Stark racial inequality calls out for explanation and redress. When police brutalize and kill Black people, when pundits quarrel about racial gaps in opportunity and achievement, and when reformers call attention to the astonishing economic and political deprivations that characterize ghetto, reservation, and borderland, many of us want to know what’s going on, and what can be done about it.
Many theorists and activists claim that “white supremacy” is at the root of these and other disparities. Addressing racial inequality thus requires us to confront white supremacy in more or less direct ways. I think that this perspective is basically correct. Yet the idea that white supremacy explains anything is often met with widespread skepticism from conservatives, centrists, and Leftists alike. It’s thus worth spending some time clarifying the explanatory role of white supremacy. Knowing how white supremacy causes racial inequality might give us guidance about how racial inequality ought to be addressed.
First, we need a reasonably clear idea of what the characteristic logic of white supremacy is. Second, we need to show that this characteristic logic shapes the environments in which human beings live their everyday lives, and how these environments shape human interests and strategies in ways that shore up racial inequality. Finally, we need to show that this logic distributes power dynamically rather than statically. White supremacy operates alongside capitalism, patriarchy, hierarchies constructed around ability and disability, and much more besides. The link between race and social standing is mediated by these co-constituting forces, and our diagnosis of racial inequality needs to account for that fact.
Yet when we use the term “white supremacy,” it’s easy to talk past one another. Most agree that “white supremacy” applies to the ideologies of white superiority propounded by the Klan, neo-Nazis, and an ever-expanding panoply of right-wing racists. Most will grant that it describes Herrenvolk political configurations such as American Jim Crow and South African Apartheid. Beyond these paradigm cases, however, contestations arise. Earnest anti-racists often use the term to describe a wide range of cultural forces perceived to institutionalize whiteness and stigmatize non-whiteness, from gentrification and awards ceremonies to educational institutions to ways of speaking and writing. If “white supremacy” can mean so many different things, the argument goes, what on earth could it mean for it to explain anything at all?
Clarifying the meaning of “white supremacy” can thus lead us straight to a conception of its explanatory power. Within critical legal studies and political philosophy, the discourse of white supremacy intervenes into a political moment in which racism is primarily interpreted as a feature of the attitudes of individuals. “Racism” means bigotry, or endorsing racial stereotypes, or having implicit bias. Limiting “racism” to the hearts and minds of individuals– and excising it from policies, governments, and broader social structures– enables a political fantasy of a colorblind race-neutral society. From this point of view, any form of race-consciousness signals a disruption of healthy, putatively race-neutral economic and civic relationships. The dream of a post-racial society has been achieved: accidents of birth such as racial membership neither limit nor enlarge one’s opportunities in a free market economy. Colorblindness, meritocracy, and a concept of human flourishing as capital accumulation go hand-in-hand. Racism is bad because it is a detriment to the market’s smooth functioning, an illegitimate harness on human capital, and ultimately something that comes from outside the domain of politics, properly speaking.
Banishing race from the scope of the political is largely responsible for the dominance of the widespread, conspicuously apolitical interpretation of racism as a moral flaw rather than a mechanism for the consolidation and distribution of social and economic power. Most Americans (and particularly, political elites) continue to think of race-consciousness as a “divisive” failure that separates us from the core values of market-first colorblind universalism. Racism is always a disruption, not the norm: it is an inessential, periodic, and fundamentally moral blemish on the actual “political” mechanisms of government.
The ideological function of the individualistic colorblind perspective is to mask the many ways in which racism is anything but anomalous. It simultaneously naturalizes and justifies the market dynamics that concentrate capital, power, and influence in the hands of an overwhelmingly white upper class. The dominance of this class is inherited from a past history of oppression and exclusion, and a present extractive economy based on the precarious labor of non-whites and poor whites in sectors from food service to transportation to policing.
The discourse of white supremacy, on the other hand, attempts to speak without illusions. It treats race as central to both politics and the identity of current institutions. Genocide and violent expropriation of Native lands, the exploitation of African/Black and Asian labor, and formal limitations imposed on non-white economic competition and wealth accumulation are not incidental to the formation of the polity, to current inequalities, or the fact that the flourishing of largely white professional classes depends on the oppression of largely non-white working classes. Similarly, the political equation of citizenship and full personhood with whiteness, formally upheld deep into the 20th century and reflected in political norms well into the 21st, should not be seen as incidental to the contemporary social, cultural, and political standing of non-whites.
