Resistance Is Not Futile

Whiteness is a tradeoff; humanity and interconnection for material resources and power – but with a gaping void at the centre that can never be satiated. What has to have happened to a people for them to make such a trade? Marika Heinrichs1 “You will be assimilated. … We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.” I am still terrified by the words, sounds, and images of the Borg, a fictional cyborg species from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg are tens of thousands of kidnapped humanoids from thousands of different worlds, all stripped of their personalities, relationships, and cultures. All forcibly transformed from living, individual beings into cyborg drones, serving a cold, rational, nearly unstoppable cubic machine, set on “assimilating” all that it encounters. Resistance is futile. Despite having been fascinated and horrified by the Borg since they first invaded my small screen in 1989, I had never given a thought to what the Borg might metaphorically represent. But when I read Marika Heinrichs’ words above – describing the “gaping void at the centre that can never be satiated” – the image that sprang to my head was the Borg. Once I saw it, there was no unseeing it. Going forward, for me the Borg will always be European colonial settlers. Or, more accurately, European colonialism, writ large. Stripped of their own pre-Christian ancestral cultures, colonists invaded, settled, destroyed, and assimilated new lands, peoples, and cultures. Then colonialism set up camp and gobbled up those who came too close. For European immigrants who later entered our country, the “melting pot” of the United States burned away most of the distinctiveness of their cultures. Irish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, etc. instead became “white American.” Of course, dark-skinned people who arrived on these shores – whether they came in chains or by choice – were not considered sufficiently human to go into that melting pot. Nonetheless, colonial whiteness “improved” itself by “adding their biological and technological distinctiveness to [its] own.” What did this colonial Borg assimilate? Not just land. And not just people. But also languages. Songs. Cosmologies. Relationships with the Earth. Rituals for coming of age, fertility, birth, death, and everything in between. The world view that sees all of us as belonging to each other and the Earth, rather than competing to accumulate the maximum amount of limited resources that can be stolen from our planet. As I write this on July 4, the nation prepares to watch performances from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., celebrating our country’s 250th birthday at the “Great American State Fair.” Fittingly, one of the scheduled performers was Vanilla Ice. Could theft of the cultural distinctiveness of Black folks get any more transparent than that? Resistance is futile. Fortunately, us Star Trek watchers know that the last bit is not true. The machine endlessly tells us that “Resistance is futile,” in the hope that we will all believe it. Many of us do. But, in the end, those of us who instead choose to believe in our own cultures, identities, and relationships – in each other – will win out. The Borg will be defeated. And through community, relationships, and connection with our own bodies and our lost cultures, some of the Borg drones, who lost their humanity to that cold machine, will heal and come back to a new version of their former selves. Locutus of Borg once again became Jean-Luc Picard. Seven of Nine became a valued member of the crew of Voyager. These stories of triumphant reclamation of humanity, identity, and culture point me back to the healing work of people like Resmaa Menakem and Marika Heinrichs, who urge us to work to heal the embodied trauma of “white body supremacy” that our culture has embedded in all of us. And to this project – Healing White History. To heal, we need to reclaim our bodies from the trauma of white-body supremacy. That work, in turn, requires us to heal our own ancestry. Menakem explains that “Americans of all cultures and colors learn to acknowledge the inherited trauma of white-body supremacy embedded in all our bodies.” Only by working through that trauma can we “mend our bodies, our families, and the collective body of our nation.” 2 As a licensed therapist, with decades of experience helping people deal with anxiety, depression, and trauma, Menakem emphasizes that settling our own bodies – and the bodies of those around us – is a learned skill, which develops with practice. The benefits of this skill are immeasurable. “If you’re white, you may discover that when you can settle and manage your body, you won’t feel a need to manage Black ones — or a need to ask Black ones to manage yours.” 