The Death of White Supremacy (and the Birth of Genetic Apartheid)
How Racial Apartheid Is Evolving in the Genetic Age
Final Goodbyes(?)
White supremacy is dying, but don’t celebrate yet. To be dying is not the same as to be dead. Personally, I won’t celebrate until the whole system is not just abolished, but nullified and obsolesced. I want to see the master's house burned to the ground with my very own eyes, and have a new home to throw a house party at afterwards. Nonetheless, I want to—if not celebrate—remind ourselves how we got here.
The mythology of white supremacy has long been enough to deter most white workers from turning to communism as a solution to the conditions of their material suffering, but whiteness is mattering less and less these days if you want affordable healthcare or even just food in your stomach with these tariffs. As prices rise, people tend to get focused on survival. The mythology of superiority is no longer enough to perpetually distract white workers from the suffering of their material reality under racial capitalism, especially in a world where class inequities between them and tech billionaires grow wider and wider every moment. As the gap between rich and poor widens, white folk pushed to the margins are confronted with the fact that their material reality inches nearer and nearer to blackness every day. And as the vantage draws nearer (as they approach those margins), so do the contradictions of the color line become clearer. Whiteness has never in all of human history been weaker than it is now; the mythology of whiteness is dying because the fruits of superiority are not keeping poor white folk nourished. However—again—I must reiterate that this is nothing to celebrate because dying is not the same thing as dead, and the ruling class knows this too. As late-stage capitalism crumbles and erodes the foundations of white supremacy and racial apartheid, we must make ourselves aware of a new system of genetic apartheid that is being built to take its place.
The Genetic Apartheid Revolution
We are entering an age of techno-feudalism that sells white supremacy not as mythology, but as the methodology for a new form of technology-assisted eugenics. The means of producing “supreme” genes is scientifically upon us; and those means of production belong to tech-billionaires that are establishing colonies to practice gene-therapy without regulation.
Prospera is a tax-free tech-billionaire colony/”start-up country”/”network state” in Honduras “where laws and regulations, and policing fall to a private corporation”. The colony hosts MiniCircle, a gene-therapy clinic whose Follistatin Gene Therapy “holds promise for unlimited health & independence from disease” with treatments that increase muscle mass, bone density, and reduced epigenetic age by up to 12 years. These clinics are frequented by vampire tech billionaires, colonizer crypto bros, and wealthy biohackers from all over the globe, who hope to not only to revolutionize “the future of governance”, but also revolutionize the boundaries of human mortality by “making death optional”.
But follistatin, as the Minicircle website points out, is but a temporary edit to the human genome, and other gene-editing technologies like CRISPR offer permanent genetic changes. Just three days ago, scientists have—for the first time in human history—used CRISPR to rewrite the DNA of KJ Muldoon, a human infant’s who suffered life-threatening complications from a rare genetic disease. The technology is being touted as revolutionary and life saving, but stories like these are being used to manufacture our consent into a world of not only rampant, unregulated, un-consensual human experimentation, but genetic apartheid.
In 2003, Sir Paul Nurse, a South African Nobel prize-winner, and chief executive of Cancer Research in the UK, predicted that in 20 years' time, it will be technically possible to sequence the genome of each new baby. In a speech about genetic testing, Sir Paul warned that without proper public debate and education, the development of gene therapy could lead to what he called "genetic apartheid" where individuals could find themselves written off by employers and insurers because of genetic defects. And if genome sequencing was only available privately to those able to afford it—as is standard of any new medicine in capitalism—a genetic underclass could result. Now, 22 years later (he was only two off) that prediction is no longer a prediction. The reality of genetic apartheid is here and we are living through the beginning stages of a revolution (re-evolution) of white supremacy because of it.
The [Body] Experiment of Capitalism
The internet, lately, has been engaging in a disappointing conversation about eugenics, concurrently in the same timeline where Adriana Smith is laying braindead as an experimental incubator. Let us, as she lays unrestful and not-at-peace, recognize the reality and longstanding history of our existential oppression.
In capitalism, the body becomes a perpetual site of experimentation, specifically for the aims and proliferation of white supremacy, patriarchy, and classism. Our bodies as black folk, as women, as immigrants, as the disabled, and as poor folk are sites of profitable extraction, exploitation and scientific data collection, used for and funded by the prosperity of whiteness.
Whiteness—historically—has been used to justify violent colonization and human experimentation in the name of scientific discovery. Here are a few examples:
The infamous Tuskegee Experiment of 1932 was only conducted because of the 1928 Oslo Study of Untreated Syphilis, which reported on the pathologic manifestations of untreated syphilis in white males. One of the scientists, Venereologist Joseph Earle Moore, is quoted to have said stated that "Syphilis in the negro is in many respects almost a different disease from syphilis in the white”.
