White supremacy in the United States

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White supremacy in the United States traces to the origins of the country. It is strongly linked to slavery in the United States, almost exclusively practiced by European colonists and White Americans enslaving other races, primarily African Americans. Enslavement of Africans intensified in the 1650s, reaching a population of four million prior to its abolition in 1865. After a brief liberalization in the Reconstruction era, white supremacy was largely restored by the Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in the South, while the urban Black population in the North experienced institutional racism including racial wealth inequality. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s largely ended de jure segregation, but extensive de facto racism remained.

Slavery as an institution dates to the colonial period preceding the United States. Prior to the 1650s, the British Thirteen Colonies primarily enslaved Native Americans. After Native Americans suffered massive population losses from the importation of diseases from the Old World, Europeans began importing enslaved African people. The use of enslaved Africans in industrialized agriculture, that had developed in the Caribbean at the time, spread to the Colonial South.^[1] The ruling white planter class was disturbed by the 1675–1676 Bacon's Rebellion, which saw the European indentured servants unite with all classes of Africans. In repsonse the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 were enacted, socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons.

The Constitution of the United States emerged as a compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the North and South respectively. The planter class's harshness was worsened by the Haitian Revolution and massacre.^[2]^[3] Pseudoscientific beliefs were used to attempt to justify slavery in the 19th century. Contradiction between the First Industrial Revolution within the Northern United States and the agrarian plantation economy of the South, which was more predicated on white supremacy, led to conflict, beginning with the Bleeding Kansas confrontations and evolving into the American Civil War. During this war, President Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the South. The postwar Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, the Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to all Africans born in the US, and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination in the right to vote.

After a brief liberalization in the Reconstruction era, the Democratic Party largely restored white supremacy via the Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in the South. The urban Black population in the North following the Great Migration was targeted with violence, exclusionary housing, redlining and racial steering.^[4] The analogous Juan Crow system and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act reflected white supremacy over Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans. The nadir of American race relations in the decades following Reconstruction's failure saw the Ku Klux Klan lead white mobs in lynchings and racial massacres.

Early history

White men pose for a photograph of the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings. Two of the black victims are still hanging while the third is on the ground. Lynchings were often public spectacles for the white community to celebrate white supremacy in the U.S., and photos were often sold as postcards.^[5]

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.^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[8] 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."^[9] In the antebellum South, four million slaves were denied freedom.^[10] The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for state secession^[11] and the formation of the Confederate States of America.^[12] 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."^[13]

The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.^[14] 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."^[15]

20th century

The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement.^[16] 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."^[17] Vann R. Newkirk II wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy."^[18] Moved by the image of Till's body in the casket, one hundred days after his murder Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.^[19]

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".^[20]^[a] 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.^[20] 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.^[21] 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.^[22]^[23] For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.^[24]

After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the American far-right.^[25] 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 (self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism") committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland.^[26]^[27] Such anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white-supremacist groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and racist skinheads) and a religious fundamentalist movement (such as Christian Identity) being the other two.^[28]^[29] Howard Winant writes that, "On the far right the cornerstone of white identity is belief in an ineluctable, unalterable racialized difference between whites and nonwhites."^[30] In the view of philosopher Jason Stanley, white supremacy in the United States is an example of the fascist politics of hierarchy, in that it "demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy" in which whites dominate and control non-whites.^[31]

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.^[32]^[33]^[34]^[35]

Some academics argue that outcomes from the 2016 United States Presidential Election reflect ongoing challenges with white supremacy.^[36]^[37] Psychologist Janet Helms suggested that the normalizing behaviors of social institutions of education, government, and healthcare are organized around the "birthright of...the power to control society's resources and determine the rules for [those resources]".^[38] Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.^[39]^[40]

As of 2018, there were over 600 white-supremacist organizations recorded in the U.S.^[41] On July 23, 2019, Christopher A. Wray, the head of the FBI, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the agency had made around 100 domestic terrorism arrests since October 1, 2018, and that the majority of them were connected in some way with white supremacy. Wray said that the Bureau was "aggressively pursuing [domestic terrorism] using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners," but said that it was focused on the violence itself and not on its ideological basis. A similar number of arrests had been made for instances of international terrorism. In the past, Wray has said that white supremacy was a significant and "pervasive" threat to the U.S.^[42]

On September 20, 2019, the acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, announced his department's revised strategy for counter-terrorism, which included a new emphasis on the dangers inherent in the white-supremacy movement. McAleenan called white supremacy one of the most "potent ideologies" behind domestic terrorism-related violent acts. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, McAleenan cited a series of high-profile shooting incidents, and said "In our modern age, the continued menace of racially based violent extremism, particularly white supremacist extremism, is an abhorrent affront to the nation, the struggle and unity of its diverse population." The new strategy will include better tracking and analysis of threats, sharing information with local officials, training local law enforcement on how to deal with shooting events, discouraging the hosting of hate sites online, and encouraging counter-messages.^[43]^[44]

In a 2020 article in The New York Times titled "How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror", columnist Charles M. Blow wrote:^[45]

We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood. Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them. The Tulsa race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it. The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he "grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her". This practice, this exercise in racial extremism has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 9-1-1, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men. This was again evident when a white woman in New York's Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life.

