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White Supremacy

White supremacy has two different overlapping meanings, resulting in somewhat distinct literatures. The more all-encompassing literature deals with “cultural studies” and “critical race theory” and views white supremacy as an endemic part of Western culture and society. The other, more traditional approach narrowly focuses on white supremacy as primarily an activist phenomenon, a social movement and/or ideology; its studies focus on organized groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

Endemic White Supremacy

In this perspective white supremacy is so historically infused into Western culture and embedded into social structure that to speak of “society” in the U.S., European, or postcolonial context is, practically, to speak of white supremacy, as well as “racism,” “white privilege,” and “Eurocentric domination” on a global scale. All are parts of the whole, sometimes called “racialized social structures”—political and cultural systems that perpetuate inequality across racialized groups of people.

Proponents hold that to understand white supremacy, one must understand, or at least acknowledge, the roots of these social structures in European (white) colonialism. “Race” itself was invented through colonizers' efforts to understand and rationalize the differences between themselves and the people they subjugated. Thus, “race” explains and maintains inequality, and to this day we live in a fundamentally unjust world built by race.

Individual attitudes, utterances, or discriminatory acts are rarely at issue in this literature, except in reinforcing assumptions that “white is right,” or that whites' cultural ways are normative and proper. For example, whites often see their styles of social interaction as “normal” (rather than culturally white), and nonwhite Christians sometimes uncritically absorb images of a white (Europeanized) Jesus.

Scholars say white supremacy has changed over time, evolving particularly in terms of strategies for its self-preservation. As domination by repression and terror ended in the mid-20th century, white supremacy metamorphosed into “domination by seduction.” Thus, many recent scholars focus on how it continues without overtly racist whites, often invoking the term color-blind racism to characterize political ideologies that ahistorically champion property and individual rights yet deny the racial history of collective repression, thereby ensuring policies that do not threaten white control over most of the power and wealth in the world.

Activist White Supremacy

The second approach to white supremacy involves active white supremacists who overtly proclaim, in one way or another, that there exists a distinct race of people (“whites”) who have a special place in humanity, are in many ways superior to nonwhites, and require segregation to avoid social, cultural, and biological contamination by nonwhites. These include a diverse set of groups who maintain that white interests must be actively protected and advanced: the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Aryan Brotherhood, Christian Identity, Skinheads, and some militia groups, for example.

Researchers study these organizations and subcultures, also focusing on a burgeoning cyberculture. Similarities include almost universal antipathy toward Jews, blacks, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, white supremacists remain ideologically fractured, with many differences in ideology regarding religion, the use of violence, or even who is “white.”

White supremacists instill fear not only because of their past terrorism but also because of recent hate crimes and proclamations ranging from dismantling welfare programs to terrorist “racial holy war” (“RAHOWA”). Weakened after World War II and again in the wake of the 1960s civil rights movement, organized white supremacists have since rejuvenated, according to watchdog organizations, such as the Intelligence Project and the Anti-Defamation League, who monitor white supremacist activities and harbor concerns that these groups might successfully tap into incipient racial hatred, especially among impressionable white youths.

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