Who Gets to Be Human?

The Unspoken Question Behind Every Policy Debate

We know what to do–those of us who choose to be anti-racism/pro-humanity educators. We have a solution set that is borne from centuries of scholarship under oppression. Out of necessity we have developed the language and concepts to describe our own coerced positions within the racial caste system and some approximations of words to describe what we can observe of the Oppressed.

What I want to discuss and what I can discuss are two different things, mainly because the “white mind,” as coined by Dr. James P. Comer, is conditioned to reject what I have to say before I can say it. The solutions have to be presented as an intellectual exercise. They can not have the “pressure” of enforcement, or potentially enforcement.

With said disclaimer in place, I will attempt to state my case and address the excuses/counter-arguments as to why many European Americans will give, which are designed to justify why they can not assist implementing said solutions.

White supremacy culture is the institutionalization of a pathology. It is normalized to the point where it is (now) a functional definition of “humanity” to millions living inside of the United States, who can “not see” it as a negative causing active harm. Why? Because to examine the structural pathology of white supremacy inside the United States is to confront a culture centered around the maintenance of unearned comfort. When confronted with a concrete, and pragmatic, "solution set" purposed to dismantle the systemic inequity directly generated by their individual and collective behaviors, the dominant European American “consciousness” rarely engages the merits of the solutions presented through a lens of justice; instead, it deploys various excuses steeped in denial, deflection, and zero-sum thinking.

​Racism, and the intelligence behind it, is so “ordinary” that any analysis of it demands that we look past the polite vocabulary of respectability politics and name the underlying sickness: a deep-seated addiction, by millions, to colonial hegemony, or what is popularly called “law and order.” The five solutions proposed here are not "leftist," “Marxist” or radical; they are the baseline prerequisites for a moral society. Yet, the resistance to them reveals how deeply white supremacy culture operates as the default operating system of the American republic.

​1. Honoring the Sacred: Indigenous Treaties and the Myth of the Expired Contract

The first plank of the solution demands that the current United States government honor all treaties with Indigenous Nations, whether that Nation is classified as living or historical. A treaty is not a temporary lease; it is a binding agreement between sovereign entities. Failure to honor a treaty is failure to honor the innate humanity of the People who entered the agreement.

The typical European American response to this demand is wrapped in the language of legalese established in “Oppressor” thought. According to “statutes of limitations” invented within colonizer minds, the common excuse sounds like this: "That happened centuries ago; we cannot litigate the past without destabilizing the modern economy."

This defense relies on the comfort of time. It treats the theft of a continent as an unfortunate historical weather event rather than an ongoing crime–as if Europeans from the 1600s have a right to invade Turtle Island and their descendants are no longer a part of an occupying force, but innocent, ahistorical residents.

In the minds of those living “today,” reservations are not colonial projects, but private lands Indigenous people choose to live on and can operate in today’s economy the exact same way white dominant corporations do.

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By claiming that honoring treaties is "unrealistic" or "too disruptive to current property owners," the dominant culture protects its real estate claims while pretending to sympathize with historical tragedies. They offer museum exhibits and land acknowledgments instead of land back, because land back costs something real: meaning, the loss of their residency on said occupied land.

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2. The Fear of Universal Standards:

The UN Declaration of Human Rights

​Adopting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as an operational standard would force the United States to measure its domestic policies against an international moral yardstick.

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The resistance here is rooted in the (unfounded) concept of “American Exceptionalism”—the ideological conviction that the United States is uniquely righteous and above external critique. When asked to submit to the UDHR, the standard European American excuse is disguised as a defense of national sovereignty: "We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights! It is the first of its kind. It established the first national democracy. We do not need international bodies, who imitate the standard we established, dictating our laws."

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Underneath this patriotic shield lies a profound terror of accountability. The UDHR guarantees things the U.S. Constitution purposefully avoids: housing, healthcare, nutrition, and an adequate standard of living. Adopting the UDHR would expose the fact that American "freedom" has always been commercialized—free to starve, free to be homeless, free to go bankrupt from medical debt. White supremacy culture resists international standards because it cannot survive an objective audit.

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3. The Sacred Obligation: Child Hunger and the Defense of Colonial Capitalism

​Flowing directly from the fear of America not being exceptional, ending child I hunger requires a direct assault on colonial-based capitalism. It forces a fundamental choice between the survival of children and the optimization of corporate profit margins.

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The excuses offered by the beneficiaries of this system are deeply moralistic, often weaponizing the protestant work ethic into voluntary servitude or chattel slavery. The resistance is articulated through the myth of meritocracy: "If we give people free food and guaranteed resources, we destroy their incentive to work. Poverty is a result of poor personal choices, not systemic failure.”

To admit that child hunger is an inherent feature of colonial capitalism would require European Americans to admit that their wealth is subsidized by the deprivation tactics. To protect the system, they choose to pathologize poor families rather than indict the economic engine that gleefully produces poverty.

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4. The Debt Unpaid: Reparations and the Illusion of Innocence

​Issuing reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery is the ultimate litmus test for European American sincerity regarding racial healing. It is the literal repayment of stolen labor that built the foundational infrastructure of Western wealth.

​The counter-narratives deployed against reparations are among the most aggressive in the white supremacy toolkit. The primary excuse is the plea of individual innocence: "My family didn’t own slaves; we arrived here long after emancipation. Why should my tax dollars pay for the sins of people I never knew?"

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This argument relies on a deliberate misunderstanding of how structural wealth operates. It ignores the reality that all white-bodied individuals benefit from the legacy of redlining, the GI Bill, preferential hiring, and the generational compounding of wealth stolen from Black bodies—regardless of when their ancestors arrived on these shores. By framing reparations as a matter of personal guilt rather than systemic debt collection, European American culture attempts to close the historical ledger without paying the bill.

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5. The Ultimate Disruption: A New Constitutional Convention

​The final solution—hosting a new Constitutional convention based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights—is (amazingly) the most terrifying prospect for the status quo. It requires acknowledging that the current U.S. Constitution was designed by wealthy, slave-owning white men to protect property rights over human rights.

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The defense mechanism triggered by this proposal is Constitutional fetishism. The excuse is framed as a warning against chaos: "The Constitution is a sacred document, the greatest experiment in democracy. Rewriting it would tear the country apart and open the door to tyranny."

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This response treats a 240-year-old compromise with slaveholders as divine revelation. The resistance is not born out of a love for democracy: it is born out of a fear of loss of control. A new convention where Indigenous, Black, Brown, and working-class people have equal structural power would mean the end of Euro-centric veto power over human progress.

When we aggregate these excuses, a clear pattern emerges. White supremacy culture does not defend its positions through logic; it defends them through the threat of tremendous violence, stalling tactics and emotional manipulation. It claims to want equality, but rejects every mechanism capable of producing it.

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The resistance to this solution set is a series of calculated confessions that only white bodies are human. It is an admission that the dominant culture knows exactly how much it has taken, knows how much it owes, and has decided that it would rather watch the republic decay under the weight of its own contradictions than pay the price of true democracy.

Ending racism inside the United States requires more dialogue–European to European. It demands a level of courage sufficient to override these excuses and enforce the solutions.

For this to happen, a small group of dissents needs to form. They must choose to endure the discomfort of being ostracized–and potentially the target of violence. I do not envy them; I cheer them on.