White supremacy is the belief thatwhite people aresuperior to those of otherraces.[1] The belief favors the maintenance and defense of anypower andprivilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine ofscientific racism and was a key justification forEuropean colonialism.[2][3]
As apolitical ideology, it imposes and maintains cultural,social,political,historical orinstitutional domination by white people and non-white supporters. In the past, this ideology had been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as theAtlantic slave trade,European colonial labor and social practices, theScramble for Africa,Jim Crow laws in the United States, the activities of theNative Land Court in New Zealand,[4] theWhite Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, andapartheid in South Africa.[5][6] This ideology is also today present amongneo-Confederates.
White supremacy underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements includingwhite nationalism, white separatism,neo-Nazism, and theChristian Identity movement.[7] In the United States, white supremacy is primarily associated withAryan Nations,White Aryan Resistance, and theKu Klux Klan. TheProud Boys are considered an implicitly white supremacist organization, despite denying their association with white supremacy.[8] In recent years, websites such asTwitter (known as X since July 2023),Reddit, andStormfront, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.[9]
Not all white-supremacist organizations have the same objectives, and while some may uphold aNordicist ideal of whiteness, others are more broadly white supremacist, including members ofSouthern European andEastern European descent.[10] Different groups ofwhite supremacists identify various racial, ethnic, religious, and other enemies,[10] most commonly those ofSub-Saharan African ancestry,Indigenous peoples, people ofAsian descent,multiracial people,MENA people,Jews,Muslims, andLGBTQ+ people.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]
In academic usage, particularly incritical race theory orintersectionality, "white supremacy" also refers to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.[19][20][21][22][23]
The theory ofwhite adjacency posits that some groups of non-White people are more closely aligned with White people than others, which affords them some degree of white privilege.[24]
White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 18th-centuryscientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that shaped international relations and racial policy from the latter part of theAge of Enlightenment until the late 20th century.[25]
White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after theAmerican Civil War, and it persisted for decades after theReconstruction era.[27] TheVirginia Slave Codes of 1705 socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons, making them disparate groups and hindering their ability to unite. Unity of the commoners was a perceived fear of the Virginia aristocracy, who wished to prevent repeated events such asBacon's Rebellion, occurring 29 years prior.[28] Prior to the Civil War, many wealthywhite Americans owned slaves; they tried to justify their economic exploitation of black people by creating a"scientific" theory of white superiority and black inferiority.[29] One such slave owner, future presidentThomas Jefferson, wrote in 1785 that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."[30] In theantebellum South, four million slaves were denied freedom.[31] The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause forstate secession[32] and the formation of theConfederate States of America.[33] In an 1890 editorial about Native Americans and theAmerican Indian Wars, authorL. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, bylaw of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."[34]
TheNaturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.[35] In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white weredisenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of theUniversity of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."[36]
The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in thecivil rights movement.[37] The movement was spurred by thelynching ofEmmett Till, a 14-year-old boy. David Jackson writes it was the image of the "murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality ofAmerican racism."[38]
Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly "declared thatNorthern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race".[39][a] TheImmigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U.S. to non-Germanic groups, and significantly altered the demographic mix in the U.S. as a result.[39] With 38 U.S. states having bannedinterracial marriage throughanti-miscegenation laws, the last 16 states had such laws in place until 1967 when they were invalidated by theSupreme Court of the United States' decision inLoving v. Virginia.[40] These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline in 1990s' polls to a single-digit percentage.[41][42] For sociologistHoward Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.[43]
After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to theAmerican far-right.[44] According toKathleen Belew, a historian ofrace andracism in the United States, white militancy shifted after theVietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position (self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism") committed to overthrowing theUnited States government and establishing a white homeland.[45][46] Suchanti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white-supremacist groups (such as theKu Klux Klan,neo-Nazi organizations, andracist skinheads) and areligious fundamentalist movement (such asChristian Identity) being the other two.[47][48]
The presidential campaign ofDonald Trump led to a surge of interest in white supremacy andwhite nationalism in the United States, bringing increased media attention and new members to their movement; his campaign enjoyed their widespread support.[49][50][51][52]
Some academics argue that the outcome of the2016 United States presidential election, and the many controversies which surrounded it, reflect the ongoing influence of white supremacy in the United States.[53][54] Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting thescapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.[55][56]
There has been debate whetherWinston Churchill, who was voted "the greatest ever Briton" in 2002, was "a racist and white supremacist".[57] In the context of rejecting the Arab wish to stopJewish immigration toPalestine, he said:
I do not admit that thedog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race ... has come in and taken their place."[58]
British historianRichard Toye, author ofChurchill's Empire, concluded that "Churchill did think that white people were superior."[57]
A number of Southern African nations experienced severe racial tension and conflict during globaldecolonization, particularly aswhite Africans of European ancestry fought to protect their preferential social and political status. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under theDutch Empire. It continued when the British took over theCape of Good Hope in 1795.Apartheid was introduced as an officially structured policy by theAfrikaner-dominatedNational Party after thegeneral election of 1948. Apartheid's legislation divided inhabitants into four racial groups – "black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian", with coloured divided into several sub-classifications.[59] In 1970, the Afrikaner-run governmentabolished non-white political representation, and starting that yearblack people were deprived of South African citizenship.[60] South Africa abolished apartheid in 1991.[61][62]
