Reclaiming and Feeding Roots Deeper Than Whiteness
What could we gain by jettisoning myths that justify power over other people and things and exploitation of them?
Originally written in 2021, updated in 2025
At the center of the culture wars are notions of identity and culture, especially claims around whiteness and Western Civilization. With public opinions increasingly polarized on one side or the other of these debates, it’s important to be able to take the wider view of the development of these ideas and see them as modern social constructs. Saying that they are merely social constructs, not natural, organic inevitabilities, is not to deny that they have great power in the real world. Money is a social construct, not a fact of nature, but it carries lethal force.
Between the 18th and 20th centuries the élite of a handful of empires conquered most of the planet and justified their domination and exploitation with the myth that the “master races” alone were capable and worthy of wielding the reigns of power. Their superior civilization and genetic endowments – so the claim went – made them uniquely capable of mastering the physical plane and the social realm, so as to create the best of all possible worlds. Modernity, as defined and governed by those who promoted whiteness as the pinnacle of the human race, became the dominant theology of secular salvation.
(A depiction of the supposed racial hierarchy from a textbook for American students: Maury’s New Complete Geography (1906))
This imperial order materially benefited some people, while oppressing many others and depriving subject peoples of their languages, cultures, self-determination, dignity, and humanity. It also set into motion the cult of consumerism and the triumphalism of materiality that has accelerated into the existential crises of ecological catastrophe that looms over our collective future.
Can we envision a more just future for all? A sustainable, a nature-oriented world that does not thrive on power over other people and things? How could people create a sense of meaning and purpose with their lives and communities if they could no longer rely on materialism and whiteness to fill those existential roles and serve those grand narratives?
Those are questions that have driven my engagement in Scottish Gaelic tradition and folk culture, which has helped to anchor and enrich my own life. One profound article (“Notes From Underground #7: I Only Have One Prediction for You” by Dougald Hine, 2020) observing the many repercussions of environmental disaster strikes a similar note:
I don’t know how to disentangle myself or my family from this way of being, this web of extraction that surrounds us with objects that seem to pop up, magically, out of the ground. I don’t even know how to frame the question, how to name the work that’s called for. (It’s not a problem, I remind myself, it’s a predicament.)
One thing I know that helps – one piece of the work – is to gather and share the embers of other ways of being, blowing them gently into flame together, knowing how much unfinished history we carry with us. Listening to those who have more experience than I do of the ways life has been made to work in other times and places, one theme I hear is how much work goes into making a grown-up. It’s not just something you become by virtue of surviving childhood, or sitting out enough years in schoolrooms and lecture theatres. When the time comes, it takes a work of initiation on which much of the life of your community is focused. You have to be cooked in the flames, I’ve heard it said, and the frame of initiation which your culture builds is the vessel that gives you a chance of coming through the fire.
Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems provide alternative ways of being and seeing that have nurtured communities for many millennia in ways that serve human needs without destroying the ecological neighbourhood in which they live. All of humanity was once indigenous – how can we rediscover, reclaim, and re-root those seeds of indigeneity?
The colourful iconography of the Scottish Highlands presents a kind of double-edged sword, or perhaps claymore. These images are ultimately derived from native Highland fashions to various degrees, and their unique charms draw much attention, but they can also act as a barrier to and distraction from revealing and exploring the deeper layers of indigenous Gaelic culture: belief systems, historical experiences, and diverse forms of cultural expression. In fact, these ethnic symbols have largely been co-opted by conservative groups and forces that would rather that we not pry too hard behind them, or questions whose purposes they truly serve.
I have written many resources rooted firmly in solid scholarship, and founded the Hidden Glen Folk School, to provide mentorship and community to those who want to explore the nuances and complexities of the Scottish Gaelic world, one as elaborate, tangled, sophisticated, and rich as any other.
In thinking about this goal, I am mindful of the visionary work of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., who stated in 1956 at the Montgomery Victory Rally:
the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.
