White Supremacy: Real Or Imagined

I have asked myself this question since I lived through and felt the indignity of Jim Crow. How can the minority people of the world have so much control over every other culture on the planet? I had to explain to my grandson, when he asked me why black people are called “minority.” He went on to say, he did a Goggle Search and found that white people are, and he said, “in fact are the minority people of the world!” When I was twelve, I had no idea this was a fact nor ever thought about it. Nonetheless, I told him it was because of White Supremacy.

His next question was – what does that mean?  I told him that it was the belief in the superiority of the white race, especially in matters of intelligence and culture used to achieve power over all other people resulting from the period of European colonial expansion to the Western Hemisphere, colonizing Africa and Asia starting from the late 1800s to the present.

White supremacists have based their ideas on a variety of theories and supposedly proven facts that they are the chosen people. This is evident by virtue of their belief in “manifest Destiny. This means God himself decreed that the earth was his and all things in it. The most prominent of these accretions include the claims of so-called scientific racist academic research that attempted to correlate inferiority and pathological behavior with categories and eugenics. White supremacist beliefs have also been justified by the Biblical hypothesis that viewed blacks as the descendants of Ham, who would be cursed for life.

There is a direct correlation between the rise of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism with the expansion of white supremacist ideology justifying Europeans political control over peoples of darker skin color through military force and ideological means. This was done in large part through religion, limiting education, the media, and outright lies about the history of all other cultures. In spite of historical proof that proves that the first people on the planet were not white.

However, those considered “white” expanded considerably in the twentieth century. For example, in the America not all ethnic groups with white skin were initially considered white. It was not until well into the twentieth century that the Irish and Italians were considered white. Later, the United States federal government expanded its definition of whites to include Arabs.

Various groups and institutions have used many tactics to enable their white supremacist thinking to organize followers socially and politically, often with the purpose of to divide and conquer but not to exclude policing racial barriers. This activism has included, but not limited to, the physical elimination of nonwhite populations through violence, preventing inter-racial marriage, and maintaining racial segregation.

The most well known examples of institutionalized white supremacy, other than slavery in America, were the system of “Jim Crow” segregation, apartheid in southern Africa, and in Nazi German. Under Adolph Hitler, he sought a “final solution” through the extermination in gas chambers of millions and through various racial medical experiments.

I went on to tell my young grandson that white supremacy is an attitude derived from “privilege”. Pointing out that the white supremacist ideology was resuscitated by a number of social transformations that were particularly evident since the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. The persistence of white privilege, even in societies where nonwhites are the majority, has meant white supremacy and its consequences have not ceased to be a source for social ills; today it’s just more transparent than ever before.

The main premise and foundation for this attitude is rooted in capitalism and clocked in religious. The problem and cause of today’s fears are that the numbers of whites are dwindling and predict to be soon less than have of what it is today in the next generation. Today, they use laws enforced by the police and armies to maintain this ideal. Blacks are killed by the police, not in a more escalated rate; it is just that the system can’t hide the murders of black people as had been the practice. In the early part of the twentieth century, thousands of blacks were lynched and murdered and in many cases for entertainment. Today, the police free reign they just murder black people in nearly every city in America and its called justified.

World systems are built on this concept otherwise it would never be possible for so few to rule so many. It was painful to tell my grandson that he started with less, had to expect less, viewed as less, and born on the endangered spices list by this system of white supremacy. So remember that the system is designed to protect the system and this is the system. And that’s my thought provoking perspective…