Patterns of influence

Political violence

The Tuskegee Institute has estimated that 3,446 blacks were the victims of lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1968, with the peak occurring in the 1890s at a time of economic stress in the South and increasing political suppression of blacks. If 1,297 whites were also lynched during this period, blacks were disproportionally targeted, representing 72.7% of all people lynched.^[46]^[47] According to scholar Amy L. Wood, "lynching photographs constructed and perpetuated white supremacist ideology by creating permanent images of a controlled white citizenry juxtaposed to images of helpless and powerless black men."^[48]

School curriculum

White supremacy has also played a part in U.S. school curriculum. Over the course of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, material across the spectrum of academic disciplines has been taught with a heavy emphasis on white culture, contributions, and experiences, and a lack of representation of non-white groups' perspectives and accomplishments.^[49]^[50]^[51]^[52] In the 19th century, Geography lessons contained teachings on a fixed racial hierarchy, which white people topped.^[53] Mills (1994) writes that history as it is taught is really the history of white people, and it is taught in a way that favors white Americans and white people in general. He states that the language used to tell history minimizes the violent acts committed by white people over the centuries, citing the use of the words, for example, "discovery," "colonization," and "New World" when describing what was ultimately a European conquest of the Western Hemisphere and its indigenous peoples.^[50] Swartz (1992) seconds this reading of modern history narratives when it comes to the experiences, resistances, and accomplishments of black Americans throughout the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. In an analysis of American history textbooks, she highlights word choices that repetitively "normalize" slavery and the inhumane treatment of black people. She also notes the frequent showcasing of white abolitionists and actual exclusion of black abolitionists and the fact that black Americans had been mobilizing for abolition for centuries before the major white American push for abolition in the 19th century. She ultimately asserts the presence of a masternarrative that centers Europe and its associated peoples (white people) in school curriculum, particularly as it pertains to history.^[54] She writes that this masternarrative condenses history into only history that is relevant to, and to some extent beneficial for, white Americans.^[54]

Elson (1964) provides detailed information about the historic dissemination of simplistic and negative ideas about non-white races.^[50]^[55]^[56] Native Americans, who were subjected to attempts of cultural genocide by the U.S. government through the use of American Indian boarding schools,^[55]^[57] were characterized as homogenously "cruel," a violent menace toward white Americans, and lacking civilization or societal complexity (p. 74).^[53] For example, in the 19th century, black Americans were consistently portrayed as lazy, immature, and intellectually and morally inferior to white Americans, and in many ways not deserving of equal participation in U.S. society.^[51]^[55]^[53] For example, a math problem in a 19th-century textbook read, "If 5 white men can do as much work as 7 negroes..." implying that white men are more industrious and competent than black men (p. 99).^[58] In addition, little to nothing was taught about black Americans' contributions, or their histories before being brought to U.S. soil as slaves.^[55]^[56] According to Wayne (1972), this approach was taken especially much after the Civil War to maintain whites' hegemony over emancipated black Americans.^[55] Other racial groups have received oppressive treatment, including Mexican Americans, who temporarily were prevented from learning the same curriculum as white Americans because they supposedly were intellectually inferior, and Asian Americans, some of whom were prevented from learning much about their ancestral lands because they were deemed a threat to "American" culture, i.e. white culture, at the turn of the 20th century.^[55]

Role of the Internet

With the emergence of Twitter in 2006, and platforms such as Stormfront, which was launched in 1996, an alt-right portal for white supremacists with similar beliefs, both adults and children, was provided in which they were given a way to connect. Jessie Daniels, of CUNY-Hunter College, discussed the emergence of other social media outlets such as 4chan and Reddit, which meant that the "spread of white nationalist symbols and ideas could be accelerated and amplified."^[59] Sociologist Kathleen Blee notes that the anonymity which the Internet provides can make it difficult to track the extent of white-supremacist activity in the country, but nevertheless she and other experts^[60] see an increase in the number of hate crimes and amount of white-supremacist violence. In the latest wave of white supremacy, in the age of the Internet, Blee sees the movement as having become primarily a virtual one, in which divisions between groups become blurred: "[A]ll these various groups that get jumbled together as the alt-right and people who have come in from the more traditional neo-Nazi world. We're in a very different world now."^[61]

David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote in 1999 that the Internet was going to create a "chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world."^[62] Daniels documents that racist groups see the Internet as a way to spread their ideologies, influence others and gain supporters.^[59] Legal scholar Richard Hasen describes a "dark side" of social media:

There certainly were hate groups before the Internet and social media. [But with social media] it just becomes easier to organize, to spread the word, for people to know where to go. It could be to raise money, or it could be to engage in attacks on social media. Some of the activity is virtual. Some of it is in a physical place. Social media has lowered the collective-action problems that individuals who might want to be in a hate group would face. You can see that there are people out there like you. That's the dark side of social media.^[63]

The Andrew Show, a series on YouTube hosted by the grandson of Thomas Robb, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, "presents the Klan's ideology in a format aimed at kids — more specifically, white kids."^[64] The short episodes inveigh against race-mixing, and extol other white-supremacist ideologies. A short documentary published by TRT describes Imran Garda's experience, a journalist of Indian descent, who met with Thomas Robb and a traditional KKK group. A sign that greets people who enter the town states "Diversity is a code for white genocide." The KKK group interviewed in the documentary summarizes its ideals, principles, and beliefs, which are emblematic of white supremacists in the United States. The comic book super hero Captain America was used for dog whistle politics by the alt-right in college campus recruitment in 2017, an ironic co-opting because Captain America battled against Nazis in the comics, and was created by Jewish cartoonists.^[65]^[66]