Previous Next

Summary: Chapter 2: Racism and White Supremacy

Race is a social construct. It has no basis in biological fact. While surface variations in skin tone, hair color, and eye color have evolved based on where humans have lived on different parts of the planet, there is no difference genetically. We are all human.

Prejudice is also very human. Humans compile data obtained by experience and from other humans, to help us make judgments and avoid dangerous situations. Racism manipulates prejudicial fears about race to create laws, policies, practices, and norms of society. Racial inferiority was developed in the United States to justify unequal treatment of Black people. The economic engine of slavery made the southern United States into a profit center. Because of its significant impact on the economy of the new country, the underlying belief system of slavery was allowed to shape American institutions and society. Although slavery was eventually outlawed, changing the deeply held beliefs about race and updating the institutions built on that idea has been harder, in part because the wealthy elite have exacerbated racial tensions to keep Black and white people from uniting in economic solidarity. 

The current system of laws governing the United States may not condone openly violent, racist behavior, but it does favor white people, who created the system and continue to operate it. This structure creates white privilege, granting white people advantages that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, and schools), while simultaneously denying people of color the power to pass legislation that might curb white peoples advantage based on race. In this way, racism is structure, not an event. 

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to help describe structural racism. If peering through the bars directly at the bird, it’s easy to not see the bars of the birdcage. If turning one’s head, only one bar may be visible. One might imagine that the bird is at liberty to fly away. Only when the person steps back, and takes in the entire birdcage, is it easy to see the impediments forming the cage, keeping the bird captive. 

Advocates for social justice refer to this dominant racial system governing U.S. society as white supremacy. Most people associate white supremacy with radical white nationalist groups. But this nomenclature acknowledges the existing influence that American movies, mass media, corporate culture, advertising, and manufacturing have at home and abroad. That influence is predominantly white. Proof of the system’s power is the fact that it largely escapes comment, while other systems, like socialism, capitalism, and fascism, are identified and studied. This failure to identify and examine white supremacy protects it and holds it in place. Naming white supremacy makes the system visible and shifts the work of changing it onto white people, where it belongs. 

To help dismantle white supremacy, white people must first be made aware of it. Most white Americans grow up within it, making it difficult for them to identify. De facto segregation minimizes contact between whites and Black people. Whites use their positions of power to disseminate messages normalizing white culture as the dominant one. White children predominantly see only white people in their neighborhoods, schools, churches, hospitals, and in media. White children learn that good neighborhoods are white neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods are Black neighborhoods. All of this together serves to create a white racial frame, which leaves white people with a limited worldview that subtly encourages white superiority. Because racial segregation is comfortable, this can lead to problematic understandings of people of color, which white people may not even realize, as they have no sense that they might be missing interaction with people of color. This narrow white racial frame may not be broken until adulthood and explains the nervousness white people feel when dealing with race. 

People of color, by contrast, have to deal with the dominant culture almost every day, and therefore have an easier time talking about race. Growing up, white people may have questioned the de facto segregation given the American propaganda about equality. These reflections need to be encouraged. It is this questioning that can help white people acknowledge the impact of negative messages about Black people, help them open doors to people of color, and cooperatively build more equitable institutions.

Previous section Chapter 1 Next section Chapter 3

Take a Study Break