“Patriarchy wears many suits—whiteness, colonialism, capitalism—and they share a tailor.”
Expanding on ideas expressed by Jaime Hoerricks
Inspiration:
Patriarchy wears many suits—whiteness, colonialism, capitalism—and they share a tailor.
I want to emphasize something that is implied in this sentence, but that not everyone will notice as we are conditioned in this culture to see these words differently.
(Jaime and I both live in what some call North America, under Anglosphere settler-colonial governments.)
Patriarchy, Whiteness, Colonialism and Capitalism are mentioned in a way to clarify they are of the same class, which in this case are ideologies. They are not about biology — reproductive organs, melanin — or anything else from the natural sciences..
While demographic related bigotry exists, where some individuals discriminate based on reproductive organs or melanin, this is not the context that these words are being used here.
Patriarchy, where I prefer the term Androcentrism, is largely agnostic to reproductive organs. This is the ideology that causes some societies to emphasize “Manipulations of Nature” (to borrow language from Western patent law) over harmony with nature, or to emphasize extractive industries over caring professions. The concept of “equal pay for equal work” is largely derailed by a fixation on reproductive organs, when it should be about increasing collective resources being put towards healthcare (lifelong physical and mental health) and education (also lifelong, not “job training”), while also reducing collective resources being put to subsidizing resource extraction or manipulation of nature (or aggressive manipulations/control over other humans or other life).
Thinking in business quarters rather than seven generations, short term thinking rather than long term thinking, is also part of Androcentrism.
Whiteness is also about treating the unique history of Europe, sometimes narrowly about certain parts of Western Europe, as the superior history and only relevant history of the world. This has led some people to believe that Western Europe’s conceptualization of “Enlightenment” is universal.
(Language returned from search)
“The Western European Enlightenment was an 18th-century intellectual movement (approx. 1685–1815) that championed reason, individualism, and scientific empiricism over tradition and religious dogma.”
This ended up only replacing one set of traditions and “faith based” dogma with another set of traditions and “faith based” dogma, and then incorrectly claimed that it was universal or “natural”. While there was a need for Europe to move away from its Feudalism and “Devine Right of Kings” with tight ties between Christianity and Monarchy, that was a problem unique to one region of the world and one set of peoples.
While reason and scientific empiricism should have enabled European thinkers to recognize the flaws in where their so-called “Age of Enlightenment” was bringing their societies, they allowed existing supremacist ideologies that grew from the co-constitution of the Roman Empire and Roman Christianity to persist. Humans are obviously pack animals, and this has expressed itself with a huge diversity of human genos (greek word), and Western notions of individualism make no sense within a more broad recognition of reason or science. Western Science (regularly fixated on “natural sciences” over “social sciences”) and Western Reason ended up being very narrow and siloed off in some arbitrary enforced social hierarchy from the rest of the world.
Ideologies such as Colonialism followed from these flawed supremacist ideologies, where peoples who were not narrowly tied to Western Christian ideologies (including not being tied to simplistic Westphalian sovereignty) weren’t treated as fully formed peoples, but only as raw material to be forcibly converted (”to cut, kill, or strike down” specific forms of human groupings which are discussed with the Greek word “genos”).
Ideologies such as Capitalism take a very narrow misunderstanding of human nature, and what motivates humans to participate in societies, and force people to conform to that misunderstanding in order to survive. The psychology behind Capitalism was always overly-simplistic to the level of being wrong for most persons and most (if not all) peoples, and yet these outdated ephemeral ideologies are still imposed (regularly quite violently) on many human societies.
https://www.tiktok.com/@bridgewalker7/video/7607957498737315103