For theorists of white supremacy, racism isn’t just a complex of attitudes realized in human psychology, but one of the internal dynamics that maintains institutional stability. For example, we need not see the rising tide of white anti-government ethno-nationalism as symptomatic of a fresh proliferation of bigots who have suddenly decided to forsake the liberal ideals on which the United States was purportedly founded. Rather, we can see this tide as an internally stabilizing force which more or less unwittingly serves the needs of status quo racial capitalism, in which civic relations and human value are explicitly subordinated to the needs of the market, and native whites’ “human capital” and entitlement to accumulation trumps that of Black, brown, immigrant, and indigenous populations. Points of tension between the often conflicting demands of capital, patriarchy, racism and other social forces are what politics is fundamentally about in the long run. Race and racism doesn’t come from “outside” politics; on the contrary, it is one of the core mechanisms that sustains politics.
The discourse of white supremacy recognizes at least three ways that racial domination is central to the life of the polity. First, in a white supremacist society, the major institutions within which human beings conduct their social lives are structured by a white/non-white social hierarchy. Those who count as white generally stand to inherit the majority of society’s goods, in the form of access to wealth, health, opportunity, security, and power. “White” is ultimately a social honorific, even where it masquerade as a biological classification. The criteria for membership in the white race shift over time: a core question at the heart of white supremacist regimes is– just which whites should rule? On the other hand, the social existence of those who count as non-white is often characterized by vulnerability– to violence, disenfranchisement, underemployment, deprivation of various forms, and “premature death.”
Second, whiteness is a marker of full personhood in white supremacist societies. It is often a criterion for citizenship and full belonging in the polity. The white/non-white hierarchy thus not only cuts across differences in life chances, but it also comes to define the boundary between those who count as full persons and those relegated to the status of (non-white) subpersons. Many theorists have pointed out that the social equation of whiteness and full belonging can confer social capital even when it does not confer other forms of wealth.
Finally, white supremacist societies are maintained by ideologies whose function is to justify the continued existence of the white/non-white hierarchy, or to mask the dominating nature of this hierarchy. Ideologies which justified the domination of whites over non-whites by appeal to the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans are obvious examples. A slightly less obvious, but no less important, example is the fantasy of the meritocratic colorblind polity discussed above.
All this gives us a clear enough working definition. To call a polity a “white supremacist” one is to say that an individual or group’s overall life chances and moral and political standing are mediated by location in the white/non-white race structure, and that this link between race, life chances, and standing is by turns justified and masked by ideologies that frustrate attempts to disrupt this racial status quo. The basic logic might persist even as the connection between race, life chances, standing, and ideology shifts between times and places. As Charles Mills explains, white supremacy might require “expropriation and enclosure on reservations here, slavery and colonial rule there, formal segregation and antimiscegenation laws in one place, mixing and intermarriage in another.”
To say that white supremacy explains racial inequality is to say that this basic logic somehow gives rise to the disparities in holdings and overall life chances we observe among different racial groups. On the view I find most plausible, white supremacy is first and foremost a normative system which distributes constraints and enablements based on race. It is a system under which racial designation determines who or what you are, how you are permitted to act, and what your social standing is. As many philosophers have pointed out, races can be understood as social role positions in a broader hierarchical race structure which specifies social norms for inter and intra-racial social conduct. Depending on what racial role you occupy, it is relatively more or less likely that you will enter into causal-historical chains which in fact favor or disfavor your life chances.
The overarching functionof this interlocking system of norms is to preserve the dispensation under which power, influence, health, wealth, and opportunity flow to upper class whites. At different times and places, these norms might be explicit and dominating, or implicit and hegemonic. The fact that these norms were observed in the past partially explains why inequality exists in the present, and the fact that the descendants of these norms exist now indicate that racial inequality will exist in the future. It is because individuals and institutions more or less unwittingly orient themselves toward the central norms of the white supremacist society that race can affect access to goods and opportunities.
This doesn’t constitute an explanation for every instance of racial inequality, but it does constitute reasonably clear guidelines for what it would mean for white supremacy to explain racial inequality. If white supremacy explains why Black men are disproportionately killed by police, why public health crises persist in urban ghettos, on reservations, and among working class whites, or why the racial wealth gap persists, then there is a salient and non-accidental connection between position in a hierarchical race structure, one’s strategies, and one’s life chances. Insofar as white supremacy is the regime that carves out and sustains these racial roles in the first place, white supremacy is at the root of racial inequality.
