourselves, we see patterns more clearly. As we recognise patterns, we understand our conditioning more deeply. As we change our environment, we find support for deeper learning. As we practice disarming techniques, we gain confidence and skill. This is the process of transformative becoming we seek in all we do. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Anna Denardin. This is Samantha Suppiah. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.