Identified as the source of police violence against people of African ethnicity, white supremacy has greater dimension than we ordinarily consider. It is, first of all, white “male” supremacy that accounts for the vast inequities in distribution of wealth.
Over the course of 400 years, the notion of white supremacy allowed inhumane capitalists to seize 12 million people from Africa and transport them into slavery in colonies, later countries, of the Americas. In turn, with arms and devastating assaults on ethnically different peoples long resident in the Americas, these men developed systems to extract resources to enhance their wealth.
Early in the course of this historic development, justification of such treatment of ethnically different people needed to be addressed. To place people in categories, the term “race” first came into our language.
People of color were strictly denied schooling, which allowed them to be labeled less intelligent and therefore needing to be looked after. No more glaring example of dehumanization was that carefully considered clause in the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 2) which, for allocation of representatives, counted slaves as three-fifths of a person.
The lengthened shadow of inferiority linked to race everywhere blocks the light. The disordered map of white supremacy allows adherents to treat ethnically different people differently. It emboldens a white supremacist-thinking police officer to utilize more aggressive measures against ethnically different persons he encounters.
The free labor of slavery was the means by which the U.S. emerged as a great economic power in the world. Cotton picked, ginned and baled in the South was shipped to British millers but, in larger part, was turned into cloth in the North. Accumulation of wealth by Northern businessmen, and employment provided, rendered beneficiaries thoughtless about the source of their well being.
White supremacy shaped the Southern view that separation from the union was necessary. Ever the lawyer, President Lincoln saw violation of law and our Civil War ensued. When it ended Robert E. Lee conceded the South had lost the war but that its cause was just. This gave rise to the South’s statuary and decades of celebrating their “lost cause.”
White privilege could not allow the sharing of political and economic power, nor any level of social equality, with the humans they had made their slaves. Federal occupation and enforcement of a new reality had only temporary and limited success. We will never know whether Lincoln’s efforts to “bind the wounds” of conflict might have altered the outcome, but the South embarked on universal suppression of people of color and the North grew weary of Reconstruction’s cost.
But the cost of white supremacy is greater still and we rarely grasp its dimensions. Generation after generation of people with darker skin, the African Americans, denied the vote and opportunity, struggled to survive as sharecroppers and prisoners, slaves still under white control, or managed to flee north to live in ghettos and perform demeaning labor; the Chinese, imported for the arduous labor of building western railroads; the Japanese, imprisoned during World War II, not because they were dangerous but because they were different; and Hispanics enlisted to annually harvest our food but considered unworthy to share it.
Nazi white supremacy — not that it needed help — learned from the eugenics movement in the U.S., copied British use of concentration camps in South Africa, learned the branding of numbers on the arms of its prisoners from British mental institutions, then took white supremacy to its greatest extreme. Barely different were the historically persecuted Jews, or Slavs, who were in the way of Germans seeking living space.
So extreme, too, was a Minneapolis police officer’s videoed murder of an ethnically different man that we are at a pivotal moment in global history.
I hopefully shout, “At last!”
A martyrdom has occurred, a bell resoundingly struck. While the numbers of the largely youthful, multiracial marchers in the streets of the world will dwindle, their message will not fade away. The demand for systemic economic, political, and cultural change has been issued. Militarized for its preservation, white supremacy is on notice.
Republicans, dedicated decades ago to serving the wealthy, today resemble the confederates, attempting in statehouses and the Senate to remain in power so they may deny minorities justice and the right to vote. The Democratic Party, stained by past failures, becomes the hope for needed change. It lacks the charismatic leadership of a Martin or Bobby — murdered 52 years ago to prevent change. Is the Democratic Party up to the challenge?
Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently at work on a re-examination of and challenge to the “American narrative.”