Indeed, we can even go a bit farther here, and name one possible mechanism through which white supremacy links race and life chances. In an illuminating recent discussion, Olúfémi O. Táíwò points out that “many aspects of our social system serve as filtering mechanisms, determining which interactions happen and between whom, and thus which social patterns people are in a position to observe.” Táíwò notes that being “filtered” into one set of circumstances makes it increasingly likely that one will be subsequently filtered into other, related sets of circumstances. These mechanisms compound over time, sometimes leading to radically different life chances and possibilities: “The rooms of power and influence are at the end of causal chains that have selection effects. As you get higher and higher forms of education, social experiences narrow – some students are pipelined to PhDs and others to prisons.”
Following Táíwò’s insight, my suggestion is that one’s position in the race structure of white supremacy can be a filtering mechanism for other more specific social identities one can inhabit (and those identities can be filters for further identities, and so on.) Social identities are structural positions that can be associated with both constellations of both social goods and vulnerabilities to harm and violence. These structural positions might bring us wealth, health, security, opportunity, friendship, love, and freedom from domination, but they also might incur illness, poverty, deprivation, precarity, powerlessness, alienation, isolation, and premature death.
From this point of view, the race structure of white supremacy is something like a “master filter” for social identities (with apologies to racial formation theorists’ description of race as a “master category.”) In the white supremacist polity, access to the goods and/or vulnerabilities associated with social identities is constrained, expanded, or mediated by our position in the race structure. For example, well into the 21st century, the goods associated with identity positions in housing and education have been largely accessible to whites, but largely inaccessible to Black and brown Americans. This accessibility relation is quite different when we consider the vulnerabilities associated with identity positions in ghettos, prisons, and their nexus. Of course, these disparate social outcomes are not unrelated to one another. Membership in one set of social categories tends to cascade into other constellations of identities and cordon off access to still others, culminating in wealth accumulation and retirement for some, joblessness and premature death for others.
Focusing on race as one “filter” among others which sorts different groups of people into different constellations of life chances is explicitly intended to resist a tendency in mainstream theory and politics to naturalize the link between race and social standing. It highlights the ultimate contingency of these social relationships. As Paul C. Taylor puts it, “A person we’d call black… is more likely to live in substandard or overcrowded housing, or lack health insurance, or be unemployed, than someone we’d call white…. This same person is more likely to be, or to have been, in the criminal justice system or to perform less well in school. And this makes some people worry, since it seems to invite us to draw conclusions about black inferiority. But the falsity of classical racialism prevents us from taking these correlations as evidence of some congenital incapacities or tendencies and requires that we look instead for social explanations…because they’re black is no longer an explanation for anything. It becomes, instead, a gesture at a request for an explanation, or for an answer to a question like this: What is it that links black people to these social conditions?” Here I have argued that “white supremacy” names precisely links of this sort.
If white supremacy explains racial inequality in the way I have described, addressing racial inequality isn’t simply a matter of concentrating social goods and social harms in the correct racial proportions. Rather, it suggests that we need both “radical” and “deep” solutions. “Radical” solutions– recalling the word’s origin in radix, or “root”– require uprooting the traditional racial norms and well-worn filtering mechanisms which continue to ensure that whites tend to have a better shot at a good life than non-whites. Radical solutions attempt to create a society in which major institutions–prisons, hospitals, churches, schools, community centers, banks, police forces, etc.– democratize access to the good life while actively removing the racial and other social barriers that so often impede such access.
“Deep” solutions complement radical solutions, yet they are in a sense more critical. Deep solutions recognize that the white/non-white hierarchy also serves the needs of capital and gender domination. Resistance to white supremacy will thus also be anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist. Deep solutions suggest that our patriarchal, late-capitalist conception of what counts as a “good life” must change. In particular, addressing racial inequality means working toward a society in which social goods are no longer made possible by the misery of the most vulnerable. A “good life” which is only made possible by domination isn’t really much good at all.
There is a decidedly personal element to all of this. White supremacy’s continued relevance lies in its ability to filter us into ever-further constellations of social identities and life chances in ways that often outrun our intentions or control. These are the identities that give meaning and coherence to our lives, and we can’t help but care about them. The knowledge that our identities and life chances are made possible by unjust racist social machinery–and that the incentives and rewards baked into these roles maintain that machinery–should lead us to be more critical of those personal strategies whose propriety and legitimacy we so often take for granted. If the theory of white supremacy is on the right track, the disturbing possibility that should keep us up at night is that in order to actively maintain injustice, all we need to do is continue to be ourselves.
Patrick O'Donnell
Patrick O'Donnell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, IL. He has interests in philosophical pessimism, philosophy of race, and philosophy of language. He lives in Chicago with his wife, who is a graphic designer, educator, and organizer.
