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Sorry, I’ve been gone for so long, y’all. Quite frankly, I’ve been overwhelmed with a bunch of things, but I’m back and finally ready to get back to talking with you on a regular basis. Thanks for sticking with me.

Unless you’ve deliberately been avoiding national news in the U.S., you know what’s been happening in Minnesota. Multiple people in the city of Minneapolis have been shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, including two people who did not survive the encounter.

Many have and continue to voice their shock and outrage at the federal agents’ continued terrorism of U.S. citizens and immigrants, so I won’t rehash such here except to voice my opinion and desire for ICE to be abolished and for all those in government supporting ICE to be held to full account.

I’ll also say that it’s more than mildly infuriating to watch white folks wake up to a reality that non-white people have been talking about for literally centuries. I’m grateful that more people appear to be rejecting American mythology, but it’s wild that it took two white people being brutally murdered on camera for y’all to care.

So this post by Ashley Baron took me out!

To me, the term “white supremacy” also carried a bit of false bravado with it. Ashley articulated this vague sense I had in her post; namely, that secure people do not insist on the inherent superiority of their race the way white people have constructed whiteness in America.

A true belief in one’s superiority does not need argument, debate, and violent reinforcement. If you know you’re the shit and such sentiment bears out in reality, there’s no need to insist that others who disagree be subjugated or killed for disagreement. Others’ failure to recognize your greatness is their problem.

So, while groups like the KKK and other white nationalist organizations say they believe white people are superior, their actions betray them and reveal that they don’t, in practice, believe what they claim about their race.

Narcissism is an interesting human behavioral phenomenon that I’ve, unfortunately, encountered (I think) several times in my professional and personal life. Dealing with folks who exhibit the behaviors below is an absolute nightmare:

But read that list again and tell me it doesn’t exactly describe the behavior of those who take up whiteness.

After the brilliant book, It’s Hard to Stop Rebels Who Time Travel, by my dear friend, big brother, and college professor, Raymond Thompson Jr., I’ve been thinking a lot about the consequences of centuries of white folks getting away with murder, theft, sexual assault, and countless other awful crimes.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a society that still lets people get away with murder, so long as those killers kill the right people, has popularized serial killers to the level we do in the U.S. When a white woman was brutally assaulted and murdered, and then a Black person was blamed and lynched for it, that actual perpetrator continued to live his life. He likely committed similar acts of violence again, but also likely reproduced, helped raise a family, and was in a position to, at the very least, model a set of behaviors that influenced his offspring. And this happened thousands of times for centuries in this country.

That’s approximately how many people voted for Donald J. Trump in the last election. Mountains of evidence of a close association with a convicted child sex trafficker seem to have only a minimal impact on his followers and supporters. Posting a shockingly racist meme about the only Black presidential family — an act that would get anyone fired from any public service job — is being widely defended as innocent or, in his case, “not a mistake”.

A familiar refrain I remember hearing from white folks when discussing the awful things U.S. presidents and other white historical figures have done is, “Where does it end?” “Do we tear down these important men of history? What would we be left with?” Needless to say, I find it sickeningly ironic that a country that refuses to acknowledge Thomas Jefferson’s sexual assault of a 14-year-old by the name of Sally Hemings he enslaved and fathered children with, is the same nation that seems utterly uninterested in prosecuting the 47th president for multiple alleged sexual encounters (assaults) of minors.

In my experience, people who exhibit narcissistic behavior never admit a wrong if said wrong would diminish their reputation or access to power.

I’m at a complete loss for where things stand today in the United States of America, except…

I’ve been listening a lot to Media Indigena lately, a wonderful podcast hosted by Rick Harp and regular guests Drs. Kim TallBear and Candis Callison. My consciousness around the world I’d like to live in has been equally shaped by Black and Indigenous scholars, activists, and people. The Wild Kitchen is an attempt to live the best of what I’m learning.

Media Indigena was on a ten-month break, but recently returned with a five-part mini series titled “Interrogating ‘The White Possessive’”. Part 4 of this series entirely broke my brain in the best way. Dr. TallBear offers a critique of the term “identity” that I’m still digesting, but another theme of this series and episode is the ways that whiteness is fueled by narcissistic behavioral patterns, and how one might recognize, combat, and move around such towards a better way of being.

Dr. TallBear rejects the term “identity” because the way the term is used decenters relationships as a defining characteristic of how one might describe oneself. The question of “how do you self-identify?” is problematic because every person is defined by their relationships, not what they alone claim themselves to be. She goes on to point out that reducing the complexity of land-based people to an identity is a tool to commodify, and ultimately, lay claim to “indigenous identity” to destroy land rights.

Put another way, it’s a lot easier for someone to claim Indigeneity when all they have to do is self-identify than it is for someone to take up the relationships of a group of people. If being Cherokee is simply a matter of blood relation rather than all of the relationships that Cherokee people have with the land, each other, and the spiritual world, then it becomes a lot easier to claim resources that Cherokee people steward, control, and/or occupy.

I’m trying my best to deepen my roots with the food I consume. It’s been the second most rewarding journey I’ve taken, next to building a family with my wife, and the two are so closely related that I don’t really feel right describing them as separate journeys.

Likewise, I don’t know how to talk about The Wild Kitchen without talking about my relationship with how the land of my birth is being abused by a way of life I see as disgusting.

The way forward through white narcissism has to be rooted in seeking out and maintaining good relations. I don’t know how that happens at a large scale, how +70 million people free themselves from whiteness, but I’m working at it, more and more each day, and I hope you’ll stay with me on this journey.