Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

by Layla F. Saad

In fact, racial discomfort is inherent to an authentic examination of white supremacy. By avoiding this discomfort, the racist status quo is protected.

As BIPOC have experienced again and again, when we don’t agree with the answers we have demanded, we all too often feel qualified to dismiss them.

The system of white supremacy was not created by anyone who is alive today. But it is maintained and upheld by everyone who holds white privilege—whether or not you want it or agree with it.

People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis.

White supremacy is a system you have been born into. Whether or not you have known it, it is a system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power. It is also a system that has been designed to keep you asleep and unaware of what having that privilege, protection, and power has meant for people who do not look like you.

White supremacy is an evil. It is a system of oppression that has been designed to give you benefits at the expense of the lives of BIPOC, and it is living inside you as unconscious thoughts and beliefs.

In the absence of white supremacy, white privilege is meaningless.

People with white privilege often do not want to look directly at their privilege because of what it brings up for them—discomfort, shame, and frustration.

So powerful!!!

As a person with white privilege, were you ever told as a child that your whiteness would work against you? That you would have to work harder to compensate for your racial difference? Or was the color of your skin something that was not even discussed because it had nothing to do with what you would be able to accomplish or how you would be treated by the world? That is the essence of white privilege.

DiAngelo defines white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”

White privilege protects people who are white and white-passing from having to discuss the causes and implications of racism.

Racism was probably talked about as being something that was binary (e.g., the idea that racists are just mean and bad people) versus an understanding of white privilege and what implications it had for you and BIPOC.

This was huge for me. I think it was honestly only in the past year or so that I learned/realized that racism was learned behavior and not just something attributed to "mean and bad people."

Tone policing is a tactic used by those who have privilege to silence those who do not by focusing on the tone of what is being said rather than the actual content.

A white person’s expression of anger is often seen as righteous, whereas a Black person’s anger is often seen as aggressive and dangerous.

I had a lot of thoughts about this chapter regarding gender.

White silence is exactly what it sounds like. It is when people with white privilege stay complicitly silent when it comes to issues of race and white supremacy.

But white silence is anything but neutral. Rather, it is a method of self-protection and therefore also the protection of the dynamics of white supremacy.

White superiority stems directly from white supremacy’s belief that people with white or white-passing skin are better than and therefore deserve to dominate over people with brown or black skin.

The idea of whiteness being “of higher rank, quality, or importance” begins before you are even consciously aware of it.

The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you.

This is why the word racist offends ‘nice white people’ so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people.

White exceptionalism is the belief that you, as a person holding white privilege, are exempt from the effects, benefits, and conditioning of white supremacy and therefore that the work of antiracism does not really apply to you.

Rather, it is often the white liberals who believe that their progressive ideologies separate them from the racism of the extreme right.

You have been conditioned into a white supremacist ideology, whether you have realized it or not.

You are not an exceptional white person, meaning you are not exempt from the conditioning of white supremacy, from the benefits of white privilege, and from the responsibility to keep doing this work for the rest of your life.

It is not just the binary black or white of you either are a racist or you aren’t. Rather, it is multilayered behaviors and beliefs that make up a white supremacist worldview.

Your internalized beliefs about racism are part and parcel with your view of both the world and yourself.

Race-based color blindness is the idea that you do not “see” color. That you do not notice differences in race. Or if you do, that you do not treat people differently or oppress people based on those differences.

Racist stereotypes within white supremacy emphasize again and again that those who are not “like us” are different and therefore a threat.

Racist stereotypes continue to reinforce the idea that those who do not hold white privilege should not be given that privilege because they are other, inferior, and a threat to white civilization.

If subconsciously, you believe that Indigenous people are primitive, or Arabs are terrorists, or Latinx people are drug dealers, then at some level, it makes sense to you when you see it reflected back to you through media messages.

And therefore, at some level, it makes sense to you that they face the kind of treatment they face by the educational system, the justice system, the health-care system, the immigration system, the employment sector, and so on.

Cultural appropriation upholds the white supremacist ideology that white people can take what they pick and choose from Black and Brown people without consequence and that when a person with white privilege adopts something from a Black or Brown culture, they are somehow enhanced because they have adopted something “exotic.”

Lastly, cultural appropriation rewrites history with whiteness at the center. So for example, though yoga has its roots in India as a spiritual practice, it is now seen as a predominantly white-centered practice that is focused largely on physical health. When we think of a yoga teacher, we think of a white person. While Native Americans were historically prohibited from practicing their religious practices by laws and government policies, now white New Age spirituality co-opts and financially profits off these practices, sacred tools, ritual plants, and ceremonial items. Black styles of hair have been vilified as being less beautiful (when worn by Black people), but now the predominantly white fashion world, which has historically neglected the care of Black hair, co-opts Black hair styles like braids, cornrows, and Bantu knots, calling them “edgy” and “urban.”

White supremacy, therefore, is not a simple litmus test of whom you vote for or what relationships you have with BIPOC, but rather, it is a set of subtle behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs, often unconscious, that when put together make up a really scary jigsaw puzzle.

The privilege of whiteness means not having to deal with white supremacy if one chooses not to.

This is an example of white centering—the idea that when a creation features mainly white people, it is for everyone, but if it features mainly BIPOC, it is only relevant to BIPOC.

White centering is the centering of white people, white values, white norms, and white feelings over everything and everyone else.

White centering is a natural consequence of white supremacy. If you unconsciously believe you are superior, then you will unconsciously believe that your worldview is the one that is superior, normal, right, and that it deserves to be at the center.

white centering is like an invisible net holding up white supremacy.

While it is easy to see and point out the active racist who uses racial slurs, it is almost impossible to see the everyday racism that marginalizes and erases BIPOC through white centering.

White supremacy does not want equality; it wants dominance. And that is why it is so hard and so important to decenter whiteness. Because in the decentering, BIPOC are given space to be treated as equals. When whiteness is decentered, white supremacy loses its power.

Tokenism is defined as “the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.”

In the case of white supremacy, tokenism essentially uses BIPOC as props or meaningless symbols to make it look like antiracism is being practiced while continuing to maintain the status quo of white as the dominant norm.

People may use their BIPOC family member, friend, teacher, person they voted for, or even antiracist author or educator they follow to prove they are not racist.

But proximity to and even intimacy with BIPOC does not erase white privilege, unconscious bias, or complicity in the system of white supremacy.

In all cases of tokenism, BIPOC are used as token props to prove one’s nonracism. It goes without saying that this is dehumanizing because it strips away BIPOC’s humanity and treats them as “get out of racism free cards” that can be whipped out at any time.

White saviorism puts BIPOC in the patronizing position of helpless children who need people with white privilege to save them. It implies that without white intervention, instruction, and guidance, BIPOC will be left helpless.

But because there is such a focus on being perfect and doing antiracism perfectly and on being seen as good person, people with white privilege often cause more harm when being called out/in because their white fragility causes them not to receive the feedback necessary to listen, apologize, and do better going forward.

By continuing to focus on your intent and your feelings, you practice the belief that you matter more than BIPOC. That your feelings of discomfort about being called out/in matter more than the pain that BIPOC experience at the hands of racism.

White feminism is an extension of white supremacy. It is only concerned with white women gaining parity with white men,