WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE AZTEC GODS
Originally commissioned by Unherd but spiked on grounds of “last week’s story.” Is this form of temporality not the key invention of news media?
California, for fifty years the herald of the Western future, and today the most politically progressive, racially diverse and economically unequal state in the United States, last week voted to adopt a new Ethnic Studies model curriculum for high schools developed chiefly by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, an activist pedagogue influenced by Robin Di Angelo.
Introducing, amongst other features, a series of ritual chants to Aztec gods of human sacrifice in the service of “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization” the new curriculum has already provoked concern. As Christopher Rufo puts it in the City Journal: “The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.”
Yet this revenge is served lukewarm. In contrast to the historical Aztecs, whose endless appetite for ritual violence, combined with extraordinarily well-ordered cities, astonished and disturbed the Spanish, the Aztecs gods of Cuauhtin’s chant, which also uses random invocations in Pinoy and Swahili, are conceived in terms of idols of inclusivity and self-actualization as opposed to sacrificial deities.
Yet there may be a deeper connection between social justice and the Aztecs. According to Inga Clendinnen Aztec political thought conceived of the ruler as “our lord, our executioner and our enemy.” This hostile and alien authority was recognized as both the inescapable core principle of Aztec ritual cosmology, and as the focus of a malice that no rituals could restrain.
The idea is not so distant from the central principle of social justice activism: white supremacism. Both are theorized as an oppressive power that goes beyond empirical dimensions to embrace crypto-supernatural aspects; hence writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates conceptualize “whiteness” as a "talisman," or "amulet" of "eldritch energies" secreting racialized injustice.
White supremacism is seen as inseparable from the history of Western institutions (hence the necessity of social justice activism) but also recognized as fundamental for them in their current social justice incarnations. If white supremacism and its sibling terms did not exist, every ‘victim studies’ or post-colonial department in the world would implode, as nothing but the restless thought of white supremacism sustains these disciplines.
And nothing else sustains their graduates, who, formed by their studies to organize their thoughts and sense of self in opposition to the universal enemy of white supremacism, go on to orchestrate the endless virtual mobbings, purgings and denunciations which now substitute for Western cultural life. In short, social justice already offers a quasi-Aztec cosmology, demanding endless sacrifices at the apex of the step pyramid of culture, but with no Aztec names involved. Now the polysyllabic names requiring symbolic cancellations are no longer Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek but Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal, ad infinitum...