White Professor: White Progressives Don't Like the Term White Supremacy b/c It shifts Race Problem to White People

Racism is White Supremacy. White Supremacy is Racism. By Robin DiAngelo From [HERE] I am white. When I give talks on what it means to be white in a society deeply separate and unequal by race, I explain that white people who are born and raised in the U.S. grow up in a white supremacist culture. I include myself in this claim, as I enumerate all of the ways in which I was socialized to be complicit in racism. I am not talking about hate groups, of which I am obviously not a member. And no, I don’t hate white people. I am addressing most of the audience to whom I am speaking, white progressives like me.

If it surprises and unsettles my audience that I use this term to refer to us and not them, even after I have explained how I am using it, then they have not been listening. That recognition should trigger some sense of urgency that continuing education is needed.

Yet invariably, a white person raises the objection: I really don’t like that term! I associate it with the KKK and other white nationalist groups. Why can’t you use a different term? As a classic example of white fragility, rather than stretching into a new framework, I am asked by a white participant to use language that is more comfortable and maintains their current worldview.

Many people, especially older white people, associate the term white supremacy with extreme and explicit hate groups. However, for sociologists, white supremacy is a highly descriptive term for the culture we live in; a culture which positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal.

White supremacy captures the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white, and the practices based upon that assumption. White supremacy is not simply the idea that whites are superior to people of color (although it certainly is that), but a deeper premise that supports this idea—the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as an inherent deviation from that norm.

Thus, when race scholars use the term white supremacy, we do not use it the same way as mainstream culture does. Nor, do we use it to indicate majority-versus-minority relations. Power is not dependent on numbers but on position. We use the term to refer to a socio-political economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefit those defined and perceived as white. This system rests on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group. If, for example, we look at the racial breakdown of the people who control our institutions, we see that in 2016-2017:

Congress: 90% white

Governors: 96% white

Top military advisers: 100% white

President and vice president: 100% white

Current POTUS cabinet: 91% white

People who decide which TV shows we see: 93% white

People who decide which books we read: 90% white

People who decide which news is covered: 85% white

People who decide which music is produced: 95% white

Teachers: 83% white

Full-time college professors: 84% white

Owners of men’s pro-football teams: 97% white

These numbers are not a matter of “good people” versus “bad people.” They are a matter of power, control, and dominance by a racial group with a particular self-image, worldview, and set of interests in the position to disseminate that image and worldview and protect those interests across the entire society.

For a clear example of what it means to have institutional control and use it to the advantage of your group, we can look to women’s suffrage in the U.S. Only white men could grant women suffrage because white men controlled the government (and all of the other institutions that allowed them to disseminate and enforce patriarchy across society). They still do. While women could be prejudiced against men and discriminate against individual men in isolated cases, women as a group could not deny all men their civil rights. Yet men as a group could deny all women their civil rights. Once white men finally granted women the right to vote, only white men could then deny access to that right for women (and men) of color. White people also write the history that tells us that “women” were granted the right to vote, and erases the reality that that access was not granted equally across race. The term white supremacy allows us to capture the all-encompassing and multi-dimensional nature of white control.

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Sam Greenlee: "Sun Tan Lotion" & White Folks

By Sam Greenlee. From "Poetry & Other Raps" [MORE]

 SUN TAN LOTION

White folks broiling in

the sun; coppin' skin

cancer one by one

Hating our guts and 

killing themselves

trying to look like

us! 

Hamid Dabashi: The Invention of the White People [the Only Purpose of Race is to Practice Racism]

Race is not real but racism is. [MORE] Racists are obsessed with skin color and their inability to produce color. They created the concept of race out of thin air. The only purpose of race is to practice racism. Having little biological validity, the term "race" is better translated to mean organization. The sole purpose of such organization is to maintain white domination and world control of non-whites, who have been frictionalized into made up classifications of people by racists. [MORE] See Dr. Blynd or Neely Fuller for more understanding. 

By Hamid Dabashi From [Al-Jazeera] There are no white people. There are no black people. There are no red, yellow, brown, blue, purple, crimson or any other colour people. These are all socially constructed delusions. Delusions though with real, frightful, murderous, and genocidal consequences. 

None of these facts have been hidden to us. There is a vast body of scholarly literature on the social construction of race, gender, and ethnicity.

In his monumental two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race (Revised edition, 2012), as early as in the 1960s Theodore W Allen had documented the manner in which the ruling elite in the United States had devised the category of "white people" by way of economic exploitation of the African slaves and the social control of the emerging polities. More recently, in her Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today (2013), Jacqueline Battalora has offered an examination of the enduring issue of race in the US tracing it back to when "white people" were invented through legislations and enactment of laws. 

The problem with this scholarly body of literature is not only the fact that its erudite message does not get through the thick skulls of illiterate racists like Donald Trump's white supremacist supporters. The problem is that such archaeology of hatred does not erase the fact that a massive body of humanity has suffered precisely because they have been branded as "black" or "red," or "yellow" or "brown". Racially constituted to divide and rule, those colourful delusions have become social facts.

Central to all such socially constructed delusions are the relations of power they entail and sustain - whether colour-coded, classed, racialised, or gendered. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman", Simone de Beauvoir declared in her path-breaking book The Second Sex (1949). In later, critical expansion of this idea, scholars like Judith Butler have shown how varied social practices are definitive to the social constitution of gender. The same is true about race or ethnicity. One is not born, we may extend de Beauvoir's insight, but rather becomes white, or black, etc. 

The gross spectacle of racist terrorists in August in Charlottesville, US, and President Trump's unabashed siding with the proto-Fascist white supremacists have now brought this solid streak in American politics to global attention. However limited or extensive this "base" of Donald Trump's presidency might be, the politics of white supremacy has now become openly integral to the racial imagination of the US.

