White supremacy

White supremacy or white supremacism is the belief that white people should conquer and subjugate non-white people and that they should politically, economically and socially control any non-whites living in those lands where whites form the majority. By its own definition, the term is typically used to describe a loosely bound political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial structures of white civilization in traditionally white countries; though few people described as white supremacists today still support historical and contemporary sociopolitical structures such as the Atlantic slave trade. There is more support for a return to altered versions of Jim Crow laws in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa.

Today, the term "white supremacy" (along with "white racism") is a name often given (usually but not always by its opponents) to a pro-white ideology that is centered upon the belief, and the promotion of the belief, that white people differ in certain characteristics, traits, and attributes from people of other racial backgrounds. Significantly, this includes the scientifically measured observation that white people have higher average IQs than most non-whites, though other groups have other evolutionary advantages. Different forms of white "supremacism" put forth different conceptions of who is considered white, and different white activists accuse different racial and cultural groups of practicing invasion migration in their areas. White separatist and supremacist groups have typically opposed living in the same areas and cultural spheres as non-white people and Jews. What is described as white supremacy has roots in extensive social and historical observations, and later in human biodiversity research (also known as HBD). Members of such groups encourage open discussion of such matters, though such debates often include insulting terms for members of non-white groups, who may even be accused of being inherently criminal.

The terms "white supremacy" and "white racism" are also used in a pejorative way by opponents of white racial identity politics, including anti-white activists, who usually prefer to describe themselves as practitioners of anti-racism. This is despite the fact that, since the 1970s, pro-white organizations have generally chosen to self-identify under labels such as white nationalist, white separatist, Identitarian, pro-white, or simply nationalist. In left-wing and far-left academic usage, particularly in usage drawing on critical race theory, the term "white supremacy" can also refer to various conspiracy theories describing a political or socio-economic system where white people enjoy a structural advantage (privilege) over other ethnic groups, both at a collective and an individual level.

History of white supremacy as a political concept

White identity has ideological foundations that at least date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international and intra-national relations from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment (in European history) through the late 20th century (marked by the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, followed by that country's first multiracial elections in 1994).

United States

Main category: White supremacy in the United States

Applied forms of white supremacy were dominant in the United States even after the American Civil War and it also persisted for decades after the Reconstruction Era. In large areas of the U.S. this included the holding of non-whites (specifically African Americans, then known as negroes) in chattel slavery with four million denied freedom from bondage. The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy over blacks cited as a cause for state secession and the formation of the Confederate States of America. In an editorial about American Indians in 1890, author L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by law 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."

In some parts of the United States, many people from non-white backgrounds were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Since the founding of the United States, when the right to vote was restricted to white men of property, professor Leland T. Saito of USC 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." The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.

The denial of socially and politically imposed equality continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the Civil Rights Movement. On the U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965, sociologist Stephen Klineberg cited the law as clearly declaring "that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race." The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and as a result would significantly alter the demographic mix in the USA, to a point where non-Asian minorities might even become the majority. Many U.S. states banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when these laws were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia. Additionally, white leaders often viewed Amerindians as obstacles to economic and political progress with respect to the natives' claims to land and rights.

Germany

National Socialism promoted the idea of a superior Germanic people or Aryan race in Germany and some surrounding areas 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" which is superior to other races, particularly the Jews who were described as the "Semitic race", Slavs and Gypsies, which they associated with "cultural sterility". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancient 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 cultures.

In order to preserve the Aryan or Nordic race, the National Socialists introduced the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later between Germans and Gypsies and Slavs.

The National Socialists used the Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, deducing that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behavior.

Modern-day white supremacist and some other extremist groups around the world reuse Third Reich symbolism, including the swastika, to represent their beliefs.

According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 people with politically significant right-wing and anti-immigration beliefs living in Germany, including 6000 Neo-Nazis.

Southern Africa

A number of Southern African nations experienced severe racial tension and conflict during global decolonization, particularly as white Africans of European ancestry fought to protect their preferential social and political status. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under the Dutch Empire, and continued when the British took over the Cape of Good Hope in 1795. Apartheid as an officially structured policy was introduced by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party after the general election of 1948. Legislation divided inhabitants into four racial groups—"black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian", the last two of which were divided into several sub-classifications. In 1970, the Afrikaner-run government abolished non-white political representation, and starting that year black people were deprived of South African citizenship. South Africa abolished apartheid in 1991. In Rhodesia, a predominantly white government issued its own unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom during an unsuccessful attempt to avoid immediate majority rule. Following the Rhodesian Bush War which was fought by black African communists, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith acceded to biracial political representation in 1978 and the state achieved recognition from the United Kingdom as Zimbabwe in 1980.

Russia

Neo-Nazi organizations embracing white separatist and supremacist ideology are present in many countries in the world. It has been claimed in 2007, that Russian Neo-Nazis accounted for "half of the world's total".

Academic use of the term

The term white supremacy is used in left-wing and far-left studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism, which they claim privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or absence of racial hatred. White racial advantages occur both at a collective and an individual level (ceteris paribus, i. e., when individuals are compared that do not relevantly differ except in ethnicity). Left-wing political 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.

This and similar definitions are adopted or proposed by Charles Mills, bell hooks, David Gillborn, Jessie Daniels and Neely Fuller Jr, and 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 all the way to later efforts to reverse this arrangement in the United States and all other Western countries. It also expresses the visceral impact of structural racism through "provocative and brutal" language that characterizes racism as "nefarious, global, systemic, and constant." 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.

