Whiteness Is the Hoarding This Country Needs to Stop
Hoarding during the COVID pandemic is a view of whiteness
The current coronavirus pandemic is not a parable, but it is a practical example.
As the world suffers through shortages, as the impact of hoarding essential medical supplies is undeniable, the connection to whiteness should be clear.
A hundred years ago, in 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”
I see an eye roll in Du Bois’s words. And whiteness being ownership, as Du Bois defined it, doesn’t mean whiteness is without cost or debt. Whiteness is not a debt-free ownership. Whiteness has not been paid off.
Whiteness is hoarding, all kinds of hoarding, including “opportunity hoarding.” This has a long history, and people can be trapped by their hoarding history. James Baldwin believed that whites are trapped in a history they don’t understand. In Baldwin’s point, hoarding is a factor.
This is not benign. This is violent. Whiteness kills. It holds back vital resources, which is inhumane, unhelpful, and criminal.
On March 23, Trump signed an executive order to prevent people from hoarding medical resources. It allows law enforcement agencies to investigate hoarding and price gouging, seize medical supplies, prosecute hoarders, and redistribute the seized medical supplies.
On March 30, Politico reports that the FBI seized 192,000 N95 respirator masks, 598,000 medical gloves, 130,000 surgical masks and “other supplies like gowns, disinfectant towels, hand sanitizers, and disinfectant sprays” from a warehouse owned by Baruch Feldheim, a 43-year-old Brooklyn man.
That’s whiteness. And that’s the appropriate response by the government to whiteness. The state must prohibit, criminalize, and investigate the accumulation of vital resources by whites. The state has to stop whiteness (hoarding). And then the state has to repossess and redistribute those essential resources.
Whiteness is a monopoly in violation of antitrust laws.
The legal scholar Daria Roithmayr argues in her book that early on whites formed “racial cartels” to monopolize resources and eliminate competition.
White identity is every definition of a cartel: It’s an amalgamation of nations; it’s an agreement between belligerents; it has a Racial Contract; the elites created it to ease divisions among the colonists, and from Bacon’s Rebellion the elites designed it to limit competition and fix prices.
The cartel comparison says again “whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” In her book, Roithmayr proves DuBois’s point. She says white advantage will continue until the government intervenes.
That’s the call to action, but the motions to dismiss prevail. The hoarders are the holdup. The hoarders are the holdouts. The hoarders are white. The ability to hoard has to end, and the ability to be white (a hoarder) has to end. This requires force—a hostile takeover, and a hostile take back.
This country has always been in a state of calamity. During a calamity, the US government can declare hoarding a crime. Whiteness is a twofer: It’s the cause and the crime.