Why White People Must Fight White Supremacy
I am a middle aged white-skinned male(he/him/his) with a lifelong interest in history and love for the better aspects of the American Dream. These interests have led me to read deeply about the best and worst of US history. Winding through that history...
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I am a middle aged white-skinned male(he/him/his) with a lifelong interest in history and love for the better aspects of the American Dream. These interests have led me to read deeply about the best and worst of US history. Winding through that history there has always been a current of White Supremacy poisoning the American psyche. It is time, long past time, for white people of good conscience to actively fight White Supremacy in the United States.
History always has complexities that fade in the general public consciousness over time. Only by going back to primary sources, reading what people said and did at the time events occurred, or reviewing the art and fiction they created, does the courage or banality of actions appear. People of any time will tell you who they are in their description of events and the stories they create around them. And when people tell you who they are,believe them. When we look at what proponents of White Supremacy have said throughout the history of the country there are several narratives that jump out as especially problematic.
Far too often the focus of US domestic history has largely been on the economics of slavery, understating social effects. Slavery in the Americas, going back to Columbus, has been a rope woven from three cords, economic, racial, and one I’ll discuss more further on. Prior to the US Civil War slavery had a largely economic justification, masking the White Supremacy inherent in the choice of the people used to meet the perceived economic needs. The Civil War became a crucible that burned away the economic justification, leaving behind a toxic residue of concentrated White Supremacy. Racism based slavery before the war became toxic racism once the pretense of economic necessity was removed. Though the principle of White Supremacy was proven unequivocally false by the Civil War, it became the core of post-war Lost Cause lies. Southern White Supremacists quickly converted their grief at the loss of the war into new racist narratives blaming people of color for the loss.Pollard’s The Lost Cause gave the new narrative a name and ideology, which was expanded by others over the years. Key publications based on the Lost Cause narrative are The Clansman and Gone With the Wind, which tell very similar, and entirely fictional, stories.
Following the Civil War, White Supremacists tell us, in their own words, that they believe people of color are inferior. There are many variants on exactly why they claim this, none of which have any basis in science. Evolutionary biology and genetics shown that all humans fall within a narrow range of very similar characteristics, and that superficial differences such as skin color have nothing to do with important aspects such as intelligence or creativity. Rather than acknowledge the fundamental truths that science reveals, White Supremacists deliberately choose to ignore the science, or attempt to distort it to fit their own ideas. While there is a place for reasonable discussion and debate,outright denial of science is dangerous not just to the deniers but to society at large. Science provides a common understanding of the world around us, one that cannot be selectively accepted. Evolutionary biology rests on the same basic science as cell phones,the same principles of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, so to deny evolution while using cell phones is absurd, as absurd as White Supremacy itself. When White Supremacists deny the truth of evolution, that all humans are fundamentally similar regardless of skin color, they also reject basic principles that tie society together.
Aside from an unjustified belief in their own superiority, White Supremacists have believed in a social order that includes violent suppression of people of color. During the first Ku Klux Klan from 1865 to 1871 they would shoot black people openly and leave their bodies in the street. It was this extreme violence that swayed public opinion against the Klan, until authorities disrupted their activities and the organization collapsed in disgrace. We have have seen reemergence of this violent behavior repeatedly since then, in Wilmington, Atlanta, Tulsa, and many other places over the past century and a half, and on January 6 of this year. When outright violence has not been used other methods of suppression have been employed. Over time, as laws have been passed to prevent tactics such as poll taxes and unfair literacy tests, the White Supremacist narrative has avoid directly stating their objectives but has instead used vague terms around security. These superficial disguises do not change their fundamental belief in asocial order ruled by whites, they only mask their toxic racism behind a veneer of public good.
Within the White Supremacist’s social order there is also the mistaken belief that people of color were happier under conditions of slavery. This idea has been spread through fictional depictions of conditions of slavery, the most vile of which was the extremely racist Gone With the Wind. There is considerable documentation that enslaved people despised their conditions, as evidenced among many other things the large number of freed slaves that joined the Union army to help free others. Yet Gone With the Wind includes a scene where Big Sam fondly recalls Tara before the war. Overwhelmingly the post war freed people were quick to build a better future for themselves as best they could under horrific conditions, including the first Klan and later Jim Crow laws designed to keep them from participating in democracy. Showing free people longing for the conditions of slavery when the great majority wanted to build new lives of freedom and prosperity is an idea that only exists in the minds of White Supremacists. Whites of good conscience must understand this lie, and counter it when we come across it.
White women, in the typical view of White Supremacists, are delicate and vulnerable and must be protected. In particular White Supremacists believe women must be protected from Black men. Reality has no place in this view, and many Black men have been brutally attacked and often murdered for the most trivial surmised slights against white women. This view of women is prevalent in the Lost Cause, simultaneously a racist and sexist view of the world.
