What is white supremacy?
What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent study found that in the United States, a black applicant with no criminal record is less likely to receive a callback from a potential employer than a white applicant with a felony conviction. In other words, being black is more of a liability in finding a job than being a convicted criminal. Into this new century, such discrimination has remained constant.
That's white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices and institutions of the dominant white society. It's not the product simply of individual failure but is woven into society, and the material consequences of it are dramatic.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
Business | Culture | Economics | Race | White Supremacy
But is it really white supremacy?
Submitted by liza on 5 May 2006 - 12:35am.
I don't know. I am out on this one, really. It's like, if you name the beast, you feed the beast.
By calling these actions white supremacy you actually give it more power. I refuse to call these acts supreme because the do not come from being better but from knowing that you're not and using the color of your skin as a means to myth-making.
Whiteness really happened in this country when the white servants classes were given a place at the table of the Bushes of this country.
Had it not been the landed and capitalist powers decided it was to their advantage to use whiteness to assimilate the white niggers of this country, we would not be talking about white supremacy but capitalist supremacy.
» email this comment | 0 points
I think it is
Submitted by Jeffrey Langstraat on 5 May 2006 - 9:27pm.
It's not just the myth of superiority, but the structural fact of occupying superior positions. I like bell hooks' term: White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They're all in there somewhere.
» email this comment | 0 points
I have to sit on that
Submitted by liza on 6 May 2006 - 2:24am.
I mean, I am not negating it is real. What I am tryinng to come to terms with is the parsing of "white supremacy" from the very real fact that Africans sold and are still selling their neighbors into slavery and many Europeans come not only me here into servitude but continue to this day as white (skin) slaves.
The construction of white supremacy is problematic because it perpetuates it. How can you speak it without giving those who want supremacy what they seek?
Because by saying they are white supremacists and that we live in a world where whiteness is supreme you are giving them exactly what they seek. Validation.
» email this comment | 0 points
It's depressing
Today is my last class period for my Inequality in America class (my last classes in both my Race and Ethnicity classes were earlier this week). In that class, the last book we read/discussed was Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation. It's a devastating indictment of the United States, and how we've allowed our schools (and our society) to re-segregate. White supremacy has become so deeply embedded within the institutional life of the United States that I'm often left with a sense of deep pessimism. I see so little hope, even among my students, that the problems can be addressed. And I've got to go try and inspire them to do something with the depressing education I've just provided them. I guess, that's why I always try to remember, and close with, a line by Cornell West, "I remain a prisoner of hope."