White supremacy
[9] In recent years, websites such as Twitter (known as X since July 2023), Reddit, and Stormfront, and the first campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, have contributed to an increased activity and interest in white supremacy.
[23][24][25][26][27] White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century (marked by decolonization and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, followed by that country's first multiracial elections in 1994).
[citation needed] 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.
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.
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.
"[40] 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.
[6] Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.
[56][57] As of 2018, there were over 600 white-supremacist organizations recorded in the U.S.[58] 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.
In the past, Wray has said that white supremacy was a significant and "pervasive" threat to the U.S.[59] 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.
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.
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.
[67] 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.
[72] 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.
"[77] 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.
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.
[85] In 1970, the Afrikaner-run government abolished non-white political representation, and starting that year black people were deprived of South African citizenship.
[87][88] In Rhodesia a predominantly white government issued its own unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 during an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid majority rule.
Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.
[99] Fifty-one people died from two consecutive terrorist attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre by an Australian white supremacist carried out on March 15, 2019.
[citation needed] The 1915 silent drama film The Birth of a Nation followed the rising racial, economic, political, and geographic tensions leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Southern Reconstruction era that was the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of Untermenschen ("subhumans"): Slavs, Jews and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.
[122] The Internet provides a venue for open expression of white-supremacist ideas at little social cost because people who post the information are able to remain anonymous.
[23][24]This and similar definitions have been adopted or proposed by Charles W. Mills,[25] bell hooks,[26] David Gillborn,[27] Jessie Daniels,[131] and Neely Fuller Jr,[132] and they are widely used in critical race theory and intersectional feminism.
The term expresses historic continuities between a pre–civil rights movement era of open white supremacy and the current racial power structure of the United States.
John McWhorter has described the use of "white supremacy" as straying from its commonly accepted meaning to encompass less extreme issues, thereby cheapening the term and potentially derailing productive discussion.
[137][138] Political columnist Kevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity to frequent use by Ta-Nehisi Coates, describing it as a "terrible fad" that fails to convey nuance.
He claims that the term should be reserved for those who are trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks and not used to characterize less blatantly racist beliefs or actions.
[139][140] The academic use of the term to refer to systemic racism has been criticized by Conor Friedersdorf for the confusion that it creates for the general public, inasmuch as it differs from the more common dictionary definition; he argues that it is likely to alienate those that it hopes to convince.