The term's rise in popularity among leftist activists since the end of Occupy Wall Street in 2012 has been characterized by some as counterproductive to the goal of further reducing white influence. Specialist in language and on 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 political evolution. Political columnist Kevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity in 2016 to frequent use by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and 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. 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 that it is likely to alienate those it hopes to convince or at least neutralize as political opponents. The term exploded even further in usage during the presidency of Donald Trump, with supporters of the Democratic Party (itself a former white supremacist party) often using the term in a pejorative way to describe Republican voters. The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, along with the rioting and looting that followed, increasingly popularized its usage.

Ideologies and movements

Supporters of Nordicism typically consider the Nordic peoples to be a superior race. By the early 19th century, white superiority was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer attributed civilisational primacy to the white race:

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, 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, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South 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.

Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1923.

Flag of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) led by Adolf Hitler.

The eugenicist Madison 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 that admixture was "race suicide". In this book, Europeans who are not necessarily 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 for Aryanization.

In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the group most associated with the white identity movement. Many pro-white groups are based on the concept of preserving genetic distinctiveness, and they do not focus solely on discrimination based on skin color. The KKK's reasons for supporting racial segregation are not primarily based on religious ideals, but some Klan groups are openly Protestant. The KKK and other white nationalist and supremacist groups like Aryan Nations, The Order and the White Patriot Party are considered antisemitic.

The Good Citizen 1926, published by Pillar of Fire Church

National Socialist Germany promulgated a form of white superiority based on the belief that the Aryan race, or the Germanic peoples, were the master race. It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of Untermenschen ("subhumans"): Slavs, Jews and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.

Post-war

After World War II, white identity politics slowly evolved around the opposition to replacement migration from the Third World into Western countries. Allegedly extremist groups have coined terms like rapefugee and crimmigrant to condemn the tens of millions of non-white "fighting age migrants" moving to Europe and North America, with a significant male bias.

Christian Identity is another movement closely tied to white supremacy. Some white identitarians identify themselves as Odinists, although many Odinists reject white supremacy. Some pro-white groups, such as the South African Boeremag, conflate elements of Christianity and Odinism. Creativity (formerly known as "The World Church of the Creator") is atheistic and it denounces Christianity and other theistic religions. Aside from this, its ideology is similar to many Christian Identity groups because it believes in an alleged "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.

The white supremacist ideology has become associated with a faction of the skinhead subculture otherwise known as white power skinheads, racist skinheads or neo-Nazi skinheads, despite the fact that, when the skinhead subculture first developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, it was heavily influenced by black fashions and music, especially Jamaican reggae and ska, and American negro soul music.

Recruitment activities for various pro-white groups are conducted primarily at a grassroots level and on the Internet. Widespread access to the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in white separatist and even some more extreme websites, a few of which advocate slavery or even genocide. The Internet provides a venue to openly express white nationalist and supremacist ideas at little social cost, because people who post the information are able to remain anonymous.

Relationships with black separatist groups

Due to some commonly held separatist ideologies, some white supremacist organizations have found limited common cause with black supremacist or extremist organizations.

In February 1962 George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, spoke at a Nation of Islam rally in Chicago, where he was applauded by Elijah Muhammad as he pronounced: "I am proud to stand here before black men. I believe Elijah Muhammed is the Adolf Hitler of the black man!" Rockwell had attended, but did not speak at, an earlier NOI rally in June 1961 in Washington, D.C. and even once donated $20 to the NOI. In 1965, after breaking with the Nation of Islam and denouncing its separatist doctrine, Malcolm X told his followers that the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad had made secret agreements with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

Rockwell and other white supremacists (e.g. Willis Carto) also supported less well-known black separatist groups, such as Hassan Jeru-Ahmed's Blackman's Army of Liberation, in reference to which Rockwell told Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Drosnin in 1967 that if "Any Negro wants to go back to Africa, I'll carry him piggy-back."

Later on, Tom Metzger, erstwhile Ku Klux Klan leader from California, spoke at a NOI rally in Los Angeles in September 1985 and donated $100 to the group. In October of that same year, over 200 prominent white supremacists met at former Klan leader Robert E. Miles's farm to discuss an alliance with Louis Farrakhan, head of the NOI. In attendance were Edward Reed Fields of the National States' Rights Party, Richard Girnt Butler of the Aryan Nations, Don Black (the founder of the Stormfront website), Roy Frankhouser, and Metzger, who said that "America is like a rotting carcass. The Jews are living off the carcass like the parasites they are. Farrakhan understands this."

Agent provocateur and false flag operations

Many white supremacist groups are alleged to have been false flag operations dominated by agent provocateurs in order for the establishment to impose censorship upon pro-white activists. Combat 18 and the Atomwaffen Division are two of the most infamous alleged examples.

See also

• Afrocentrism
• Alt-right
• Anti-miscegenation laws
• Aryan Brotherhood
• The Birth of a Nation (movie)
• Black supremacy
• Eurocentrism
• Hate group
• Heroes of the Fiery Cross (book)
• Human biodiversity debate
• Institutional racism
• Jim Crow laws
• Master race
• Race and intelligence
• Frances Cress Welsing
• "The White Man's Burden" (poem)
• White power music
• Superiority complex
• White nationalism
• List of white nationalist organizations

Further reading

• Dobratz, Betty A. and Shanks-Meile, Stephanie. "White power, white pride!": The white separatist movement in the United States (JHU Press, 2000) ISBN 978-0-8018-6537-4
• Lincoln Rockwell, George. White Power (John McLaughlin, 1996)
• MacCann, Ronnarae. White Supremacy in Children's Literature (Routledge, 2000)

External links

• Heart of Whiteness documentary film about what it means to be white in South Africa
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Frank Meeink from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum