Many people today associate “white supremacy” with images of Nazis painting swastikas, the KKK burning crosses, or khaki-wearing white nationalists carrying tiki torches chanting “we will not be replaced” at Unite the Right rallies. Although these people are fighting for white supremacy and oft-referred to as “white supremacists,” they are just one of many symptoms of white supremacy.
Part I focused on the barriers to understanding white supremacy and its definition, while Part II examined the historical legacy of white supremacy and racism as a system. This (final) addition will tackle privilege and the role of white people in combating racism.
The Privilege Created in White Supremacy
A foundational tenet of white supremacy is creating a society that automatically privileges white people over people of color. These privileges have been so automated and often carried out in racially segregated vacuums that most white people live their whole lives never recognizing that their experiences are not everyone’s experience.
Quote 11: Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group …
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact … cannot count on most of these conditions.
- I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
- I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
- If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
- I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
- I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
- I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
- When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
- I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
- If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
- I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.”
Click here for the other 40 conditions
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Quote 12: Michael Mark Cohen: Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We’ve All Been Waiting For
“White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply man, whereas you might be a black man, an asian (sic) woman, a disabled native man, a homosexual latina (sic) woman, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go. With each keyword added, so too does the burden of representation grow.
Sometimes the burden of representation is proudly shouldered, even celebrated. But more often this burden of representation becomes a dangerous, racist weight, crushing and unbearable. Michael Brown was killed in part because of this burden (the stereotype of black male criminality), and his body continues to carry this weight as the protests mount (the martyred symbol that black lives matter).
But white men are just people. Normal. Basic Humanity. We carry the absent mark which grants us the invisible power of white privilege. Everyone else gets some form of discrimination.”
Internalizing Normal and Good vs Abnormal and Bad
No matter how “woke” you consider your family to be, all people who grow up in a society dominated by white supremacy will subconsciously internalize some white supremacist beliefs and biases. It’s not a question of if but a question of how much white supremacy you internalized, how it is subconsciously affecting your reactions to the world and the people around you, and to what extent are you able to course-correct these internalized beliefs.
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Quote 13: Dismantling Racism: Racism Defined
“White supremacy is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless (worth less), immoral, bad, and inhuman and ‘undeserving.’”
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Quote 14: Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ): White Supremacy (sic) Culture
Question: Why do you call it white supremacy (sic) culture? Can we call it something else?
Answer: We get this question a lot when people plan to use the article on white supremacy (sic) culture with their groups and organizations. They express a genuine concern that the term ‘white supremacy (sic) culture’ will turn white people off, make us defensive and less willing to consider how this culture is reproduced. Part of this concern reflects how we’ve been taught by this culture to associate white supremacy with the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other people or groups that actively advocate a racist ideology and viewpoint. We believe it is important to use the term ‘white supremacy (sic)’ culture because the norms, values, and beliefs that our culture reproduces act to reinforce the belief that ‘white’ and people attached to ‘whiteness’ are better, smarter, more beautiful, and more valuable than ‘black,’ or people and communities indigenous to this land, brought here for the purpose of enslavement, or immigrating here from Asia, India, or south of our border. We think it is important to name what is really happening, which is that we live in a culture that reproduces—sometimes overtly and sometimes very subtly—the idea that white is supreme. Those of us who live in this culture, including those of us who fight against racism, swim in this culture and unintentionally and unwittingly reproduce these norms, values, and beliefs. One way to address the genuine concern is to explain why we use the phrase white supremacy (sic) culture to get people to think about it. We are not white supremacists and we are swimming in and affected by a white supremacy (sic) culture.”
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Quote 15: Cornel West: Race Matters
“White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.”
Final Thoughts
The last view to be shared on white supremacy focuses on the importance of understanding the role of “good will” white moderates—not white extremists—in the preservation of white supremacy in the U.S. By ending this article with the following quote, I hope that white people will stop blaming white supremacy entirely on white supremacists and start realizing that it’s the responsibility of all white people to do the anti-racism work needed to dismantle white supremacy.
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Quote 16: Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.'”
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