They have also through the auspices of missionary work sustained white supremacy by directing the energies of well-meaning white people into efforts to “save” darker-skinned peoples, whether by evangelism or by charity, without recognizing their own role in creating global inequities and conditions of deprivation. And in its construction of “morality” as a matter of being “good,” white American Protestantism has played a role in the maintenance of white supremacy and structural racism by appealing to what Barbara Applebaum identifies as “white desires for moral goodness and innocence.”
