Racism is a parasite
The Cordyceps of society: How racism hijacks our communities.
Have you ever gone on a nature walk and wondered what kind of shrooms might nourish you, send you on a psychedelic journey, or deliver your soul to Mammon?
I used to think fungi came in three simple categories: the edible ones like Shiitake or Enoki, the hallucinogenic ones that bend reality, and the poisonous ones that grow in bathrooms or protrude from fermented food.
That’s when I discovered Cordyceps.
Picture this: you’re an ant living a simple ant life, foraging for food, communicating with your colony, following the same trails you’ve traveled a thousand times.
You don’t realize that weeks ago, microscopic spores attached to your exoskeleton and began their slow invasion.
The fungus is now threading through your body, crawling through your thoughts, altering your brain... and you don’t suspect a thing.
But it’s there.
Like the stench of decay that’s been following you around all day.
Like the high school bully, you blocked 3 years ago... still stalking your social media.
It’s a master strategist.
It keeps you functional because it needs your cooperation—infiltrates your mind until you're nothing but a shell—the perfect vessel for its spawn.
So, for weeks, you carry on with your routine, while it lives inside you, crawls around rent free and slowly takes control of the steering wheel.
Then one day, you feel this irresistible urge to climb. Your friends watch you thinking you’re just trying to get the berries on the tallest branch.
Higher and higher you go...leaving behind your home, your community, your common sense... until you reach the highest point and perfect humidity.
You clamp down on a leaf with your mandibles—the cordyceps devours you from the inside... and then like a bacterial confetti, it erupts from your body... releasing thousands of spores to rain down on your unsuspecting colony below.
The most terrifying part?
You never knew you were compromised.
The cordyceps fungi... reminds me that no matter how minuscule or useless something might appear—it can play a sinister role in your demise.
I was naive.
I had no idea there were mushrooms that could hijack minds, turn living organisms into puppets and orchestrate their deaths with surgical precision.
But I guess that’s the circle of life...
Nature has never been subtle...
But what if I told you humans already have their own version of cordyceps?
Or that it favors self-preservation over evolution.
Just like fungal spores... racist ideologies drift through our species.
it doesn’t begin with police brutality... it doesn’t even begin with white privilege.
It begins with something far more insidious...
Ignorance disguised as innocence.
It appears innocent at first, a parasitic spore waiting on its host.
It latches on, seeps into our minds... slowly reprogramming, slowly disassembling intellectuals, crawling into the collective conscience, children are indoctrinated.
With this influence, it reaches the pinnacle of success, the tallest fall first.
It draws you in with success, whispers of fame, and then the spores are released, generations infected by what seemed to be obsolete... now infecting individuals and inspiring young minds to dehumanize, demoralize, and devolve our species.
“Microaggressions become normal...”
“You’re so articulate!”
“Where are you really from?”
“Meritocracy becomes gospel...”
SAT scores—College acceptance
Best qualified candidates
Segregated schools
“Colorblindness becomes virtue...”
“I don’t see color.”
“Not everything is about race”
“We’re all human.”
"Slavery was 500 years ago.”
“Assimilation becomes success...”
Code-switching
Hair change
Plastic surgery
“Professional” appearances.
“Individuality becomes self-preservation.”
“Pull yourself up.”
Personal responsibility
Success requiring isolation from community
White fragility
“Religion becomes Colonial...”
White Jesus imagery
Historical erasure (Whitewashing ancient Egyptians)
Destroyed heritage
Genocide
“African religions are demonic”
“Indigenous spirituality is primitive.”
“Progression becomes performance...”
Diversity photos.
Partial to no representation in books and movies.
Performative activism
White superiority—White savior complex.
Exclusionary feminism
"Proximity becomes power..."
Minstrelsy
Digital black face...
It’s the circle of life.
The circle of demise.
This is how white supremacy perfected itself—not just through visible violence, but strategic, invisible infection.
Racism has convinced its hosts that the only route to survival, meant severing roots, abandoning collective powers and erasing identity.
Success became synonymous with distance from blackness.
White supremacy became the enemy of Black empowerment.
And we know misery loves company—which is why they function as a hivemind.
Like Cordyceps—threading through an ant's nervous system, racism rewired ancient civilizations.
They deployed educators, religious believers, military, sanitized historians and missionaries to "civilize” indigenous peoples.
To decimate minorities and civilizations.
They infiltrate our governments and implement laws that rob us of our freedom.
These institutions became another transmission point, spreading spores through textbooks that glorify conquest, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia.
They profit and hide behind religion.
It’s evil disguised as compassion.
And if we continue to encourage violence towards minorities and not against the patriarchy... we create a wormhole, another pathway to extinction.
And why?
Why do we believe the abuser and not the abused?
Because we have been contaminated too.
Racism is the perfect cordycep to destroy humanity.
If one of us falls, we all fall.
It can only end, if we pluck it from the root,
It must be extinguished.
Eloquently written!