We stand on the brink of an abyss that could be darker than any other period of human history. Whether or not we decide to follow bad actors into that abyss, or to reject their messages of fear-mongering, Othering, and scapegoating, will require the best and most courageous of humanity to raise our voices and take a stand for our collective well-being – and to reject these false idols and misleading myths.
I have yet to encounter a more attractive or convincing “myth” than the Christian gospel: that we are made in the image of a loving God, that we are inadequate in ourselves but that we are made complete in Jesus and that, in embracing him as Saviour and Lord, we inherit eternal life when he returns to renew creation. Sin e!
Want a false idol and misleading myth? How about racelessness!
Race is not merely a social construct. It is much more of a natural, organic inevitability than people care to admit. Humans are not a biological monolith.
The problematic part isn't races themselves (the Gael is not the Han is not the Bantu is not the Masai is not the Persian is not the Arab, etc..) but the mythos of a hierarchy, at least if you're not among those on top. Though sometimes it's hard to be humble: At least one German Jew was a literal Einstein, and a German von Braun was perhaps uniquely good at getting up-goers made. And you don't see a lot of space activity coming out of African parts of Africa. (People of) Different races have had different achievements.
We are not all the same, and it would be foolish to suppose that our differences must solely be in appearance. It's idiotic that we have to pretend to be shocked when we see proverbs like "Birds of a feather" bear out (people prefer associating with people like themselves), or that East Asian names dominate the calculus entry tests at universities. I'm surprised that people aren't working to get petite Vietnamese ladies into the NBA in the name of social justice.
I even heard someone say the differences within groups are bigger than those between groups. This is patently absurd: you look much more like your siblings, or those of your own blood heritage, than those of different heritages, especially far-flung ones. It is perhaps true of something like intelligence: the differences between the smart and the hopefully-otherwise-gifted within a group may be broader than the differences between group averages. But it’s not like it’s some kind of magical impossibility that some human races might tend to be of higher intelligence than others, broadly speaking. Certainly, some environments select more for power, some more for intelligence, although in all both are helpful, if not essential.
The thesis that one's social opportunities shouldn't be strictly delimited by mere dint of one's genetic heritage (and of course people can play games with how that is reckoned) is sound in terms of respecting the dignity of the human individual. Where people err is supposing that the heritages do not exist at all (relative to one another), or are arbitrary, meaningless. No. Blood means something, goddamnit. The 'shape' of the Gael, speaking broadly, is as or more important as the tongue of the Gael.
(I make no claim that the Gaels are the smartest or most powerful race on Earth, we’re just the best-looking and sweetest-sounding one.)
Our blood is not arbitrary. It’s been hard-earned, honed to our environments over countless generations. There’s got to be more going on than just appearance, and I don’t just mean how sickle cells for malaria resistance are a feature pretty much exclusive to Sub-Saharan Africans. We are much deeper than our appearances, and our temperaments and predilections are also highly likely to be heritable, if difficult to track for both scientific and political reasons.
What we need is not One Master Race to Rule Them All. (Maybe we do need One Master, someone people widely respect to set things to rights and provide leadership, but that’s a different matter.) We need an art of pluralistic racial flourishing. This needs must include being respectful of one another’s tongues and cultures, and continuously working to ensure fair dealing. Ecological biodiversity is important, and so is human biodiversity. Neither should we ban intermarriage nor push ourselves to all become beige.
Personally, I suspect that given that there are competing pulls between reinforcing the type and bringing in the exotic, as long as cultures have the wherewithal to maintain themselves, human reproduction won’t need to be micromanaged. All we need to do is fire all the DEI people and get on with life, and stop according people privileged treatment just because they're non-white and/or non-male. People of any race or either sex can stand on their own two feet in the dignity of their own achievements. Let's focus on that instead of nebulous concepts like decolonisation or abandoning whiteness.