If you turn on the news, read the paper, or check Twitter, you are likely to come across someone being labeled as a “white supremacist,” whether it’s a mass shooter or the president of the United States. The term, originally used to describe someone who adheres to the ideology of white supremacy, is now used so frequently that its meaning has become unclear.
The term “white supremacy” first appeared in the early 1800s, as documented in The Oxford English Dictionary. Early references can be found in books like Emancipation: Or Practical Advice to British Slave-holders and Thirty Years in India, as well as in “The First Annual Report of the Edinburgh Society for Promoting the Mitigation and Ultimate Abolition of Negro Slavery,” which discusses conditions in the Caribbean British colonies. The report states, “Now…we arrive at the truth of the matter and find that the whip is of the very essence of the system, and that the right to use it is the fundamental charter of white supremacy.”
The concept of “white supremacy” made its way to the United States, according to Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Before the Civil War, whites in the South felt the need to defend against abolitionism and used arguments to justify white domination through slavery. The term “white supremacy” was used positively in this context to suggest that it was natural law and the rightful order of things. For example, in 1856, Kansas settler Jefferson Buford made a public appeal for the territory to be admitted into the Union as a slave state, questioning if Kansans were willing to give up “white supremacy in the South.”
Although the Confederacy was defeated, the ideology of white supremacy persisted. Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, notes that white supremacy took on a new sense of victimization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Supporters of this ideology began to argue that white supremacy was under threat, that whites were losing their dominance, and that undeserving groups were taking away what belonged to them.
In 1867, John Van Evrie, a controversial pseudo-scientist from New York, published a book titled White Supremacy and Negro Subordination. His goal was to legitimize black subordination and white supremacy. This philosophy was further promoted by individuals like Thomas Dixon Jr., whose work inspired the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard-trained historian known for The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. These figures replaced the scientific arguments for white supremacy with cultural arguments, asserting that whites were culturally superior, an idea that still resonates in America today.
The 1960s saw the civil rights and Black Power movements challenging white supremacy. James Baldwin, in his 1962 New Yorker essay, described the need for great force to challenge the fortress of white supremacy. Malcolm X declared the end of white supremacy, and bell hooks coined the phrase “Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.”
Despite efforts to critique and challenge white supremacy, the terms “white supremacist” and “white supremacy” have seen a resurgence in recent years in the U.S. This resurgence reflects a renewed wave of anti-immigrant, anti-minority, and anti-Semitic sentiments. The use of these terms increased notably after the Charlottesville rally in August 2017. Even Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was accused of being a white supremacist during a speech at Harvard, and President Trump has been labeled as such by liberal writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. However, Trump and his administration have consistently denied these claims.
The frequent labeling of individuals as white supremacists has been criticized as a trend by some, who argue that the term should be reserved for actual neo-Nazis and not applied broadly. This overuse of the term has led some to adopt more socially acceptable labels like white separatist, nationalist, or “alt-right.” However, according to SPLC’s Potok, it is important to accurately identify and address real white supremacist movements, rather than diluting the term’s significance.
The continuous use of “white supremacy” and “white supremacist” in public discourse risks diminishing their impact and allowing true white supremacists to escape scrutiny. It is crucial to accurately name and address the dangerous ideologies of white supremacy that persist in society.
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