InRhodesia a predominantly white government issued its ownunilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 during an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid majority rule.[63] Following theRhodesian Bush War which was fought byAfrican nationalists, Rhodesian prime ministerIan Smith acceded to biracial political representation in 1978 and the state achieved recognition from the United Kingdom asZimbabwe in 1980.[64]
Nazism promoted the idea of a superiorGermanic people orAryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" that was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race",Slavs, andGypsies, who they associated with "cultural sterility".Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of theancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.[65]
As theNazi Party's chief racial theorist,Alfred Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justifiedHitler's racial and ethnic policies. Rosenberg promoted theNordic theory, which regardedNordics as the "master race", superior to all others, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans).[66] Rosenberg got the racial termUntermensch from the title ofKlansmanLothrop Stoddard's 1922 bookThe Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[67] It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German versionDer Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[68] Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard.[69] An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "colored" peoples to white civilization, and wroteThe Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."[70]
German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler'sMein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s. Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models.[71] Race-based U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nazis' two principalNuremberg racial laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.[71] To preserve the Aryan orNordic race, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later between Germans andRomani andSlavs. The Nazis used theMendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits, such as inventiveness or criminal behavior.[72]
According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, theFederal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6,000neo-Nazis.[73]
Fifty-one people died fromtwo consecutive terrorist attacks at theAl Noor Mosque and theLinwood Islamic Centre by an Australian white supremacist carried out on March 15, 2019. The terrorist attacks have been described by Prime MinisterJacinda Ardern as "One of New Zealand's darkest days". On August 27, 2020, the shooter was sentenced tolife without parole.[74][75][76]
In 2016, there was a rise in debate over the appropriateness of the naming ofMassey University inPalmerston North afterWilliam Massey, whom many historians and critics have described as a white supremacist.[77] Lecturer Steve Elers was a leading proponent of the idea that Massey was an avowed white supremacist, given Massey "made several anti-Chinese racist statements in the public domain" and intensified theNew Zealand head tax.[78][79] In 1921, Massey wrote in theEvening Post: "New Zealanders are probably the purest Anglo-Saxon population in the British Empire. Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such. The strain of Polynesian will be no detriment". This is one of many quotes attributed to him regarded as being openly racist.[80]
Supporters ofNordicism consider the "Nordic peoples" to be a superior race.[81] By the early 19th century, white supremacy was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopherArthur Schopenhauer attributed cultural primacy to the white race:
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancientHindus andEgyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, theBrahmins, theIncas, and the rulers of theSouth Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.[82]
TheeugenicistMadison Grant argued in his 1916 book,The Passing of the Great Race, that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and thatadmixture was "race suicide".[83] In this book, Europeans who are not of Germanic origin but have Nordic characteristics such as blonde/red hair and blue/green/gray eyes, were considered to be a Nordic admixture and suitable forAryanization.[84]
In the United States, the groups most associated with the white-supremacist movement are theKu Klux Klan (KKK),Aryan Nations, and theWhite American Resistance movement, all of which are also considered to beantisemitic. TheProud Boys, despite claiming non-association with white supremacy, have been described in academic contexts as being such.[8] Many white-supremacist groups are based on the concept of preserving genetic purity, and do not focus solely on discrimination based on skin color. The KKK's reasons for supportingracial segregation are not primarily based on religious ideals, but some Klan groups are openlyProtestant.[citation needed] The 1915 silent drama filmThe Birth of a Nation followed the rising racial, economic, political, and geographic tensions leading up to theEmancipation Proclamation and the SouthernReconstruction era that was the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan.[85]
Nazi Germany promulgated white supremacy based on the belief that theAryan race, or the Germans, were themaster race. It was combined with aeugenics programme that aimed forracial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination ofUntermenschen ("subhumans"):Slavs, Jews andRomani, which eventually culminated inthe Holocaust.[86][87][88][89][90]
Christian Identity is another movement closely tied to white supremacy. Some white supremacists identify themselves asOdinists, although many Odinists reject white supremacy. Some white-supremacist groups, such as the South AfricanBoeremag, conflate elements of Christianity and Odinism.Creativity (formerly known as "The World Church of the Creator") isatheistic and it denounces Christianity and othertheistic religions.[91][92] Aside from this, its ideology is similar to that of many Christian Identity groups because it believes in theantisemitic conspiracy theory that there is a "Jewish conspiracy" in control of governments, the banking industry and the media.Matthew F. Hale, founder of the World Church of the Creator, has published articles stating that all races other than white are "mud races", which is what the group's religion teaches.[citation needed]
The white-supremacist ideology has become associated with a racist faction of theskinheadsubculture, despite the fact that when the skinhead culture first developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, it was heavily influenced by black fashions andmusic, especially Jamaicanreggae andska, and African Americansoul music.[93][94][95]
White-supremacist recruitment activities are primarily conducted at agrassroots level as well as on the Internet. Widespread access to the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in white-supremacist websites.[96] The Internet provides a venue for open expression of white-supremacist ideas at littlesocial cost because people who post the information are able to remain anonymous.
