Racial Supremacy

Racial supremacy is related to social structures that organize people politically and economically into complex hierarchical systems of racialized social groups or “races.” A critical understanding of racial supremacy is vital to the field of global studies because racial phenomena, such as the persistence of wealth and power imbalances on a global scale between light- and dark-skinned people, are significant features of global society. This entry focuses on the following components of the globalization of racial supremacy: racial superiority and inferiority; global White supremacy; White opportunity structures; colorism, which is the belief that those who have lighter skin are superior (i.e., smarter or more attractive); and pigmentocracy, which is a political and social arrangement based on a hierarchical ordering of people based on skin tone.

Race is a fundamental characteristic of a system of racial supremacy. Although the social sciences have established that races are social constructions rather than biological facts, this does not mean that races are not real. Race has material and psychological consequences. The investments that [Page 1429]people make in their assigned racial group guide individual and collective behaviors. Moreover, races serve a purpose, particularly for those who most benefit from racial supremacy, in that they perform social and political tasks. One main task is to reify notions of alleged superiority and inferiority that have been attached to particular racial groups. The highest status racial group in a racial supremacist system invariably believes in its superiority relative to other races. Feelings of superiority circulate at both conscious and unconscious levels, meaning that dominant race members do not have to profess their superiority for racial supremacy to exist. Because dominant race members are most likely to be in charge of social institutions, their sense of racial superiority shapes policy as well as much of everyday life.

Although there may be numerous subsystems of racial supremacy, White supremacy is the dominant form of racial supremacy at the global level. White supremacy structures racialized social relations within, between, and across nation-states throughout the world. It functions to construct White geopolitical domination, ascribe higher social value to White personhood and labor, and distribute unjust advantages to those who approximate as “White.” The troubling result is that Whiteness is considered synonymous with “human,” “modern,” “developed,” and “civilized.”

Global White supremacy underlies much of humanity's past and present struggles. During the last 500 years, Europeans have conquered, colonized, and enslaved non-Europeans; territorialized humanity into a racialized system of nation-states; and redrawn the sociopolitical map of the world. Race was instrumental to Europeans because it gave them a quick way to distinguish the colonizer from the colonized, persons from subpersons, the civilized from the savage, as well as the superior from the inferior. European colonization established White settler states around the globe that were premised on a White opportunity structure for lower status Europeans. In return for following the agenda of the White polity, European immigrants were given access to forms of property, justice, and status that were regularly denied those defined as non-White. High-status Whites in these White settler states regulated the flow of European immigrants as needed to maintain domination, bringing in more when people of color were perceived as a growing threat to White status. In this way, Whites from all economic classes furthered the project of global White supremacy because they saw in it a personal and collective advantage.

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