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January 15 - April 30, 2021
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.
White supremacy is a racist ideology that is based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races.1 White supremacy is not just an attitude or a way of thinking. It also extends to how systems and institutions are structured to uphold this white dominance.
White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created. Many white people hear the words white supremacy and think That doesn’t apply to me, that they don’t hold that belief but rather that they believe that all of us are equal and that they don’t modify their treatment of people based on the color of their skin. What this book, which is a deep-diving self-reflection tool, will help you to realize, however, is that that isn’t true. White supremacy is an ideology, a
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White supremacy is an ideology, a paradigm, an institutional system, and a worldview that you have been born into by virtue of your white privilege. I am not talking about the physical color of your skin being inherently bad or something to feel shame about. I am talking about the historic and modern legislating, societal conditioning, and systemic institutionalizing of the construction of whiteness as inherently superior to people of other races. Yes, outwardly racist systems of oppression like chattel slavery, apartheid, and racial discrimination in employment have been made illegal. But the
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We must look directly at the ways in which this racist ideology of white supremacy, this idea that white equals better, superior, more worthy, more credible, more deserving, and more valuable actively harms anyone who does not own white privilege.
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. What you receive for your whiteness comes at a steep cost for those who are not white.
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. The process of examining it and dismantling it will necessarily be painful. It will feel like waking up to a virus that has been living inside you all these years that you never knew was there. And when you begin to interrogate it, it will fight back to protect itself and maintain its position.
When do I react this way? When do these thoughts or feelings come up for me? How does this specific aspect of white supremacy show up for me? How does thinking or feeling this way benefit me? Why do I feel this way? Why do I believe this? Why do I think this is true? Why do I hold on to these beliefs?
Important
You start to realize that you weren’t feeling these feelings before because you had shut down a part of your humanity in order to participate in white supremacy. White supremacy purposely numbs you to the pain that your racism causes.
Science has proven that the concept of race is not a biological fact but rather a social concept.
Race is a social concept, but that does not make it imaginary when it comes to the very real consequences it has for BIPOC in their daily lives in the presence of white supremacy.
It is important to understand that white privilege is separate from but can intersect with class privilege, gender privilege, sexuality privilege, age privilege, able-bodied privilege, or any other type of privilege.
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.
Think back over your childhood and young adulthood. Most likely, your racial conversations (if any) were not very nuanced or multilayered. 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 lack of exposure to conversations about race has left you ill-equipped to handle the discomfort of racial conversations as an adult, leading to an inevitable response of white fragility.
This desire to be seen as good, by yourself and by others, prevents you from looking at the ways you unknowingly participate in and are a part of white supremacy because of your white privilege. Your desire to be seen as good can actually prevent you from doing good, because if you do not see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.
It is often a big shock when BIPOC decide they will no longer tone police themselves and instead fully express their range of feelings about racism. People with white privilege wonder with confusion and frustration, Where is all this anger coming from?, not realizing it was always there and that the expression of it is the beginnings of self-reclamation as a BIPOC.
When you insist that you will not believe or give credibility or attention to BIPOC until they speak in a tone that suits you, then you uphold the idea that your standards as a white person are more superior. When you control the tone of how BIPOC are supposed to talk about their lived experiences with racism and existing in the world, you are reinforcing the white supremacist ideology that white knows best.
Staying silent by not sharing social media posts about race and racism in your spaces because of the way it might affect your personal or professional life, or simply reposting the posts of BIPOC but not adding your own voice or perspective.
Question
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. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism. You have been conditioned by media that continues to reinforce white superiority through an
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It is not the right-wing nationalists and overtly proud racists who carry a sense of white exceptionalism. They often wear their true beliefs for all to see. They are clear about who they are, what they stand for, and who they see as a threat. Rather, it is often the white liberals who believe that their progressive ideologies separate them from the racism of the extreme right. It is the people with white privilege who believe that they are not an impediment to antiracism who carry white exceptionalism like a badge of honor.
When it comes to racial color blindness, what begins as a seemingly noble purpose (eradicating racism by going beyond the idea of race) quickly reveals itself as a magic trick designed to absolve people with white privilege from having to own their complicity in upholding white supremacy.
Malcolm X famously called Black women the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected people in America.
Black women are either superhumanized and put on pedestals as queens or the strong Black woman, or they are dehumanized and seen as unworthy of the same care and attention as white women. Both superhumanizing and dehumanizing are harmful because, as Davis rightly points out in her speech, they fail to capture Black women in the mess, joy, beauty, and femininity of women of other races.
Assuming financially successful Black men are either athletes, entertainers, or drug dealers.
How have you wanted to “save” Black children?
All people, regardless of race, can hold some level of prejudice toward people who are not the same race as them. A person of any race can prejudge a person of any other race based on negative racial stereotypes and other factors. Prejudice is wrong, but it is not the same as racism. Racism is the coupling of prejudice with power, where the dominant racial group (which in a white supremacist society is people with white privilege) is able to dominate over all other racial groups and negatively affect those racial groups at all levels—personally, systemically, and institutionally.
