How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

by Crystal Marie Fleming

As a result, most of us make it through the entirety of our lives without structured opportunities to learn about racism from experts on the subject. Is it any wonder that so many people are so damned racially ignorant?

But what no one told me as a child in the “gifted” program is that the criteria that define intellectual “giftedness” are socially constructed—shaped and molded by power relations, including racism and sexism, and largely determined by wealthy white men who, you guessed it, just so happen to situate themselves as intellectually superior to other groups.

When social scientists describe racism as “systemic,” we’re referring to collective practices and representations that disadvantage categories of human beings on the basis of their perceived “race.” The key word here is “collective.” Much of the racial stupidity we encounter in everyday life derives from the fact that people think of racism as individual prejudice rather than a broader system and structure of power.

antiracists are people of any racial or ethnic background who take a personal, active role in challenging systemic racism.

Allen’s study of colonial America shows that belief in a superior “white” race was invented as a form of social control designed to empower and enrich elites by fomenting hatred and conflict between working-class whites and oppressed racial minorities.

And though racial biases and denigrating stereotypes are widespread among all of us regardless of our racial or ethnic background, the fact remains that there is only one racist system in the United States, and that system is called white supremacy.

white supremacy is not just neo-Nazis and white nationalism. It’s also the way our society has come to be structured, such that political, economic, and other forms of capital are predominately maintained by elite whites.

dominant discourses of individualism, exceptionalism, and meritocracy work to sustain collective denial about racism and other forms of injustice.

Certainly the histories of slavery, patriarchy, and class oppression demonstrate that violence and dominance are human problems, not merely “white problems.” But in the same way that men invented patriarchy, critical race theorists argue that we must be clear that Europeans invented (and continue to benefit from) modern racism in order to combat misrecognition and misrepresentation.

It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission.”19

for institutional racism (and, therefore, white supremacy) to exist does not mean that every white citizen must hold racist beliefs or engage in individual acts of racism. Because institutional racism is a systemic power structure, it functions through collective action and systemic practices.