Like most Black African children growing up in the United States, and perhaps the whole world at this point, my introduction to the divine was the story of a single deity who created the entirety of existence. This god of Abrahamic monotheism, Yahweh, set up his stronghold and chosen people in West Asia, and his followers justifiably slaughtered the worshipers of other fictitious and/or demonic gods in the region, the ones many of our ancestors worshipped before being introduced to Christianity or Islam.
But in the Old Testament there is also another god named Moloch. Moloch is a Canaanite god of the adjacent Ammonites associated with infant sacrifice via immolation in the book of Leviticus, Jerimiah, and 2 Kings. Unlike Yahweh, who only asked our parents to be willing to murder us to prove their loyalty, Moloch demanded his worshipers actually follow through with it by burning their children to death. Obviously, worship of this god and associated rituals were severely stigmatized by Christians, to the point that many don’t even know they ever existed. But their valorization of putting their children on a fiery sacrificial altar to maintain their hegemony continued even beyond Yahweh’s threats of a Lake of Fire and brimstone.
Many of us often think of child sacrifice as belonging to the realm of what a colonized view of history might indicate as “backwards” or “primitive” cultures and people of darker hues, particularly cultures and peoples that became Christian later than Europeans, or still aren’t. But if you can see past the ongoing propaganda championing essential white innocence, we can more easily recognize that this has never been the truth, and shapes the culture of whiteness even today.
Although the worship of Moloch was wiped out, child sacrifice lives on and has taken new shape in the form of global white supremacy. Much like the Moloch worshippers of Biblical times, colonizers show readiness and eagerness to consign both their own children and ours to the flames of global warming rather than risk giving up global hegemony maintained primarily through capitalism. Even their most drastic proposals on combating climate change often stem from projections about how it may be detrimental to the maintenance of imperialism, or show an eagerness to make sure only our children are sacrificed, not theirs.
In the realm of medicine, there has also been an upswing in white parents risking or inducing their own children’s deaths by preventable diseases because of the supposed link between vaccines and Autism. (There do exist Black anti-vaxxers, but much like Black pro-lifers or Black queerphobic people, this is influenced by a history of medical racism, experimentation, eugenics, and depopulation that certain members of our communities have become hyper-vigilant against in detrimental ways. This is not the case in white anti-vax movements.)
Readers of Marimba Ani, who mapped out the mechanisms of White European cultural thought and behavior in her groundbreaking Yurugu, will remember that one of the foundational aspects of whiteness or westernism is the idealization of conscious thought or conscious will in complete unilateral control over the rest of the body, rather than seeing the whole body as a mind—every part of the body as something that thinks and feels. Whiteness imagines a brain in a vat driving a car, a puppet master with a marionnette. The human body is controlled by an “objective” mind, and therefore it is lesser than the mind and is always justified in being sacrificed for it.
This is why their anti-vaxxers would rather kill their own children than risk the next generation with lessened powers of “reason,” with a lessened capacity for detached, objectifying control over their bodies and the rest of the world. And this too, is child sacrifice. Maybe the followers of Moloch sacrificed the bodies of their children for military victory, maybe it was for a bountiful harvest, maybe it was to wipe their slate clean of sins against Moloch. This is only speculation. I’m no expert on biblical times, but I can say with certainty that no sense of control, no harvest, no military victory, no sustained life, no riches, no prosperity is worth living in when built on an ever-widening, fiery mass grave.
We are often warped in the process of trying to compete against this ideology. But if we have the right conceptual and cultural and spiritual tools to recognize the true nature of whiteness and resist being corrupted by it, we’ll be more empowered to keep our children safe. And if our children can survive the end of the world with their Souls intact, then the hardest part of the work we’re doing here will have already been completed.
Suggested Readings:
Anthony Rogers-Wright, “White Supremacy and Climate Change: A Sinister Symbiosis“, Medium, 2018
“DJ Ferguson” is a Black American (Akata), freelance writer who studied Philosophy at Ball State University. Would love to produce content like this for a living , so please help fund RaceBaitr!
