White Racism

White racism refers to a system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color by the White Western world, specifically White Europeans and White Americans. Scholars have employed terms including institutional racism (or institutional discrimination), systemic racism, White supremacy, and global racist order to emphasize conceptually similar ideas. Although there is a tendency to think of racism as just a matter of individuals engaging in racially hostile prejudices and actions, White racism extends well beyond this to encompass the all-important ways in which racial oppression has been structured into societies over time, particularly through law, the economy, and education to privilege Whites and disadvantage people of color. This entry places White racism in its historical context and explains how it has been structured into society and how it affects worldviews of Whites and people of color.

In this sense, the concept of White racism addresses a critique by those arguing that racism should not be conceptualized as a “White phenomenon,” but should incorporate the ways in which people of color are also “racist.” Although many people, including people of color, harbor racial prejudices, White racism, as a concept, captures the well-documented world-historical development of enduring systems of racialized oppression within the United States and around the world, via White supremacy. Such systems have been created by White Europeans and Americans and have targeted people of color, making the term White racism theoretically appropriate and historically accurate.

Understanding the concept of White racism requires a historical lens. Distinguished U.S. scholar W. E. B. Du Bois famously observed in 1910, “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing…. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction…. Today, we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is White and by that token, wonderful!” Although many people commonly assume the self-evidence of racial differences, “race” is, in fact, an idea that gradually emerged with European colonialism, beginning in the 1400s. Although not yet explicitly racialized, early colonizers, like the Portuguese and Spanish, employed beliefs regarding supposed European superiority as a rationale for exploiting the labor and natural resources of Indigenous Peoples. Later ideas drew upon religious differences, differentiating between European “Christians” and “heathen” others. As European colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade expanded, color and other physical characteristics became progressively more central to an explicitly racist ideology rationalizing Western ascendancy over indigenous and inferior-“raced” peoples. This racist ideology was disseminated in thousands of books and articles by leading European and U.S. thinkers from the 17th century on, advancing supposed “evidence” of White superiority contrasted with the intellectual, moral, and cultural inferiority of [Page 1406]Africans and other people of color, marking them fit for conquest and domination.