Kanye West and breaking down white supremacy: what is it and how do we dismantle it
This essay is longer than usual (about a 12 minute read) as there’s a LOT to cover…
In the past several weeks, Kanye West – or Ye, as he is now known – has come under fire for antisemitic remarks released on his social media, as well as in a string of news interviews. Despite the indignant cries of Kanye West fans and apologists, who cite his mental illness as an excuse for this behavior, hate groups like the antisemitic Goyim Defense League were quick to capitalize on the massive social media reach of the musician (~50 million across Twitter and Instagram) and parade their hate on- and offline.
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 (and world) 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 we mean by “white supremacy”
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, I remember seeing a lot of videos and memes online that played with the following analogy:
Racism is to Americans as water is to fish.
The point being: racism is in the very air we breathe. It surrounds us everywhere we go; we live under its influence unconsciously; and it is foolish to believe we can compartmentalize it as an unfortunate, but independent evil in our society.
I’ve seen a similar argument used to describe “white supremacy,” a term which 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 poster boys 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 – including the legions of conspiracist Internet trolls on Reddit and YouTube – would suggest. As a pseudo-scientific 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 happily diminished in number, but its historical effects have a much longer tail.
A short history 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 pseudo-scientific arguments about white people’s biological, intellectual, and even spiritual superiority, all of which we now understand to be rooted in blatantly racist stereotypes.
To take a historical example: a physician named Samuel Cartwright once wrote in 1850s Louisiana that the reason slaves kept running away from their masters was that they had “smaller brains and blood vessels…and [a] tendency to indolence and barbarism.” If only their enslavers would keep them in a more benevolent “state of submission,” they would become naturally “spellbound” and cease to run away.
This argument was rooted in centuries of pseudo-scientific racism that made all sorts of claims about Black bodies: that our blood was thicker, feet flatter, skulls smaller, muscles bigger, senses keener. The list of specious – now, ridiculous-seeming – claims go on and on.
And from the earliest days of the slave trade, these arguments (albeit in more rudimentary forms in the 15th and 16th centuries) were crucial to justifying the barbaric treatment of the enslaved. Western Europeans were Christians, after all. Black Africans had to be dehumanized in order to justify their enslavement and torture, especially to a continent of believers who humbly touted the equality of all humankind before God. The physical “animalization” of Black bodies in Western culture was predicated on a belief that white bodies and brains were the standard measure for humanity.
This racial hierarchy – before “race” was even a clear social or “biological” concept – was the seed of modern white supremacy. And when they made contact with African peoples in the 15th century, white Europeans used key pillars of their civilization and identities to prove their superiority.
First and foremost, they were Christian, whereas Africans and other indigenous peoples, to them, worshiped primitive gods, the Devil, and/or witchcraft. In the early days of European global expansion and “discovery,” it therefore seemed natural to the believers of the “true” religion to seek to control unbaptized, unsaved peoples and to redeem them through a “superior” faith.
As Europeans and Americans became more advanced scientifically, another facet of white supremacist theory became entrenched in their psyche: intellectual superiority. Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern civilizations – to name a few – had independently developed their own traditions of scientific, technical, and artistic brilliance to rival any in the West. But by the 18th century, European imperialism demanded further justification for the subjugation of far-away lands and foreign peoples. Christianity was seen as one of the main tools of “civilization,” but eventually modern science, engineering, literacy, and medicine were also rebranded as the white man’s gift to less “developed” parts of the world.
This haughty sense of superficial benevolence developed further in the 19th century, when industrializing nations in the West vied for power in theaters of conflict around the world. When white people were at the center of these conflicts, as in the war of American independence, Europeans fought each other in the name of man’s natural right to liberty. But when people of color were involved, as in the dozens of colonial wars in 19th century Africa and south Asia, Europeans justified their interference by claiming the natives were unfit to run their own regions. And behind that justification was the old white supremacist premise: white people’s civilization is superior, and it is their duty – or the “White Man’s Burden,” as Rudyard Kipling once put it – to bring these backwards nations into the light.
Not everyone agreed with these blatantly racist, imperialist views of colonial expansion. But as the 19th century progressed, philosophies of racial superiority began to crystallize with more sophistication. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously coined the term Übermensch (“Super-person” or “Above-person”) to describe a new generation of humans that would lead the modern world forward. German National Socialists (i.e. Nazis), eventually led by Hitler, would come to employ this concept (erroneously) to distinguish between Übermenschen (“Above-people”) and Üntermenschen (“Under-people”). They used these ideas to classify communities like the Jews, Africans, and homosexuals as under-classes eligible for extermination. This obviously led to Hitler’s Final Solution and the Holocaust, which exterminated millions of people from “undesirable” racial, ethnic, religious, or social classes – and above all, European Jewish communities – in the name of racial white supremacy.
It would take a lot more time and space to do the history of white supremacy in Western colonialism and imperialism justice. (Manifest Destiny is a particularly pertinent example closer to home that Americans used to justify the annihilation of Indigenous peoples.)
Suffice to say these ideas 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.
This advertisement for Pears’ soap (still a British brand today!) from the 1890s speaks to just how entrenched white supremacy used to be in culture:
The not-so-tacit implication of this ad is that white people (or “white saviors”) are virtuous educators – bringing culture, civilization, and cleanliness to the four corners of the dirty, undeveloped world. All the naval imagery speaks to the military core of the British colonial empire, while a Christianizing missionary hands out soap to a highly stereotyped African native on the bottom right. And “The White Man’s Burden” is a reference to a jingoistic Rudyard Kipling poem, written for a public jubilee celebration under Queen Victoria to justify the American occupation of the Philippines in the early 20th century. (It was eventually passed over for another of Kipling’s stately odes to British imperialism.)
Of course, 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 was still able to justify his shooting at a Black church in Charleston by claiming that Black people have lower IQs.
Society changes, but ideas take a long time to die.
White supremacy in our society 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.
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 after-effect 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.
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 “red-lining” 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 $187m in funding (0.43% of the $43bn 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.
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 is of course that America – white America – was blameless in its response to Covid – 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 (AAVE), 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.
Porter Braswell