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ausetkmt · 5 months ago

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This is what white supremacy looks like in 2022

The signs in the image above hung over the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, a typically liberal and progressive city. It sent shockwaves through the country as yet another reminder that white supremacy is alive and well in pockets of the country. But it’s also a reminder to me that “white supremacy,” as an ideology, has a much longer and more complex history than the blatantly racist pageantry of hate groups would suggest.

What is white supremacy?

White supremacy is a term that tends to offend people’s sensibilities much more immediately than the word racism. That’s because white supremacy today presents itself to the American consciousness in offensive, alienating forms. The KKK, hate crimes, neo-Nazis, and now the Goyim Defense League in the photo above—these are the proud examples of white supremacy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Most people condemn them unequivocally, and they have become a sort of sinister “other,” against which non-racist people may define themselves.

The truth is, white supremacy has a much longer, much uglier history than contemporary white supremacists would suggest. As a pseudoscientific theory of race, a justification for worldwide colonialism and imperialism, and eventually an explicit call to mass genocide, white supremacy has been responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against humanity in modern history.

As a result, it leaves behind an ugly legacy that stretches across much of our society, including law, politics, economic policy, education, arts and culture, and even language. White supremacists may have diminished in number, but the historical effects of white supremacy have a much longer tail.

The origins of white supremacy

At its theoretical core, white supremacy refers to the belief that white people naturally constitute a superior race, and therefore deserve a privileged, dominant position in society. This dominance is always to the detriment of other races—historically, people of color and Jewish people, in particular. It is also typically justified by historical or pseudoscientific arguments about white people’s biological, intellectual, and even spiritual superiority, all of which we now understand to be rooted in blatantly racist stereotypes.

For centuries, pseudoscientific racism made all sorts of claims about Black bodies: that our blood was thicker, feet flatter, skulls smaller, muscles bigger, senses keener. And from the earliest days of the slave trade, these arguments were crucial to justifying the barbaric treatment of the enslaved. Black Africans had to be dehumanized in order to justify their enslavement and torture. The physical “animalization” of Black bodies in Western culture was predicated on a belief that white bodies and brains were the standard measurefor humanity.

This racial hierarchy—before “race” was even a clear social or “biological” concept—was the seed of modern white supremacy. As Europeans and Americans became more advanced scientifically, another facet of white supremacist theory became entrenched in their psyche: intellectual superiority.

Ideas around the superiority of white people were prominently accepted in Western culture for at least 200 years, from their crystallization in the Enlightenment up to the advent of desegregation and decolonization in the 1950s. They had a massive impact on the structure of modern Western society and globalization for the entirety of that period.

The cultural ubiquity of white supremacy

White supremacy has been ideologically, visually, linguistically, and legally baked into Western society—including the many colonial regimes around the world propped up by European and American powers—for hundreds of years. But in the bygone eras of explicit, ubiquitous white supremacy, nobody referred to it as such. The constellation of beliefs and theories about white racial superiority were simply part and parcel of globalizing, imperialist Euro-American societies. Even once “white supremacy” became the go-to designation for hate groups and egregiously explicit declarations of “white superiority” (e.g. the KKK, neo-Nazis), the phrase adapted to survive. It has since morphed into new slogans and movements over time, from “White Power” in the 1950s to, less overtly, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign.

Through it all, white supremacist ideas have been defended as natural, scientific, and moral. Even people who have not associated themselves with hate groups or white supremacist violence have often supported white supremacist ideas. One example is the advent of intelligence testing in the 20th century (e.g. IQ tests), which was used to assess intelligence across large samples of national populations. In their early history, these tests were used to justify the idea that white people from the global North were intellectually superior to people of color. Even though IQ tests have been debunked as an incomplete method of assessing intelligence, Dylann Roof tried to justify his shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by claiming that Black people have lower IQs.

Society changes, but ideas take a long time to die.

White supremacy today

The history of white supremacy runs long and deep. And even though the ideas behind it are no longer socially acceptable, it still guides racially biased thinking in almost every field of human experience. The strength of its influence on earlier periods in history is reflected in the ubiquity of its legacy today.