During WW2, Unit 731—a Japanese human experimentation camp where Chinese and Russian prisoners of war had all four limbs amputated and were referred to by doctors as “logs”, among many other atrocities—was funded by the United States government, who retrieved data from the camp’s experiments after the war to fund research on bioweapons and houses some of them in the Library of Congress. Mind you, we nuked them twice (!) to end the war, and then proceeded to harbor their war criminals and unethically-acquired data. The data from Unit 731 has been used not just to develop weapons of biological warfare but also medicinal research into human-pathogen interactions. In 2021, epidemiologists requested of the United States and Japanese governments to publicly release the data in order to help with pandemic control for COVID-19. Both governments declined to release the data. I wonder why.
Just as those WWII experiments dehumanized marginalized, poor, and non-white bodies, modern capitalism continues this legacy through Adriana Smith. Her body exists not only as a site of disregarded and violated human dignity and human autonomy (during the war of women’s bodies for the aims of patriarchy), but also of violated economic power. Ultimately, human lives are but mere data used to maintain hierarchies of control under capitalism. In this system, women’s bodies are reduced merely to resources, their lives to cattle. Their bodies are extracted as sites of reproductive labor, where the production they can potentially create—new human life—is harvested as yet another body, and another worker, to be exploited.
The economic exploitation of human life—and the reproductive labor it performs—is nothing new. Adriana Smith is a part of a long history of black women and human experimentation, where the human experiment in question was not only disregarded economically, but used as a generator of profit. Henrietta Lacks, famously known as the black woman whose immortal cancer cells revolutionized medicine (and, by extension, the American healthcare system) as we know it, died in poverty and so did her family. The family of Adriana Smith, whose body has been kept alive for over 90 days—and is expected to be kept on life support for 11 more weeks until the baby is born, has been forced to foot the bill for every second their daughter is connected to life support against their will (link). Both of these examples are layers of the same system, not separate injustices. They show how racial-capitalist oppression has evolved, culminating into profitable eugenics. Henrietta Lacks’ exploitation generated profit through her cells; Adriana Smith’s exploitation generates profit through her womb. Genetic apartheid escalates this logic, commodifying not just the black woman’s body, but the DNA inside them.
But black women and their families aren’t the only economic victims of experimentation. As I established earlier, KJ Muldoon, the white, “male”, CRISPR baby has had its autonomy violated through experimentation. Doctors do not know the long-term effects of CRISPR DNA-editing technology, and KJ will live a life in-and-out of doctor’s rooms, studied with a dehumanizing gaze for the effects of the technology on their body, like a lab rat. It’s entirely likely that KJ will live a life of chronic illness, disability, and pain without healthcare that should be subsidized by the investors of this research. But if we know anything about the American healthcare system (which comprises 18% of the American GDP), free healthcare is not and will never be trendy, not even for KJ Muldoon, a white “male” baby.
Adriana Smith’s body, forced into reproductive servitude by Georgia’s ‘Heartbeat Bill,’ is part of the same capitalist logic that fuels genetic apartheid: both reduce human life to extractable data. Just as her autonomy is violated for the sake of fetal ‘production,’ CRISPR experiments like KJ Muldoon’s reduce human bodies to sites of genetic experimentation—a hierarchy where some lives are deemed more ‘editable’ (or disposable) than others.
White Supremacy and the Philosopher’s Stone: What’s Next?
Science is frequently touted as an objective discipline, but the violent subjectivity of capitalism is always at the center of every major scientific pursuit in the modern global capitalist age. Stories like KJ Muldoon, Adriana Smith, Henrietta Lacks—stories where the limits of human mortality are tested and peer-reviewed—are always stories of exploitation, dehumanization, and autonomy. These stories fit within the larger narrative of eugenics and mythology of white supremacy, a mythology that now has the technological means of production to maintain itself not as mythology, but genetic reality. The dying of white supremacy and racial apartheid is but an incubation period for a new world order of genetic apartheid. And we all really need not only to be paying attention to it, but to be actively talking about it!!! As Sir Paul Nurse has said, we need proper debate and education about the technology that our freshly-installed government is selling federal buildings and national parks to invest in!
But buildings and parks aren’t the only resources our government is willing to sacrifice for technology that will “make death optional“. Our government is planning on sacrificing the economic value of every citizen (and non-citizen’s) labor in this country. As we saw at the inauguration, the American Government has been captured by a tech-billionaire coup. And why are tech billionaires doing this? Because 70% of the global economy will soon be technology, specifically technology surrounding digital business models, start-ups, social media, and AI. Tech billionaires are planning to funnel all economic value this country has (and all the people within it) into their personal immortality projects. The goal is to get everybody in America to foot the bill for every new CRISPR discovery and every new human experiment.
