Understanding White Supremacy
It is important to understand that the concept of white supremacy extends beyond the recognized understandings of race, racialization, and racism. White supremacy certainly depends on the construction of the idea of race as a hierarchical relationship of power based on presumed biological and cultural difference, as well as related practices of racism, the valorization of whiteness and the denigration of non-whiteness. But we should also recognize that the workings of race depends on racialization processes where racial meanings are often in flux and can be malleable and shifting in various contexts – even as whiteness retains its power position. The articulations of white supremacy, therefore, may shift depending on cultural and political contexts. There remains, nevertheless, a set of specific power dynamics inherent in the construction of race: that is, the hierarchical categorization of ‘white’ as racially superior. The point is to be explicit in naming whiteness as the clear power position in any analysis of race, racialization, and racism. In naming whiteness and analyzing white supremacy, it is just as important to stress the dominant role of racialized-as-white people in creating the material realities of inequality, racial oppression, hierarchies, and ‘white-framed interpretations’, but also, the ‘white-imposed community norms; scientific and medical categorizations; residential, educational, or occupation segregation; and the racial images and ideologies of the media, popular culture, and science’ that assure white privilege and power. Race is always a description of a social, historical, cultural, and political position, and as James Baldwin reminds us, ‘whiteness is a metaphor for power’.
To examine white supremacy is thus to point to the presumed power and privilege of whiteness, and to analyze how whiteness is structured in and through our institutions, our disciplinary theories and methods, our everyday relations, as well as through global economic and political processes, processes that are always racial. It is to understand how, as Rev. Martin Luther King once reminded us, the doctrine of white supremacy is ‘embedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit … [it is] a structural part of the culture’. At the same time, and in keeping with sociologist, W.E.B. DuBois’s analysis of the ‘complete domination of the world by Europe’, ideologies and practices of white supremacy are transnational and global.
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