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

by Crystal Marie Fleming

As I’ll argue throughout this book, conversations “about race” based entirely on racial ignorance are actually quite harmful.

I was placed in the “talented and gifted” track. Minorities like me who “make it” in predominately white settings are viewed and treated like unicorns—aberrations from the white (male) supremacist rule.

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.

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 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 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 simple-minded view of racism holds that white supremacy only exists if and when all resources and all power are held by “whites only.” If any person of color holds a position of authority or experiences any degree of success, their mere existence is taken to be evidence that systemic racism and white privilege do not exist. This is what I call the Whites-Only White-Supremacy Fallacy, the foolish idea that proof of white supremacy requires every single person of color to be deprived of all rights and resources.

Anyone who has ever studied racism knows that though people of color tend to be more knowledgeable about racism (due to direct experience) and more opposed to racial oppression than whites, they can also actively participate in maintaining white supremacy—and be rewarded for doing so through their individual advancement (while members of their racial group remain collectively oppressed). Prominent examples include Booker T. Washington, Clarence Thomas, Dinesh D’Souza, and Barack Obama.

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.

In case there was any ambiguity, let the record reflect that I have no fucks to give about respectability politics. I am tired of pretending that we should be polite about calling out a violent, oppressive system that is responsible for the mass killing, enslavement, exploitation, and methodical disadvantaging of millions of people.

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.

From a critical race perspective, the United States is not (and never was) a benevolent “nation of immigrants.” Rather, it is a nation of settler-colonialism, genocide, white nationalism, racial slavery, legal torture, and institutionalized rape. Since the inception of this country, laws and legal practices systematically favored whites economically, politically, and socially.

Consider the fact that Charles William Eliot, university president from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century, played a major role in legitimating eugenics, an ideology first developed by white male scientists for the purpose of promoting the genetic erasure of groups deemed to be inferior. Harvard has, in fact, been described as the “brain trust” of the eugenics movement.

white supremacy, as an ideology, would have you believe that white people have been timelessly dominant. This simply isn’t true. Remember how long our species (Homo sapiens) has been on the earth: about two hundred thousand years. White supremacy and European global domination have existed for about four hundred years.

An intersectional approach to understanding racism specifically, and oppressions more broadly, makes it clear that racial oppression is one of multiple, interlocking systems of domination. And—crucially—it’s not the oldest form of oppression.

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.

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.” If being racist is about supporting a system of racist domination, then becoming antiracist is about recognizing and opposing this system.

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.

The only way a nation founded on white supremacy, colonial violence, and hypercapitalism can be framed as a moral entity is to continually devalue the lives of those it has repeatedly diminished, in our case women, indigenous populations, and black, brown, working-class, and poor people.

People of conscience must eventually admit that we do not need to keep making excuses for white supremacists and enslavers—even those who putatively embraced ideas of “freedom”—because the freedom they had in mind was not honorable.

For white male supremacists, “liberty” was conceived as consistent with oppressing marginalized others: women, indigenous people, Africans, the poor. This should go without saying, but people who base their concept and practice of freedom on genocide, slavery, and rape aren’t moral models. A true moral revolution requires letting go of the need to elevate those who justified exploitation, murder, and oppression.

But the fact that a black woman created Me Too specifically to support girls of color in healing from sexual trauma and violence would have gone unnoticed if black women hadn’t organized online to prevent her erasure.

Analysts often point out that black women “entered the labor market” earlier than white women, but what this means concretely is that, for generations, black women and girls were forced into slavery and worked to death performing unpaid labor in concentration camps, more commonly referred to as “plantations.” Even today, black women still work outside the home at a higher rate than their white counterparts, but “have the lowest pay and occupational status jobs of any race/gender groups.”

After being “liberated” from centuries of sexualized slavery, black women were then almost immediately targeted by eugenicist campaigns designed to keep us from having any children at all.

Intersectional theory asserts that our social identities can overlap in ways that make us vulnerable to more than one type of discrimination, rather than imagining (as many people do) that sexism, class exploitation, and other axes of inequality are divorced from each other.

if you’re not thinking about race intersectionally, then you’re not thinking about race intelligently.

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.

Being less stupid about racial politics means understanding that politicians—yes, even people of color—combine racist and antiracist ideas, mainly for the purpose of appealing to racists and their victims.

And under Trump’s presidency, the United States became one of only 3 countries in the world to vote against a UN resolution signed by 131 nations denouncing Nazism.

Operation Paperclip stretched from 1945 until at least 1990, meaning that no less than nine presidential administrations were involved in the government’s secret partnership with Nazi researchers, engineers, and scientists. Let me say this again: nine different US presidents quite literally facilitated the normalization of Nazis.

Just three years after rejecting Holocaust refugees, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, thereby initiating the racist policy euphemistically known as the “internment” of Japanese Americans.20 As a result of white supremacist hysteria, more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans, children included, were rounded up without legal hearings or trials, forcibly removed from their homes, and relocated to ten different concentration camps scattered throughout California, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas.21 More than 60 percent of those incarcerated were born in the United States. Historian Roger Daniels has described the racially motivated incarceration as an “attempt at ethnic cleansing.”22 Officially, Roosevelt and military officials rationalized their racist policy with the now familiar excuse of national security.23 Japanese Americans were described as an enemy race and an existential threat to the nation’s wartime effort—despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever of disloyalty or espionage among Japanese Americans. Of course, German Americans and Italian Americans were not treated similarly or sequestered in concentration camps. Gee, I wonder why.

President Andrew Jackson was a slave trader, enthusiast of settler-colonialism, an advocate of ethnic cleansing, and a proud murderer of indigenous people. His white supremacist policy positions included the indian Removal Act of 1830, which systematically cheated and forced indigenous people out of their own land and included the “outright endorsement of killing Natives.”

Thomas Jefferson, a white supremacist, enslaver, and rapist who believed that black people should be enslaved because he viewed them as “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” and, accordingly, asserted that blacks should only be incorporated in the United States as slaves, never as free persons.

Dwight Eisenhower, who proclaimed that Southern racists were “not bad people,” to Lyndon Johnson, who referred to civil rights legislation as “nigger bills.”

Clinton, our so-called “first black president,” who managed to play the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show while simultaneously facilitating the racist mass incarceration of African Americans and other people of color.

Patty’s white tears for Donald Trump made me realize that there are generations of white people who have been socialized to believe that what we now call “racism” is just “the way it is”—the way it should be. Of course law enforcement should be supported, even as officers murder unarmed black people for simply existing. Of course brown immigrants should be kept out—they don’t belong here. “This land is my land,” the white fable goes, and it was never meant to apply to people from Mexico and Central America, even though they, and those indigenous to what we now call the United States, are quite literally the original Americans.