Let's go there: White supremacy

[gollygee]

http://debbyirving.com/lets-go-there/


White Supremacy founded this country. It justified displacing and exterminating millions of indigenous people, for profit. It justified enslaving and trading fellow human beings, for profit. It continues to justify a system in which an elite few populate a hierarchically constructed top and are able to parcel out, or not, resources to the rest of us. It’s 180° away from America’s stated democratic ideals. And it continues to be the organizing principle that constructs American institutions, American hearts and minds, and the American master narrative – that one that tells us America was built by and for white people.

And get this: beyond who the White Supremacist culture values is what the White Supremacist culture values. In other words, if you can’t look like a high-class, white, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied dude, at least act like one. Oh, and don’t get in their business. Don’t rock the boat. Show emotional restraint, be on time, be efficient, and act independent. Also, choose data over anecdotes and intellect over instinct. And for God’s sake, understand that you exist in a hierarchy and stay in your damn place. There are all kinds of names for people who act outside of their assigned social boxes: bitch, uppity, pussy, crip, and NOCD among them.

It’s this White Supremacist, stay-in-your-box, better-than/worse-than, bullying backdrop amidst which racial hatred, homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance, classism, and other forms of oppression fester. And don’t be fooled–White Supremacy can come in seemingly benign packaging. I’ve always found it easy to point my finger at people I see as “bad” and “mean” and “racist” – yet, to some degree, all of it also lives in me. Images of white, male, Christian, able-bodied, hetero as normal and superior saturated my young life. How could I not have internalized White Supremacist norms? I would be lying to say I’m anything other than a recovering White Supremacist.

How about you? Can you go there? Can you examine how White Supremacy manifests in your school? Your company? Your town? Your mind? Your heart? Can you see it? Feel it? Name it? This is what eradicating racism, I mean White Supremacy, requires. Let’s go there.

[gollygee]

2. White supremacy sux

if you read anything into this other than that, it says much more about you than the article.

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. When people hear white supremacy, they imagine neoNazis and Klan

They don't realize that it actually structures their own lives, regardless of their beliefs, location, or professions. Every aspect of American life is saturated with white supremacy.

[Cleita]

5. Only white, non-gay protestants delude themselves with that. The rest of us get it.

Brown skinned people get it. Jews, Muslins, and even Catholics get it. LGBT get it.

[jwirr]

12. Why do Catholics get a pass? Maybe Irish Catholics but others?

[Cleita]

14. Catholics get as much prejudice thrown at them as Jews do.

When I was growing up, in public school, the Jewish kids and Catholic kids not in parochial school were openly shunned and not invited to play in the recess games with the other children.

[jwirr]

15. That did not happen in my schools or my childrens schools. Plus I do not see religious

discrimination a cause of white supremacy unless it involves religions other than Christianity. Look at the rw Catholic politicians.

[Cleita]

16. It happened and still happens.

Remember Kennedy had to overcome a lot of anti-Catholicism to run for President. Just because some Catholic politicians are Republicans doesn't make a difference. Right here on DU, because I have defended Catholics from Catholic bashing, I have been accused of being Catholic although I'm not. I was even told I should have my posting privileges revoked because I defended the new Pope from untrue accusations. So don't tell me that Catholics are not discriminated against. they are as much as are Jews and Muslims in certain circles.

[jwirr]

17. I am aware that there is anti-Catholic actions but I do not think it has to do with white supremacy.

For God's sake the Catholic Church has a white male hierarchy.

[Cleita]

18. Prejudice is prejudice and it doesn't matter if the people are white.

I think there was a war in Bosnia a couple of decades ago where Christians committed atrocities on Muslims and vice versa. Yet all parties concerned were white Europeans. However, it was the Muslims who were and still are considered the underclass even though they are very white. You won't find a lot of prejudice against Catholics in places like Boston where there is a large population of Irish Catholics, but you will find it in Protestant dominant places in the Midwest and out west along with a prejudice against Jews. Yes, Jews are still very much discriminated against in those places and they are mostly white too.

[jwirr]

19. The OP was about white supremacy.

[Cleita]

20. Yes, it is and go to any site that caters to these weirdos and you will see that they hate Jews more

than blacks and Hispanics. They don't have much use for Catholics either because millions of Catholics are Hispanic. But they don't much consider Italians and Spaniards to be legitimately purely white either. Years back there was a dude from Idaho who had affiliations with the Aryan Nation, who made a rode trip to Los Angeles and he targeted a Jewish Community Center and went in and shot a bunch of pre-schoolers that were in day care there. He was deliberately targeting Jews. The irony was that a protestant church had rented space at the community center for day care and he ended up shooting a bunch of little protestant white kids.

