White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
As a political ideology, it imposes and maintains cultural, social, political, historical or institutional domination by white people and non-white supporters. In the past, this ideology had been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, European colonial labor and social practices, the Scramble for Africa, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the activities of the Native Land Court in New Zealand, the White Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa. This ideology is also today present among neo-Confederates.
White supremacy underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including white nationalism, white separatism, neo-Nazism, and the Christian Identity movement. In the United States, white supremacy is primarily associated with Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Proud Boys are considered an implicitly white supremacist organization, despite denying their association with white supremacy. In recent years, websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and Stormfront, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.
Not all white-supremacist organizations have the same objectives, and while some may uphold a Nordicist ideal of whiteness, others are more broadly white supremacist, including members of Southern European and Eastern European descent. Different groups of white supremacists identify various racial, ethnic, religious, and other enemies, most commonly those of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous peoples, people of Asian descent, multiracial people, MENA people, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
In academic usage, particularly in critical race theory or intersectionality, "white supremacy" also refers to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.
History
White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 18th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that shaped international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century.United States
Early history
White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, and it persisted for decades after the Reconstruction era. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons, making them disparate groups and hindering their ability to unite. Unity of the commoners was a perceived fear of the Virginia aristocracy, who wished to prevent repeated events such as Bacon's Rebellion, occurring 29 years prior. Prior to the Civil War, many wealthy white Americans owned slaves; they tried to justify their economic exploitation of black people by creating a "scientific" theory of white superiority and black inferiority. One such slave owner, future president Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1785 that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind." In the antebellum South, four million slaves were denied freedom. The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for state secession and the formation of the Confederate States of America. In an 1890 editorial about Native Americans and the American Indian Wars, author L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."
19th century
Benjamin Tillman was a white supremacist former U.S governor and senator who participated and boasted about the lynchings of Black Americans, and defended on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white supremacist and the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, gave a speech calling for the lynching of Black men.
20th century
A series of U.S politicians continued to advocate and agitate towards White supremacy. An example being an Elected Governor of Mississippi, James K. Vardaman, who used the term White Supremacy verbatim when he said "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."Eugene Talmadge was a white supremacist who was elected four times as the governor of Georgia. His opponent, Ellis Gibbs Arnall, once noted that nobody could beat Talmadge in what he cynically called the "nigger-hating contest". Both were white supremacists and anti-black, but Arnall was less crude about it.
The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement. The movement was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy. David Jackson writes it was the image of the "murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."
Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly "declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race". The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U.S. to non-Germanic groups, and significantly altered the demographic mix in the U.S. as a result. With 38 U.S. states having banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws, the last 16 states had such laws in place until 1967 when they were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia. These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline in 1990s' polls to a single-digit percentage. For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.
After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the American far-right. According to Kathleen Belew, a historian of race and racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland. Such anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white-supremacist groups and a religious fundamentalist movement being the other two.
21st century
The presidential campaign of Donald Trump led to a surge of interest in white supremacy and white nationalism in the United States, bringing increased media attention and new members to their movement; his campaign enjoyed their widespread support.Some academics argue that the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election, and the many controversies which surrounded it, reflect the ongoing influence of white supremacy in the United States. Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.
British Commonwealth
There has been debate whether Winston Churchill, who was voted "the greatest ever Briton" in 2002, was "a racist and white supremacist". In the context of rejecting the Arab wish to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine, he said:I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race... has come in and taken their place."
British historian Richard Toye, author of Churchill's Empire, concluded that "Churchill did think that white people were superior."