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

by Crystal Marie Fleming

The costs of taking a superficial approach to addressing racism are quite high—and fall squarely on the shoulders of people of color.

Defining my self-worth in relation to my intellectual accomplishments and external validation wasn’t healthy, not only because our worth is inherent but also, as I would later discover, because dominant definitions of “intellect” and “achievement” were intentionally crafted to exclude and oppress women, nonwhites, and economically disenfranchised people—that is to say, my people.

In this book, the term “racial stupidity” refers to nonsensical, illogical, ahistorical, or socially inaccurate claims about race and racism the denial of racial oppression racist beliefs such as the inherent and natural superiority of one race over others superficial descriptions of the racial order

Rather, racial stupidity has become routinized and is the result of intentional actions of European colonists and enslavers who sought to justify their capitalist exploitation of non-Europeans through the myth of white superiority.

Race is inherently ridiculous for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we now know there is no biological basis to dividing humans into “racial” categories.

It is debatable whether it is possible for someone socialized in a racist society to rid themselves of “racist” thinking—or even to divest themselves of systemic racial privileges—even if they wanted to.

White supremacy is the social, political, and economic dominance of people socially defined as “white.”

Instead, 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.

In his magisterial work Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois cogently demonstrates that poor and working-class whites were distracted from their own alienation and class exploitation by the psychological “wages” of whiteness.20 More recently, critical race philosopher Shannon Sullivan has argued that middle-class whites bolster their sense of moral goodness by defining themselves as “good white people”—in contrast to “racist” rednecks, whom they regard as “poor white trash.”

Just as patriarchy makes room for women—especially when they remain subordinate to men—white supremacy has historically made room for people of color who were willing to accommodate white dominance.

One hundred percent of the time, references to black supremacy are designed to deflect critiques of white supremacy.

Racial stupidity serves to justify and reinforce racism. And if we’re ever going to build a better world, we will need to fearlessly identify and dismantle the many forms of ignorance that keep so many of us in bondage.

First: white supremacy is, most fundamentally, a system of power designed to channel material resources to people socially defined as white. Second: 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.

Critical race theory is an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as legal theorists grappled with naming and challenging the persistence of racism after the fall of de jure segregation.

From this perspective, laws and legal institutions within this country have continually converted white identity into a valuable, exclusive mechanism for maintaining power.

The powerful always thrive on the miseducation of groups they seek to exploit and control.

As long as everyday citizens are fed a daily mental diet of white supremacist ideology, historical ignorance, and disinformation, the overall power structure remains difficult to detect—and oppose.

The mythology of white superiority and scientific racism developed over time in the aftermath of colonial conquest and slavery to justify socioeconomic exploitation and theft.

And, so, we come back to class relations—and why Bernie Bros get it wrong every time they insist that we should talk about class instead of race.

Because institutional racism is a systemic power structure, it functions through collective action and systemic practices. As such, it is “deliberately maintained . . . by the power structure and through [whites’] indifference, inertia and lack of courage.”

Once established as an ideological and political system, white supremacy reproduces itself through repertoires of silence, denial, misrepresentation, disinformation, deflection, willful ignorance, justification, and—when all else fails—brute violence and force.

Ordinary racists and their extremist counterparts employ liberal, inclusive, and even, at times, “antiracist” ideas in order to obscure the racist intentions and effects of their actions and institutional arrangements.

As Northern liberals frequently point to Southern (and/or conservative) racists in order to deny their own racism, so, too, do Europeans frequently point to the overt evidence of racism in the United States to portray their own societies as nonracist, racially benign, or “less racist.”

If we are ever to move beyond this racial order, then we will also have to dismantle the system of unearned privilege attached to being socially defined as “white.”

As a system, white supremacy needs people to believe that it (1) doesn’t exist, (2) has been overcome, or (3) only exists among extremists. White supremacy can’t tolerate millions of people finally realizing that it is pervasive and systemic. It needs us ignorant and hopeful. And it needs us to cling to a particular kind of hope—a hope that reinforces racial ignorance and denial of white supremacy. A hope that sells you neoliberal inclusion and “feel-good” tokenism—the kind of hope that cannot threaten the racial status quo.

In order to envision and build a more just society, we will have to collectively recognize the foundational immorality of the Founding Fathers and commit to creating a world better than the one they conceived.

But the opposite is true: the founders’ actual practice of oppression reveals that they used the language of freedom to justify domination.

There’s an energetic parasitism about all of this. Black women’s labor (emotional, intellectual, political, and otherwise) gets routinely shamed and silenced even as it is appropriated and exploited by those who feel threatened by our legitimate critiques—and, yes, by our reasonable anger.

