For this first Erase Racism Carnival, i’m not going to define racism. I think everyone has their definition of racism and those definitions get easily muddled in discussion and debate. I, for one, think the term is limiting. After all, i am not talking simply about the discrimination or prejudice against someone because of their race. I am talking about the discrimination, prejudice, genocide, enslavement, impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the majority of people on this planet. And that is something that is far more ingrained, systematic and institutionalized than individual discrimination. Anti-racist activists often find themselves adding qualifiers to the word racism (institutional racism, systematic racism, White racism). Doing so not only confuses many people, it also makes it seem as though we are talking about different kinds of racism. It may also imply that Black racism or Asian racism are just as potent.
What i see as the root of racism is the creation of Whiteness. And so it is White Supremacy that i am concerned with deconstructing and destroying. But before we can begin to destroy such 0a powerful beast, we must first peel away the layers of myth. White Supremacy is not something practiced solely by poor people in the U.S. South. It is not something practiced solely by members of the Ku Klux Klan or the National Socialist Movement. And it is not a thing of the past. White Supremacy is the systematic belief (conscious and subconscious) that White people are superior to people of color. This belief is so ingrained into us (not just White people) that we don’t even believe it exists. That’s how common place it is. Its like the air around us. We are so used to its embrace that we no longer feel it, except during the occasional wind storm.
Those wind storms are like the recent White riots in Australia or the Klan riots in Cincinnati. They are moments of discomfort when we are reminded that White Supremacy is alive and well and all around us. But like the air, it is not only surrounding us, it is inside of us. Each and every one of us. Although most of us maintain liberal notions about race and equality, those notions are so easily shattered in real life without even causing us to pause. White people remain the most segregated population, being the least likely to have contact with people outside of our racial categorization on a daily basis. We continue to segregate ourselves in every aspect of our lives. We move to White neighborhoods (and then move out when people of color move in because we believe that it will become unsafe or property values will go down). We segregate ourselves at schools - starting in elementary and going all the way through college. We segregate ourselves at work. Although Affirmative Action has gotten a lot of heat over the years, it is pre-existing “affirmative action” that has created segregated school and work environments privileging White people (nepotism, social networking, preferential treatment for children of alumni, etc). All of this has been done with the belief that White people are superior and therefore deserve more.
We are taught to believe in a false meritocricy - a world where one’s social standing is dependent solely on the individual’s effort towards climbing the social ladder. It is that belief that further feeds our ideas of superiority in everyday life. We believe that White people have disporportionately high numbers in colleges, honors programs, corporate boards, government, and so forth because of the intellectual, moral, and character superiority of our Whiteness. After all, if we are all given the same opportunities in life and the outcome is that White people come out ahead, then the logical conclusion is that we remain innately superior. Inversely, this logic implies that people of color do not attain such positions because they are lazy, morally corrupt, intellectually inferior, or other such nonsense. No study has ever been able to find a racial genetic link to such beliefs and yet we continue to subconscious store them in our minds as fact.
It is his innate moral corruption, we come to believe, that is the reason for the disproportionate number of people of color in prisons. And even without looking at prison numbers, we internalize this belief of moral corruption and play it out in a million different ways. When we see young Black or Latino men we believe them to be untrustworthy, violent, drug dealers, gang members, rapists, or simply sketchy enough to elicit clutching our wallet and crossing the street. We view wimmin of color as sexually exotic and adventurous, Welfare Queens, drug addicts, or easy targets of rape and sexual harrassment. We believe people of color are more likely to do and sell drugs, skip school, bully other kids, be on welfare, rob, shoot, rape, and attack. As White people, we teach ourselves to believe that people of color pose a direct physical threat to us because of their inability to act as morally as White people. Of course, our views of White morality are greatly skewed and, of course, there has never been complete homogeneity among people classified as White. This, i believe, is one area where White Supremacy greatly harms White people. We come to believe that those that are threatening our safety are people of color. When, in fact, the greatest threat to our safety is in corrupt CEOs and politicians, friends and family who rape and abuse, and greedy corporations that undermine fair wages, safe working conditions, job security, pensions, healthcare, clean environments, etc. And if we look at who those people are, they are typically White people. So we find ourselves combating a mythical threat instead of the real threat. We are Don Quioxte.
