Why “white supremacy?” Why not just “racism?”

Something’s been on my mind of late. Namely, with Left terminology and trying to break it down for folks, there’s an inevitable friction: why do we have to know all these terms? Aren’t the things that “normal people” say just . . . . ok? Are we just engaging in some jibber-jabber, as Mr. T would put it, where we speak this private language of oppressions and exploitations and alienations and so on and so forth?

I’ve been thinking this through, because I’ve gone through quite a few strange encounters between people of color caucuses and confused whitefolk. The most recent being at a convention of the Northeastern SDS chapters in Boston, which at some point just became a strange exchange of jargon which wasn’t at all collective, which had a certain ring of rote memorization of formula.

Now, I know a few things: I know I’m not in the camp that says everything would be better if we just stuck to 4th grade vocabulary. I also know that there’s plenty of folks out there who do that, and there’s always a certain ring of desperation in it: “Hey look! I can speak your language!” That to me is the worst form of elitism: elitism behind the mask of the vulgar. I know I scrapped together whatever I could to pay my own damn tuition, so I wouldn’t be bamboozled by people talking down at me. It’s awfully privileged for folks whose parents could afford to tackle the burden of college tuition to just say “Fuck it! I’m going to talk like we’re all in junior high!”

On the other hand, I know what it’s like to be bamboozled by people talking way above me and taking it for granted that I understood what they meant. Or to hear people “put on airs” using terms they don’t even know how to use, just to sound intellectual, and have it feel like nails scratching a chalkboard. Double ugh.

There’s a temptation in this to just scrap certain phrases, viewing them as just academia’s litter washing onto our otherwise pristine movement beaches. But words have meanings, and beyond the literal meaning, they also provide context that grounds our ability to distinguish between that which just is to that which must be acted upon.

I want to put forward an example of where this distinction counts. “White supremacy.” For those who just want to be vulgar about it, just a highfalutin’ word for “racism.” If we want to get real vulgar about it, it’s what those brownskins say bad about good apple pie America. So, why should we use the term “white supremacy” rather than just “racism?”

1) It’s specific to the American context. That is, there’s a lot of forms of racism — everywhere there are peoples who are defined in a certain, pseudo-genetic fashion, there is some form of racism. The classic example (often used by certain Irish-Americans to play this card of “me oppressed too”) is that the definition of the “Anglo-Saxon” Briton and the “Celtic” Irishman: according to pseudo-scientific theories of eugenics, the Briton was “fit to rule” the Irishman.

That’s all well and good, but let’s talk about our own backyard. Irish-Americans became white decades ago; the notion of the Irish exception should be banished just like, ahem, Whitey Bulger from his FBI handlers, as well as the last defenders of Southie’s segregation.

The term “white supremacy” gets real about America. It acknowledges that in the public life of America, there is a category called “white.” It’s an exclusive club to which everyone is supposed to aspire. We have an American dream which is synonymous with being, and staying, “white” – if not explicitly, then at least implicitly. And some ethnic Europeans have done better than others: German-Americans became the truest “silent majority”, almost totally assimilated into the fabric of America; while Jewish-Americans have to deal with their religious expressions being public and their features being the subject of mockery.

In this scheme, African-Americans are on the whole considered unassimilable, never to be let in without being warned not to be too close to their own people (the Wright controversy being emblematic of how one has to make one’s peace with the overall structure of white supremacy in order to get in). But even among those who are definitely non-white there are gradations: there’s the Afro-Carribeans who are lavishly praised for not being African-American; there’s the Asian-American “model minority” myth. And so on. Nevertheless,

2) The term term “racism” tends to be a blunt instrument in describing American race relations; it simply describes domination and subordination. The term “white supremacy” acknowledges the reality of hegemony. In other words, the competitive game in which various peoples are pitted in America isn’t just a matter of who wins all the marbles wins; it’s more complex. The game is more like, whomever has the most marbles wins, while fierce competition occurs for second and third place, and alliances are formed for this purpose. However, the system that exists is fundamentally rigged so that those in the category of “white” can even be insulated from resentments aimed toward them.

In this, I want to be very clear: this is not simply a matter of “blame whitey” (or even “blame Whitey“). But let’s take apart the commonly used example to prove the “death of racism” (as Dinesh D’Souza would put it): the example of the reciprocal violence between Korean-Americans and African-Americans in South Central Los Angeles in the period up to and into the LA Uprising. Those in the Left are often tut-tutted with this as an example of, how left to their own devices, the non-whites will wipe each other out: the black people will loot and the yellow man will shoot back.

Notice very deft sleight of hand that occurs here: the point the Right wants to make is that, hey, white people are completely blameless in this. No white person looted. No white person shot back. We should throw this logic right back in their face: the white officers who beat Rodney King, and the lily-white Simi Valley jury which acquitted them unleashed hell on both Korean-American and black community. Having vacated the ghettos long ago, and used Korean-Americans as something like a white man’s chief, white supremacy got off, scot free. Such is the power of white supremacy in America: it can unleash hell on the non-whites, then watch us go at it like crabs in a barrel.