Moving from INDIVIDUAL PURITY SALVATION
toward NON-LINEAR ENTANGLED COLLECTIVE LIBERATION.
THE SPIRIT PROJECT AT TASK
In this essay I make a case for, what I perceive to be, the Spirit Project at task for the Project of Whiteness today. I am using the word “project” twice here, but don’t get confused. When I talk about the “Project of Whiteness” I am referring to a constructed and maintained ideology that structurally, psychologically and institutionally pigeonholes power, land, and resource control to the white-body phenotype at the cost of equity, justice, and ecological equilibrium.(1) And when I talk about Spirit Project, I am referring to the necessary adaptations to inherited means of being in the world that a culture or a society must take up for psycho-social well-being.
The way I see it, the spirit project of whiteness has been put off for many generations, all the while, the task at hand, building up in intensity. I see an orientation toward linear progress and an atrophied respect for death processes.
In short, I believe the Spirit Project of the Project of Whiteness is to learn how to compost itself. I can’t help but take note of white culture’s fear of death. I say this because death is an important part of the compost cycle, and that might be where we’re getting stuck. How might appreciation of death as a transformative act bring us one step closer to solidarity and liberation?
Death is a natural part of the life cycle. Death is a release of old ways that don’t serve us anymore so we have room and energy to step into something new. It’s actually a quite fertile, generative place to be. I will use the framework of composting to articulate the life/death/life cycle I am getting at.
In the first section of this essay I will run through a brief overview of the construction of whiteness for historical context and consider its insidious, pervasive means of operation and its orientation toward linear progress and individualism. Then I will walk through the motions of composting the trouble at hand by means of embodiment, release, and creation. I emphasize that a capacity to embody, to be with the trouble afoot is a necessary step to bring about the heat needed for re-arrangement. For stepping into something new. We must be in relationship with change in more present ways to provide the necessary foundation from which to build something new.
Click here to read the essay. This essay is speculative and I would love feedback!