When we begin to look at these examples, which are but a few from the tip of the iceberg, we see that White Supremacy is not just something practiced by poor southerners or extremist groups. In fact, those two groups are hardly the problem at all considering they do not have the financial or political clout to carry out the institutional acts of White Supremacy. Instead, they are scapegoats. They serve to divert attention from the larger problem. These classist and regionalist views of White Supremacy work only to hurt movements for social justice. Yes, we must fight groups like the KKK and the neo-nazis and we must fight racism in the US South, but we must not believe for one moment that those fights are where the struggle ends. White Supremacy is too far spread, too much a part of who we are to be contained beneath a bed sheet or wrapped inside an arm band. White Supremacy lives in each of us and if we are to destroy racism, then we must start by looking inside ourselves. As Chris Crass said, “Until White people confront their internalized superiority, the dynamics of racism will be reproduced unconsciously.”
So what is White Supremacy? Simple. Its the little voice inside your head that actually convinces you that White people earned what we have. Its the voice that tells you a room full of White people is safe, but a room full of people of color is dangerous. Its the voice that sings so loud that you never question why we’ve never had a persyn of color as president. Its the voice inside your head that you call reason. Its the voice that tells you, you aren’t racist. Its the voice that convinces you everything is ok. Its the voice with which we speak.
[tags]Erase Racism Carnival[/tags]
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Fantastic analysis.
–IP
Excellent!
What I find challenging, and probably always will, is the slippery nature of White Supremacy for me. I think I’ve got a handle on it, see it in my actions, then ping! gone.
thanks!
jay - i hear what you’re saying. I think its a fallacy to believe that White people, within the current structure, can really have a handle on White Supremacy. At least, i don’t believe it is possible for us to really be non-racist in a system that provides so many privileges based upon skin color. We will continue to say and do racist things because we are unable to live completely outside the system we are a part of and the self that we are socialized into. However, we can stay on our learning edge and live life on the margins, challenging White Supremacy. If we do this long enough (over generations) with enough people and power behind it, then i do have great hope that one day we will find that we, all people, have created a world where White Supremacy truly is the fringe that we are taught it to be.
I really like this post, but I do think it’s a little too general. I think your assumption that racism in Australia and racism in America have the same history, ignores some important points. In New Zealand, and from what I know Australia, racism begins with colonialism.
I live in New Zealand and when I read analysis of racism written in America, and American accounts of white supremacy. Something seems wrong, the analysis doesn’t fit with my analysis of racism, and I never quite know where.
It wasn’t until someone pointed it out to me, that often there is no analysis of colonialism withing American analyses of racism. That makes a heap of sense, the most overt and systematic racism in America is racism based on slavery. So it is what most Americans turn to when they think of racism, and the white supremacy analysis works best in that situation.
Whereas in New Zealand the most overt and systematic racism is racism based on colonialism. It’s the history of the theft of land and war against culture that is the basis of our racist society and racist state.
maia, i agree with a lot of your thought–that there seems to be a preferencing of slavery over colonialism in the u.s.–but i would disagree that this preferencing is because it’s reality–i think that people forget that the u.s. is a colonized territory because we are *still* colonizing native peoples. if we acknowlege that there is a history of colonialism, then we would have to acknowlege that colonialism is still occuring…if you look at the violence so many native peoples experienced in the 60’s when there was a strong movement asserting continued colonialization, you can see what investment the u.s. has in continuing to pretend like native peoples are “playing” indian or refusing to “grow up”. the U.s. prefers to pretend that all that messy colonialism crap ended back in the 1700’s when the last mohican died, you know? That native peoples don’t *really* exist any more and that they haven’t been resisting for the last 500 years. the invisibility is more a sign of continued violence and agression on the part of the u.s. rather than a sign that slavery is the ultimate sin of the u.s. I mean, you couldn’t even *have* slavery if you didn’t forcibly displace and murder millions of native peoples to get them off the land to begin with. you know?
