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May 29 - June 4, 2020
How could the same country that twice voted for an Ivy League–educated black president end up electing an overt racist who can barely string together two coherent sentences?
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.
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.
conversations “about race” based entirely on racial ignorance are actually quite harmful.
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).
Whether you realize it or not, racism is systemic, pervasive, and embedded within the core of all of our major institutions.
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.”
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.
But the truth is that white supremacy is not something you can isolate among far-right radicals or overt racists. Instead, white supremacy—the dominance of people socially defined as white—is systematically maintained by hundreds of millions of ordinary people, as well as by everyday institutional practices that protect the racial order.
“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.
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.
the fact remains that there is only one racist system in the United States, and that system is called white supremacy.
There are a certain number of prerequisites for the course that you will find between these pages. These include critical thinking, reflexivity, compassion, and a willingness to experience and sit with discomfort.
I also think that compassion—for others and for ourselves—is key to doing this kind of critical work.
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.
Race scholars are aware that white women are the top recipients of affirmative action, but few have considered that white women’s primary access to affirmative action helps maintain the racial wealth gap.
I was predominately trained to examine racism as a “cultural” phenomenon happening “out there” in the social world, not a structural feature of oppression that shaped what we were taught—and by whom.
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.”
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.
It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.
By 1989, Trump was taking out full-page ads in four different New York newspapers publicly calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—four African Americans and one Latino falsely accused of raping a white woman. Though the men were later exonerated by DNA evidence and paid $41 million by New York City for wrongful imprisonment, Trump still insists—to this day—that they’re guilty.
I suspect that Trump could give a speech dressed in full KKK regalia and his supporters would still describe him as the next coming of Martin Luther King Jr.
Though white Republicans express racist views at a higher rate than white Democrats, nearly one in four white Democrats believe that African Americans are lazier than whites and about one-fifth of white Democrats view African Americans as less intelligent.
As a friendly reminder, there is nothing new about the normalization of white supremacy in the United States.
