White paranoia embodied and armed with guns killed Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Justice requires America to stop the madness of white paranoia.
White paranoia is a racist form of paranoia. It’s a racist “suspiciousness and distrustfulness” of Black people, whites considered less than white, and people of color. And it’s characterized by “systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur.”
Per the dictionary definition of paranoia, the systematized delusions of white paranoia are:
“Arranged with a definite plan or scheme”
“Falsely and delusively believed and propagated”
“A persistent, false psychotic belief regarding the (white) self or persons or objects outside the (white) self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary. “
The Origins
Steve Martinot in his book, “The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization” has an insightful analysis of white paranoia that he traces back to colonial America when elites in the Virginia colony panicked over a cross-group uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion. After the rebellion, the elites invented whiteness and white-skin privileges to prevent future trouble.
This means panic and paranoia are in the origin story of whiteness. From Bacon’s Rebellion, white paranoia gets a job as a patroller, and it becomes the duty of all whites. White paranoia and white violence form white identity and white solidarity.
Part of Being White
White paranoia, as an aspect of white identity, may be heaviest among whites with a strong white identity, but white paranoia is part of being white. This is not about pale or light skin; this is about the amalgamation of political and social interests called white. One can be light for all their days. But no one should be white, not even for a day.
Whiteness is a product of white racism; pale or light skin is a product of human evolution. Depigmented skin has been around for about 7,000 years. Whiteness as a social status is less than 500 years old. Skin color and ancestry predate whiteness. Being white is something more. Being white is nothing good.
To be white is to claim, or partially benefit from, a fragile and fake purity that’s vulnerable to contamination and corruption. That nonexistent delusion of purity is paranoia all by itself as a delusion of grandeur. And that nonexistent delusion of purity requires paranoia, solidarity, and violence. White identity is a killer identity in the worst way.
In one piece for the Atlantic, “How Racism Invented Race in America,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that race is not “a fact of providence, but of policy...”
In another piece for the Atlantic, “It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton the First Black President,” Coates suggests that race is not who we are but what was done to us. According to Coates, race is a made thing.
White paranoia is part of what makes white white and wrong. The evidence of white paranoia is everywhere, all the time, and it's overwhelming: It’s in white flight; it's in whites calling the police on Black people; it's in whites murdering Black people; it's in white terrorism; it's in whites voting for Trump, it's in whites thinking they are the victims of discrimination, and it's in whites being afraid of demographic changes.
In the Pew Research Center 2019 Race in America report, 65% of the Black respondents said, “People acted like they were suspicious of them,” which received the most responses out of seven questions.
I pair those findings with Martinot’s words that, “whiteness and social paranoia, whiteness and the need for a threat, are inseparable.”
Taken together, if part of what it means to be Black in America is that people act like they’re suspicious of you. Then part of what it means to be white in America is to be paranoid.
The murderers of Arbery and Taylor were being white. The murderers of Arbery and Taylor were doing what whiteness does to become white and whiter. Those who were silent and complicit in their murders did the same.
The Cycle of Whiteness
For Martinot, “the concept of whiteness and race” comes from a cycle of “paranoia (a sense of threat), solidarity, and violence.” Those are the three major elements of white identity, and according to Martinot they bolster each other.
Martinot says white paranoia justifies white violence as self-defense (or legal, I would add) and then demands white solidarity. For Martinot, the audience for racism and whiteness is white, and “Because the audience is white, what happens to the victim of racist hostility becomes a problem only if it is a problem for that (white) audience.”
Too many times has that statement been true. We see it again in the murders of Arbery and Taylor. Local officials acted after the murders became a problem for the white audience. And the solidarity of silence from local authorities that immediately followed the murders comes from the cycle of white paranoia, white solidarity, and white violence.
Without White Paranoia
I would like to imagine a country without white paranoia. In this country, no one treats Black people like suspects. In this country, “caravans, hordes, and infestations” are not words that trick and trigger white voters to vote for whiteness. In this country, politicians aren't primarily white, and politicians are free to do what's right. In this country, people never mind white conspiracy theories.
In this country, people speak whatever language they like without fear or violence. In this country, people eagerly embrace demographic changes instead of demagogues. In this country, hate crimes and hate groups do not exist. In this country, white flight never takes off. In this country, there's no opposition to reparations.
