Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Many of the most celebrated intellectual icons of the last few centuries, from Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson to Lincoln, Kant, Hume, Churchill, Hugo, Hegel and many more otherwise intelligent and in some cases very brilliant people, openly espoused their belief in innate white supremacy, so it is rather odd that we are so squeamish about the phrase now. Even stranger that we are trained to think of white supremacy as the invention of some supposedly obscure hooded lunatics in the American South. This belies reality, first in that the KKK at their height had many millions of members, and second because, as shown above, white supremacy was a mainstream and openly espoused legal, political and moral imperative until the latter half of the twentieth century, so hardly ancient or remote history.