They came with a mission. Not to learn, but to extract. Not to connect, but to claim. The earliest European "guests" who stepped onto African and Indigenous soil did not arrive with curiosity. They came under royal orders to locate gold, chart coastlines, and assess what could be taken.
The Portuguese and Spanish crowns, later followed by the Dutch, French, and English, sent explorers under the false banner of "discovery"—as if human beings had not already built kingdoms, cities, and civilizations on those very lands. To our ancestors, these pale visitors seemed like wanderers. To the visitors, our ancestors were resources. Our elders offered food, rest, and protection. They saw guests. But the guests were scouts, carrying parchment promises of land seizure, conversion, enslavement, and eventual annihilation.
The African worldview—rooted in communal harmony, reverence for elders, spiritual balance, and collective survival—had no reference point for the level of calculated greed they were encountering. Our people operated from abundance, the European mind from scarcity. One saw reciprocity; the other, opportunity to dominate.
What kind of human meets gentle people and draws up plans to enslave them? Dr. Frances Cress Welsing gave us the only framework that makes sense: Fear. Existential fear. Genetic fear. To the European, the presence of a powerful, spiritually grounded, genetically dominant people was not a curiosity. It was a threat. And threats are not debated. They are subdued. The Destruction of Harmony: Accident or Objective?
It’s tempting to view the destruction of African and Indigenous communal life as collateral damage—a side effect of greed and empire.
But what if it was more than that?What if it was the primary goal? Because communalism is a fortress. When a people are unified, land is sacred, elders are wise, and children are everyone's responsibility, they cannot be easily bought, broken, or ruled. To extract the land, they first had to fracture the people. So, missionaries came, not just with crosses—but with division. Traders came, not just for good but to implant dependency. And colonizers came, not just for land—but to shatter the collective will. They rewrote our stories, renamed our gods, redrew our borders—and called it civilization. But what they really feared wasn’t our savagery, it was our sovereignty.
Because a self-sufficient person cannot be governed by outsiders. A spiritually rooted people cannot be dominated by fear. A united people cannot be enslaved without resistance. They didn’t just want our gold. They wanted to break the memory of what it meant to belong to each other. And so, we must ask: Did they come for gold, or did they come to end a way of life? The Fear Behind the Smile: Dr. Frances Cress Welsing’s Warning
It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t misunderstanding. It was fear—a specific, biological, existential fear—that drove the colonizer’s mission.
Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, a psychiatrist and one of the boldest minds of the 20th century, proposed a theory that makes sense of what history refuses to explain. Her Theory of Genetic Annihilation argues that the behavior of white people toward Black people is not random, nor is it solely about economics or power—it is about survival.
White skin is recessive. Melanin is dominant. In the biological reality of reproduction, when a Black person and a white person produce a child, the Black genetic code dominates. Over time, whiteness—when absorbed into a melanated majority—disappears.
This is not speculation. It is science. And for those who perceive their identity as tied to whiteness, this means only one thing: extinction.
Welsing argued that white supremacy is not merely a tool of control—it is a global survival strategy, rooted in an unconscious or conscious fear of erasure. This fear underlies:
The obsession with controlling Black bodies (from slavery to mass incarceration).