By today, you have probably begun to realize that white supremacy is usually present in some form when you are interacting with someone who does not hold white privilege. There is always a hierarchical power and privilege dynamic at play.
The first thing to understand is that allyship is not an identity but a practice. A person with white privilege does not get to proclaim themselves an ally to BIPOC but rather seeks to practice allyship consistently. And a person with white privilege does not get to be the judge of whether what they are practicing actually is allyship, because what they might deem to be allyship could actually be white centering, tokenism, white saviorism, or optical allyship instead.
White fragility causes so much discomfort that it is easy to decide that it is not worth it and return to the comfort of white supremacy. White apathy is like a warm blanket that says, “This is too hard. Let’s go back to sleep.”
Using perfectionism to avoid doing the work and fearing using your voice or showing up for antiracism work until you know everything perfectly and can avoid being called out for making mistakes.
I definitely do this
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.
Do you give more credence, respect, worth, and energy to people with white privilege and white-centered narratives over BIPOC and BIPOC-centered narratives? Do you question, dismiss, or feel ambivalence toward BIPOC when they interrupt your white-centered world view? Do you make an intentional effort to interrupt white centering when you see it, such as by demanding more representation of BIPOC? During your antiracism work, do you focus more on how you feel over what racism feels like for BIPOC?
White supremacy makes people with white privilege fear their whiteness being decentered because they have been taught to believe that if they are not centered, then they are being marginalized and oppressed. But decentering whiteness does not mean becoming inferior to BIPOC. This idea simply feeds into the hierarchical paradigm that drives white supremacy—that one race must be above the others. Decentering whiteness means learning to stop upholding whiteness as the norm and instead learning to live and operate in a more inclusive way.
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. Being in a relationship with a BIPOC or having a biracial or multiracial child does not absolve a person with white privilege from the practice of antiracism.
In more subtle ways, white saviorism is the person with white privilege speaking over or for BIPOC in the belief that they know better how to say what needs to be said.
White saviorism is condescending and an attempt to assuage one’s own white guilt. It may look like an attempt to make things right, but it only serves to empower people with white privilege by making them feel better about themselves. It is actively disempowering to BIPOC and continues to reinforce the white supremacist ideas that BIPOC are only useful to the extent that they can be used for white interest (tokenism) and that white people are more capable of knowing what is best for BIPOC than they know for themselves (white superiority).
The act of allyship involves no real risk. It is one that is performed from the safety of one’s comfort zone of privilege.
I do this.
The person engages in white fragility when challenged by BIPOC to not perform optical allyship rather than listening and taking guidance.
Somewhat guilty.
Reposting antiracism posts and virtue signaling so that everyone knows you’re an ally but not doing much more work beyond that.
I have done this recently, but I am getting better.
Distancing yourself from your own white supremacy by continuously complaining about how awful other white people are.
So when we talk about being called out or called in, a common reaction by people with white privilege is to focus on their intention rather than their impact on BIPOC. This is a form of white centering, which prioritizes how a person of privilege feels about being called out/in versus the actual pain that BIPOC experience as a result of that person’s actions, whether intentional or unintentional.
If you do not examine your own reactions to being called out/in, then you will stay in a state of fragility, and you will continue to weaponize this fragility against BIPOC by centering yourself as the victim and refusing to apologize or change your behavior. This keeps white supremacy firmly in place.
The questions today are these: When (not if) you are called out/in, are you well-equipped enough to respond to it in a way that will help you learn and do better, or will you simply give in to white fragility and fall apart? Are you willing to do the work to set aside your unconscious beliefs around your racial superiority and exceptionalism and really listen to BIPOC with empathy and a desire to do better? Will you put in the work to educate yourself so that as you continue to grow and learn, you will do more good than harm?
White feminism focuses on the struggles of white women (usually cisgendered) over BIPOC. It is a feminism that is only concerned with disparities and oppression of gender, and it does not take into account disparities and oppression of other intersections that are just as important, including race, class, age, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so on. White feminists will often ask BIPOC to set aside their race and issues with racism and instead band together in sisterhood under the issue of gender and sexism first.
To ask BIPOC to set aside their race is to ask BIPOC to act as if they are white.
The privilege of whiteness means only seeing yourself as a woman (if that is your gender identity), because due to white centering, you are seen as “raceless.”
What are the ways I have benefited from being white? In what ways do I support and uphold a system that is structurally racist? How do my race, class, and gender affect my perspective?
Under white feminism and white supremacy, the only way for BIWOC to gain parity with white women would be to perform an impossibility—to make ourselves raceless in the white imagination.
The more you do your own antiracism work, the more you can influence white leaders to do their own work too. And the more that they do their antiracism work, the more they will influence other people with white privilege to do their work too.
When you are so focused on making sure that other people know that you are not racist, you simply continue to practice racism through behaviors like white exceptionalism, tokenism, optical allyship, and white saviorism.
