White Supremacy has been all the rage in our public discourse of late.
Understandable, given that the current occupant of the White House has been tucked up in bed with white nationalists/Nazis/white supremacists throughout his campaign and well into the first year of his Presidency. His odious, morally and politically illiterate comments in the wake of the murderous Nazi/white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, VA only served to underline his alliance with these, the most depraved elements of the Nation’s body politic. He will not escape the onus and odium for this, despite the departure of such political bottom feeders as Steve Bannon from his entourage or the later, pro forma, denials and denunciations extorted from him by political necessity.
What has emerged from the spate of commentary on this subject however, is the high level of confusion about this topic that exists in Liberal/Left/Progressive circles. This confusion appears to stem primarily from the use of the term “white supremacy” interchangeably to refer to two distinct, if related, social and political phenomena.
In order to examine and hopefully clarify this confusion it’s necessary to go back to the basic questions of definition and usage.
The standard accepted definition of white supremacy is as follows:
White supremacy or white supremacism is a racist ideology based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore white people should be dominant over other races. White supremacy has roots in scientific racism and it often relies on pseudoscientific arguments. Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists typically oppose people of color as well as people who are members of most religions.
The term is also typically used to describe a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical or institutional domination by white people (as evidenced by historical and contemporary sociopolitical structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa).[1] Different forms of white supremacism put forth different conceptions of who is considered white, and different forms of white supremacists identify various racial and cultural groups as their primary enemy.[2]
This definition is what might be described as Political/Eliminationist white supremacy and is what most people mean when they use the term. This encompasses the Nazi/white supremacists that came out into the open at Charlottesville. It isn’t the only usage though.
There’s also this:
The term white supremacy is used in academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred. White racial advantages occur at both a collective and an individual level (ceteris paribus, i. e., when individuals are compared that do not relevantly differ except in ethnicity). Legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley explains this definition as follows:
“By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to 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.”[28][29]
This and similar definitions have been adopted or proposed by Charles Mills,[30] bell hooks,[31] David Gillborn,[32] Jessie Daniels,[33] and Neely Fuller Jr,[34] and they are widely used in critical race theory and intersectional feminism. Some anti-racist educators, such as Betita Martinez and the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, also use the term in this way. The term expresses historic continuities between a pre–Civil Rights Movement era of open white supremacism and the current racial power structure of the United States. It also expresses the visceral impact of structural racism through "provocative and brutal" language that characterizes racism as "nefarious, global, systemic, and constant".[35] Academic users of the term sometimes prefer it to racism because it allows for a disconnection between racist feelings and white racial advantage or privilege.[36][37]
While one can argue about the validity of either these definitions, what is indisputable is that they do not describe the same realities, despite using the same term. Therein lies the difficulty and the danger.
I’d stress that there’s nothing wrong or improper in distinguishing between Political/Eliminationist white supremacy and what could be called Structural/Cultural white supremacy. The problem arises when that distinction isn’t, in fact, made clear.
The term's rise in popularity among leftist activists in 2016[citation needed] has been characterized by some as counterproductive. A specialist in both language and race relations, John McWhorter has described its use as straying from commonly accepted meaning to encompass much less extreme issues which thereby cheapens the term and can shut-down productive discussion.[38][39] Political columnist Kevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity in 2016 to frequent use by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and he describes it as a "terrible fad" which fails to convey nuance and should be reserved for those who are trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks and not used for any type of less severe racist belief or action.[40][41] The use of the academic definition of the term white supremacy has been criticized by Conor Friedersdorf for the confusion it creates for the general public in how it differs from the more common dictionary definition and he argues that it is likely to alienate those it hopes to convince.
These concerns aren’t simply a matter of semantics. They refer to a fundamental material difference. That being, the essence of Political/Eliminationist white supremacy is a that it is the conscious, active advocacy of a racist ideology and agenda that follows a consistent internal reasoning to its logical end point.
The essence of Cultural/Structural white supremacy, in contrast, is that it is the unconscious, even passive, acceptance of the status quo. It operates on the basis of received prejudice and custom and as such is reactionary in character. The former is an aggressive, radical force that seeks to abolish the status quo.
Both Political/Eliminationist white supremacy and Cultural/Structural white supremacy are real things but they are not the same thing. No more than politics and culture, while related, can be said to be equivalent.
I don’t say this lightly. I have spent years researching and studying the Political/Eliminationist white supremacist movement. A part of that work required infiltrating their gatherings, rallies and events, passing as one of them. I did this to gather intelligence for a civil rights organization, which means I spent good bit of my time talking with them, learning how they thought and nosing out their plans, strategies and tactics as well as the psychological underpinnings of their outlook.
What I learned is that this movement is a distinct and autonomous phenomenon. It is not simply an extension of ingrained cultural tropes and bias. These people are not interested in maintaining their white skin privilege in a multi-racial society. They are genocidal racists. They don’t want to rule over people of color. They want people of color gone, either by exclusion and expulsion or by extermination. Frankly, most of them would prefer the latter.
They conceive of themselves as soldiers in a race war in exactly the same way that the original Nazis did. Just as their predecessors, they are willing to use any means, any subterfuge, any degree of violence to attain their goal.
This is precisely why they cannot be considered a cultural extension or legacy of either slavery or Jim Crow. The institution of slavery was, in its essence, an economic institution. Its purpose was the maximum exploitation of human beings for the maximum profit. Likewise the terrorist tyranny of Jim Crow, as documented by Douglas A. Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name, was purposely designed to maintain this pattern of subjugation and exploitation.
Neither of these systems aimed at the complete physical elimination of people of color.
Nazi/white supremacy does.
A similar misunderstanding occurred when Hitler first emerged. He too was initially seen as an extension of a pre-existing culture of anti-Semitism. People simply couldn’t comprehend that he was something far worse.
In the present moment, nothing could be more fatal than to repeat that error by conflating Nazi/white supremacy with a pre-existing, general, cultural racial prejudice. To understand this murderous movement, one must look to the German/European experience as much as, if not more than, US history.