On Being “Clean”
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Cleanliness is not next to godliness–that’s White Supremacy talking.
White Supremacy is not a problem of personal prejudice, it is the historical and contemporary system of exploitation and oppression of peoples of color by the white ruling class. It is a “political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.” We have been taught to implicitly understand what is white as what is good, moral, fair, logical, clean, and valuable. To be not white is to be unclean is to be “trash.”
An explicit illustration of the equation of whiteness and cleanliness is the mythology of white women’s sexual ‘purity.’ Included in this is a mythologized conception of Black men as innately and savagely driven to rape white women–the Rape Myth. This supposed innate quality is cited as justification in lynching Black boys and men. Cannabis was outlawed based on white american narrative that Mexican men would ‘act out’ sexually with white women. Cocaine was criminalized based on that same narrative: that it drove Black men to have sex with white women (and that it made white women want sex with Black men). Opium was criminalized because of the narrative that a growing Chinese immigrant population would be competition for white men…that white women would want Chinese men. The Rape Myth positions white women’s purity, and coveted access to it, as the antithesis to Blackness, which is regularly accessed and exploited for the progress and reproduction of the inaccessible whiteness of the ‘master race.’
So, for the ‘unclean’–people with darker skin, gender non-conformists, drug users, disabled people, working-class people and the like–segregation and eugenics policies push us into the ‘unclean’ underbelly of society, underfunded, underutilized, and undervalued. This shows up in daily life when products marketed towards Black women are more likely to have toxic chemicals in them, but we are expected to use them to stay clean. Cleanliness standards for Black women are heavily informed by an unsaid understanding that we are the cultural opposite of “pure” white women.
Gender is connected to race in a complex way, rooted in american slavery. While white women were seen as too frail to be out in the sun, dehumanized Black women were “bred” for hard physical labor outdoors. The cleanliness standards that come from this legacy require daily use of products like talcum powder, harsh soaps, and toxic hair products, which build up to cause bodily harm over the course of our lives.
Dehumanization and forced assimilation are traumatic experiences. Minority stress is the unique and excess recurring stresses that systematically oppressed people are subject to as a result of their position as an oppressed social minority. Stress from social exclusion accumulates over time and results in health issues: fatalism and other forms of mental distress show up when we feel personally responsible for our oppression; experiencing discrimination damages sleep and increases the likelihood of contracting diseases through diminished immune function. Genocide across the globe is justified in appealing to the ever-so-ethical pursuit of ethnic purity, that is cleanliness. To be dirty is not only an inherent quality of a person, it’s also treated as an inherited quality, inescapable and in need of a cure, assimilation, or elimination.
Race in the United States is ever-changing & scientific racism falsely and loudly ‘proves’ a spectrum where to be Black/brown (a person of the global majority) is to be dirty, to be white is to be clean, and miscegenation between the two should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Even the idea of ‘white trash,’ the necessary specification of trash as white in comparison to the implied standard non-white trash, has its roots in united states eugenics practices and segregation laws, both inspirational for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi “Final Solution.”
People who do drugs are not inherently dirty; abstaining from drugs is not inherently clean. The history of a word is important–what shared cultural meanings allow us to create a mutual understanding? What associations and biases have we attached to certain words individually and as a culture? Cleanliness is political and its standards change over time.
Bottom line: you are not for anyone else to define, especially if you aren’t a part of the hegemonic culture. Whether you use drugs or not–you are not dirty, and you are loved.
