Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

White supremacy is a bizarre mythology created by people with pale skin. It asserts that paler people deserve more—more respect, more resources, more opportunity—for no reason beyond the utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless pigmentation of their skin. It says that pale people make the important decisions while people of color pay the price. Pale people define what is normal; they make the rules. Whiteness is the default, the standard, the norm; when it goes without saying what someone’s ethnic background is, it’s because they are pale. Pale people fill the airwaves, screens, and history books with their stories, until it is hard to find heroes and role models who are not pale. “This system rests on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group,” writes Robin DiAngelo, the whiteness studies professor who also coined the term “white fragility,” which refers to the discomfort and resistance white people often express when these issues are raised.