White supremacy

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White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them.[1] The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.[2][3]

As a political ideology, it imposes and maintains cultural, social, political, historical or institutional domination by white people and non-white supporters. In the past, this ideology had been put into effect through socioeconomic and legal structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, European colonial labor and social practices, the Scramble for Africa, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the activities of the Native Land Court in New Zealand,[4] the White Australia policies from the 1890s to the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa.[5][6] This ideology is also today present among neo-Confederates.

White supremacy underlies a spectrum of contemporary movements including white nationalism, white separatism, neo-Nazism, and the Christian Identity movement.[7] In the United States, white supremacy is primarily associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Aryan Nations, and the White American Resistance movement, all of which are also considered to be antisemitic.[8] The Proud Boys, despite claiming non-association with white supremacy, have been described in academic contexts as being such.[9] In recent years, websites such as Twitter (known as X since July 2023), Reddit, and Stormfront, and the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.[10][11][12][13][14]

Different forms of white supremacy have different conceptions of who is considered white (though the exemplar is generally light-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed — traits most common in northern Europe and that are viewed pseudoscientifically as being traits of an Aryan race), and not all white-supremacist organizations agree on who is their greatest enemy.[15] Different groups of white supremacists identify various racial, ethnic, religious, and other enemies,[15] most commonly those of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania, Asians, multiracial people, Middle Eastern people, Jews,[16][17][18] Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.[19][20][21][22]

In academic usage, particularly in critical race theory or intersectionality, "white supremacy" can also refer to a social system in which white people enjoy structural advantages (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level, despite formal legal equality.[23][24][25][26][27]

  1. ^ John Philip Jenkins (April 13, 2021). "white supremacy". britannica. Archived from the original on April 27, 2022. Retrieved August 14, 2022.
  2. ^ American Association of Physical Anthropologists (March 27, 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Archived from the original on January 25, 2022. Retrieved June 19, 2020. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.
  3. ^ "Ostensibly scientific": cf. Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross (eds.) 2003. The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences Cambridge University Press, p. 293 "Race has long played a powerful popular role in explaining social and cultural traits, often in ostensibly scientific terms"; Adam Kuper, Jessica Kuper (eds.), The Social Science Encyclopedia (1996), "Racism", p. 716: "This [sc. scientific] racism entailed the use of 'scientific techniques', to sanction the belief in European and American racial Superiority"; Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Questions to Sociobiology (1998), "Race, theories of", p. 18: "Its exponents [sc. of scientific racism] tended to equate race with species and claimed that it constituted a scientific explanation of human history"; Terry Jay Ellingson, The myth of the noble savage (2001), 147ff. "In scientific racism, the racism was never very scientific; nor, it could at least be argued, was whatever met the qualifications of actual science ever very racist" (p. 151); Paul A. Erickson, Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory (2008), p. 152: "Scientific racism: Improper or incorrect science that actively or passively supports racism".
  4. ^ Ray, William (June 3, 2022). "Season 2 Ep 6: Native Land Court". RNZ. Archived from the original on December 2, 2023. Retrieved August 25, 2023.
  5. ^ Wildman, Stephanie M. (1996). Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America. NYU Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-8147-9303-9.
  6. ^ Helms, Janet (2016). "An election to save White Heterosexual Male Privilege" (PDF). Latina/o Psychology Today. 3 (2): 6–7. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2017.
  7. ^ Brody, Richard (April 9, 2021). ""Exterminate All the Brutes," Reviewed: A Vast, Agonizing History of White Supremacy". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
  8. ^ Building a Corporate Culture of Security: Strategies for Strengthening Organizational Resiliency. p. 41.
  9. ^ Kutner, Samantha (2020). "Swiping Right: The Allure of Hyper Masculinity and Cryptofascism for Men Who Join the Proud Boys" (PDF). International Centre for Counter-Terrorism: 1. JSTOR resrep25259. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 19, 2023. Retrieved July 30, 2022.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference :6 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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  15. ^ a b Flint, Colin (2004). Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A. Routledge. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-415-93586-9. Although white racist activists must adopt a political identity of whiteness, the flimsy definition of whiteness in modern culture poses special challenges for them. In both mainstream and white supremacist discourse, to be white is to be distinct from those marked as nonwhite, yet the placement of the distinguishing line has varied significantly in different times and places.
  16. ^ "'Jews will not replace us': Why white supremacists go after Jews". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
  17. ^ "How Anti-Semitism Is Tied To White Nationalism". National Public Radio. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
  18. ^ Ali, Wajahat (January 19, 2022). "Antisemitism Is Driving White Supremacist Terror In The United States". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved January 19, 2022.
  19. ^ "Why Are So Many White Nationalists 'Virulently Anti-LGBT'?". National Broadcasting Company. August 21, 2017. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved August 21, 2017.
  20. ^ "Why are white nationalist groups targeting LGBTQ groups?". National Public Radio. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved June 19, 2022.
  21. ^ "White supremacy's rigid views on gender and sexuality". Cable News Network. June 15, 2022. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved June 15, 2022.
  22. ^ "Knoxville Pridefest parade: White nationalists to protest". Knoxnews. Archived from the original on July 13, 2022. Retrieved June 13, 2018.
  23. ^ Ansley, Frances Lee (1989). "Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship". Cornell Law Review. 74: 993ff.
  24. ^ Ansley, Frances Lee (June 29, 1997). "White supremacy (and what we should do about it)". In Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic (eds.). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Temple University Press. p. 592. ISBN 978-1-56639-532-8.
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