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

by Crystal Marie Fleming

Why are so many people so incredibly confused and misinformed about race? It’s the white supremacy, stupid! As I’ll demonstrate throughout this book, one of the main consequences of centuries of racism is that we are all systematically exposed to racial stupidity and racist beliefs that warp our understandings of society, history, and ourselves. In other words, living in a racist society socializes us to be stupid about race.

The key idea that I’ll come back to again and again is that living in a racist society exposes us all to absurd and harmful ideas that, in turn, help maintain the racial status quo.

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.

When members of a so-called “racial” group are able to impose their prejudices in ways that reliably benefit them and disadvantage others, they have managed to successfully institutionalize their racist beliefs and protect their racial privileges. “Institutional racism” consists of racist ideas and practices embedded within social organizations and institutions (e.g., policies, laws, families, education).

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

White supremacy is the social, political, and economic dominance of people socially defined as “white.”12 Although white supremacy might seem ancient or timeless, it’s important to understand that white identity and white supremacist racism are relatively new phenomena.

The stupidity that undergirds white supremacy is now perpetuated from one generation to the next through “socialization,” the process through which our families, peer groups, and social environments shape our behavior, beliefs, and identities. As a result, racism is not “in your heart” but rather is “in your head”—and racism is in your head because we live in a racist society.

White supremacy is about power. It’s about the intersections of racial domination, class domination, gender domination, and other forms of oppression. It’s about capitalism. It’s about colonialism. The bottom line is that white supremacy is about resources: who gets (and retains) access to them, who gets excluded, whose lives are made to matter, and whose lives are rendered disposable.

The KKK Fallacy is the idea that white supremacy is a cancerous tumor you can remove, when the truth is that white dominance is pervasive. The sad reality is that the social cancer of white supremacy began to metastasize and infiltrate our institutions, laws, and cultural representations centuries ago.

Have you ever heard racial idiots say that racism doesn’t exist simply because they haven’t experienced it—or because they don’t want to believe those who have been targeted by racial exploitation and terror? This is an example of racial gaslighting: denying the existence of racial oppression. “Gaslighting” is a term for psychological manipulation in which an abuser denies that any harm is taking place, prompting the target of abuse to question reality.

The Class Fallacy is the wrong-headed notion that wealthy and “educated” whites are somehow immune to racism and absolved from complicity with racial domination.

A 2017 study by psychologists at Yale University shows that both whites and blacks tend to severely underestimate the extent of the racial wealth gap by about 25 percent, expressing what the authors call “unfounded optimism” about the extent of progress made in addressing racial economic inequality.

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.

Nationwide, white families hold thirteen times the wealth of black families.

“Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community.

Hamilton and Carmichael are careful to point out that 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. As such, it is “deliberately maintained . . . by the power structure and through [whites’] indifference, inertia and lack of courage.”

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.

White supremacy continues to persist, in part, due to the widespread temptation to only see and condemn other people’s racism—racism is always someone else’s crime.

Well, I hate to break it to ya, but even the complete erasure of racial prejudice in the contemporary era would not be enough to undo the harm of racial injustice or disassociate resources from skin tone. As sociologists Dalton Conley, Devah Pager, and Hana Shepherd have already pointed out, the ongoing effects of past discrimination (such as racist policies, redlining, and restrictive housing covenants) would continue to reproduce the racial wealth gap (and related disparities) even in the absence of present-day discriminatory behavior.