I worked alongside the wives of these miscreants, when I lived in Idaho. I know exactly whom they hate and a lot of whom they hate are white people, whom they don't regard as white enough for them.

[notadmblnd]

4. I've been saying that for years.

But what I think is also important besides recognizing it in ourselves- is recognizing that it is wrong and working to become better members of the human race by eliminating it within ourselves.

[marym625]

6. K&R all over the damn place!

Excellent. Yes, I go there. And I won't ever stop going there.

[Cleita]

7. This is why I have always supported reparations for our native people and those descended from

former slaves. It's the only way to begin to heal as a nation and step forward into truly standing for the ideals Americans claim they hold.

[Initech]

8. It's the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

[malaise]

9. Good post

Rec

[heaven05]

10. great post/OP

[jwirr]

11. Excellent post. Manifest Destiny. Based on the biblical idea from Genesis 9:18-27. It has been

around for a very long time. In reading English history it was used to justify creating an Empire across the world and not always just against people of color as the Irish and Scots can attest to. And yes it was used to create America as a part of that Empire.

What is really sad is that we have not learned to stop this practice. How many times do we hear the words "brown skinned people" when we are talking about war or police abuse. About building our own Empire. We are still using the idea that somehow white skin means superiority. We use the dominance of white skinned men as proof that God somehow favors them and thus they are free to do anything they want to other people.

As to searching my own heart - I am not sure I know how to do that. For me it means looking behind my love for my "brown skinned" family members. I realize that I was raised in the white supremacy world but for me that got kicked under the bus by WWII - Hitler was the supremacist in that war and I am German/American. As an American I was forced to take a look at who I was and to chose sides. With the help of my parents that was not a problem except for feeling guilty about who I was for most of my life.

I also was one of those hippies in the 60s - deeply involved in the civil rights movement. So deeply involved that my sister and I now have more "brown skinned" descendants than we have white family.

So given these two events in my family I do not know where I stand in relation to the idea of white supremacy. My rational mind says it is not only wrong but untrue. I do not even know how to dig deep enough to recognize how much the idea still plays in my life.

[calimary]

13. Kicking!!!

Yes. We need to grow up and go there. Face it, confront it, and grow up OUT of it.

[hfojvt]

21. good grief, so ridiculous I don't even know where to start

At the beginning? "White supremacy founded this country."

Okay, first of all, when are we saying the country was founded? In 1776 or in 1607 (I guess we can ignore Roanoke). In what history book do the original settlers of Jamestown get together and say "let's get in a ship and establish a colony overseas to prove we are superior to all other races"? I guess you could kinda postulate (if you were steeped in some ideology) that everything any white person does (or did) is based in white supremacy, but that seems like a pretty strange way of looking at the world to me.

"It justified displacing and exterminating millions of indigenous people, for profit."

Again, this is like a cartoon version of history, albeit one which is now widely believed. Having engaged in a multi-year project to debunk this cartoon, I happen to find things like this in Jennings "Invasion of America" "...both the historical sources and archeological evidence indicate unmistakeably that depopulation was already far advanced by 1607." p 24 Thornton in "American Indian: holocaust and survival" somewhat quantifies that in his preface. On page xvii there is a chart. It shows a population of 5 million natives in 1492 which is below 3 million by 1600. Down to about 2 million by 1650.

Now the US had not even been settle by white people (other than the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest, and those are NOT traditionally considered the founding of THIS country) by 1600, and the white population in 1650 was only about 50,000. Are we supposed to believe that less than 50,000 people slaughtered 1/3 of 3 million people? Well it sure takes some large belief in white supremacy to believe that 50,000 white people could be so powerful.

Here's a couple examples from Bailyn's "The Barbarous Years" about how those powerful white people were just dominating this continent "By May 1610, when the remainder of the delayed flotilla of 1609, including the new interim governor, Sir Thomas Gates, finally arrived, only sixty of the four hundred of the previous spring and summer were alive ..." p 61

"Analysis of the five-year war that Gates and Dale pursued reveals twenty distinct encounters - skirmishes, ambushes, sieges, raids, and direct confrontations - in which at least 350 Englishmen were killed (a number equivalent to almost 20 percent of all the immigrants between 1607 and 1614) and 250 Indians." pp 75-6

So there's a little factual response to the cartoon.

I also love where she disparages this "Show emotional restraint, be on time, be efficient, and act independent."

Those awful white values. I never examined them before to see how hollow they were.

[hifiguy]

22. Some good points,

but disparaging data and intellect is anti-intellectual horseshit. And anti-intellectual horseshit is one of the things destroying this country.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america