Taking their cues from their president and his chief advisers like (until recently) Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka in the White House, a small but increasingly vocal armed militia calling itself "white nationalists" (a euphemism for white supremacists) march with torches like the KKK, saluting like Nazis, and chant xenophobic and anti-Semitic slogans through Charlottesville. These are the driest and deepest layers of racial hatred from the time of the first slaughter of Native Americans, from the time of mass slavery of African Americans, now finding the right environment to come up to surface. 

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Would the US Government Ever Seek to Program Black People with a Falsified Consciousness?

From Dr. Amos Wilson [HERE] SOCIOPATHOLOGY PRECEDES PSYCHOPATHOLOGY. Collective pathology precedes individual pathology. That is, diseased social interactions between groups generate diseased social interac¬tions within groups, and furthermore, diseased social interac¬tions within groups generate diseased psychological interactions within individuals who are their constituents. The discontents of individuals reflect the discontents of groups; and these, the discontents of the societies and cultures they constitute. The Great Chain of Discontents inextricably binds together individ¬ual, group, society, and culture.

The character and conduct of groups and individuals however labeled and categorized, whether judged to be good or evil, superior or inferior, are the products of historic intergroup, intragroup, and interpersonal relations, and can only be meaningfully understood in terms of these relations. The character and behavior of Afrikan American individuals, whether labeled "normal" or "abnormal," can only be fully and accurately comprehended, along with the process and purpose of labeling itself, in terms of the historic power relations between dominant European-American and subordinate Afrikan-American groups.

White domination and Black subordination involve special types of social power relations constructed predominantly by Whites in order that they might receive certain material and non-material benefits thereby. These social power relations involve social practices and processes which mediate the White American socioeconomic, sociopolitical, sociopsychological manipulation and construction of Black consciousness and behavior. Under White supremacy Black consciousness and behavior are socially manufactured, labeled, and judged by Whites in ways consonant with their social control and expropriation of Black natural and acquired human resources. The "normality" or "abnormality" of Black consciousness and behavior are so classified with reference to the degree to which they support or oppose to the continuity of White supremacy. "Normal" Black consciousness and behavior under the various regimes of White domination are characterized by habitual thought patterns and behavioral tendencies which render them pliable to White authoritarian/authoritative social control with minimal resistance; which induce Blacks to accept their subordinate status as natural, perhaps actually to misperceive their oppression as freedom. "Abnormal" Black consciousness arid behavior under White supremacy involve habitual thought patterns and behavioral tendencies in Blacks which make their social control by Whites intolerably difficult or ineffective; which induces them to protest, resist and reject their subordinate status as destined or natural, to perceive their oppression as unfreedom.

From the vantage point of the continuity of White supremacy, the basis for the labeling of Black consciousness and behavior by Whites as normal or abnormal depends not on the discovery by Whites of discrete states of consciousness and their correlat¬ed behavioral tendencies in Blacks, but on the discovery of the degree to which Black consciousness/behavioral tendencies are perceived as serving or dis-serving their hegemonic interests.

Disturbances of thought, emotions, motivational and values priorities, and psychological processes in Blacks are the unavoidable outcomes of their oppression by Whites. To be oppressed is by definition to have one's thought processes disturbed; emotions impaired; motives and values inverted; and one's body functions imbalanced. There can be no "normal¬ity" of consciousness and conduct for Blacks as long as they remain dominated by Whites — merely socially acceptable or unacceptable adjustments to the ever-changing demand characteristics of White supremacy. The normality of Blacks under White domination is by that circumstance, above all, a "pathological normalcy" — disturbances in Black consciousness and behavior which are deemed serviceable and beneficial to the needs of their White oppressors.

The alleged normality or abnormality of Black consciousness under White supremacy requires that Blacks involuntarily and obsessively deceive themselves. This collective self-deception which is the benchmark of oppressed Black consciousness is the mam product of White-Black social power relations motivated by anxiety and ignorance, founded on the denial and distortion of reality. Both the normality and abnormality of Black consciousness and behavior as reproduced by the power relations of White supremacy, also require that they operate against their own best interests in the interests of their White oppressors; that they be self-denying, self-defeating, and oft-times self-destructing, while convincing themselves that the opposite is true.

Normality is as much a political-economic concept as a psychological-social concept. As a political/economic construct it is the result, in large part, of the interplay of inter group, intragroup and primary group social-economic power relations and practices which have been exercised on the bodies of persons. Normality is born of fairly systemic methods of rewarding and punishing behavior, ritual practices and indoctri¬nation, training, correction, supervision, and constraint. As societies change so do their fields of power relations, methods of socialization, and concepts of normalcy. To paraphrase Foucault,5 the "normality" which inhabits a person and brings him into existence is itself a factor in the mastery that those in power exercise over that person's consciousness and behavior. Normality as a functional state of being, as a circumscribed set of states of consciousness and their correlated behavioral tendencies, is the effect and instrument of dynamic political-economic relations. The "norm" is in essence a principle of coercion; a constraint on behavior; a rule to be followed. It involves the establishment of a set of values or standards, a range of behaviors to be respected which must be achieved through conformity, reinforced by social sanctions, rewards, and punishments. Normalization, the process of using the values of the norm to compare, differentiate, hierarchize, homogenize; to determine the level and value of abilities and the "nature" of persons and groups; to exclude; to mark the frontier of the abnormal — and thereby ration power, privilege and favor — is one of the great instruments of power wielded by those who rule and dominate others. Hence, under White supremacy the "normality" of Blacks is to a significant extent both the effect and the instrument of White power. For the subordinated Afrikan, "normality" is the prison of his mind and body. [MORE]