In this country, police don't kill Black people at a disproportionate rate. In this country, the police and prisons are minimal. In this country, gun sales and gun ownership are low. In this country, the national defense budget is modest.
No one should underestimate how much white paranoia animates white identity and influences the culture of a country.
Stopping the Cycle
White paranoia, which comes with white identity and white racism, will not go away or cure itself. If whites are to be less white, not white, and anti-white, that starts by stopping white paranoia and what white paranoia does and allows.
Martinot points his fingers at white identity as the problem and says, “For white racism to be eliminated, white impunity needs to be criminalized as unethical, autocratic, and therefore anti-democratic.”
However, Martinot is careful to point out that the revenge ethic of imprisonment, the courts, and police brutality shouldn’t guide the criminalization of white impunity. Martinot recommends communities develop a different ethic in dialogue.
Criminalizing acts of white paranoia, with a focus on restorative justice, is a start. At least one lawmaker in New York City said calling the police on Black people for no reason should be a hate crime. Lawmakers across the country should agree.
There are also self-defense laws, stand your ground laws, and police policies that uphold and decriminalize white aggression and white violence. All of that has to change for people to live.
Ending white paranoia means ending white identity. It means ending everything that makes people white. It's a tall order, and it’s the only way out of this disorder.
Related Essays
Here are a few essays I wrote on Medium related to white paranoia and lynchings.
”How Donald Trump’s Impeachment Made the White Party Whiter Than It Was”
I wrote this essay on Medium back in December 2019 after watching House Republicans during Trump’s impeachment. I saw white violence and white solidarity during the House impeachment proceedings that made the GOP whiter. Some say “race” is a verb. The piece explores the idea that whites become whiter based on what they do.
This quote from the essay is a statement about white identity:
Trump’s presidency is one of white solidarity, through white violence, that starts with white paranoia.
”Stop Making People Your Suspects”
I wrote this essay on Medium in August 2018 after watching the documentary about Trayvon Martin, “Rest in Power.” White violence starts when whites make people into suspects, and making people into suspects is a major factor in white violence.
I learned the etymology of the word “suspect” is “to regard with mistrust,” “to look at,” “to look up at,” “to look at secretly,” or “to observe.”
The etymology of the word suspect, with its meanings to look at or to observe, reminds me of the phrase, “the obsessive white act of noticing,” again from Martinot’s book “The Machinery of Whiteness.”
If we look back at history, we see that white paranoia invents things like “reckless eyeballing.” “Reckless eyeballing” is a projection of white paranoia and what whites do. Whiteness is the evil eye, and a great deal of whiteness starts in the eyes. The KKK has been urging whites to “Wake Up” for years.
It’s also interesting that the word suspect is related to the word spectacle. Spectacles are “unusual, notable, or entertaining”; spectacles are “eye-catching public displays”; spectacles are “an object of curiosity or contempt,” and spectacles are “a device used to correct defects of vision.”
White paranoia makes suspects and spectacles.
This quote from the essay is another statement about white identity:
Because, often, the suspicious person is the suspicious person.
”Stand your ground laws give provoking people a license to kill”
I wrote this essay on Medium in July 2018, after a white patroller murdered Markeis McGlockton, 28, in Clearwater, Florida. The white patroller was upset because McGlockton’s girlfriend parked in a handicap spot at a convenience store.
When McGlockton came out of the store, he saw the white patroller in his girlfriend's face and McGlockton shoved him. The white patroller fell on the ground and shot McGlockton dead. After a national outcry, local officials arrested the white patroller, and he was later convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Here's a quote from the essay I wrote about this tragedy:
A shove that’s free of injury and imminent danger does not call for killing anyone. When push comes to shove — is not an idiom for murder.
“What’s Next After the Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act?”
I wrote this essay in December 2018 when the Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act was in the news. Congress has passed versions of the bill, but Congress has not reconciled the bills and to date the act is not law. My essay asks a question about something that hasn’t been settled, but the main thrust of the essay is to close the gaps in justice that allow white terrorism. And there are many gaps in justice that allow white terrorism.
Here are a few quotes from the essay:
“White terrorists still murder and torture people because of the gaps in justice. The deadly list is long. The torture list is long. Both lists grow because America loves its freedom to hate.
Veterans aren’t the only ones who have died or will die for America’s freedoms. Innocent civilians have died and will die because of America’s freedoms.
For the marginalized, there are no bone-spur deferments in the war against white supremacy. Modern-day lynchings are real, and America must close the gaps in justice that allow them to continue too.”
