White supremacy is hella complicated. A big reasons is that it's such an intrinsic part of every piece of our society. It can also be especially difficult for white people to see. As shown by Professor Dreier's activity I discussed in entry 1, we are taught to be colored blind, to not see our whiteness. Also, the history we learn in school does a good job at hiding this story, the story of racism and genocide. So it's a lot of work to re-learn history with this lens.
A bit I learned about the origination of whiteness/racism: The idea of whiteness came from economic needs. In the early 1600s, 50 wealthy english man bought stock which included a large parcel of land in Virginia. They needed people to work the land, so they brought in poor English kids and kidnaped Africans. Conditions for both were horrific - they were whipped, nearly starved to death, denied days off. But at that point, they were all in it together. Then came the late 1680s. In an attempt to stop the series of revolts that had taken place, land owners created slave codes. Slave was equated with negro, and servant with white. Servants were given special privileges - a small plot of land, freedom dues paid in tobacco, right to challenge land owners. They were also offered the first jobs as slave patrols, a strategic move made to create further tension. These laws did a great job at breaking up the unity of the workers by tricking the white workers in to thinking they had more in common with the white wealthy landowners. We see here how slavery and whiteness were created at the same time! (From Sharon Martinez's Shinin' the Lite on White).
Andrea Smith does a grand job at breaking down how white supremacy functions in her piece "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy." She sees it functioning in three ways, or what she calls pillars:
1. Slavery/Capitalism: This logic sees black people as inherently slavable. This can been seen clear as day in today's racist prison system, which is largely filled with black folks. Before the Civil War, prisons were mostly filled with white people. However the thirteenth amendment banned slavery except for in prisons. "Black people previously enslaved by the slavery system were re-enslaved through the prison system. Black people who had been the property of the slave owners became state property."
2. Genocide/Colonialism: This logic believes hat indigenous people must disappear. This legitimizes rightfull take over of land by non indigenous people. "In a temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to 'play dead,' as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to disappear." After the initial genocide, much effort was put in to native communities disappearing - forced boarding schools for children, sterilization, and forced christianity for example.
3. Orientalism/War: This logic sees the West as superior in opposition to the exotic and inferior "orient". This logic makes people from these nations a constant threat. This legitimizes anti-immigrant sentiment and racial profiling of Arab Americans for example. This also legitimizes the U.S. being constantly at war, and the U.S. must be at war in order to maintain white supremacy.
So then she brilliantly brings this all together: "What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced with the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-Black peoples are promised that if they comply, they will not be at the bottom of the racial heirarchy. And Black, Native, Latino and Asian peoples are promised that they will economically and politically advance if they join US wards to spread "democracy"." Woah.
Ok I promise no more straight up article summaries moving forward. Please accept my apologies. Just couldn't help myself it's all so good!
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