It’s worth sharing some of these examples to appreciate the slow-burn effect that white supremacy continues to exert.

Cultural white supremacy

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the cultural white supremacy implicit in the backlash against a Black actress playing the live-action Little Mermaid in 2023: Halle Bailey. To me this is a subtle example of white supremacist gatekeeping when it comes to arts and culture. Even fictional characters have to adhere to our very real sense of racial hierarchy. But in this domain, you could also think about our Eurocentric approach to history, literature, and art in schools and museums, which inevitably privilege Western art. Even tokenism—the practice of symbolically adding characters of color into works of art as a superficial nod to racial equality—could be viewed as an aftereffect of white supremacy.

I’ve also written about cultural appropriation in the past—to me, the practice of borrowing or stealing from other cultures’ artistic output for profit is a perfect example of white supremacist imperialism still in action. Western (and particularly American) culture remains globally dominant: to assimilate other cultures into its systems of power without due credit or profit-sharing is a practice steeped in white supremacist ideology.

The economics of white supremacy

As an ideology that privileges whiteness and white people’s well-being, white supremacy has also had economic effects on our society. The old practice of “redlining” is a classic example: Mortgage lenders used to (literally) outline African American neighborhoods in red and mark them as higher risk. These neighborhoods did not receive comparable benefits from the various housing and mortgage programs of the New Deal in the 1930s. As a result, Black neighborhoods stayed Black, relatively poor, and unable to access good credit. Discriminatory lending of this kind was one of the major issues addressed by Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, and it originates in a white supremacist logic of economic exclusion.

I myself have experienced this as a Black founder; just this past quarter, Black founders received a paltry $187 million in funding (0.43% of the $43 billion deployed in Q3 2022). There are many reasons behind this kind of inequity, but most of them are rooted in disparities of access to capital, education, wealth, and entrepreneurship—most of which trace their roots back to white supremacist ideas as well. Perhaps the most significant of these is the continued wealth and income inequality between Black and white people, which has barely changed since the 1950s, when white supremacy supposedly came to an end.

White supremacy in politics and law

From a legal perspective, white supremacy was coded into Jim Crow laws almost as soon as the Civil War ended. These laws created a different America for Black people, in which it was far easier to be criminalized and much harder to gain wealth or access education. Segregation ended formally with the legal victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, but it continues in schools and housing up to the present day in more covert forms. The idea that Black and white people cannot share space is obviously a direct corollary of the white supremacist belief that white people are superior.

Politically, white supremacy has shown up more, and more overtly, since the growth of the Tea Party and its conversion into Trump’s presidential base of support. “Make America Great Again” is only the most memorable example. Trump calling COVID-19 the “Chinese” virus was equally white supremacist—not just because it’s a racist taunt, but because it designates Covid-19 as the creation of a foreign, hostile power rather than a globally shared public health crisis. The implication, of course, is that America—white America—was blameless in its response to COVID-19; all culpability lies with the unknown, but probably malicious, Chinese “Other.”

As you can see, white supremacy influences our society in all sorts of ways. It is deeply connected to the forms of racism that survive today. The KKK is no longer allowed to march freely in Washington, D.C., (as they did in the 1920s), but the ideas that underpin their ideology have long worked their toxicity into our economic, intellectual, and social systems.

It would probably take a lot for me to call someone a “white supremacist” outright, but it’s important we understand the origins of this ideology and the profundity of its impact on Western society. Visual and linguistic symbols of white supremacy still survive—think Confederate/Dixie flags, swastikas, the N-word, racist humor, disdain for African American vernacular, or even personal professions of “colorblindness.” These are all remnants of the historical privileging of whiteness, which literally reigned supreme in Europe and America for over 200 years.

Today, we have to recognize the many forms white supremacy and its legacy can take. We have a responsibility to call it out when we see it. We have to remain sensitive to its often subliminal effect on our own behavior and biases—whether that’s stepping up at work to defend equitable hiring practices, or calling out a friend who makes a racist joke, or ensuring racist candidates don’t make it into office.

White supremacy is the unfortunate bequest our ancestors left us—it’s up to all of us to tear it apart.

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