Combining the word “misogyny” with the French word for black, “noir,” “misogynoir” highlights the intersections of gendered and racialized violence that shape the lives of black women and girls. Describing the origins of the term, Bailey wrote: “[It] is important to me . . . that the term is used to describe the unique ways in which Black women are pathologized in popular culture.

At no time in the history of this country have white women collectively stood up to condemn white supremacy or to actively oppose the racism from which they benefit on a daily basis. Not once.

One of the major insights of intersectionality is that understanding one axis of oppression does not necessarily mean you’ll have revolutionary insight into or sympathy for other struggles.

Black feminism teaches us that we all need to cultivate reflexivity to examine our own complicity with systems of oppression and compassion for forms of oppression we will never experience.

I was blinded by propaganda . . . and the human need to believe you have a homeland . . . and to love it, no matter how wretched it is.

It is now well known that Obama deported more undocumented people (most of whom are of Latino descent) than any other president in US history.13 Despite the sustained uprisings and political mobilizing of activists in Ferguson and throughout the country, Obama never acknowledged or condemned systematic racism and unchecked police violence. Instead, he protected the racial status quo (and the state’s monopoly on violence) by misrepresenting police killing and brutalization of vulnerable people as the result of a “few bad apples.” And though Obama made sure to tell freedom fighters that there is “no excuse” for damaging property, he never gave a speech proclaiming that there is no excuse for officers raping and sexually assaulting black women.

This is what is generally meant by neoliberalism: pushing free-market capitalism, deregulation, competition, and individualism for the purpose of enriching the 1 percent.

To put it simply: neoliberals elevate the economic interests of corporations and billionaires over marginalized people. The main difference between neoliberals in the Republican and Democratic Parties is that the former capitulate to private interests proudly, whereas the latter pretend to care about working-class families while supporting laws and macroeconomic policies that favor the super-rich.

Another difference is that Republicans typically mislead working-class whites into supporting a neoliberal agenda that undermines their economic security by using overt and covert racism to draw attention away from the enrichment of the capitalist class.

I suspect Obama chose the side of white supremacy and neoliberalism for the same reasons other minorities make this choice: internalized oppression and naked self-interest.

Those of us who care about improving this world can’t afford to treat our politicians like religious figures. Critical thinking—especially about our political candidates and elected officials—is vital to becoming less stupid about racial politics.

Being critical about our racial politics requires being painfully honest about how political parties and corporate interests prey on our own racialized emotions, wishes, hopes, and dreams to enrich the 1 percent. Whether those dreams seem hopeful or whether they’re grounded in fear, the reality is that both the Democrats and the Republicans regularly manipulate voters’ racial imaginations while perpetuating systematic racism.

And though Obama didn’t make it a daily habit to issue deranged public attacks against the press on Twitter, his administration “prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined.”

Trump is not some kind of alien creature that came here from outer space. His brand of crude white supremacy resonates with tens of millions of US citizens (as well as white nationalists and neo-Nazis across the globe) because his views align with many of the foundational principles upon which Western colonial expansion broadly, and the United States specifically, were established. And the issue here is not just that our nation’s founding principles were explicitly white supremacist, xenophobic, and imperialist. It’s that these principles have been actively maintained, institutionalized, and normalized for generations.29 The white supremacist in chief is a uniquely ugly and unseemly politician, but in many ways, we have always lived in Trump country.

One of the major consequences of the civil rights movement was the emergence of a new way of talking about race, an ostensibly kinder, gentler form of white supremacy that eschewed the biological essentialism of the past yet still denied white racism and blamed minorities for racial disparities.

And despite the valiant efforts of white observers to blame the election on the economic anxiety of white workers, study after study has confirmed what people of color already knew: Trump’s appeal to whites was primarily driven by race—and racism—not class.

“The wages of whiteness are available to all whites regardless of class position, even to those whites who are without power, money, or influence. . . . It is the relative political advantages extended to whites, rather than actual economic gains, that are crucial to white workers.”

Most of all, liberals’ intellectually dishonest conflation of white supremacy with Trumpism prevents us all from having a rigorous conversation about how deeply rooted white supremacist racism is throughout our major institutions and in both major parties.

To quote Eduardo Bonilla-Silva once more: “The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the tea party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.”

The thing about white supremacy is that it socializes all of us to minimize its terror, to systematically deny or underestimate the harm. “We’ve come so far,” “Things are getting better,” “It could be worse”—all of these tropes minimize racial terror.

But the main lesson most whites absorbed from the civil rights era wasn’t that they have a personal responsibility to fight systemic racism but, rather, that they have a responsibility to maintain a public appearance of being “nonracist” even as racism pervades their lives.

What Alterman and so many other clueless white media analysts still refuse to accept is that providing a platform for white nationalists and presenting white supremacy as “just another side” is really fucking racist. The existential question that white folks keep struggling with—“Should we listen to the white supremacist side now??”—only ever has one answer: NO.