racism’s

heritage: a left facebook newsfeed inspired poem

lynk bella hues
5 august 2019

racism’s heritage
isn’t found in mental illness,
which makes reasoned sense,
because mental illness itself
isn’t measureable illness
like cancer, diabetes, or aids.
and while racism’s invention
only several centuries ago
has produced mass premature death
and extreme material inequalities
that can be measured, this doesn’t mean
it’s a mentally healthy or sane ideology.

without biological origins in inferior psychoemotionalities
of weak peoples naturally lazy, unresourceful, and polluted,
but with social origins in european empire-building
inside monarchical states and colonial projects abroad,
racism remains an insaned ideology of labor control,
not just because it’s bound up within capitalism
and its oppressions. but because racism tries to sincerely
perform on life’s modern stage, the marketplace,
as if it’s a character type named natural logic
whose ruler written backstory tells of a sanely labor-process
when multiple races were born from soil and blood,
first growing up from the ground where every group’s “ancestors”
lived, worked, and loved a millennia ago, then extending out
from each group member’s genetic code for all to read
on a living body’s systematically shaped skin to determine,
if they and you will, a person’s “heritage” within world “heritages,”
once, that is, different looking people populated shared lands
composing multicultural class societies with dominating hierarchies
reliant upon unequally racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings
of what inheritance and property is as wealth, group, and nature.

why do we play this game
of inheritance and property—
this game of heritage,
perhaps always a game
of truth and power—
as if it isn’t a root of roots,
maintaining toward destruction,
the whole despairing-miserable world?

racisms’ cruel workings in capitalism’s factories, halls, and kitchens
tries to cover its brutal inventedness and bloody operations in the past,
hide its fears and anxieties, and clothe its domination with “rationalism,”
even when angrily or civilly expressed in a quietly screaming confidence
of unidentified traumatized existence which tends to express itself
in (mass) violence the more rational and confident it becomes hidden
and not-so-hidden at the core of the productive base and its social institutions
which do the modern market’s central business of involuntarily compelling
the expropriatively philistine life-activities of hustling to pursue profit,
accumulate privilege, and exercise power over others without care for consent.

racisms,
like cisheteropatriarchy
and sanism,
in short,
are at the roots,
the concrete foundation,
of capitalism’s heritage
which, like any show,
has a beginning and an end
that’s fully constructed
by differently coerced
and differently managed labor
with our natural body-powers
differently engaged
in the everyday building
and reproduction processes.

if racisms’ heritage requires fully undoing capitalism
by dismantling its intersecting logic with living bodies
because it commodifies us into harming each other
while workers across borders create all that we can see,
when will we finally reclaim, or claim for the first time,
what is rightfully ours? will it be as we do that undoing work,
itself always, like being, a doing? asked differently with urgent
patience, how much longer we will allow this insaned nonillness
called racism to haunt and harm the oppressed of the world
who produce, by fear of nothingness with alienating results,
to enrich the rulers of private property who hold our means against us?

in a word, hoping it not be read
as negatively reductive, perhaps
what confronts us isn’t a failure
of the enlightenment’s scientific rationality,
as erich fromm argues in the sane society (1955),
but a problem of heritage
whose question opens to the classed history
of race, cisheteropatriarchy, and madness
within the capitalist epoch in the us empire and how violence
is a doing of the oppressor class within governing structures
called states and corporations who inspire its practice
by those coercively socialized to submit to its domination.

knowing the intersectional messiness
of the past and present world
in relation to
capitalism’s matrix of domination
becomes
here
a liberatory pedagogical activity
which can provide the revolutionary tools
we need to transform heritage
into something new,
a newness of social forms
who contents exist democratically
without violence, free from capitalism
and its many immiserations.