That said, how are tech-billionaires able to convince workers to invest their hard-earned money into a panacea they will likely never have access to? That answer is simple. The reasons we are seeing visible white supremacist, hateful, ragebait content skyrocket across “For You” pages everywhere is intentional because it is making use of our attention economy to stoke the fires of hatred. And if we know anything about fire, we know it is a fuel source, a source of energy that can be utilized. Tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are using white supremacy on platforms like Twitter and Facebook to remind white folks of two things: 1) that communism is bad (and white supremacy is better) and—perhaps more important, 2) that they should invest their money in cryptocurrency. Remember earlier how I said clinics like Prospera are frequented by crypto bros? There is a profound overlap between right-wing radicalism and cryptocurrency that has been studied as a form of economic theft. The tech bro “biohackers” that visit places like Prospera make their money from crypto schemes, where poor white supremacist grunts (and poor people in general) gamble away their money in hopes to make enough to expatriate to the “crypto-libertarian paradise”. There is even a Prospera sub-Reddit where hopeful crypto bros discuss their hopes and dreams to get hired there, use their gene-therapy services, and start crypto businesses.
The myth of genetic supremacy did not emerge in a vacuum. Genetic supremacy is but the latest iteration of a centuries-old alchemy that transforms hierarchy into divine law. For centuries, the idea of the colonial ethnostate has been enough to rally worker investment for manifest destiny, for Zionism, for the Crusades, and for the colonial-Christian scramble for Africa. White supremacy has always used the mythology of immortality to manipulate poor people into sacrificing their lives for the longevity of a rich, white man. This relationship between whiteness and immortality has it’s roots in Calvinism—the Protestant branch that birthed capitalism—which taught that lives should be devoted to work and that material wealth signaled God’s favor. Today, tech oligarchs have swapped scripture for CRISPR: genetic ‘enhancement’ is their new marker of divine right. Just as Calvinists claimed poverty was a moral failure, gene-editing clinics like Prospera imply that sickness, aging, or ‘unoptimized’ DNA are personal defects—failures to invest in the ‘right’ upgrades. But the lie remains the same: your suffering is your fault, and salvation (whether spiritual or genetic) is a commodity only the privileged can afford.
Calvinism invented the idea of the ‘workaholic’ and packaged meritocracy as common sense to convince workers to keep laboring. The ruling class profits from this labor, just as they profit from genetic science today. And who profits from all that workaholic labor? Who materially benefits from the enslavement of another body? The ruling class. And the ruling class can be anyone: it can be a tech-billionaire, it can be a priest or a pope, it could be a king, or even a president. The ruling class—historically—has every incentive to squeeze our country and our economy dry, because alchemy science is expensive and elixirs of life gene-therapy does not come without a cost.
What are our solutions? What is the common person’s method of resistance against this new re-evolution of apartheid? I can’t say I know all the answers. In fact, I don’t even really know what’s going on. lol*. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, has famously said “all I know is that I know nothing”. Critical thought and problem solving is always a process of humility, where one surrenders themself to curiosity in search of answers. In effect, the only true knowing is knowing that you know nothing. But I only think that’s true on an individual level. Individually, none of us know anything. But collectively, we know all there is to know. The answers and solutions to our accelerated transition into genetic apartheid lie in our collective organizing power. They lie in our creativity, our art, our language, our ability to communicate and express with one another. They lie in our infinite capacities for empathy and compassion, and our capacities to connect and share with one another both emotionally and materially. They lie in our humanity. Humanity is a network of perspectives and the more work we do to connect our perspectives, and raise our capacities to communicate and share with one another, we gain access to a vantage that can show us out of this labyrinth of suffering called capitalism.
An Epilogue for White Supremacy: You Are Not Immortal
Before I wrap this up, I want to be clear that, despite advancements being made to evolve its form, white supremacy is still dying. The gag is—that, despite access to gene-editing technology—“superior” genes don’t exist. What is follistatin to an angry mob? What is CRISPR to a bullet? What is capitalism to communism? What is kryptonite to Superman? The mythological narrative of white supremacy has defined itself as a never-ending quest towards immortality. Though they claim supremacy above humanity, these hateful white folk still are/and will forever be—just human. And to be human is to be fated to die. No matter if they colonize, imperialize, and genocide the entire world in order to pay for their elixir of life, they’ll always be human. No matter what sacrifices they make of their own humanity, and of the humanity of others, a white supremacist will never be able to escape the destiny of their humanity.
White supremacy is dying. Soon it will be dead, as is its destiny…. but let’s pay attention to the genetic apartheid that being born to replace it.
* - EDIT (for clarity) I know this is optimistic abstraction but I genuinely am not an expert. I approach all information I have presented to you with humility. This is new to me too. The answers of revolution are complex and honestly—probably—need to be discussed offline.
Powerful piece, subscribed. Antidote needed…