Whites | Us and Them: Part Eleven
In Part Eleven of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen does what he said he would do from the beginning — stops talking about so-called white people and talks directly to them. And he can do this from a position almost no one making these arguments can occupy: he is Irish-German, grew up poor and white in America, moved through that country inside that category, and his family history — farmers, serfs, peasants on both sides — is the same family history as most white Americans. None of his people knew they were white until they arrived in America. Someone told them it meant something. And they entered the caste system the way everyone does — not by agreeing to it, but by having no framework to refuse it. This is the acknowledgment that most people making this argument never make, and which Part Eleven begins with: you did not choose this. The traits were installed before you could evaluate them. Your brain lives in a furnished apartment. That is not exoneration. But it should make you less defensive and more honest. Then Bolsen does something rarer still — he names the pathologies from inside. The grammar of love expressed entirely through violence: I would kill for my kids. The pre-cognitive hierarchy ranking the moment you enter any room. The loneliness epidemic as the structural consequence of a culture that cannot compute horizontal human relationships. Materialism not as a love of money but as a way of knowing — the assumption that only the measurable is real, which makes morality a performance and consequence a fiction. The deep irony being that moral causation is the most verifiable pattern in all of recorded history. And every empire built on injustice eventually collapsed under the weight of it. As is happening now. The only difference between him and the audience he is addressing: Islam gave him a lens to see it. And the obligation to say what he sees.
In Part Eleven of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen does what he said he would do from the beginning — stops talking about so-called white people and talks directly to them. And he can do this from a position almost no one making these arguments can occupy: he is Irish-German, grew up poor and white in America, moved through that country inside that category, and his family history — farmers, serfs, peasants on both sides — is the same family history as most white Americans. None of his people knew they were white until they arrived in America. Someone told them it meant something. And they entered the caste system the way everyone does — not by agreeing to it, but by having no framework to refuse it. This is the acknowledgment that most people making this argument never make, and which Part Eleven begins with: you did not choose this. The traits were installed before you could evaluate them. Your brain lives in a furnished apartment. That is not exoneration. But it should make you less defensive and more honest. Then Bolsen does something rarer still — he names the pathologies from inside. The grammar of love expressed entirely through violence: I would kill for my kids. The pre-cognitive hierarchy ranking the moment you enter any room. The loneliness epidemic as the structural consequence of a culture that cannot compute horizontal human relationships. Materialism not as a love of money but as a way of knowing — the assumption that only the measurable is real, which makes morality a performance and consequence a fiction. The deep irony being that moral causation is the most verifiable pattern in all of recorded history. And every empire built on injustice eventually collapsed under the weight of it. As is happening now. The only difference between him and the audience he is addressing: Islam gave him a lens to see it. And the obligation to say what he sees.