Whiteseparatism is a political and social movement that seeks the separation ofwhite people from people of otherraces andethnicities. This may include the establishment of awhite ethnostate by removing non-whites from existing communities or by forming new communities elsewhere.[97]
Most modern researchers do not view white separatism as distinct from white-supremacist beliefs. TheAnti-Defamation League defines white separatism as "a form of white supremacy";[98] the Southern Poverty Law Center defines both white nationalism and white separatism as "ideologies based on white supremacy."[99] Facebook has banned content that is openlywhite nationalist or white separatist because "white nationalism and white separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups".[100][101]
Use of the term to self-identify has been criticized as a dishonest rhetorical ploy. The Anti-Defamation League argues that white supremacists use the phrase because they believe it has fewer negative connotations than the termwhite supremacist.[98]
Dobratz and Shanks-Meile reported that adherents usually rejectmarriage "outside the white race". They argued for the existence of "a distinction between the white supremacist's desire to dominate (as inapartheid,slavery, orsegregation) and complete separation by race".[102] They argued that this is a matter of pragmatism, because, while many white supremacists are also white separatists, contemporary white separatists reject the view that returning to a system of segregation is possible or desirable in the United States.[103]
The termwhite supremacy is used in some academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural orsocietal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred. According to this definition, white racial advantages occur at both a collective and an individual level (ceteris paribus,i. e., when individuals are compared that do not differ relevantly 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 supremacisthate 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.[19][20]
This and similar definitions have been adopted or proposed byCharles W. Mills,[21]bell hooks,[22]David Gillborn,[23] Jessie Daniels,[104] and Neely Fuller Jr,[105] and they are widely used incritical race theory andintersectional feminism. Someanti-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 supremacy 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".[106] Academic users of the term sometimes prefer it toracism because it allows for a distinction to be drawn between racist feelings and white racial advantage orprivilege.[107][108][52]John McWhorter, a specialist in language and race relations, explains the gradual replacement of "racism" by "white supremacy" by the fact that "potent terms need refreshment, especially when heavily used", drawing a parallel with the replacement of "chauvinist" by "sexist".[109]
Other intellectuals have criticized the term's recent rise in popularity among leftist activists as counterproductive. John McWhorter has described the use of "white supremacy" as straying from its commonly accepted meaning to encompass less extreme issues, thereby cheapening the term and potentially derailing productive discussion.[110][111] Political columnistKevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity to frequent use byTa-Nehisi Coates, describing it as a "terrible fad" that fails to convey nuance. He claims that the term should be reserved for those who are trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks and not used to characterize less blatantly racist beliefs or actions.[112][113] The academic use of the term to refer tosystemic racism has been criticized byConor Friedersdorf for the confusion that it creates for the general public, inasmuch as it differs from the more common dictionary definition; he argues that it is likely to alienate those that it hopes to convince.[113]
Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.
{{cite book}}:|journal= ignored (help)Although white racist activists must adopt a political identity of whiteness, the flimsy definition of whiteness in modern culture poses special challenges for them. In both mainstream and white supremacist discourse, to be white is to be distinct from those marked as nonwhite, yet the placement of the distinguishing line has varied significantly in different times and places.
The questions deal with most of the major racial issues that became focal in the middle of the twentieth century: integration of public accommodations, school integration, residential integration, and job discrimination [and] racial intermarriage and willingness to vote for a black presidential candidate. ... The trends that occur for most of the principle items are quite similar and can be illustrated ...using attitudes toward school integration as an example. The figure shows that there has been a massive and continuous movement of the American public from overwhelming acceptance of theprinciple of segregated schooling in the early 1940s toward acceptance of theprinciple of integrated schooling. ... by 1985, more than nine out of ten chose the pro-integration response.
In 1942 only 42 percent of a national sample of whites reported that they believed blacks to be equal to whites in innate intelligence; since the late 1950s, however, around 80 percent ofwhite Americans have rejected the idea of inherent black inferiority.
white racial attitudes shifted dramatically in the postwar period. ... So, monolithic white supremacy is over, yet in a more concealed way, white power and privilege live on.
While theNew Right andChristian Right flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, the Far Right also rebounded... The Far Right—encompassing Ku Klux Klan, neonazi, and related organizations—attracted a much smaller following than the New Right, but its influence reverberated in its encouragement of widespread attacks against members of oppressed groups and in broad-based scapegoating campaigns
The white power movement that emerged from the Vietnam era shared some common attributes with earlier racist movements in the United States, but it was no mere echo. Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white-supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983.
For instance, Ben Klassen, founder of the atheistic Church of the Creator and author ofThe White Man's Bible, discusses Christianity extensively in his writings and denounces it as a religion that has brought untold horror into the world and has divided the white race.
A competing atheistic or panthestic white racist movement also appeared, which included the Church of the Creator/ Creativity (Gardell 2003: 129–34).
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