maia - i should preface by saying that when i write, i typically write in the context of the US cuz that’s what i know. However, i don’t think that the history of racism and White Supremacy are completely seperate when it comes to any part of the world. The idea of Whiteness and White Supremacy has been/is being globalized as aggressively as Starbucks, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart.
i, like bfp, would disagree that US White Supremacy started with slavery. Instead, it started when White people first began to colonize the land and the people who inhabited it, murdering about 95% of the indigenous population within a century of Columbus’ arrival. However, Whiteness as a racial categorization was solidified (and expanded) in the US during and because of slavery. While i am not completely familiar with the hystories of New Zealand and Australia, i do believe that this exported notion of Whiteness is what helped define an already forming definition in those two countries. But regardless of hystories, given the current context, it seems that there is very little difference between the recent race riots in Cronulla, Australia and in Toledo, Ohio. They both stem from notions of White Supremacy and racist ideas of ‘nativism’.
I greatly agree that there needs to be more of an analysis of colonialism within the current discussions on race in the US. But i would be offended that there is no analysis of such here. There is a great amount of critical thought about colonialism, especially among First Nations people, but it seems to largely be relegated to the margins (as does most great thought, no?).
I’m wondering what you meant by the analysis of White Supremacy working best in the context of slavery. Persynally, i’d say it works in the context of colonization, as well, but you seem to imply otherwise. Can you expand? I’m always interested to hear views outside the states.
I didn’t mean to imply that analysis about colonialism wasn’t happening in America - or that there wasn’t a history of colonialism. Just that it generally doesn’t dominate discourse around race. In New Zealand it does dominate the discourse about race (possibly sometimes in a problematic way, where Maori - and pacific - and Pakeha are the only options).
I guess that means for our analysis is that the material reasons for this racism - the theft of land - are really close to the surface. There has been theft of Maori land rights as little as two years ago, and that is where the politics of race start. I don’t see racism as starting with the creation of whiteness, but with the theft of land and resources. The ideology justifies the theft, the theft doesn’t come from the ideology.
BFP - obviously America is based on colonialism as much as NZ is. But America is obviously also built in slavery. It makes sense to me that analysis of racism would be different in a country that had a history of both slavery and colonialism, from a country that didn’t have a history of slavery.
You’re absolutely right the last insult of colonialism is to deny that it ever existed, and the battle is to unhide that history.
i see what you’re saying, maia, and it is tricky. Obviously, if we look at historical events in the current context, then it would seem that racism preceeded White Supremacy as there were acts of genocide and colonization against indigenous and Black people before the definition of Whiteness (or Blackness, for that matter) was solidified. However, how can racism preceed race? The concept of race was created as a way to normalize the unearned power and privileges of wealthy White Europeans and European decendents. It was that belief of supremacy that fully convinced the colonizers that they had the god-given right to the land they stole. They were fully convinced that their decendency from the European superpowers gave them the power to conquer and enslave the inferior ’savages’. I’d say this was the beginning of White Supremacist thought. The ’savages’ at this point were not quite fully defined in contrast to Whiteness, but rather viewed akin to the less-than-humyn savages of, say, Ireland or Scotland. The enslaved Africans were beginning to be moved away from the ’savage’ category and into the category of Blackness. After all, they could no longer be defined as savage once they were incorporated into ‘civilization’ (even if that incorporation was as less-than-humyn). So they were racialized as humyn, but not quite the superior specimen of humyn as the property-owning euroamerican man. First Nations people, however, remained ’savage’ and were not racialized until fairly recently (after almost complete genocide). So in the case of colonization, i know that this immature idea of race and racial superiority played some role in it, but it also seems to be something a bit more. What you’d call it, i don’t know. Seems like an awkward mix between manifest destiny, speciesism (if the ’savages’ weren’t humyn then they were some other inferior animal species), and racial superiority (racism).
In short:), i think it was the theft of land, resources, and humyns, as well as the campaigns of genocide that helped to define race, racism, and White Supremacy. But i’d agree, the fucked up things that White people have done started before they fully identified as White.