The expression “white supremacy” underwent a similarly paradoxical boom: The less it existed, the more it was invoked. By the turn of the century it was being used more frequently than it ever had been in American history. The epithet “white supremacist” was being used five times as often as it had been in its previous heyday—which was not, incidentally, during the Jim Crow era but at the end of the 1960s.