These four examples, a belief in racial superiority, justification of violence, a skewed version of conditions under slavery, and an unrealistic portrayal of women, area high level look at White Supremacy in the United States. At this point we should look at the high level consequences of this strain of hatred. Consequences for people of color are known, as victims of mass and individual murder, theft of property, destruction of homes,job discrimination, redlining, and other aggressions. Consequences for white people also exist, though. To be clear the consequences for whites have never been as severe as for people of color. For a century and a half some whites have supported White Supremacy to their own detriment, and this is what needs to change. There is no changing hard core White Supremacists for the most part, but there are many moderate whites who follow along, who tacitly support the discriminatory policies out of fear and training. Through education and experience enough white people can be reached to turn the tide of today’s White Supremacist violence.
First off consider those of us called white allies. These are people such as myself who were born into white privilege and through some combination of education on social justice and experience with people of color have recognized the depths of injustice that have existed in the US, and do something about it. We have a responsibility to discuss issues with other white people, raise awareness of the ways that White Supremacy has harmed all of the United States, and taken actions to change our communities. Our privilege has come at a cost to people of color,something we must acknowledge and correct, even if that privilege in our individual case is indirect and not deliberate suppression. We must be supporting justice at city council meetings and school boards, or in hiring and promotion decisions at work, or in our daily interactions.
About 1,300 words ago I mentioned a third cord in the rope of slavery. We in the US have never recognized this third aspect of pre-war slavery and modern racism, allowing it to support the radical extremism that threatens to destroy our democracy. We still live under a post Civil War ideal of maintaining a Union that White Supremacists do not believe in. White Supremacists have never believed in the sanctity of the Union.
From The Lost Cause: “There could be no congeniality between the Puritan exiles who established themselves upon the cold and rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the South, and drank in their baronial halls in Virginia confusion to roundheads and regicides.”
From the movie opening to Gone With the Wind: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the OLD SOUTH…”
Some seventy-five years separates those two quotes sharing the same idea. Pollard refers back to the initial English colonies in New England and Virginia, identifying Southern ideals as descending from the Cavaliers. The selected quote contains the core idea, but a good portion of the second chapter of The Lost Cause elaborates on the principles if you want to read more.
Roundheads and Puritans, explicitly disdained by Pollard, were the supporters of the Parliament of England during the English Civil War. Cavaliers were supporters of not just King Charles, but also the principle of the divine right of kings. More than two hundred years after the English Civil War Pollard ties the US Civil War back to the political ideologies of those earlier times. By using the term “regicides” he clearly establishes his view about parliamentary government. That idea is still strong in Gone With the Wind.
That royalist part of White Supremacy is the point that has faded in our current view of history, at great danger to all of us. Over one hundred years after the English Civil War, the American Revolution fought for freedoms based on individual liberties. The Enlightenment refined ideas of liberty during that time after the English monarchy was restored, and ideologically the basis of the United States is that people are able to rule themselves – We The People. For all the flaws and failures since, our founding principles are explicitly humanist, and we do not believe in monarchical rule at all, going so far as to prohibit the President from using “king” or other monarchical titles right in the Constitution. Cavaliers, supporting the idea of absolute monarchy, are enemies of the ideals of the United States. Pollard and all those who follow the Lost Cause narrative today are not merely un-American,they are anti-American, by their own words.
Why has White Supremacy persisted so long in the United States, when it should have died an overdue and natural death in 1865? Not just because of racism, though that is part of the story. Modern White Supremacists come from a tradition that does not even believe in democracy. In this light, the events of January 6, and all the violence that has come before is unsurprising. Current efforts to destroy US democracy and install autocratic governance are another attempt in a long series of attempts to end democratic governance. All the racist redistricting and voter suppression measures we see today descend from the Lost Cause.
There are certainly many people living in the modern South who do believe in democracy and the promises of liberty inherent in the United States. Our concern must be those who do not, and all of us must understand that when we face off against the more determined White Supremacists we are not facing people who believe in the rule of law, but rather in autocratic tyranny. If we are to preserve democracy we have no choice but to face the lies of the Lost Cause, including both the racist lies and the royalist lies,because each set of lies reinforces the whole. History has proven that inclusive democracy, even a young and flawed democracy, is the only political system that allows a modern society to flourish. We cannot drag White Supremacists into the future, but we must not allow them to hold us in the past.
White people, wherever we live, whatever our family history, whatever our current privilege, must fight White Supremacy. Fighting White Supremacy because of the terrors wreaked upon people of color is sufficient reason by itself, but if that is not enough for you individually understand the threats to your own freedom as well. It is time to end White Supremacy for once and for all.
This diary is a high level overview, please let me know in the comments anything you would like to know more about. Reading sources such as Pollard and the journals of the Southern Historical Society is not pleasant, but it is necessary to uproot the evil of White Supremacy.
