White Supremacy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

White supremacy is actualized white racism. Its core tenets include a belief in inherent racial inequality, white superiority, antipathy toward people of color, and a willingness to maintain it through legal and, if necessary, extralegal means. It includes, but cannot be reduced to, prejudicial attitudes and ethnocentric preferences because it is deeply embedded in the social structures, economic institutions, public policies, and ideologies that perpetuate white authority in all spheres of social, economic, and political life. According to Joe Feagin and Hernán Vera, white supremacy in the United States can be defined as “the socially organized set of attitudes, ideas, and practices that deny African Americans and other people of color the dignity, opportunities, freedoms, and rewards that this nation offers white Americans” (1995, 7). While people of color may hold prejudicial or antipathetic attitudes toward white people or other people of color, this is distinct from white supremacy.

Historically, white supremacy has several sources. European exploration and colonialism reflected views that Native Americans were uncivilized heathens. Some Enlightenment philosophers posited that Europeans alone possessed the necessary capacity of reason in contrast to Africans, indigenous peoples of the New World, and Asians who were ruled by caprice or custom. Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Carolus Linneaus, explained human variation with typologies that invariably placed Europeans at the pinnacle of intelligence and beauty, with Africans, Asians, and Native Americans representing lines of “degradation” from this ideal. In the late 1800s, pseudo-scientific definitions of race and intelligence were offered by Samuel Morton and Paul Broca, who ranked races on the basis of brain size and facial features. And Christianity in the United States justified both the enslavement of Africans, based on the Curse of Ham and belief that slavery would Christianize Africans, and the expulsion of Native Americans from their land on the basis of “manifest destiny.”

White supremacy can take an overt, direct, and substantive form, such as slavery and Jim Crow–era de jure racial segregation in the United States, “White Australia” policies, apartheid in South Africa, and the ideology of Aryan supremacy that led to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. These policies were official doctrines of the state and were institutionalized through culture, policies, and laws, and rested on assumptions of the biological, genetic, or cultural inferiority of the various groups that were to be subjugated or eliminated. While such policies have been officially changed and these assumptions rejected, there remain avowed white supremacists who are proudly racist and willing to engage in violence (e.g., hate crimes, lynching) on the assumption that their government is sympathetic to and infiltrated by people of color and their allies.

White supremacy also can take a covert, indirect, and procedural form that may be harder to expose, such as de facto racial inequalities and institutionalized discrimination that persist in the United States even after landmark civil rights legislation ended legal segregation. Although overt racism has been repudiated by most, as is evident in the decline of overtly expressed prejudice measured in surveys, white supremacy persists in latent assumptions of the allegedly inherent character flaws (e.g., “laziness” and “criminal propensities”) that are used to explain and justify racial inequalities in an era of colorblind laws and equal opportunity. Further, some scholars suggest that equating white supremacy with violent racists such as skinheads ignores how it is covertly and deeply embedded in cultural, economic, and political practices to the point that it assigns “white privilege” to all white people, even those who do not consider themselves racist. Whiteness as a racial identity thus becomes racial privilege and allocates social and material resources such as the best education, access to housing, and employment to white people that when accumulated and transferred to future generations reinforces itself over time.

White supremacy can be found on multiple levels. On a personal level it includes racist acts by individuals ranging from discriminatory hiring to hate crimes perpetuated by members of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or neoNazis in the United States and Europe. On a sociocultural level it includes racist ideologies and beliefs that are expressed and perpetuated in religion, popular culture, and the news media. Lawrence Blum states that on an institutional level, white supremacy includes the “racial inferiorizing or antipathy perpetrated by specific social institutions such as schools, corporations, hospitals, or the criminal justice system as a totality” (9). Depending on the level, it can be counteracted through litigation, legislation, consciousness-raising, debunking pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies, moral arguments for the oneness and equality of humanity, and economic programs aimed at alleviating the systematic disadvantages and barriers against which people of color struggle in white dominated societies.

Bibliography:

Blum, Lawrence. “I’m Not a Racist But . . .”:The Moral Quandary of Race. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Eze, Emmanuel C., ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. New York: Blackwell, 1997.
Feagin, Joe R., and Hernán Vera. White Racism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Frederickson, George M. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Norton, 2005.

This example White Supremacy Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.