“Whiteness Has a Hand in Lynching Black Trans Women“
Black trans women are under attack in America. The founder of Black Trans Lives Matter, Cherno Biko, has called the murders of Black trans women lynchings. I wrote this essay in July 2019 not to excuse Black men who lynch Black trans women, but to expose the white hands at work.
This piece brought together Blackness and Transness for me. One scholar C. Riley Snorton in their book, “Black on Both Sides: The Racial History of Trans Identity,” says, “To feel black in the diaspora, then, might be a trans experience.”
In a paper, “The Transness of Blackness, the Blackness of Transness,” the scholar Marquis Bey describes Blackness and Transness as “fugitivity” with dispositions of “refusal” and “escape.” Accordingly, there is a runaway quality to Blackness and Transness.
It may be a coincidence that Arbery was running and Blackness and Transness have a runaway quality. It’s not a coincidence that the lynching of Arbery has a trans quality and is part of the trans experience.
What I’m Reading Online
“In Arbery Shooting, a George Zimmerman-Style Defense May Resonate with Jurors” - When Georgia officials arrested Arbery’s killers, I thought about how arrests are often the first step to acquittals for whites. Arrests and trials are sanitizing rituals for whites. This article in Newsweek says the ritual could work again.
But we need to keep talking about how whites use white laws to get away with crimes against humanity. White laws cannot justify white crimes.
“Louisville Police Officers in Breonna Taylor Raid Named”-Three white men killed Taylor and three white men killed Arbery. Perhaps that's a coincidence. What is not a coincidence is that both cases include white paranoia, white solidarity, and white violence.
“Are All White Americans Police Officers ”-Andre Henry combines history and the present reality to show that “many White people believe they are still our overseers.”
In “overseers,” we have another sight word. The etymology of the verb oversee means “to look down upon, to keep watch, survey, observe.” That's exactly what Arbery's murderers did. They looked down on him; they watched him; they surveyed him, and they observed him—to death.
Whites still think they're our overseers because that's what it means to be white. That is one major function of whiteness. And whites still think they're white. This is an identity problem. The solution is to stop and unmake white identity.
“Reckoning with Violence” -Michelle Alexander in a piece from March 2019 gives her opinion about restorative justice practices for violent crime offenders. Her piece is timeless, and I found it helpful while thinking about white violence. Martinot's words about criminalizing white impunity without giving in to the revenge ethic fit with this piece.
“We Are Living in the Age of Black-Panic Defense” -In this piece for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb reviews the details of Arbery's murder and makes the connection between the “gay-panic” defense and the Black-panic defense. In both cases, as Cobb states, violence becomes acceptable in the name of self-defense because of a “rational” fear. White paranoia makes the irrational rational to itself.
The age of Black-panic defense has been going on for centuries. Sadly, we're still living in that age. The Black-panic defense is an offensive strategy that should offend. Cobb identifies the strategy, but Cobb leaves white paranoia unnamed and therefore armed.
“Liberty and Justice for...All?”-Austin Channing Brown writes in her newsletter about the lynching of Arbery with a realness that moved me as she called bullshit on words that have yet to be real for all.
“Racial battle fatigue and the pandemic: A modern-day lynching in Georgia | Salon.com” - I appreciate that Chauncey DeVega from the Salon puts the coronavirus and the lynching of Arbery in one post. That's the reality of white terrorism in America. White terrorism is all at once and from many sides. The assault isn't uniform, but it is united. And the racist battle fatigue is real.
A tweet by Michael Harriot about white silence In this tweet, Michael Harriot says when he accuses white people of silence he hears “not all,” even though he never says, “all white people.” Harriot then connects that point to the lynching of Arbery. Harriot says no one would hunt and kill a Black man in a residential neighborhood in broad daylight unless they were sure “all white people” would remain silent.
Harriot’s tweet speaks to white solidarity. It's often white actors who make assumptions about how whites will respond to white violence. The “not all’s” were nonexistent in Arbery's case, and his lynchers didn't bother with the thought of “not all’s” at all.
Last Words
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”
Dr. King said those words. As it was when he was alive, the law itself allows modern-day lynchings. Instead, laws should keep people from lynching people. It’s not good enough for the law to work after I’ve been lynched. The law has to work in advance. It can start by stopping white paranoia in its tracks and traps.