3 Menakem also teaches us how to face and move through the pain embedded in our bodies as white body supremacy. The process has five anchors: 1) Soothing yourself; 2) Noticing your bodies’ sensations, rather than reacting to them; 3) Accepting your bodily discomfort, rather than fleeing from it; 4) Staying present and aware of your body as the experience unfolds, with all of its uncertainties and ambiguities; and 5) Safely discharging any remaining bodily energy once the experience is over. 4 This is how we start to reclaim ourselves from the Borg. Working through the trauma of white-body supremacy requires imagination. We white folks have to imagine ourselves in the position of Black and brown bodies as they have been traumatized by white bodies across centuries. And, we also have to imagine ourselves in the bodies of our ancestors, who suffered trauma long before that racial hierarchy came to be. Heinrichs asks “What has to have happened to a people” for them to trade their own humanity for material resources and power? Menakem has the answer: medieval European history. Centuries before American colonists created racial hierarchy, white bodies were traumatizing other white bodies with incredible cruelty – torture chambers, decapitations, burning at the stake, enslavement, and lynchings – not to mention psychological and cultural abuses, such as imposition of Christianity and erasure of ancestral spiritual practices. For America to outgrow the bondage of white-body supremacy, white Americans need to imagine themselves in Black bodies and experience what those bodies had to endure. They also need to do the same with the bodies of their own white ancestors. And they need to ask themselves this question: “If we don’t address our ancient historical trauma, what will we pass down to our children, and to their children and grandchildren?” 5 For us white folks, this ancestral work should include not only working through ancestral trauma, but also finding positive and connective elements of ancestral culture. As Marika Heinrichs points out, “[w]e all come from people who at one time held deeply embodied, reciprocal, and spiritual relationships with land and spirit that were expressed through ritual, song, and movement. Understanding how these ways of life were lost is part of the work of understanding and dismantling whiteness.” 6 For example, she describes how the pre-Christian European “Maypole dance,” like many indigenous rituals, celebrates fertility, masculine and feminine energy, and the return of new life. 7 My own work with the Healing White History project has focused on my more recent ancestors, starting in America’s colonial era. I have chosen ancestors who interacted with People of Color and helped build and spread the false story of racial hierarchy. But, even as I confront these ancestors, they have uniformly been loving and familial, even while I challenge their moral choices and world view. At some points in my ancestral conversations, this emotional juxtaposition hit me hard. When I visited my Puritan ancestor the Rev. John Russell, Jr., his father John Russell, Sr., and their wives Martha and Dorothy in Hadley, Massachusetts in 1677, they were in the midst of war against the “heathen” Wampanoag people. I pleaded with them to recognize the humanity of the Wampanoag, in part by pointing out that, by my ancestors’ definitions, I am a “heathen” as well. They brushed aside this notion by patronizingly informing me that I may be among God’s chosen, but I’ve just not realized it yet. This exchange shook me – quite literally. But Martha brings me a blanket and wraps it around me, while handing me another mug of warm cider. Dorothy and the two Johns look across the table at me with tenderness. Martha says again, “Steven, you are always welcome here.” I finish the cider silently. I am still shaking. I put the mug back on the table. I look up at all of them. “Thank you for allowing me in your home. Thank you for answering my questions. I have to go now.” 8 The results of these imagined encounters have been transformative for me – calling me to work on racial repair, including building this project to provide other white folks the chance to heal connections with their own ancestors. Resistance is not futile. We can reclaim our bodies, ourselves, our culture, and each other. Please subscribe to follow the arc: truth → healing →transformation & repair 1 Feet in the Butter Our collective inheritance: Claiming white kin and the other side of righteousness The last thing I want to do is write another think piece full of blame or advice. This is an edited version of a letter I wrote to the Embodied Ancestral Inquiry alumni on the day of Trump’s election to a second term. May we all find the people and communities with whom we can share deep purpose, reciprocity, and kinship in times of great fear and unrav… Read more 2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Marika Heinrichs 2 Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands , Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies , (Kindle Edition 2017) at 10. 3 Id. at 152-53. 4 Id. at 168. 5 Id. at 61. 6 https://www.embodiedancestralinquiry.com/anatomyofthevoid (accessed July 6, 2026). 7 Feet in the Butter A Wild Dance Note: This writing was previously published on my website in May 2022… Read more a year ago · Marika Heinrichs 8 https://healingwhitehistory.substack.com/p/they-believed-god-commanded-them?r=e2z7c